Erik Prince's Group Chat, Russiagate, and the authoritarian mindset

"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" is an approach that Democratic and Republican Party diehards both embrace -- as long as their side is in power.

Lavrentiy Beria, the Soviet secret police chief who inspires Democratic and Republican diehards alike. Phot credit: Wikimedia Commons.

A number of people messaged me or commented on Twitter to dispute my view, which I noted in my story last week in the New Republic about Erik Prince’s secret group chat, that Russiagate “led to” President Donald Trump’s first impeachment and was “cooked up by Democrats as part of a politically motivated attack to drive him from office.” I ignored the first few commenters because they wrote such abysmally stupid things – for example, that I was a tool of Erik Prince who himself leaked me the story – or were so obsessed with that single line they saw it as more important than the roughly 7,000 other words in the story they agreed with.

I don’t respond to morons or lunatics, which is why I didn’t reply to the initial comments. I also don’t reply to ideological fanatics of any type, and for the same reason: facts don’t matter to such people and I have better things to do with my time than argue with them.

In my opinion, Trump cultists and – in the case of some critics of my comments about Russiagate – “Vote Blue No Matter Who” zealots share the same fundamentally fascistic mentality. The moment either spots the first sign of ideological deviation, however trivial, they relegate offenders to purgatory, thereby preserving the sanctity of the tightly sealed political echo chambers they inhabit in order to feel safe and righteous.

I do respond to intelligent criticism and when I’m wrong don’t have a problem acknowledging it, even though it’s never pleasant to admit you screwed up. That’s why I’m writing this brief note on Russiagate, as more recent commenters had a capacity to appreciate nuance. I still believe the evidence backs up what I wrote about Russiagate, and I’ll explain why, though I doubt it will change anyone’s mind or not.

First, I’m not of the opinion that Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t try to “meddle in the 2016 presidential election,” to employ the phrase typically found in press accounts on the topic. He would have been negligent not to, and I have no doubt the leaders of a number of other countries did too, in the same way the US “meddles” in foreign elections all the time, whether via propaganda or a coup d’etat.

As I mentioned in this story on the group chat at Washington Babylon on Substack, Prince and Trump’s unofficial campaign consultant Roger Stone were regularly in touch during the runup to the November 2016 election. That includes discussion of a “payload” Stone was eagerly awaiting in October of that year, which was almost surely a reference to WikiLeaks’ imminent release of Hillary Clinton’s hideously embarrassing emails. Stone was later found guilty of obstruction of a congressional investigation, witness tampering and making false statements to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks. 

I don’t believe the leaked emails, whether WikiLeaks got them from Russia or somewhere else, as some people argue, cost Hillary Clinton the election. She lost because she was one of the most dislikeable, incompetent presidential candidates of modern times, comparable perhaps only to Hillary Clinton ‘08, who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against little known Illinois first term Senator Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries, just as she did against Trump eight years ago.

Hillary’s Woman of the People routine didn’t go over well on the 2016 campaign trail.

More to the point, I’m fully aware Trump was impeached for the first time on charges related to Ukraine, not Russia. However, I believe Russiagate directly led to his impeachment because the narrative regarding Trump’s alleged collaboration with Putin – in the most extreme telling, that he was a Manchurian candidate controlled by Moscow – emerged from opposition research work produced by Fusion GPS that generated a hysterical, generally improper effort on the part of Democrats to block Trump from taking office between his election victory and inauguration, and to their ceaseless efforts to impeach him when that failed.

I say “improper” for a few reasons. First, many of the early key allegations concerning Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, to take one example, that in August 2016 his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen met Kremlin officials in Prague – were flatly wrong. Even when it became apparent that many of the allegations were false, Democrats continued to spread them because they were politically useful and because the party, and especially Hillary, desperately needed a scapegoat to blame for her humiliating loss to Trump.

In late-2016, a group of Democratic oligarchs gathered outside the US to discuss ways to keep Russiagate going as part of an effort to stop Trump from taking office. Part of that effort came when BuzzFeed published the famous dossier with Fusion’s work on January 10, 2017, shortly before the inauguration. In my opinion, it should never have run – which is entirely on BuzzFeed, not Fusion – because it wasn’t vetted and important parts of it, like Cohen’s trip to Prague, were simply wrong. 

Nevertheless, the resulting hue and cry led Democrats, and much of the media, to embark on a crusade to remove Trump from office for one thing or another. Evidence against him that wasn’t known at the time but was discovered subsequently during investigations launched on the basis of inaccurate, politically-motivated allegations doesn’t serve as retroactive justification for launching the investigations in the first place. 

I’m also not convinced that what’s been proven about Trump’s actions in regard to Russiagate or Ukraine merit impeachment, but if it does, Hillary Clinton should’ve been prosecuted – or impeached, had she won the 2016 election – for flagrantly using her family foundation to raise money from a rogue’s gallery of foreign business executives who only donated to it as a means of currying favor with the woman they were sure was going to be the next US president. Between 2016 and 2021, contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plummeted from around $63 million to about $16 million. As I wrote in a story last year for County Highway, it turns out that it’s a a lot harder to peddle influence when you have a lot less influence to peddle.

I loathe Trump, believe he was dangerous as president the first time and would be more dangerous a second time, which is the main takeaway from the story I wrote for the New Republic (and others I’ve published or will be publishing here, including this one from last Friday). I find the Democrats to be generally loathsome as well, but, unlike diehards in both camps, don’t believe Hillary is a “traitor,” which is considered to be a truism among many in Prince’s group chat, any more than I believe Trump is.

I’m not arguing the two parties are indistinguishable. They’re both irredeemable and share equally awful views on many major issues, but the GOP, which has gone entirely off the rails and is dominated by genuine cranks and mental cases, is collectively worse.

However, Trump and Hillary employed similarly sleazy, unethical tactics when running for the presidency in 2016 and during their respective political careers each sought to personally enrich themselves via corrupt practices, though it’s hard to say with certainty whether it was illegal corruption, since almost nothing is illegal in Washington because politicians generally write the rules. With Trump and Hillary, the larceny is in the blood. Political and financial self-interest, not treason, is what drives them both.

How Donald Trump, the son of crooked, racist, Queens slumlord Fred Trump, turned out to be so morally compromised is one of the great political mysteries of modern times.

Much of what I’ve written to this point is opinion, and you’re free to disagree with it. What’s not disputable is that the Democratic Party and its wealthy financial backers drummed up Russiagate and it became part of a political witch hunt to get Trump at all costs. Paul Singer of Elliott Management first hired Fusion to dig up dirt on Trump because he initially supported Marco Rubio for president. After Rubio flamed out, the DNC picked up the tab, through cutouts, and that’s when Fusion’s research turned to Trump’s ties to Russia. 

Some of what Fusion found was true and significant, but not all of it, including some of the more sensational claims BuzzFeed published without confirming they were accurate. From there, other news outlets picked up the Russiagate collusion story, which drove the national political narrative for years. 

The problem wasn’t only that some of it was wrong, but that the entire exercise was politically-motivated and financed by ultra rich Democratic donors whose outsized power has turned US democracy into a sad joke. Needless to say, that’s equally true of their billionaire GOP counterparts who are equally adept at using their money and connections to skew policies and media coverage in ways that favor their own political and financial interests. 

That doesn’t mean every individual component of the Russiagate narrative was fake news, nor that everything written about Hillary’s emails or Hunter Biden’s laptop was bogus. But all three began as covert political ops, which raises a lot of questions – even the case of Hillary’s emails, which as far as I know were all legitimate – and makes it impossible to view the impact they had as a triumph of justice. 

If it does, we may as well endorse the position of Lavrentiy Beria, the Soviet secret police chief, who reportedly said, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime,” because that’s the basic concept behind all of them.