Remember the second Iraq war, back in 2003? The one that George W. Bush was Hell-bent on fighting, for reasons known only to the right wing ideologues in the various billionaire-funded think tanks that once fed the American policy community most of its bad geopolitical ideas (in this case, something about rebuilding the Middle East in America’s image, if memory serves)? The thing was, to start a military operation of the scale required to conquer a whole country, W. had to get the approval of Congress, and to do that, he had to convince 535 legislators (most of whom were sane adults, hard as that is to imagine from today’s vantage point) that he had a good reason for sending an American army halfway around the world on a mission of conquest and occupation. Of course, he didn’t have one. So he got his minions to make one up, and it even sounded plausible: Saddam Hussein was back in the business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, the bastard, and something something Al Qaeda. This wasn’t remotely true, but it was believeable, except for the insinuations about Iraq and al Qaeda being in cahoots; Saddam had indeed once attempted to develop nuclear weapons, and was getting close before the Israelis put a stop to it by bombing the bejesus out of his sole nuclear reactor, back in 1981. Who knew what the dangerous lunatic might now be up to? All W. needed was something he could call evidence.
Enter Curveball.
“Curveball” was the code name for an intelligence asset developed initially by the Germans, who purported to be an insider of the Iraqi WMD program with detailed knowledge of the weapons being made and the facilities that were making them, particularly when it came to biological warfare. His real name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, and he was, frankly, full of shit. The German and British intelligence services listened to him for a while, realized he was lying through his teeth, and told their American counterparts that they shouldn’t believe a thing coming out of his mendacious little mouth, which, OK, but except for that he was, to Bush et al, just what the doctor ordered. At last, an intelligence source! Yay! So the Bush administration pretended to believe what Curveball was selling, browbeat U.S. intelligence services into vouching for his credibility, and sent poor Colin Powell to talk to the UN about the Iraqi WMD program, waving around all sorts of visual aids and artist’s renderings based largely on Curveball’s fanciful stories. Mobile labs! Bio-weapons! Anthrax! Scary! Must be stopped!
I forget what Curveball’s angle was in all this, but it doesn’t really matter. He came along at just the right time to be useful to a bunch of lying Republicans, and they milked a disastrous war out of him, the profoundly negative effects of which are still being felt. Iraq was conquered, to no particular end. After a couple of years of furious searching, everybody quietly stopped agitating about the nonexistent WMDs and moved on to botching the occupation. Reputations were destroyed, especially Bush’s, Rumsfeld’s, and Colin Powell’s, and public cynicism grew still further, even if the Republican Party didn’t seem to suffer much long term damage.
Now, this might just be an entertaining old story from a happier time when we actually believed that W. was the worst President America would ever have to endure, but it’s relevant today because, apparently, no lessons were learned. You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that the Curveball dumpster fire would have made the Republicans, even those so dimwitted as to make the rather less than brilliant George W. look like Nikola Tesla, permanently and profoundly reluctant to risk their necks on transparently phoney intelligence sources. You can only ride that shit for so long before it blows up right under your backside, right? Yet, despite the ongoing presence in both chambers of a number of lizardly old GOP geriatric cases who were there two decades ago, and have personal memories of being fooled by the Curveball horse shit, nobody told James Comer to be careful.
Who’s James Comer? Well, James Comer (R)(Kentucky) is the Chair of the House Oversight Committee and the head of the inquiry into the supposedly corrupt finances of the “Biden crime family”, particularly as they relate to Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy concern for which Hunter was once a Board member. It’s all very complicated, and I won’t go into the details of what amounts to a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory, one invented, moreover, by Russian intelligence as a way of helping Trump get re-elected in 2020, the attempted substantiation of which eventually sucked in Rudy Giuliani and shady operators like Lev Parnas (remember him?). You might recall Rudy’s ridiculous expedition to Ukraine, which yielded absolutely nothing. The attempt to smear Joe Biden with Burisma is what led, finally, to Trump’s first impeachment, after Donald tried to blackmail Ukrainian President Zelensky into manufacturing the evidence.
The main thing is that as far back as 2019, the supposed corruption involving the Bidens and Burisma was understood, and had been conclusively proved, to be nothing but another one of Putin’s schemes to put his thumb on the scale for Donald, cooked up by the dark operators of the FSB. It’s Russian disinformation, pure and simple. Yet here we are in 2024, and the Republicans, led by the intrepid James Comer, are still trying to prove it, hoping to launch a revenge-impeachment of President Biden at the behest of Donald. To this end – you guessed it – the Russians are still helping out, and this is where the unlearned lessons of the Curveball affair come in.
In public, Comer, vying in the extremely competitive race for Dumbest Republican in Congress, has only been able to prove that Joe Biden once lent his son Hunter some money, which Hunter then paid back, all when Joe was a private citizen. As even Lauren Boebert would tell you, that ain’t enough to ground an impeachment. It’s not enough, actually, to merit a mention in passing. Not to worry, responded Comer, you’ll see. He had a Source. This Source had provided him with reams of irrefutable evidence that Joe Biden was up to his neck in filthy Burisma corruption. There were secret payments to the tune of five million bucks involved. He could prove it. The utterly reliable Source was vetted by the FBI, and boy, was he ever going to blow the lid off Washington when he testified, which would be any day now, just as soon as they could find him, because he was, entre nous, ummmm, well I guess you’d say on the lam.
Well they tracked him down, and the FBI, whose analysts had listened to Mr. Source’s tales of Burisma with evident skepticism, and figured out more or less straight away that he was a lying little rat working in connection with, yup, the Russians, promptly arrested him. He’s already admitted to them that the FSB fed him the latest batch of fabrications. The Russian spooks handed him a story, he gave it to the Feds, Comer got wind of it and bet the wad on its veracity, and now Mr. Source is being charged with lying to the FBI, which is a very serious federal crime. He could get 25 years for his trouble.
CNN’s Jake Tapper laid it all out on air with one of his correspondents:
EVAN PEREZ (CORRESPONDENT): What the FBI now says and what David Weiss, the special counsel, who has charged Hunter Biden in two separate cases in Delaware and in Los Angeles — This case is being brought by David Weiss against this informant. What they’re saying is that all of that was false and that he is now facing these charges of false statements and creating a false and fictitious document. Those are the two charges that he’s facing now in Los Angeles, Jake.
JAKE TAPPER (HOST): And just to remind folks who Smirnoff, because they might not know the name — This was the individual that he had been told by somebody who ran Burisma that Joe Biden himself was going to get $5 million for all these shady dealings. This is the guy that Senator Chuck Grassley was insisting that this FBI report be revealed to the public. This was the guy who basically provided hours worth of content on Fox, especially in primetime. This was the guy who James Comer, the guy who runs the House Oversight Committee, was relying on as a major source of information and the FBI is saying, “The guy’s a liar. In fact, so much so we’re charging him with a crime.”
PEREZ: Correct.
Why might Comer, had he just a few more neurons firing, have harboured a sneaking suspicion that the Source’s tale of Burisma and the Bidens was weapons-grade bullshit, probably of Russian origin? Well, for one thing, it was essentially the same pack of lies already proved years ago to be nonsense cooked up by the FSB. It was also, honestly, preposterous. Plus, Mr. Source’s real name is (you can’t make this up) Alexander Smirnov. Alexander Smirnov, for the love of Christ! It might as well be Boris Badinov! The guy’s an Israeli citizen, but c’mon, with a name like that, you’ve got to have a couple of preliminary questions, don’t you? In everyone’s defence, Smirnov had for more than a decade been an FBI asset, and apparently once a reliable one, but by the time Comer was making an appalling hash of his impeachment inquiry, the G-Men were already wising up to the reality that either the guy had changed sides, or had always been a double agent. They were gathering evidence concerning his interactions with Russian spooks, and growing increasingly dubious. If you’re Comer, maybe you’d ask the FBI to keep you abreast of what they thought, and whether they ever suspected that this guy with the Russian name had any known connections to, say, Russian operatives? Who was this guy really? Was he as Russian as his name sounded, or maybe of recent Russian descent? Did he have connections in Russia? Maybe with Russian organized crime? Comer seems not to have asked, either because he’s a moron, or didn’t want to know, or, probably, a little of both.
Or, even worse, the FBI did tell him the intel was likely trash, and he wanted to use it to smear Biden anyway. Pick your poison.
So here’s the next logical question: were Comer, Jim Jordan, Chuck Grassley, Elise Stefanik, and other Republicans touting the latest supposed intel on Biden, merely the usual cast of GOP dimwits and liars willing to make use of what they knew or ought to have known was pure bunkum straight out of Putin’s weaponized information garbage machine – or are they in on it, and actively colluding with the Russians to smear Biden? I’ve been talking about unlearned lessons as if the Republicans are unwitting dupes, or at worst conniving opportunists, but maybe that isn’t it at all; maybe what we’re seeing isn’t just a deliberate attempt to retry the old Curveball gambit, but a knowing and active participation in the latest Russian effort to ensure Donald’s re-election. Do they want Trump back badly enough to coordinate and collaborate with the FSB? Are there Russian assets holding seats in Congress?
Is that even possible?
It is. I know how it sounds, but it’s not beyond the realm. This sort of thing has happened before. One of the more horrifying things I’ve ever learned was recently the subject of a great podcast and subsequent book by Rachel Maddow, the latter titled Prequel, in which she related a sordid episode of American history that nobody ever talks about – I’d never before heard of it – that’s been swept under the rug, despite being widely reported at the time: during World War II, numerous members of Congress were on the Nazi payroll and working actively for the Germans. Not staff. Senators and Representatives. During the war, as Americans were dying in Europe. It’s truly a chilling story, especially as Maddow goes into great detail on the inability of American institutions, both political and legal, to deal with the problem, even though the ugly facts were well understood by law enforcement. You’d think these traitorous politicians would have all been sent to the joint, if not the electric chair – it was outright treason of the most heinous kind, fully conforming to the strict definition of the capital crime set out in the Constitution – yet none of them paid any price for their high crimes. A few had a couple of close scrapes, and there was a trial that eventually went nowhere, but in the end they all skated.
This is a story well worth your time, because I worry that it’s not just history anymore, which is of course Maddow’s point, and the basis of her calling the story “prequel”.
I think it’s by no means certain, but certainly possible, that crimes of equivalent magnitude are now being committed by members of the GOP, from Trump on down, maybe even stretching into the Murdoch media empire, and plainly extending to useful idiots like Tucker Carlson, whose recent propaganda junket to Moscow was almost literally sickening. Why are so many Republicans and their media mouthpieces working so hard to ensure the success of Russian clandestine operations? Why are they repeatedly parroting Russian propaganda? Why are they continually straining to support Putin’s dreams of conquest, while destroying the Western alliance system? Look at recent events. Just as we’re seeing Comer and his henchmen spewing the conspiracy theories cooked up by the FSB, we’re watching, helpless, as Speaker Mike Johnson calls a two week recess to the workings of the House of Representatives, just after the Senate, by a nowadays unheard of majority of 70-30, passed a bill to renew support for the Ukrainian war effort. Johnson, who has vowed to kill the bill, then ran to visit Donald and kiss the ring. This just after Donald says he’d be fine with the Russians invading deadbeat NATO allies. What’s going on?
What’s happening? Well, what’s it look like?
It’s time somebody started doing some forensic accounting, and began tracing what I’m thinking is the slimy path of Russian money through the various PACs, election campaign funds, and personal bank accounts of American politicians and their cronies. It’s time to look into who these people meet in out-of-the-way places, who they sit and eat with, and who they talk to when they think nobody’s listening. I’m not versed in the legalities, and I don’t know what sort of evidence would be needed to support what sort of necessary FISA warrants, but serious people need to start thinking about such matters straight away. Not just law enforcement, but journalists too. Look, it may be that they’re all just so in love with Putin, and want so badly for him to succeed, because they see him as an anti-woke crusader, an ally in the new culture war, and an authoritarian whose ways they wish to emulate. This could all be disgustingly, cravenly anti-American and rotten to the core, but thoroughly and lamentably legal. Maybe.
But they’re sure as Hell behaving as if they’re all on the take. The GOP might not just adore Putin. Its most prominent members may actually be in his pocket, crazy as that sounds. It’s time we found out, before it’s too late. And this time, if such treachery can be proved, perhaps we can do something about it. Rachel Maddow would counsel us not to count on it, but you know me, I may sense previously unthinkable calamity just over the horizon, and I may be terrified, but still, I’m always and forever full of hope.
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The great Trae Crowder turns out to be thinking the same stuff as me:
the needlefish 