I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar after Elon Musk’s robot played dumb over and over again to deny that Trump willingly accepted help in 2016 — “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” 2020 — when the White House ignored warnings that Rudy was being targeted in a Russian influence operation, and 2024, when there were campaigns paying top Trump propagandists, manufacturing dirt on Biden, and attacking Tim Walz; maybe Grok is willfully dumb because of Elon’s role in the whole thing.
All that’s before you consider how quickly Steve Witkoff and Jared resumed the outreach from Kirill Dmitriev, or how quickly Trump moved to get Alexander Smirnov sprung from prison.
Grok showed amazing agility for a robot, always moving the ball from “accepting” Russian help to “sitting in a room and asking for it.”
The robot claims there are no documents akin to the ones John Solomon had just released implicating Eric Swalwell, but not showing that he knew Christine Fang was working for China. Except that among the documents Solomon released, he revealed that Konstantin Kilimnik had renewed his efforts to get Trump elected in 2020.
And that Michael Caputo had participated in an anti-Biden propaganda effort in 2020, before he joined Trump’s government.
NYT doesn’t go into all this detail in its piece describing how Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. But it did note the gravy train Benny Johnson was floating on.
Disclosures during the Biden administration, including federal indictments, accused both Russia and Iran of engaging in aggressive influence operations in 2024. Iranians were charged with hacking Mr. Trump’s campaign and shopping stolen material to various news outlets in an effort to harm his bid to return to the White House. The Justice Department and other agencies accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of again trying to bolster Mr. Trump (and degrade U.S. support for Ukraine) by targeting the United States with disinformation — including by secretly funneling $10 million to a conservative media start-up.
But those revelations were piecemeal, and do not offer a full portrait of what foreign meddling took place.
Congress passed a number of laws after Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election intended to better inoculate the American public from foreign attempts to influence voters. That included requirements for more transparency with lawmakers and the public from the nation’s spy agencies about what intelligence had been collected concerning the ambitions of foreign powers around federal elections.
In a letter in July, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee urged Bill Pulte, then the acting director of national intelligence, to declassify and publicly release a redacted version of the 2024 election report. The law at issue requires the assessment’s public release within 60 days of the conclusion of the federal election cycle “to the greatest extent possible” while protecting sources and methods.
The Trump administration also has yet to deliver to Congress a report required by law, identifying foreign intelligence threats to the coming 2026 midterm election. The deadline was in early May, a Democratic aide to the House Intelligence Committee said.
“The intelligence community is currently in violation of multiple statutes designed to ensure that Congress understands the full scope of foreign adversary plans and intentions this cycle,” as well as the administration’s efforts to combat those threats, the letter said.
Though to be honest, I think Trump may have as much to hide regarding the Iran hack-and-leak that successfully compromised Trump’s rat-fucker Roger Stone, his defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, and his campaign manager (though Trump delayed confirmation that Iran did get at least some files from Susie Wiles), as he does on the Russian front. I say that for reasons beyond the fact that even as he was being hack Trump was promising to be nice to Iran.
I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.
Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?
I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.
Does there need to be a government response?
Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.
Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.
We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.
There was a blackmail component with the Bolton hack, and I would be unsurprised if Iran at least tried that with Trump. Just as importantly, even from the few documents I saw from the hack (the vetting documents for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum), I have real questions whether Trump vetted JD anew or just relied on one that Peter Thiel had done in 2022.
Whatever the reasons, Donald Trump is defying the law that requires him to tell us all the ways Russian intervened to help him get elected in 2024 before they try again in 2026.
Iran could not have done a better job than it did with Trump. Before he won in 2024, they were a rogue nation run by a geriatric extremist. Look at them now!
New, younger extremist leadership. Full control of the Strait of Hormuz–that place few Americans could have found on a map, but so many *now* understand the visceral importance of–with the option for future riches to be extorted from same. And a US military being consumed by the folly of its civilian leaders…so as to perfectly set up whatever Iran’s larger buddies feel like doing in that same degraded (for us, not them) future.
So yeah, no wonder Trump is hiding details of the Iran hack. Which would be Biden’s fault anyway, like everything else.
‘Full control of the Strait of Hormuz’
Such full control that Donald & Co appear to be giving up on bombs (not that they’re running low or that their military personnel are sick of being treated like shit or anything like that) and are going for economic warfare, i.e., trying to put the screws on anybody who does business with those nasty Iranians who are hurting The Donald so much.
Given what we know about the Iranian regime (and the fact that they have powerful friends who don’t like Donald much), why would he think that might work any better than bombing the crap out of them?
Still, stupid is, stupid does. (And desperate-to-win-the-next-election does what he can.)
Looking for a bright side: if the Republicans really want to build and maintain a ‘Christian’ theocracy, they’ll need the military onside and, at the moment, they’re shitting all over them (aka Donald’s understanding of ‘respect’).
I hope that that comes back to bite them.
I keep thinking of what Hilary Clinton said about Trump back in 2016: “A man you can bait with a tweet can’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.” Now the question is not who’s blackmailing Trump — but who isn’t?
To what extent could a Democratic Congress in 2029 subpoena officials in office (either as temp or as permanent appointees) to deliver the goods, either in writing or as testimony and compel answers about why reports were delayed? We know the reasons why but it gets people like Pulte in front a Democratic panel without a President to claim Executive Privilege and a possible Pardon for past crimes to cut off Fifth Amendment claims.
I expect Trump will refuse ALL cooperation with Congress, so you need to get to people who’ll testify some other way.
Subpoena the people who were fired for finding this.
Refusing to testify in 2027 is expected, referrals for Contempt of Congress will go nowhere, and Inherent Contempt will run into The Republican Six on SCOTUS saying that IOKIYAR as a matter of law.
But refusing to testify in 2029 if Democrats have a trifecta? Trump might be able to stall indefinitely while running up legal bills but calling every member of the Executive Branch to testify, including all pardoned persons to testify about what crimes they committed and for which they received pardons? Not even Thiel, Koch, and Elmo will want that legal bill sent to them.
Which is why Marcy’s suggestion to subpoena not Trump, but the folks Trump had fired for what they had discovered is such a good one.
Especially if these folks have copies of “memos to the file” that contemporaneously detail their account of what unfolded and ultimately crashed on top of them,
We use phrases like flouting the law, but since the SCOTUS made the president the law at the federal level, isn’t Trump just flouting himself?
“I got into it with Grok” It’s a chatbot. Life is too short for that.
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short, your username will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. /~Rayne]
Life’s a little short for drive-by shitposts, too, isn’t it?
To my great frustration, some rump center/left election-knowers on Twitter have lately claimed that recent results, and particular the defeat of Alex Vindman in Florida, show that Democrats are finally moving on from a supposed obsession with the Trump/Russia affair that was preventing them from focusing on the ills of Republicans writ large. I don’t know whether or not they’re right politically, but I think it’s awful that they dismiss the scandals discussed here as unimportant.
Democrats moved away from Vindeman because the candidate running against him was a local politician who goes way back in that state and has a reputation as a fighter. To quote the Guardian:
https: //www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/19/angie-nixon-florida-democratic-socialist
If Nixon’s win sent shock waves through the Democratic establishment, it proves how out of touch these folks have been. Her win, as I look at it, was more about her quality as a candidate and all the work she has put in over the years, not at all about turning away from Trump/Russia stuff.
It’s mostly about race and about the appearance of carpetbagging. Nixon is a Florida native; Vindman has only lived here about 5 years.
Neither of them had much in the way of ad buys on broadcast in central Florida; I suspect they were crowded out by MAGA GOP whose ads sucked up about 80-90% of this media market’s slots. Which means they would have had to rely on alternative outreach instead of paid media. Nixon would have had a much larger and well-established reach that even money couldn’t buy.
While it’s true that Angie Nixon is hard working, creative, smart, courageous, committed to helping ordinary people, and politically skilled, she lives in the same world as all the rest of us. That world is full of differences of opinion and disagreements about strategies and tactics.
Outreach and polling were scant for this Senate seat in the primary. The polls I saw indicated that Angie Nixon did not appear at all competitive. Because of past disagreements with some long established Black leaders in both the local Democratic community and elsewhere in FL, it seemed like she might not get their support.
My understanding is that, at the 11th hour, there was something that instigated the local Democratic community to come together and set the past disagreements aside. And that spread throughout the state because of how networked their history of working together is.
I’m not saying Callais wasn’t also a factor. I’m just saying that other things had an impact too.
I believe Angie Nixon will excel at giving Ashley Moody a run for her money.
Those “moving on” comments have probably been seeded by Trump’s minions online who are disseminating the Truth According to Trump — Russia helping him in the 2016 election never happened, it was all fabricated by his enemies. A key part of Trump’s agenda in this term is erasing any memory of his many, many crimes by insisting evidence (like the really damning stuff in the Epstein files) doesn’t exist and baselessly prosecuting those in the FBI and DOJ who investigated and prosecuted him for his crimes as president — exactly what was done in the old USSR. In his narcissistic grandiosity, Trump apparently believes he can convince history he wasn’t the sociopathic criminal he so clearly is.
“I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar . . .”
I love you, Marcy, but sometimes I worry about your health. OTOH, getting into it with Grok sounds like it could be a rather interesting e-sport.
“Grok, can you explain why South African whites were so stupid as to think that apartheid was God’s will?”
“Grok, can you explain why Elon Musk was so stupid that he thought ‘move quick and break things’ is a sound business plan, let alone a model for wise government policy?”
“Grok, can you explain the legal theory that allows a former president to refuse requests by the National Archives to have him return items in his possession that belong to the federal government?”
Before Trump “furloughed” Smirnov from prison, Trump’s DOJ folded into Smirnov’s defense team, and asked the judge to throw out the guilty plea. Argued by now Acting Deputy AAG Robert Keenan in April 2025.
https://www.legalaffairsandtrials.com/p/seriously-judge-questions-doj-case
Also, since that Jacqueline Sweet from November, Smirnov’s BOP location listed on the website has changed at least twice.
November 2025: FCI Terminal Island (BOP web listing)
Sometime by April 2026: FCI Lompoc II (BOP web listing)
Sometime by today: MDC Los Angeles
Who knows where he really is I’m not familiar with prisons enough to know if that indicates favorable treatment, similar to Ghislaine Maxwell, or just routine stuff.
The Terminal Island facility closed shortly after Sweet’s article about Smirnov somehow leaving the prison despite still listed as housed there, due to … underground tunnels. The conspiracy theory writes itself.
https://lbpost.com/news/citing-decaying-conditions-feds-say-they-will-close-terminal-island-prison/
And now he is at an administrative-security prison which makes it sound like he’s expecting to have a hearing? Or for medical reasons? I dunno maybe just normal prison stuff.
Lompoc has always been a minimum-security prison for white-collar criminals, so definitely a step up from Terminal Island. It’s located south of Vandenburg AFB and is in a rural setting near the coast in Santa Barbara county. MDC is the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown LA, usually a transitional stop on the way out of jail or a transitional stop on the way to some other detention facility.
This doesn’t even count the election interference by Israel. Smirnov is an agent of Israel, for an agency he won’t name publicly, and his fraud conducted with Brady, was attempted election interference in 2020, and arguably election interference in 2022 and 2024.
A timeline of his business activity and Brady scheme suggests the payments which ended up predicating his tax crimes, was in response his attempt to interfere in the election.
Other potential foreign spies that benefitted Trump and the GOP in elections, include Gal Lyft and Miles Guo.
I believe the Hunter Biden laptop op can be added to the list of Israeli election assistance for Trump. There is currently an allegation by Tucker “Qatarlson” during his recent interview of Hunter, that an Israeli intelligence operative met with his producer in October 2020 to push allegations of child porn on Hunter’s “laptop”. [Carlson’s comments are independent from the reasons why I came to believe that there was Israeli involvement there].
Such an allegation, which has triggered Laura Loomer in her ongoing battle with Tucker “Qatarlson” would be election interference in 2020, 2022, 2024, and potentially 2026. A golden goose.