Lindsay Beyerstein

Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently working on a book about the history of conspiracy theories in American politics.

This Yale professor is so wrong about how to stand up to Trump

Yale professor Evan Morris argues that it’s time to “unyoke the sciences from the humanities,” by which he means that faculties of science should split off from the humanities and form science-only universities to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump.

Scientists at Columbia and Harvard lost grants because Trump falsely accused their administrators of indulging antisemitism on the part of their students.

It was a flimsy pretext to bring the Ivy League to heel, but instead of blaming Trump, Morris incongruously blames humanities professors.

“The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us — grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences — with them,” he laments.

Morris’ take is shockingly naive.

Trump is at war with all independent sources of knowledge, from unbiased government statisticians to the free press. Any expert who can tell Trump he’s wrong about climate change, vaccines, public health, or sex differences is a direct threat to his power.

Science, therefore, is squarely in his crosshairs.

Let’s review a small part of what Trump has already done.

Trump’s racist crackdown on international students is an existential threat to American science. International grad students do much of the day-to-day work of science in this country. Foreign students are also a major source of revenue for their universities because they pay full tuition. For years, universities have recruited international students to offset dwindling state funding. An all-science university would suffer just as much, if not more than, a regular university from a collapse of international student enrollment because STEM programs draw more students from overseas.

To make matters worse, Trump is trying to cap indirect research funding for the medical and physical sciences. The cap is a direct threat to grant-getting research scientists. This is the money that keeps the lights on in their labs.

It gets worse.

Trump’s handpicked acting US Attorney for Washington, D.C., even tried to launch a frivolous criminal prosecution of green energy grantees. He admitted he had no probable cause to show that any of these people had committed crimes, but he still wanted to claw the grant money out of their bank accounts for the crime of working on green energy. The effort fizzled, but this fiasco should serve as a warning. Trump and his allies aren’t done trying to prosecute scientists for inconvenient truths.

Morris wants to ditch the social scientists, but they warned us that populists like Trump demonize intellectuals and experts of all stripes, scientists included.

Any scientist who’s doing work on epidemiology, vaccines, climate, evolution, or sex differences could find themselves in conflict with the White House and its MAGA allies.

And it’s not just scientists in controversial fields who are at risk. International collaboration is the lifeblood of science but congressional Republicans are already trying to label collaborations with Chinese scientists as a national security threat.

What about theoretical mathematicians? Surely that’s apolitical.

There’s still no escape.

If your work has no obvious applications to weapons, artificial intelligence, or crypto, MAGA will label you a decadent parasite and demand that your job be eliminated to pay for tax cuts.

We don’t need to guess how they feel. Vice president JD Vance once gave a talk entitled “The Universities are the Enemy.”

“So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country,” Vance told his audience.

“If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Universities are a threat to the MAGA agenda because they produce knowledge that contradicts Trump’s lies.

Splitting science from the arts and humanities will shortchange students without protecting the sciences.

For Trump appointees, being a predator isn’t a liability — it’s a career booster

Before leaving office, President Joe Biden announced that the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution had been ratified. A few days later, Donald Trump, an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, took Biden’s place as the president of the United States.

The contrast could not be more stark.

In a Trump administration, rape is a career-booster. And why not? For the narcissist-in-chief, slavish emulation is the sincerest form of flattery. Trump has been accused of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment by at least 26 women since the 1970s, including his ex-wife Ivana and writer E. Jean Carroll.

Trump confessed to a pattern of sexual assault in the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, in which he confided that he habitually grabbed and kissed women without asking, because "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy."

Carroll won a lawsuit against Trump for raping her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s and a defamation lawsuit against him for claiming she made the whole thing up. The jury found that Trump shoved his fingers into Carroll’s vagina against her will. The judge clarified that this was rape as most people understand the term, and therefore that Carroll’s claim that Donald Trump raped her was true – even though New York’s outdated rape statute only covered rapes with penises. The law has since been updated to include all forms of non-consensual penetration.

Trump chose Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to administer the oath of office to JD Vance. Kavanaugh was confirmed despite compelling testimony that he attempted to rape Christine Blasey Ford. Kavanaugh’s contemptuous denials and self-pitying antics won him the admiration of Trump, who considers such performances as a testament of strength and a badge of honor.

Trump’s first pick for US Attorney General was Matt Gaetz, who resigned from Congress and withdrew from consideration before the House Ethics Committee could reveal substantial evidence that Gaetz violated Florida's statutory rape law.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth paid a $50,000 settlement to a woman who said Hegseth raped her at a Republican convention in 2017. Hegseth blindsided the Trump transition team by not disclosing the California episode, but willingness to furiously deny a rape allegation counts for more than honesty in Trump’s book.

Trump stood by his nominee while his allies waged an unprecedented campaign to intimidate witnesses who might speak to Hegseth’s drinking and his stormy history with women. Republican Senators enabled the deception by refusing to meet with Hegseth’s accuser. During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth refused to say whether rape would be disqualifying for a secretary of defense.

Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. apologized by text to his former babysitter after she alleged that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, cornering her in a bedroom and groping her against her will. In public, however, Kennedy was contemptuous of the allegations and hinted there were many more where that came from. “I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” Kennedy said when asked about the allegations, “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

SpaceX paid $250,000 to silence a SpaceX flight attendant who accused Trump’s co-consul Elon Musk of exposing his erect penis to her on a flight, pawing her leg and promising to buy her a horse if she jerked him off. Musk was also sued by eight former employees who claim that Musk personally fired them after they objected to the sexually-charged work environment he created at SpaceX, accusing him of running high-tech empire like the “dark ages,” barraging employees with vile sexual banter, obscene memes and degrading comments, and retaliating against anyone who complained.

There’s not enough space to delve into the allegations against senior Trump’s campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski, senior advisor Jason Miller, former personal lawyer (and former lawyer) Rudy Giuliani, prospective secretary of education Linda McMahon, or future ambassador to the Bahamas, Herschel Walker.

The one belief that predicted Trump voters with scary accuracy

Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.

Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.

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Part of the problem is the media. Certainly, the mainstream media is shy about stating the truth and the rightwing media-influencer complex is dedicated to disseminating lies. Social media barons use algorithms to maximize their profits at the expense of our edification.

But the problem goes deeper than that: You also have to look at the conspiracist mindset that says the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, the government is controlled by the Deep State, and scientists are on the take, because it’s what makes people turn away from consensual reality.

CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.

Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.

The conspiracist mindset allowed Trump’s followers to reinterpret his 34 felony convictions as evidence of the plot against him, rather than evidence of his terrible behavior.

Once you adopt a conspiracist mindset where you can dismiss any evidence that clashes with your prejudices as part of the conspiracy, you are free to create your own reality. Since it’s a worldview that scapegoats your fellow citizens as diabolical deceivers, that reality is bound to be ugly. Worse still, your willingness to discount mainstream sources of evidence in favor of the outlandish claims of demagogues becomes a badge of ideological purity. You welcome the lies.

This is why social scientists have been warning about the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism for a century. There was never any evidence that the Jews secretly controlled the world – but it didn't matter because lack of evidence was proof that the Jews controlled the press, and the universities, and science and the arts. Jews in pre-war Germany didn't control any of those things – but no evidence to the contrary could penetrate the conspiracy theory. And the complete absence of evidence for their hegemony was just proof of their total domination.

Another reason why conspiracism and totalitarianism are closely connected is that conspiracy theories take away our ability to have good-faith debates. If everything you don't like becomes evidence of your opponent's plot to destroy you, you can't discuss anything rationally. Human-caused climate change is a fact. But conspiracism takes the debate out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of character assassination of scientists and their supporters. It paints us as hoaxers and saboteurs. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but instead of debating their merits based on evidence, anti-vaxers portray their opponents as agents of a nefarious coverup to kill children. And it's completely irrefutable within their conceptual framework. When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that's what conspirators to kill our children would say.

There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.

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Trump covertly planning the world’s biggest protection racket

You wouldn’t expect a presidential candidate to make a massive middle class tax hike the centerpiece of his economic platform, but that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.

Trump has vowed to slap a 20 percent tax on all imports, a 60 percent tax on all Chinese imports and a 2,000 percent tax on imported cars.

These taxes are known as tariffs. Everything from tequila to video game consoles would cost more. Trump’s tariffs would cost the average family nearly $4,000 a year and rising prices would accelerate inflation.

Trump claims that other countries will pay for the tariffs, but consumers paid for nearly all of the tariffs he imposed in his first term through higher prices.

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And then we paid billions more to bail out the farmers who were ruined by the tariffs our trading partners imposed in retaliation.

So why is Trump so keen on taxing imports?

Because the Trump tariffs would create the greatest engine of corruption in history, an institutionalized kleptocracy where import-based business lives or dies by Trump’s favor. Elon Musk’s imported parts might be exempted while GM’s are not.

Congress has given the president sweeping powers to impose tariffs, and critically, to waive those tariffs for a favored few. US imports totaled $3.8 trillion in 2023. The thought of a 34-time convicted felon wielding that kind of power is terrifying. Powerful interests at home and abroad want to save money and gain an edge over their competitors by dodging tariffs. Trump is just the man to make that happen, for a price.

Trump’s business empire creates limitless opportunities for would-be tariff dodgers to convert cash into official acts. In all, Trump’s businesses raked in nearly $2 billion in revenue during his first term, including millions from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If emoluments won’t suffice, there’s always bribery. Trump is credibly accused of taking 200 pounds of cash worth $10 million from Egypt in exchange for a friendlier diplomatic posture towards the autocratic regime.

Trump politicized tariff waivers in his first term.

The Brookings Institution found that “a bewildering array of politically favored importers won tariff relief” during that time. Bibles from China got a waiver because the religious right insisted, but textbooks are still taxed. Now the Trump Bible is made in China, too. Salmon and cod got waivers because powerful Republican senators threw their weight around. Chinese tiki torches got the nod for reasons that remain as murky as a bad fish farm. Governments including China, Russia and Argentina are suspected of granting Trump and his family trademarks worth millions of dollars in the hopes of securing more favorable trade relations.

Technically, the Commerce Department grants the waivers. These concessions are supposed to be based on the national interest, but the process is notoriously opaque and politicized at the best of times.

In a second Trump term, it would become completely corrupt. In the name of fighting an imaginary “Deep State,” Trump plans to purge career civil servants and replace them with maga hacks who will do his bidding. The Heritage Foundation, home of Project 2025, is already flooding federal agencies with Freedom of Information Requests to find out which civil servants aren’t Trumpy enough. Heritage shelled out $100,000 for Project Sovereignty 2025 to draw up a McCarthyite list of civil servants that Heritage President Kevin Roberts considers to be a “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.”

If you wondered why JD Vance called on Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” there’s your answer. It’s the mid-level bureaucrats in every federal agency that stand in the way of turning the federal government into a Trump protection racket.

Trump’s tariff plan would give him discretion to play favorites over trillions of dollars of trade. We know he’d follow through because he played favorites with tariffs in his first term. The second time around, he will vastly increase the amount of goods subject to tariffs and purge the civil service of anyone who might oppose his bid to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

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A convention fight is a pure pundit’s fantasy

A snarky aside from a Republican special counsel, lackluster presidential poll numbers and a pass on a Super Bowl interview have plunged certain pundits into full-blown, sweaty-palmed panic.

Ezra Klein of the Times, Damon Linker of The Atlantic, and Substacker Nate Silver say president Joe Biden should refuse to seek a second term despite his outstanding record in office because … he seems kind of old.

Klein and Linker propose instead that Biden release the delegates he wins in the primary to choose the Democratic nominee at the party’s convention in late August. This proposal is madness. If punditry had standards, it would be malpractice.

A new poll released Friday by Emerson College showed Biden trailing Trump by one point with 11 percent of voters still undecided. The same poll had Trump beating vice president Kamala Harris by three points, California Governor Gavin Newsom by 10 points, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer by 12 points. This is in line with the rest of the polling. All of the most bruited alternative candidates poll worse than Biden in a head-to-head with Trump. So why are we having this discussion?

A convention fight is a pure pundit’s fantasy. First off, it’s predicated on Biden voluntarily stepping aside, which is not going to happen. Although Linker’s not above a little light blackmail to try to force the issue:

“For starters, every major figure in the party prevailing on Biden to drop out. That can be done behind the scenes at first, out of respect for the president. But if he refuses to budge, then it will be time for embarrassing leaks to the press. I would like to think that Biden will see the only way to preserve his reputation, record, and self-respect is by announcing, somewhat as Lyndon B. Johnson did in March 1968, that he’s withdrawing from the race.”

Moreover, a brokered convention is a unicorn, a beguiling chimera that gets conjured by nerds every cycle but never materializes in the modern world because its existence is incompatible with real life.

Klein breezes past the fact that the last contested Democratic convention was a disaster of epic proportions. In 1968, the deeply unpopular incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, dropped out and threw his support behind his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. The convention became a flashpoint for intraparty conflict so fierce that newsman Dan Rather was beaten by police on the convention floor. Humphrey prevailed, but Democrats were in disarray for real. Richard Nixon won the general election.

In 2024, a contested convention would become an arena to settle every score from Gaza to Medicare for All. A free-for-all would shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that Joe Biden so carefully knit together. If Kamala Harris won, people would complain that Joe Biden put his thumb on the scale, even if he didn’t. If Harris didn’t win, an equal and opposite faction would be furious that she was passed over. We have no idea who would win this hypothetical battle royale. We don’t even know who might enter. Virtually any Democrat over 35 could throw their hat in the ring. Klein rattled off a list of fourteen potential contenders. A chaotic and crowded race would increase the odds that someone completely unvetted got the top spot.

By then it would be late August and the Democratic party would have about two months to refocus on beating Trump with whatever nominee came out on top.

But given that party elites picked the nominee, there’d be no guarantee that the rank-and-file would accept their choice. The pundits are asking a couple thousand Biden delegates to pick the future leader of the free world. They’re also asking Biden to disregard the will of the Democratic primary voters who pulled the lever for him. This is profoundly undemocratic and unlikely to play well in a party where there are still people fuming about the superdelegates of 2016.

Klein and Linker are well aware that a contested convention would be risky.

“Could it go badly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it will go badly,” Klein writes, “It could make the Democrats into the most exciting political show on earth.”

The absolute last thing the Democratic Party needs is to be the greatest show on earth.

Joe Biden’s polling isn’t where it needs to be. That should scare everyone who enjoys living in a democracy.

That anxiety is eating at us all, but pundits should not be dangling the false hope that some mystery candidate will solve Joe Biden’s electoral problems. This is a binary choice between Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump. Period. One is rated by historians as the 14th-best president of all time, the other is a proven rapist and fraudster with 91 indictments and a failed coup under his belt.

It’s time to shelve the childish fantasies and focus on the task at hand: Supporting Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump. He’s done it before. He can do it again, but he needs our help.

Trump lawyer wrote detailed instructions on how to steal election in Nevada and Arizona

The Harvard-educated Chesebro pled guilty in October to a single felony count of conspiring to file false documents in Georgia.

This was a generous plea deal given that Chesebro conceived the massive fake electors’ scheme and micromanaged its execution

The attorney general of Nevada announced that six fake electors, including the chair and vice chair of the Nevada GOP, have been indicted for their bid to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump.

The state will have a significant advantage. The intellectual architect of the fake electors scheme, Ken Chesebro, has agreed to travel to Nevada and neighboring Arizona to assist prosecutors.

Of all the members of Trump’s legal team, Chesebro is the most enigmatic. The sixty-something was a mild-mannered liberal until he made several million dollars trading cryptocurrency, split from his wife of 20 years, and married a woman in her early twenties. Whereupon, he reinvented himself as a far-right Republican.

The Harvard-educated Chesebro pled guilty in October to a single felony count of conspiring to file false documents in Georgia. This was a generous plea deal given that Chesebro conceived the massive fake electors’ scheme and micromanaged its execution. Moreover, he signed his name to everything. A smart lawyer and a dumb criminal, Chesebro sent detailed written instructions to state-level Republican operatives on where and how to cast their fake votes. At times, he was astonishingly candid about how outrageous his plan was.

“[Two Republicans officials] are concerned it could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote on Monday if there is no pending court proceeding that might, eventually, lead to the electors being ratified as the legitimate ones,” Chesebro wrote to Rudy Giuliani, bolding the word “treasonous” for emphasis.

“Which is a valid point…” he conceded, before explaining why they were going to do it anyway. There was, in fact, no pending litigation in Arizona that could have declared Trump the lawful winner of the state’s electoral votes.

It should be noted these concerned Republican officials participated in a standoff with armed federal law enforcement at the Bundy Ranch in 2014. When they’re concerned about the treason optics, the situation is truly dire.

Chesebro described Nevada as “an extremely problematic state” for the coup plotters, because, he observed, the secretary of state had to preside over the casting of the electoral votes and the votes could only go to the winner of Nevada’s popular vote. Neither of those provisos applied to Chesebros’ handpicked fake electors and he knew it.

Chesebro reached for a historical precedent to justify the fake electors scheme. In 1960, Richard Nixon carried the state of Hawaii by a mere 140 votes. A recount ensued. The Democrats selected alternate electors just in case the recount went their way. The Democrats did, in fact, prevail on the recount and the governor certified their slate as the genuine article. There was no evidence that the Democrats intended to deceive anyone, let alone to push their claim in the face of a failed recount. Indeed, there would have been no point, given that John F. Kennedy had already secured enough electoral votes to win the election. The Hawaii Dems of 1960 were simply using their alternate slate as a placeholder.

Only two slates of fake electors, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, stipulated that their votes should only be counted if their side prevailed in litigation, the rest, including Nevada and Arizona, simply falsely asserted that they were the real electors from their states.

Chesebro has already obtained a proffer in Nevada, which guarantees that he won’t be prosecuted under the laws of that state if he testifies against the fake electors. Such leniency to the Cheese may seem unfair to Nevada’s fake electors, given that they were merely running Chesebro’s playbook. But that’s how plea deals work. The sooner you flip, the sweeter the deal.

Elon Musk is emulating Henry Ford

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Last week, X CEO Elon Musk endorsed a tweet accusing Jews of pushing “dialectical hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities … flooding their country.”

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied.

In parroting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and giving antisemites free rein on his site, Musk is emulating Henry Ford, a car mogul who bought a media platform to spread antisemitic libels.

The Great Replacement is the delusional belief that someone is trying to replace white people by championing liberal immigration policies and racial justice. As is typical, Musk cast the Jews in the role of racial puppet masters.

When fascists in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” they were referencing the myth of the Great Replacement. The following year, Robert Bowers accused the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HAIS) of perpetrating white genocide before his shooting spree at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh:

“HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people,” Bowers said. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

In 2019, a gunman killed 52 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. His manifesto was entitled “The Great Replacement.” The same year, a shooter cited the Great Replacement to explain why he took 23 lives at an El Paso Walmart. The Buffalo supermarket shooter was also a believer.

Jewish philanthropist George Soros is routinely cast in conspiracy theories for his foundation’s support of liberal causes, such as criminal justice reform and the Black Lives Matter movement.

During the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, American Jews played a prominent role in founding and funding major civil rights organizations. Many of the white student Freedom Riders were Jewish and 17 rabbis were arrested alongside Martin Luther King in St. Augustine in 1964. Segregationists spread their own conspiracy theories about Jews teaming up with Blacks to destroy the white way of life.

In fact, the image of the liberal Jew goes back at least as far as the French Revolution. In the prevailing spirit of liberalism, the revolutionary government became the first in Europe to grant citizenship to Jews in 1791. In keeping with this liberalizing ethos, various European countries emancipated their Jewish residents. This wave of emancipation vastly expanded opportunities for Jews in terms of where they could live, what jobs they could do, and how they could participate in politics, business and the arts. Not surprisingly, many Jews embraced liberal ideologies because liberal tolerance improved their lives.

It was during the 19th century that Europe’s longstanding Jew-hatred curdled into modern antisemitism. It was during this time that the myth of the international Jewish conspiracy was fully fleshed out.

Some scholars argue that conspiracy theories are the defining characteristic of antisemitism. It’s wrong to hate someone for their religion, but the animosity is rooted in a real difference of opinion: Jews aren’t Christians, and some Christians have had a problem with that for centuries. Whereas, antisemitism is based on pure racial and political fantasy.

Modern antisemitism construes Jews as both the racial other and as agents of malignant modernity. Jews are identified with both communism and capitalism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most successful antisemitic tract of all time, was forged by agents of the Russian secret police in the late 19th century. It purports to reveal the secret deliberations of a group of rabbis gathered in Prague to take over the world. By some estimates, the Protocols have been republished more than any other book except the Bible.

In 1920, Henry Ford began publishing the Protocols under the header of “The International Jew” in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. At the time, the Independent had a greater national reach and more influence than the Times. Hitler praised Ford by name in Mein Kampf as the “single great man” of the “American Union” standing against “the Jews.”

The Protocols were debunked as a crude forgery in 1920 and Ford was eventually forced to retract them and apologize after being sued for libel by an American Jewish lawyer whom Ford accused of furthering the conspiracy by founding farm cooperatives.

In endorsing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, Musk is partaking in an ancient and ugly tradition of twisting one of Judaism's proudest traditions – a commitment to social justice.

The point is smearing the president

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With a slim majority and a number of members representing districts carried by Joe Biden, it’s doubtful that the GOP has the votes to impeach Biden. Trump doesn’t care, the point is to announce the investigation.

The House Republicans will hold their first impeachment hearing for Joe Biden next week, a non-event that even backers admit will present no new evidence.

The extreme rightwing of the GOP caucus is in open rebellion against Speaker Kevin McCarthy. So, as a sop to the insurgents, McCarthy agreed to allow impeachment hearings. However, McCarthy had to use a procedural trick because he would have lost a vote on the issue.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Even the most vocal proponents of impeaching Joe Biden admit that there’s no evidence that he was involved in any of his son’s influence-peddling schemes. Given that the Republicans have been investigating Hunter Biden’s messy business dealings and turbulent personal life for years, it seems unlikely that the extra subpoena power that impeachment proceedings allow is going to generate any new leads.

After the mind-wipe of the pandemic and the betrayal of January 6, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump was first impeached for trying to strong-arm Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s time on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified that Trump didn’t care whether the investigation actually happened. All he wanted was the announcement of an investigation ahead of the election. “He had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it,” Sondland explained during Trump’s first impeachment.

Trump’s goal was to tarnish Biden before the election. Now, Trump’s threatening House Republicans with immediate primary challenges if they don’t vote to impeach the president. With a slim majority and a number of members representing districts carried by Joe Biden, it’s doubtful that the GOP has the votes to impeach Biden. Trump doesn’t care, the point is to announce the investigation.

The repeatedly debunked allegation is that as vice president, Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor who was looking into corruption at Burisma. Biden did indeed push for Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to step aside. Trump and his allies alleged that Biden was freelancing to benefit his son. In fact, pushing the prosecutor to step down was official US policy. Far from shaping US policy to benefit his son, Biden was executing the Obama administration’s anti-corruption agenda. Furthermore, the Shokin inquiry had already been shelved by the time Biden tried to force him out and its scope never extended to Hunter’s time on the board anyway.

The Republicans have tried to keep the furor alive by hyping the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Vish Burra, a Republican operative from New York, bragged that he spent nearly two months holed up in a hotel room with Steve Bannon trying to create “an October Surprise” with the data from Biden’s laptop. Burra said they called their effort “the Manhattan Project because we were essentially creating a nuclear political weapon.”

The October Surprise largely flopped because the mainstream media and social media giants recognized the laptop dump for what it was – a transparent attempt by the Republicans to manipulate the election with a fake scandal, just as Trump had tried to do in Ukraine.

Operatives like Burra and Bannon have done their best to spin conspiracy theories about Biden’s involvement in Ukrainian biolabs, Chinese intrigues and imaginary sex-trafficking schemes. But none of these allegations have gained traction outside the Republican fever swamps, most likely because Hunter Biden was a sad dude who dined out on his family name like countless Washington failsons, but who didn’t actually convince his father to intervene on behalf of his clients. As Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer put it, Hunter sold “the illusion of access.”

By opening impeachment hearings with zero evidence of wrongdoing by president Biden, the GOP is running a tired Trumpian play. It doesn’t matter whether an investigation uncovers anything, all that matters is that the investigation be announced.

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Fear not, the right to lie is safe

As soon as Donald Trump was indicted last week on federal conspiracy charges for his bid to steal the 2020 election, his lawyer alleged that the charges infringed upon his client’s right to free speech.

“Our defense is going to be focusing on the fact that what we have now is an administration that has criminalized the free speech and advocacy of a prior administration during the time that there’s a political election going on. That’s unprecedented,” said defense attorney John Lauro.

A parade of Republicans came forward to fret about how the right to lie was under attack.

Congressman Gary Palmer of Alabama lamented the “criminalization of disinformation and misinformation,” which to be fair, are indispensable political tools for Republicans.

Fear not, America, the right to lie is secure.

As the indictment makes clear, Trump has every right to run his mouth in public, even to lie about election fraud.

What matters is the corrupt agreement that Trump and his confederates allegedly acted on in a bid to reverse his electoral defeat.

The indictment alleges that the former president conspired to pervert the federal government’s administration of the 2020 election and to derail the certification ceremony on January 6, 2021; and that if his plot had succeeded, it would have deprived millions of voters of their right to have their votes counted.

While the indictment provides overwhelming evidence that Trump knew (or should have known) that his claims of outcome-altering fraud were bogus, that was just one dishonest facet of an alleged scheme that was rotten to its core.

This is a nation of laws. If you think an election was stolen, you take that up with election officials and the courts, and you abide by their determinations. You don’t conspire to falsify legal documents and intimidate elected officials into counting the fakes over the genuine articles. Which is exactly what Trump is alleged to have done through the fake elector scheme.

The fake electors' scam is the base of the indictment pyramid, and the other allegations stack on top of it. The “wild protest” and the intimidation campaign of J6 was a bid to force Pence to count the fake electoral votes and disregard the real ones. The indictment also alleges that Trump pressured the Department of Justice to proclaim that the fake electors’ slate from Georgia was real.

Donald Trump and his co-conspirators recruited GOP loyalists in seven battleground states to pose as electors and cast fake electoral votes. Trump then tried to browbeat vice president Mike Pence into counting their fake electoral votes instead of the real ones. When he couldn’t convince Pence to play along, he turned the mob on the Capitol to physically intimidate Pence. The VP was whisked from the Capitol just ahead of a mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

The indictment alleges that the conspirators lied to the fake electors, promising them that their “votes” would only be counted if a court reversed the outcome of the election in their state. In fact, the courts reversed bupkis, but the conspirators submitted these fraudulent certificates anyway and tried to strongarm Mike Pence into counting them during the certification. It is fraudulent to forge legal documents and submit them to the federal government, whether you think there was election fraud or not.

The indictment alleges that one of Trump’s co-conspirators acknowledged in writing that in many states these fake electors couldn’t fulfill the legal requirements for how and where to cast electoral votes, but the conspirators knowingly submitted those defective certificates anyway.

Trump may try to fall back on an “advice of counsel defense,” claiming that his lawyers told him that the plot was legal. But that’s going to be an uphill battle because John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesboro are Trump’s alleged co-conspirators. You can’t just add a lawyer to your conspiracy and make everything legal.

As former federal prosecutor Mary McCord told The New Yorker, “A lawyer who is part of the conspiracy himself will cause an advice-of-counsel claim to falter.”

Furthermore, the indictment is full of examples of Trump’s Co-conspirators at Law admitting that aspects of their scheme were illegal.

For example, Eastman admitted to Mike Pence’s lawyer that the Supreme Court would unanimously reject his plan. He later asked the lawyer to indulge him in just one more violation of the Electoral Count Act. Even the so-called Eastman Memo – which Trump’s lawyer is waving as a get-out-of-jail-free card – acknowledges in passing that certain aspects of the plan violate the Electoral Count Act.

Trump’s lawyer is wrapping his client in the mantle of free speech because he has no other defense. Jack Smith’s indictment is full of damning evidence of conspiracy and obstruction and the advice of counsel is dead in the water. This case is about what Trump did, not what he said. The former president is standing trial for his actions, not his words.

Punishing a cowardly cop could create a perverse precedent in Florida

Scot Peterson is the first cop to be prosecuted for failing to act during a school shooting. The former school resource officer of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school faces a criminal charge for every child and adult who was shot after he arrived outside the building where Nicholas Cruz rampaged. If convicted of all charges, Peterson faces nearly a century in prison – the same as the gunman.

That’s monstrous.

Peterson is a coward, a f*ckup, a liar.

But he’s not on par with a mass murderer.

Peterson had a handgun on that horrible Valentine’s Day in 2018, but no body armor and no rifle. The gunman was armed with an AR15 and thousands of rounds. If the 56-year-old glorified mall cop had rushed in alone, he probably would have added his name to the body count.

Peterson is not a sympathetic figure. His nickname was “Rod,” short for “Retired on Duty,” a moniker he earned from his lackadaisical approach to his job. His claim that he hid because he thought that he saw a sniper inside shooting out is preposterous.

That said, Peterson is poised to become a scapegoat – a hapless creature banished to absolve the sins of others, namely the lawmakers who refuse to enact commonsense gun laws, and the judges and justices who refuse to uphold gun laws based on a historically bankrupt reading of the Second Amendment.

Since the Columbine rampage of the late 1990s, police doctrine has stressed the importance of engaging the shooter immediately. But in the heat of the moment, doctrine amounts to a suggestion. Time and time again, officers fail to engage school shooters. Several other officers from the Parkland area responded to the scene but failed to enter the building. In Uvalde, Texas, an astonishing 376 officers failed to confront the shooter. A report later concluded that the officers put their personal safety above the wellbeing of the victims. The officers knew the shooter had an automatic weapon and they were scared.

“Protect and Serve” is a popular police motto, but it’s purely aspirational. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that police officers typically have no duty to protect citizens. In light of these rulings, the 11th Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the police violated Parkland students’ right to due process by standing by.

Florida prosecutors are trying to sidestep this body of law by prosecuting Peterson under a novel and extremely tenuous legal theory of child neglect. They contend that Deputy Peterson was a caregiver. His failure to intervene was a crime.

In their rush to nail a cowardly school resource officer, prosecutors could end up creating a perverse precedent. In 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis threw open the doors to armed teachers in the classroom. Teachers are definitely caregivers. Would that mean that every pistol-packing teacher is criminally liable if they fail to draw on a school shooter with an AR?

Even if the Florida courts manage to cobble together some novel legal duty to intervene in school shootings, it’s not realistic to expect cops or anyone else to consistently live up to it. Soldiers train intensively and regularly to be able to run toward gunfire. Peterson had completed a few workshops on school shooters, which is laughably feeble preparation to override the instinct for self-preservation. Running toward gunfire to defend the innocent is heroic. But heroism is, by definition, above and beyond what’s required. Making criminals out of ordinary people in impossible situations is grotesque.

The real problem is that most police officers are scared to face down shooters armed with weapons of war. The only solution is gun control.

Everything else is a distraction.

Why 'artificial intelligence' is still just a marketing buzzword

Investors’ demand for stocks of companies touting “Artificial Intelligence” accounts for all the US stock market gains this year. A steady stream of hucksters, whose incomes invariably depend on more venture capital funding for machine learning, are lining up to tell us how the technology is poised to reshape everything from movies to medicine to romance. But "artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. Services like ChatGPT are not intelligent and describing them as such sets us up to be suckered by tech companies.

“AI is a machine’s ability to perform the cognitive functions we associate with human minds, such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting with an environment, problem solving, and even exercising creativity,” kvells McKinsey and Company, the management firm whose high-paid consultants who have finessed the destruction of whole sectors of the economy and eased the paths of authoritarian regimes worldwide.

This is false. Today’s “AI” doesn’t see or learn or remember in the way that sentient beings do, and it certainly doesn’t use creativity. Neural nets probe huge datasets and find the patterns that we tell them to look for. ChatGPT and its ilk are fancy autocomplete. There’s no insight behind their output. They don’t know what’s true, or even what words mean. Which is why bots like ChatGPT generate polished nonsense backed by manufactured sources.

Today’s machine learning tech isn’t much smarter than the “cybernetic tortoises” and “hardware mice” of the mid-20th century. The quest for machine intelligence goes back to the 1950s. The AI industry has gone through repeated hype-disappointment-shame cycles since that time. You don’t need a neural net to see this pattern: a new advance offers marginal improvements, which are shamelessly oversold, consumers are disappointed, and anticipation is replaced by a sense of betrayal. Whereupon “AI” becomes a dirty word for the next decade, only for the cycle to repeat, thanks to new discoveries and short memories. The cycle is so predictable that researchers coined the term “AI Winter” to describe the alienation and embitterment phase of the cycle.

The more tech CEOs talk up the brilliance of their algorithms, the more predisposed we are to regard whatever they churn out as smart. The so-called Barnum Effect that keeps fortune tellers in business may account for our willingness to perceive the generic outputs of machines as intelligent. When you tell people that a paragraph of generic platitudes comes from a personalized astrological reading, recipients will marvel at the precision and insight of the pronouncements. In truth, we ascribe our own meanings to vague statements, but we ascribe the sense-making to the imaginary agent, be it the amazing Zoltan or ChatGPT.

Tech CEOs want to give the algorithms all the credit, but their apparent brilliance is actually piggy-backing on the acumen of countless low-wage workers. The startup behind ChatGPT relies on an army of low-paid human contractors to label the data they use to train the system.

If you're a boss, replacing your copywriter with "artificial intelligence" sounds a lot better than entrusting your brand to a neural network that literally has no idea what it's spitting out.

The CEO of Emirate airlines predicted that pilots might one day be replaced by machines. It sounds a lot better to say you want “artificial intelligence” to land the plane than that you’re prepared to let autocomplete take the wheel.

Maybe one day we'll have true machine minds, but we're nowhere near that yet. And priming people to expect intelligence is setting them up to vastly overrate what the current tech is capable of--in ways that can be dangerous. Companies like McKinsey are salivating at the prospect of teaching companies how to lay off humans and replace them with algorithms.

Seventy years on, "artificial intelligence" is just a marketing buzzword and you're doing the tech companies’ promotions for them when you use it uncritically.

Conservatives may lose the mifepristone battle but their war on abortion rights will continue

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the abortion drug mifepristone will remain available while appeals play out on a lawsuit that sought to take the drug off the market. The fate of mifepristone is critical to abortion access because medication abortions account for a majority of terminations in the U.S. and most of these are carried out with a two-drug regimen that includes mifepristone.

The fact that the high court granted a stay doesn’t automatically mean that the justices will vote to keep mifepristone available. However, it’s noteworthy that only two justices--Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas--opposed the stay.

Longtime Supreme Court-watcher Adam Liptak of the New York Times sees a conservative majority losing its nerve.

The far-right has been gearing up for a national assault on abortion access ever since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe. However, they made the mistake of mounting an embarrassingly weak test case.

An umbrella group of anti-choice doctors challenged the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of a safe drug, long after the statute of limitations for such disputes had elapsed. These doctors don’t even have legal standing to sue over a drug they don’t take and don’t prescribe. The Constitution restricts legal standing to those who have suffered a concrete and identifiable injury from the thing they’re suing over. The best the plaintiffs can say for themselves is that they’ve been injured because they might hypothetically have to see patients who suffered complications from mifepristone prescribed by other doctors. It’s unclear why patients suffering from rare mifepristone complications would stampede to doctors who don’t even do abortions. Or why the possibility of more business for these doctors counts as an injury.

The current bid to yank mifepristone off the market is an outrageous bit of legal hackery whose sponsors deserve points only for shrewd venue shopping. They got their case in front of diehard anti-choice judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a veteran of the abortion wars, whose rulings are laden with contempt for abortion providers and strewn with anti-choice buzzwords.

The Dobbs decision disingenuously promised to restore peace and harmony to America by returning abortion laws to the states. It was obvious from the outset that this was a ruse. National anti-choice groups have set their sights on abolishing abortion at the federal level, which is why they’re trying to get a regulatory do-over for mifepristone 23 years and 5 million abortions after the fact. They claim to care about the safety of patients, but the real answer is that they’re trying to get mifepristone banned because they want to ban abortion nationwide.

Mifepristone has been on the market for over 20 years. This progesterone-blocking drug is safer than Tylenol or Viagra. More than 5 million people have used it to end pregnancies in the United States since it was approved by the FDA in 2000. Study after study has shown that mifepristone is both safe and effective, but rather than relying on volumes of scientific evidence, Trump judge Matthew Kacsmaryk was instead swayed by anecdotes from the anti-choice doctors who brought the suit and blog posts.

And there’s another mifepristone challenge waiting in the wings. The anti-choice, anti-birth control group Students for Life has filed a citizen petition with the FDA claiming that the agency didn’t assess mifepristone’s impact on endangered species when it approved the drug. The FDA did, in fact, assess data on mifepristone’s potential environmental impact during the approval process, as it does for all drugs. The group seeking approval supplied calculations that showed that amount of mifepristone that would find its way into the environment was trivial. Littering from the packaging was a bigger concern. But the anti-choice movement isn’t about to permit the truth, logic, or the law, get in the way of its all-out assault on reproductive freedom.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court may not have found the right test case to ban abortion pills nationwide, but their agenda hasn’t changed.

Ron DeSantis and Florida's Doctor Antivax

Last week, Dr. Joseph Ladapo issued a meaningless "health alert" to the people of Florida about mRNA covid vaccines.

Ladapo was back last week when it emerged that he'd been investigated for allegedly falsifying data for a previous antivax gambit.

The investigation was closed after the tipster clammed up.

The recent health alert was based on an uptick in reports to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Ladapo baselessly alleges that increased reporting must point to safety problems with covid vaccines.

However, the increase in 2021 and 2022 is better explained by the biggest and most carefully-monitored vaccine rollout in US history, more stringent reporting requirements for COVID vaccines, and increased public awareness of the VAERS system.

It's malpractice for a government agency to issue health directives based on VAERS data. VAERS reports guide future research, not shape medical decision-making.

VAERS data are correlational and unvetted. Anyone can report that they experienced any symptoms after receiving a vaccine.

Healthcare providers are required to report some adverse events, but compliance has historically been spotty.

Antivaxers love to claim that 32,000 people have died from the covid vaccine, because there have been 32,000 reports of people dying after being vaccinated.

VAERS provides zero evidence any of these people died because of the vaccine.

VAERS scientists look for unusual patterns.

If they think they see a signal, they'll pull medical records or death certificates to confirm these patients actually got the vaccine and actually experienced the adverse event, say, heart failure.

But even then, further research would be needed to determine whether the vaccine is the culprit – or an innocent bystander.

COVID vaccines came with much stricter VAERS reporting requirements than other adult vaccines. What's more, the government worked to educate doctors about their new responsibilities. Healthcare providers are legally required to report all major adverse events following a COVID vaccine, whether they're plausibly connected to the vaccine or not.

So if the patient gets struck by lightning on their way home from the vaccine clinic, their doctor is supposed to report it, just in case.

To make matters worse, some major antivax groups and personal injury attorneys coach their followers to make VAERS reports about third parties.

Antivax propaganda drives VAERS reports and antivaxers point to increased VAERS reports as proof that the vaccines are dangerous.

Media and internet exposure also drive VAERS reporting. When vaccine safety is in the news, people are more likely to attribute their symptoms to vaccines and more motivated to report those symptoms to VAERS. The media firestorm over Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent paper linking vaccines and autism boosted VAERS reporting rates for the MMR vaccine. VAERS reports also rose for Gardasil when the right decided that vaccinating young girls against cervical cancer was grooming.

The antivax site OpenVAERS now gets more traffic than the real VAERS website. Between December 2020, when the COVID vaccines first rolled out to mid-August of 2021, right-wing media like Fox and Breitbart mentioned VAERS seven times more often than mainstream outlets.

This is not the first time Ladapo has misused surveillance data to push governor Ron DeSantis's antivax agenda.

Last year, he disregarded CDC guidelines and recommended against covid mRNA vaccines for men aged 18 to 39. He did this based on a severely flawed, non-peer-reviewed study conducted by unnamed individuals within the Florida Department of Health.

This was the same project that generated the investigation into potential data falsification. A faculty committee convened by Ladapo's peers at the University of Florida condemned him for "careless, irregular, or contentious research practices."

Amongst other things, the professors faulted Ladapo for misuse of statistics and cherry-picking his data.

As a contributor to the USA Today network put it, "Ladapo is emerging as a central player in the governor's outreach to vaccine skeptics and opponents who now form a stunningly large part of the GOP's national voter base."

DeSantis is trying to brand himself as the biggest antivax loon in the GOP presidential primary.

It's a tall order, but Ladapo is prepared to do whatever it takes.

The cheese stands alone

Now that both Joe Biden and Mike Pence have been caught keeping classified documents at home, it's tempting to make a false equivalence between their bad behavior and Donald Trump's 20-month campaign to steal classified information.

To their credit, Biden and Pence have cooperated fully with investigators.

Whereas, Trump went to extraordinary lengths to hang onto his illicit secrets.

In fact, the former president is still fighting.

Still hanging on

Here's a very compressed history of Trump's fight to steal secrets.

Government archivists asked him to return presidential records, including classified material in January 2022. Trump sent back a token amount and fought for months to hang onto the rest, forcing the archives to turn to the Justice Department.

In May, the DOJ got a subpoena for all documents bearing marks of classification. A month later, Trump's lawyer handed over a mere 38 classified documents. That was it. He swore to it. Well, actually, he got some other sucker to swear to it.

That might have been it had not security cameras caught Trump's Diet Coke valet moving boxes out of a storage unit at Mar-a-Lago before and after the subpoena.

The valet admitted Trump personally ordered him to move the boxes, prompting the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago in August. That search yielded 184 more classified documents, including nuclear secrets.

As he keeps reminding us, Trump owns many properties. Unfathomably, Trump's people were allowed to do their own searches of sites including Trump Tower and the Bedminster golf club. The search team turned over two more classified documents they found in a West Palm Beach storage locker.

Classified material continues to trickle out of Trumpland. At least 300 classified documents were taken from the White House, and those are just the ones investigators knew of. Trump's chaotic management style could have allowed many more to go missing without anyone being able to track them. So, it's a near certainty that Trump is still hanging on to some classified material.

Why nobody

Recently, several news outlets have regaled the public with the tale of goofy Uncle Donald using a folder marked "classified" to block a blue light on his landline phone that was keeping him up at night.

That folder was turned over by Trump's private investigators. Like a bad magician, Trump is redirecting our attention to the goofy "lampshade." If we’re focused on office supplies repurposed as interior decor, we’re not talking about how Team Trump also recently relinquished a document with classified markings, an aide's laptop, and a thumb drive. All classified material they should have disclosed earlier.

In December, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to hold Trump (or his office) in contempt. Trump's team claimed they searched four of his properties before Thanksgiving. The Justice Department said those searches were not adequate and therefore that Trump was still flouting the six-month-old subpoena that requires him to turn over all classified material in his possession.

To the Justice Department's great frustration, Trump has refused to appoint a custodian of records, a single person who can certify that all classified material has been handed over, and who can be held personally responsible if that’s not true.

You can see why nobody wants the job.

Team Trump swears they've given everything back, but assurances mean nothing.

We are inured

Judge Beryl Howell has not yet ruled on whether Trump will be held in contempt.

Trump has been scoffing at a subpoena for six months. Anyone else would have been charged with obstruction of justice months ago, but we've become inured to the idea that there's a different standard of justice for Trump than for anyone else.

Did Charles McGonigal sabotage the 2016 election?

The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pressing the Department of Justice for details about a former FBI agent who was indicted for working for a sanctioned Russian oligarch and laundering the proceeds.

Charles F. McGonigal retired as special agent in charge of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office in 2018. McGonigal allegedly began cooperating with an agent of aluminum baron Oleg Deripaska while he was still working for the FBI. Deripaska is under indictment for allegedly evading sanctions and obstructing justice.

Dick Durbin raised urgent questions in his open letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. As Durbin noted, McGonigal was promoted to special agent in charge just before the FBI’s October 2016 announcement that it saw no ties between Trump and Russia.

Durbin is asking the questions that are on everyone’s mind:

Did McGonigal do anything to tip the scales of justice in favor of anyone he’s now linked to in the indictments? What roles did McGonigal play in the 2016 FBI’s Trump-Russia probe and the Mueller investigation? Is there any chance that McGonigal compromised sources, methods or evidence? How did one of the most elite counterintelligence operations not notice that one of its main guys was allegedly doing favors for a sanctioned Russian oligarch while he was still on the FBI payroll.

Deripaska’s history with the FBI is long and bizarre. The FBI has investigated Deripaska for links to Russian organized crime.

Nevertheless, 2007, the FBI colluded with Deripaska to spring a kidnapped CIA contractor from captivity in Iran. His name is Robert Levinson and he was an FBI agent before he went to work for the CIA.

Deripaska reportedly spent $25 million of his own money on the mission. You might wonder why the FBI needs a Russian oligarch’s money. The idealistic answer is that Iran is under economic sanctions, so Americans couldn’t legally spend money there. Realistically, it’s probably because some of that money went to bribe people the FBI regards as terrorists. Deripaska went along with this scheme because the FBI was supposed to make his US visa problems go away.

They didn’t.

And Levinson didn’t get to come home.

The US State Department had barred Deripaska from the country because of his alleged ties to Russian organized crime. Evidently, they were on the cusp of a deal to release Levinson when the mean-old State Department scuttled the visa scheme once and for all – possibly because they didn’t want to be in the debt of a man like Deripaska.

Undeterred, the FBI tried to enlist Deripaska’s help again in 2014, first as an informant on Russian organized crime and in 2016 as a source for their probe into the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Two months before Donald Trump was elected, FBI agents reportedly visited Deripaska in New York City and asked him whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. Deripaska put on his best innocent face and insisted that the agents were making something out of nothing.

By this point, campaign manager Paul Manafort had been feeding sensitive campaign and polling data to Deripaska’s associate for months, information that made its way to Russian intelligence. It’s unclear how much impact Deripaska’s denial had on the FBI’s later announcement that it knew of no links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Did the FBI’s attempts to recruit Deripaska ultimately result in Deripaska recruiting a top FBI agent? A recent story in the Times strongly implies as much, albeit without providing much in the way of supporting evidence.

Let’s hope that answers are forthcoming.