When war strikes, so does disinformation. It’s a vital component of a conflict, especially in these days of social media and hyper-interconnectedness. In the past three weeks, we’ve seen how quickly disinformation can shape the discourse of war. As the Kremlin attempted to legitimize Vladimir Putin’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine, it generated the unsubstantiated allegation that the United States was involved with biolabs in Ukraine that were producing weapons that could threaten Russia. Fox host Tucker Carlson eagerly amplified the accusation, as did such conservative luminaries as Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn. This was more than just own-the-libs trolling, for this propaganda boosts the Russian justification for its war on Ukraine and could even become a rationale for strikes on US targets. Remember when the US government argued that WMDs justified preemptive military action? It didn’t matter whether those WMDs actually existed.

What is with the right when it comes to promoting Russian talking points? Former Trump campaign mouthpiece A.J. Delgado inexplicably claimed that reports of Russian bombs hitting maternity wards and other civilian targets were “probably bullshit.” That was what Moscow propagandists said. Another Trump fangirl, Candace Owens, declared that Ukraine wasn’t a real country and called President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “very bad character” who was involved in some plot with “globalists” against “the interests of his own people.” (See Dumbass Comment of the Week below.) This, too, echoed the Kremlin line. Rep. Madison Cawthorn called Zelenskyy a “thug,” and his remarks were all over Russian state television. This noise from the right makes it tougher for the United States to have an honest debate about the vexing issue of the war in Ukraine. Which is what Putin wants. It also provides free content for Putin’s Big Lie machine in Russia.

Russian disinformation has dramatically affected US politics in the Trump and post-Trump eras. The most serious instance was Moscow’s attack on the 2016 campaign, which was mounted to help Trump win the White House. Though cyber experts and the US government fingered Moscow as responsible for the hack-and-leak operation that hampered Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, Putin and the Kremlin said Nyet, it wasn’t us. This fake news was embraced by Donald Trump and his minions who asserted there was no Russian intervention. As president, Trump even said he accepted Putin’s denial. Score that as a big win for Putin.

The Russia-Trump disinformation connection runs deeper. As my occasional co-author Michael Isikoff revealed in 2019, Russian intelligence cooked up a phony conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee employee who was murdered on a Washington, DC, street corner in July 2016. The SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, planted with a conspiracy website the false story that Rich had been gunned down by assassins working for Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, this untrue allegation morphed—with the help of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and American conspiracy-mongers—into the more extensive conspiracy theory that Rich had been killed because he (not the Russians) had stolen the hacked emails from the Democrats. As Isikoff reported, “the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks.”

Moscow’s goal was to purportedly show that Putin had not subverted the 2016 American election. And Trump allies in and outside the White House—including Bannon, longtime Trump adviser and dirty trickster Roger Stone, and Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump—pushed versions of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Let’s pause for a moment so that can sink in: Trump aides were peddling a loony conspiracy theory originated by Russian intelligence.

Here’s another example of from-Russia-to-Trump disinformation quite relevant today. Trump landed in his first impeachment mess partly because he accepted Russian disinformation. Recall his famous July 25, 2019, phone call with Zelenskyy. When the Ukrainian president asked for more security assistance, particularly Javelin anti-tank weapons (which have been crucial in the battle against the Russian invaders), Trump replied, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it.” Later in the conversation, he pressed Zelenskyy to produce dirt on Joe Biden. But at first he was talking about the nutty conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had intervened in the 2016 election and had done so to assist Clinton. This batcrap story claimed that the hacked DNC servers had been whisked away to Ukraine by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that had worked for the DNC, and were being hidden in Zelenskyy’s country as part of a cover-up.

It was complete nonsense. The files on the servers had been turned over to the FBI. There was no Ukrainian connection to the hacking and leaking. CrowdStrike was not, as Trump had told others, a Ukrainian company. Where did this junk come from? Take a guess.

This Ukrainians-did-it conspiracy theory appears to trace back to a fellow named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was identified in a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report (approved by the Republicans and Democrats on the committee) as a Russian intelligence officer. Last year the US Treasury Department described him as a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.”

In 2019, BuzzFeed News obtained an FBI report about an interview conducted with Rick Gates, a top Trump campaign aide in 2016, during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Gates was a longtime business partner of Paul Manafort, who had been chair of the Trump campaign. Both had been business associates of Kilimnik in Ukraine. The FBI report noted, “Gates recalled Manafort saying [in 2016] the hack was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians, which parroted a narrative Kilimnik often supported.”

This is the earliest chronicled appearance of the blame-Ukraine cover story. And it came from a suspected Russian intelligence officer. This connection is even more intriguing now that we know, as the 2020 Senate intelligence report disclosed, that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” Put it all together and this picture emerges: Manafort’s business associate, a Russian intelligence officer (to whom Manafort passed inside information on the Trump campaign in 2016), was possibly involved in Putin’s operation to subvert the election to assist Trump, and then he told Manafort the Ukrainians were the perps.

The Ukrainian conspiracy theory became more convoluted in the following years, as American conspiracists added evidence-free claims about the servers, CrowdStrike, and a Ukrainian businessman who supposedly was the grand plotter behind all this. But this notion started with a suspected Russian intelligence officer.

It’s not publicly known how Trump came to latch on to this bonkers idea. He raised the issue during an April 2017 interview with the Associated Press. And he discussed it with his advisers. On October 17, 2019, then–White House aide Mick Mulvaney confirmed that Trump’s belief in this theory had prompted Trump to block military assistance to Ukraine. “Did he also mention to me in [the] past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely," Mulvaney said. "No question about that. But that's it, and that's why we held up the money."

During the congressional hearings in the fall of 2019 for Trump’s first impeachment—which was precipitated by his phone call with Zelenskyy—his House Republican defenders repeatedly referred to the allegation that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 contest, adopting this line to protect Trump and deflect from his wrongdoing. Fiona Hill, the former White House Russia expert, tried to shut this down when she testified, saying sternly, “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Her plea didn’t work. The Republicans kept at it—and Trump did, too. The next day, he did exactly what Hill had cautioned against. In an interview with Fox, he prattled on about Ukraine covertly possessing the server: “A lot of it, they say, had to do they say, had to with Ukraine. It is very interesting, it is very interesting, they have the server from the DNC.” In September 2019, Russian state TV had said Trump should keep digging for “the sweetest” kompromat of all: “proving that Ukraine—not Russia—interfered in the US elections.” That’s what he was doing—assisting a Russian disinformation campaign.

Russian intelligence has had a good winning streak in America in recent years. The 2016 attack. The Seth Rich smokescreen. The Ukraine-did-it operation. The latter served Moscow’s strategic interest of harming US-Ukraine relations. Putin’s spies and propagandists have a tougher task now that Russia is destroying cities and slaughtering civilians in Ukraine. But recent days have shown that on the right there’s still a strong market for Putin’s lies.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Dumbass Comment of the Week

War does not make people more intelligent. While Putin was killing Ukrainian civilians, conservative commentator Candace Owens, known for being one of Trump’s most prominent Black supporters, tweeted, “Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians.” This was wrong. Ukraine, ceded to the Soviet Union by the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact struck by Stalin and Hitler, was not created by the Russians when the Berlin Wall fell. It regained its independence two years later when the Soviet Union disintegrated. But history doesn’t matter, for the intent of this tweet—to discredit Ukraine’s standing as a real nation—was in sync with the disinformation swill slung by Putin and the Kremlin to justify mass murder.

Owens, an anti-vaxxer who has quasi-defended Hitler in the past, kept up her Putin-aiding propaganda campaign with another tweet: “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.”

Working with “globalists” in some instances has been coded language with an anti-Semitic bent. Let’s assume that was not Owens’ intent. Still, can you imagine providing ammo like this to the pro-Putin propagandists, as Russia is lobbing missiles at apartment buildings, hospitals, theaters, and other civilian targets? Owens remains a prominent contributor to Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, a popular right-wing site. If ignorance—and being soft on Hitler—is not a disqualification, what is?

Fox’s Jesse Watters, a poor man’s Bill O’Reilly, went full stupid when he asked the computer repair guy who handed Hunter Biden’s laptop to the FBI if he believes the Ukraine war was "engineered" by President Joe Biden as "a distraction.” Why not ask him what the Federal Reserve will do next?

Let’s stick with Fox and turn to Fox Nation host Lara Logan, once a respected foreign correspondent for CBS News. Now she’s a complete nutter. I defy you to make sense of her comments about the Ukraine war and Zelenskyy. She called Zelenskyy a “100-percent puppet who you can find on the internet in black stilettos and leather pants, shirtless, doing a spoof Dancing with the Stars, kind of a mock-up of a Ukrainian group that does this kind of satanic, occult type of music video.” Huh? Zelenskyy used to be a comedian. This was part of his act. Why was Logan fixated on this and tying Zelenskyy to something “satanic”? She then claimed Zelenskyy wasn’t elected but “selected.” By whom? She didn’t say, but she referenced Big Tech and election fraud. Her suggestion was that he was placed in office by some nefarious force, not Ukrainian voters. Globalists, perhaps? She topped it off by remarking, “To pretend this war is about Russia and Ukraine is just a bald-faced lie.” I wonder what the Ukrainians who have lost loved ones to Russian bombs and bullets would say to that.

For sheer ignorance, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker scored the touchdown of this week. The former NFL star had this to say about evolution: "At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?...If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.” Yes, think about it. Walker only attended three years of college before turning pro. Maybe he should have stuck around for the fourth.

This week, we have two honorable mentions. First goes to Fox host and Putin promoter Tucker Carlson. Six days ago, I published a scoop that revealed a Kremlin memo advising Russian media that it was “essential” for them to feature Carlson “as much as possible” when covering the Ukraine war. No other Western journalist was mentioned in the 12-page document. Carlson, the memo indicated, was the go-to guy for Putin’s disinformation campaign. I repeatedly tried to get Carlson and Fox to respond. They ignored my requests. After the article appeared, Carlson said nothing about it. But Bill O’Reilly did. (By the way, on Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov praised Fox's coverage of the war.) Carlson has yet to explain his pre-war Putin-cheerleading. Here’s a good reminder of his past Putin-boosting and his current disingenuousness:

The other honorable mention is awarded to Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet. Can you imagine holding that title and believing that in the middle of a vicious war and humanitarian crisis—when the risk of nuclear war has increased—this is what your message to the world should be?

The Mailbag

There were many responses to my article recounting my long-ago interactions with Tucker Carlson, when he was a journalist, not a demagogue. I noted that in those days he was a likable sparring partner and that I considered him generally an honest proponent of conservative views. Some readers took me to task for this reflection. Lois Breedlove wrote:

You know how I read this? You two were part of an exclusive white boys’ club. Nice guy that Tucker? Are you kidding me? Tucker Carlson never cared about anything but Tucker Carlson and gotcha journalism got him the fame he craved. And so he gave his audience more of what they wanted. He was never more than a panderer. And Crossfire was a key player in the destruction of American journalism. (I was a journalist turned prof. I used to show Jon Stewart’s takedown of Crossfire to my classes back then. Another guy of the club you can wonder where did he go wrong?) The problem is the club. But because you thought Tucker a likable guy, you’re bewildered by what he became? Maybe if you’d allowed women and POC into the boys’ club they could have told you. This column says more about you than Carlson. And it isn’t a pretty message.

Ouch. I wish I'd had the power to hire folks for Crossfire, where I was an occasional guest host, and could have brought a more diverse crowd into the clubhouse. But I did not. Alas, I’ve never had any gatekeeping clout in the mainstream media “boys’ club.” That aside, I will say that there have been plenty of members of what Lois calls the “boys’ club” who have not gone on to become Putin propagandists and fascistic demagogues, and, to my mind, it is interesting (and perhaps important) to ponder such transformations.

Francisco Javier also thought I was too soft on Carlson:

I, like others who read your blog regularly, know you provide us with a view that we can't seem to find in regular news/commentary, a view that fits with our current world view and allows us to see the difficulties we are now facing. I do wonder if you are giving Mr. Carlson "another chance" because he is a white man. I know this is going to sound "way left" but as a Mexican, white, gay man, I have come to see how we tend to give more "chances" to white men (and some white women too) to allow them to "repent" before being written off as the "right wing nuts" they are. I too thought Mr. Carlson seemed "well balanced" (I am embarrassed to admit even Lou Dobbs was in that group for a while) in the distant past, but I finally awoke to realize he is part of that group that cannot and will not allow an equal sharing of power for all humans, no matter their gender, race, ethnicity, etc. It is a sad state of affairs that must be accepted to allow us to move forward. Keep up the good work.

Francisco, I’m not giving Carlson “another chance.” I was hoping—as a rhetorical device—that he would make contact with his younger self and renounce his evil ways. But I do agree that one privilege enjoyed by the privileged is the shot at a second chance.

K. Brockett noted that she, too, has been trying to figure out Carlson:

I enjoyed watching his show on MSNBC. I saw him as a provocateur with a libertarian bent. He was sort of a nagging conscience for the furthest left. The story of how he went from that to his current craven iteration would be a fascinating one to read. He grew up comfortably. It has to be more than money. Hard to believe notoriety could be that seductive. But what else explains it?

Jerry Peace emailed:

Which is worse? To actually believe the hateful and vile misinformation he spews or to cynically crap this stuff out for the ratings, for the access, for the adulation of fascists? Either way, once one's sold their soul to whatever devil, there's no buyer's remorse period, no exchanges, no do-overs.

Laura “Pizzy” Pizzicara chimed in:

First, I applaud you for your perspective on this fellow, yet, in my point of view, I cannot believe that he was ever the way in which you’d described! It seems unfathomable that this snide, sneering, sot could have ever been held in high esteem! A journalist? Humm… An overtly wealthy individual whom has all the advantages that this world has to offer; to spew such venomous poison into the minds of the ill-informed is well, repugnantly evil. As for his “long strange trip,” he ought to purchase the Grateful Dead’s album, Working Man’s Dead! But I sincerely doubt that he’ll ever see “the light.” As for the joust between you two—I surely hope that you’d knocked him off his “High Horse!”

Nancy Hale noted the Carlson piece resonated with her:

I've been a free subscriber on a very limited income, having sworn no paid subscriptions. The Carlson/Kremlin column sold me. Thanks.

Dene Kraus wrote in about the recent newsletter on Trump and nuclear war:

I was really blown away by your having quoted my earlier email in your newsletter. My 15 minutes. I'm writing in response to your latest, concerning nuclear weapons, Tillerson's comment, and Trump. It's a brilliant piece of writing.

Thanks, Dene. Now you’re up to 30 minutes.

Pen Harms had kind words about the most recent MoxieCam™:

That is a beautiful picture of Moxie. It is not only external, but her eyes have a sensitivity often missed by humans when looking at another animal. No wonder you're bonded with her. Just my comment—to me this is just as important as the "news" stuff.

Moxie agrees. Speaking of which...

MoxieCam™

Moxie says, “I’ve been waiting for spring for a...”

“A year?” I ask.

“I’m not sure what you mean. But I’ve been waiting.”

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

March 15, 2022: Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, and me; why you should watch Severance; and more.

March 12, 2002: Putin, Ukraine, nuclear war, and Trump; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Madison Cawthorn, again!); the Mailbag, MoxieCam™; and more.

March 8, 2022: The progressive dilemma in Ukraine; rehabbing West Side Story; does Inventing Anna target or celebrate Instagram culture?; and more.

March 5, 2022: Once again, Merrick Garland should tell us if the DOJ is investigating Trump for his attempted coup; Dumbass Comment of the Week (winner: Ben Shapiro); masks and freedoms, the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

March 1, 2022: From CPAC to Ukraine—how the right went from wrong to crazy; rebranding this newsletter; and more.

February 26, 2022: How we let Ukraine—and the world—down; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Special Useful Idiots Edition); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

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February 19, 2022: A masterclass in both-sidesism from Washington Post columnist Matt Bai; Dumbass Comment of the Week; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

February 15, 2022: Why is John Fogerty serenading Trump crony Steve Wynn?; can Trump be barred from running for president because he flushed documents down the toilet?; The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window doesn’t know if she’s in a parody or not; Elvis Costello tells us to listen to Ian Prowse; and more.

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