Miranda Devine

Miranda Devine

Politics

‘Putin’ us on: Why Dems’ ‘Russian disinformation’ claims can’t be taken seriously

The phrase “Russian disinformation” lost its sting when Democrats started using it as a domestic political weapon.

Now, even Republican patsies are accusing people who aren’t sufficiently hawkish about waging war against Russia, like Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, of being agents of the Kremlin.

Sen. Mitt Romney this week called Gabbard, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former Democratic candidate for president, of being a “treasonous” liar. Ana Navarro and Whoopi Goldberg, co-hosts of ABC’s “The View,” piled on to demand that the Department of Justice investigate Carlson for “shilling for Putin.”

Ex-MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann said the Fox News anchor and Gabbard should be arrested and jailed as “Russian assets” because “there is a war.”

But smearing someone as a Russian asset doesn’t carry much weight anymore. Everyone knows it’s the catchall excuse for Democrats.

Maybe if they hadn’t used Russia as their personal bogeyman for six years, it wouldn’t be so easy to dismiss their claims that everyone they dislike is a Kremlin asset. 

Hillary Clinton crippled the first three years of Donald Trump’s term by accusing him of colluding with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 election. Her campaign ginned up Russiagate, with the assistance of senior adviser Jake Sullivan, whose role is coming to light through court filings by special counsel John Durham. For his efforts, Sullivan was promoted to national security adviser and is currently President Biden’s point man for Ukraine.

“Russian disinformation” finally was rendered meaningless on the eve of the 2020 election when 50 former senior intelligence officials, including John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta, signed a bogus letter designed to rescue Biden from evidence of wrongdoing, found on his son Hunter’s abandoned laptop.

Sen. Mitt Romney branded former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard a “treasonous” liar. Greg Nash/Pool via AP

Without evidence

They claimed, without evidence, that incriminating emails from the laptop, published by The Post, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and were being used to “undermine” Biden’s candidacy.

The letter was the excuse used by Big Tech and other media to ensure Joe Biden was never held to account for meeting with Hunter’s corrupt paymasters from Russia and Ukraine — and lying about it during the campaign.

None of the signatories of that scurrilous letter have apologized for misleading the American people, now that everyone accepts that Hunter’s laptop is real. Some, like Brennan, also were implicated in Russiagate.

The liberal media is attempting to smear Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a Russian asset. Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press Wire

It is galling to see them pop up on TV in the last three weeks as experts on “World War III.” Former CIA chief Brennan has been musing with Joy Reid on MSNBC about assassinating Putin. Clapper, former director of national intelligence, likes to tell CNN that Putin is “unhinged.”

Panetta, a former Obama defense secretary, calls for tougher action against Putin with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” another Russiagate disinfo merchant.

Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, pushes out tweets likening Putin to Donald Trump and retweeting memes in which Carlson is depicted as a “Russian asset.”

It’s all so corrosive to public trust.

The Biden administration was close to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky well before the Russian invasion. HANDOUT/UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SER/AFP via Getty Images

The manufactured moral panic on the left about Russia is the political equivalent of the boy who cried wolf. In the Aesop fable, a shepherd boy repeatedly sounds a false alarm that a wolf is attacking the town’s flock of sheep. The townspeople stop believing him, so, when the wolf does arrive, no one listens to his cries and he is eaten alive. The moral of the story is that no one believes a liar even when they tell the truth.

So when it comes to Russia, you can hardly blame people, especially Trump supporters, for being skeptical about what comes out of the mouths of the same liars who have cried wolf for the last six years. 

While the threat of China grew, and a virus unleashed by China killed millions and crippled our economies, they talked only about Russia. While the virus was circulating, they impeached Trump over his clumsy attempt to get Ukraine to reveal what it knew about the Biden family’s involvement in corruption there.

Hillary Clinton crippled the first three years of Donald Trump’s term by accusing him of colluding with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 election. AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File

Launching Trump’s first impeachment, in January 2020, Democratic ringleader Adam Schiff declared: “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”

But he never explained why, exactly, we were so eager to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia. Why would we hand such a gift to China?

And why did we keep meddling in Ukrainian politics, to the point that in February 2021, a few days after Biden’s inauguration, the US Embassy in Kyiv applauded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s crackdown on his pro-Russian, Euro-skeptic political opponent Viktor Medvedchuk, whose television stations were closed and his assets seized before he was placed under house arrest. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin is exploiting President Biden’s weakness. Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File

Within days, as Time magazine reported last month in “The Untold Story of the Ukraine Crisis,” Putin started deploying troops to the Ukrainian border.

We saw how Putin reacted the last time Democrats were in power, and meddling in Ukraine: He invaded Crimea in 2014. 

A few weeks later, Hunter Biden joined the board of corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma, owned by Moscow-aligned oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who paid then-VP Joe Biden’s crack-addicted son $83,333 a month.

Hunter had multiple connections to Russian oligarchs in Putin’s inner sanctum — as the Chuck Grassley-Ron Johnson Senate inquiry found.

In February 2014, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina wired $3.5 million into a bank account associated with Hunter’s business partner Devon Acher. A few weeks later, Hunter and Archer flew to Lake Como in Italy and met Baturina.

Special counsel John Durham exposed Hillary Clinton’s plot to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Georgetown meeting

She and her husband, the corrupt former mayor of Moscow, were on Hunter’s guest list for a dinner he hosted at Café Milano in DC’s Georgetown section in 2015 for his VP father to meet his overseas business partners, including a Ukrainian representative of Burisma.

Hunter’s relationships with Russian oligarchs stretched back at least to 2012, when he flew to Moscow for breakfast at the home of one of Putin’s closest allies, Ara Abramyan. Hunter’s diary also records a meeting that afternoon with Sergei Chemezov, another Putin pal and the head of state corporation Rostec. Dinner was with another oligarch. After breakfast the next day, he was back at Abramyan’s mansion, to meet two more billionaires.

You can see why Hunter’s name was listed along with his father and Hillary Clinton on Russia’s list of sanctioned US officials released this week. It can’t simply be laughed off by the White House. It is a personal message from Putin to the president, whose family’s influence-peddling schemes now are caught up with national security concerns.

The more the usual suspects scream “Russian disinformation,” the more cynical Americans become.