Barack Obama Donald Trump Featured Hillary Clinton Hither and Yon Russiagate

Five Quick Things: The Long Overdue Russiagate Reckoning | The American Spectator

July 31, 2025

About half the country has almost a decade’s worth of rage that has been building and building over the utter lawlessness atop the Democrat Party.

What’s sad is that the angry half doesn’t seem to include any Democrats.

The utterly horrific Russiagate scandal, which gets worse with every disclosure emanating from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, isn’t just pulling off a scab and re-exposing old wounds. Because there has never been a scab. The wound has never healed. It has gone untreated for years. It’s septic and at least half the country knows it’s infected and putting the patient’s life in danger.

You cannot run a representative republic if one political party sabotages the duly elected president of the other party in ways that poison parts of the government against the interests of the people. Russiagate was exactly that; the lies concocted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign team and furthered by the dead-enders of the late-stage Obama administration to weaponize intelligence and law enforcement agencies against the people’s elected president amount to treason.

And treason must be addressed.

As Marcus Tullius Cicero said, “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.”

People understand that the lawlessness that took us from Hillary Clinton using a private email server while secretary of state solely for the purpose of hiding from the public the illegal acts of corruption she was regularly committing, to Clinton’s team drumming up a false narrative accusing Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 presidential election, to Barack Obama using that pack of lies as justification to both spy on Trump’s campaign and set up prosecutions of Trump allies, and finally to the entire Democrat apparatus concocting a false scandal so as to wreck the first Trump administration, cannot be dismissed.

And yet there is little confidence it will be punished as it would have to be in a nation of laws.

Still…

1. The Soros Connection to Russiagate Has to Be a Tipping Point, Doesn’t It?

It’s hard to be surprised by any of these revelations, and yet this is nonetheless a slap in the face:

Newly-declassified so-called Clinton Plan intelligence included intercepted communications from a George Soros ally which suggested that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Donald Trump was plotting a “long-term affair to demonize” Trump by linking him to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and that the Clinton campaign expected that “the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”

The revelations, including intercepted purported communications from Leonard Benardo, a top official at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and communications by Clinton foreign policy adviser Julianne Smith, provide new insight into information that the U.S. intelligence community received in July 2016 — just before the FBI launched its politicized Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

The bombshell allegations about a plot to falsely link Trump to Putin in an effort to distract from Clinton’s classified emails scandal are found within a formerly classified but now largely-unredacted appendix from special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report on the origins and conduct of the Russiagate investigation.

The intelligence received by the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, included information and analysis from purported emails from Benardo which detailed an alleged plot by Smith and others, with the approval of Clinton herself.

“During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated…technical structures… in particular, the Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications,” the classified annex said. “The media analysis on the DNC hacking appears solid…. Julie [Campaign Advisor] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”

The purported emails added: “HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] approved [Campaign adviser Julie’s] idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing emails.”

“The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue… In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media, and GRU [Russia’s Main Intelligence Directive] will hopefully carry on to give more facts,” the alleged emails from Benardo said.

Durham said there is evidence to believe the Clinton Plan intelligence was authentic and that the Clinton campaign did carry out such a dirty trick.

“The office’s review of certain communications involving Smith provided possible additional support … to the notion that the Clinton campaign was engaged in an effort or plan in late July 2016 to encourage scrutiny of Trump’s purported ties to Russia, and that the [Clinton] campaign might have wanted or expected the FBI or other agencies to aid that effort (‘put more oil into the fire’) by commencing a formal investigation of the DNC hack,” Durham’s classified annex stated.

The Durham classified annex also assessed that “it is a logical deduction [REDACTED] [Julianne] Smith was, at minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia” and that the communications reviewed by the special counsel “certainly lends at least some credence that such a plan existed.”

Word has it that the document in question was found in a “burn bag” at FBI headquarters. They were trying to memory-hole the thing altogether.

The newly declassified appendix to the Durham report is game-changing. It showed that the CIA believed Russian intelligence memos, which analyzed hacked emails and alleged a Clinton Plan to vilify Trump by linking him to Russia, were credible.

“The CIA prepared a written… https://t.co/OoeRrcNCZe pic.twitter.com/8U5UTOcAJR

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 31, 2025

That sure isn’t a surprise, is it? Because it certainly looks like the Soros network and Hillary Clinton cooked up the entire Trump–Russia narrative as a means of pulling the public’s attention away from her email scandal — and the Obama administration’s coverup of it.

The great Michael Walsh once said the Democrats are a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. It’s impossible to disagree with Walsh now.

2. Cincinnati and Its Horrific DEI Police Chief

That awful video of the racially motivated beating of two white people by a mob of blacks last weekend in Cincinnati, which I will not show here, has had a fairly large cultural effect this week.

And it’s peculiar that it’s the morbidly obese white woman serving as the police chief in that city who made things so much worse by complaining publicly not about the beating but about the public reaction to it.

Teresa Theetge, who at the time of her pathetic whining at social media influencers and journalists “sensationalizing” the incident had made precisely zero arrests, is the exact personification of the failure of DEI and left-wing “inclusion” that the country is finally beginning to turn away from after all the damage it has done.

Theetge has actually turned the Cincinnati incident into a lot larger story than it originally was. It’s the kind of pristine failure that raises the question of whether DEI and other woke practices shouldn’t be rolled back all the way to the beginning.

And at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson actually goes there:

There’s a lot to say about the disturbing footage of a violent mob beating a man and woman in downtown Cincinnati, but one thing that shouldn’t go unsaid is that the outrageous and offensive response from Cincinnati Police Chief Teresa Theetge is yet another reminder that we should get women out of men’s spaces — and out of men’s professions.

Policing is a man’s profession. So is soldiering, and commercial fishing, and underwater welding, and so on. That’s not to say women shouldn’t be able to serve in clerical roles in a police force or in the military, but they have no business leading police departments or being deployed into combat areas.

This is, or should be, a commonplace observation. But ever since the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the rise of feminism, we’re all supposed to pretend that women can do any job that men can do. What nonsense.

Davidson notes that four white former Cincinnati police officers are suing Theetge for discrimination, and one wonders if such practices didn’t directly lead to the lawless thuggery on display on that city’s streets last weekend.

Perhaps his is a radical take, but can anybody point to a female police chief (or fire chief, for that matter, given the performance of the angry lesbians in charge of the fire department in Los Angeles) who would prove Davidson wrong?

I would argue that it’s DEI that is the culprit more than sex. You might have fewer female police chiefs without DEI, but you surely would have fewer atrocious disgraces like Teresa Theetge. And, I’d argue, likely fewer disgraces of all shapes, sizes, and colors if merit alone was what governed the selections of police chiefs.

3. The Wall Street Journal Loses the Plot on Those American Eagle Ads

There seems to be an unending stream of this sort of thing of late:

A racy, widely panned jeans campaign for American Eagle Outfitters starring actress Sydney Sweeney is bringing into question whether the retailer accidentally strayed from its typically female-friendly marketing or deliberately tried to shift focus https://t.co/VVHNaKVgUK

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 31, 2025

Last I checked, American Eagle’s stock is up 15 percent since the launch of that “widely-panned” campaign. Can the Journal’s parent company boast of similar results?

In the next issue of The American Spectator’s print magazine, I’m going to have a piece on corporate media and its collapse and what comes next. There might be a lot of argument about what that will be, but I’ll say this — it isn’t going to be the Wall Street Journal if that’s all they have to offer.

You don’t have to love the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign. Writing here at The American Spectator yesterday, Aubrey Harris was pretty demonstrative in saying she doesn’t, and that’s OK. But it’s impossible to argue the campaign isn’t good marketing.

I’ve told this story before, but just from personal experience I can attest that American Eagle is on the right track. My first political book, The Revivalist Manifesto, shot to No. 1 on Amazon’s politics chart for a short time well more than a year after its publication, and for one reason: Mike Johnson wrote the foreword, and after he became speaker of the House, CNN decided to attack him for having written that short couple of pages. The Revivalist Manifesto was “full of conspiracy theories” and it was “racist and homophobic,” of course, as if anyone believes those accusations coming from CNN.

I couldn’t have written better sales copy. CNN’s screeching might have unleashed a flurry of trolls writing hateful Amazon reviews, but it also goosed the hell out of book sales and made me a nice little bit of mailbox money.

So a host of deeply unattractive TikTok trolls emoting about Sydney Sweeney ads as “Nazi propaganda” would only give American Eagle my experience on steroids and at scale.

How does the Wall Street Journal, supposedly the chronicle of capitalism, not understand this?

4. The Reversal of That Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding Is a Really Big Deal

It hasn’t gotten the play it deserves, though Melissa and I did give it a Spectacle Podcast segment this week, but the EPA’s reversal of its 2009 finding that carbon dioxide was a danger to the environment this week is beyond huge.

Chris Talgo at the American Thinker described the stakes pretty well:

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Endangerment Finding, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put into effect under President Barack Obama, essentially labels carbon dioxide a harmful “pollutant” that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Since it was put into place in late 2009, the Endangerment Finding has been used increasingly by the federal government to regulate fossil fuels.

“The Endangerment Finding is the legal foundation that underpins vital protections for millions of people from the severe threats of climate change, and the Clean Car and Truck Standards are among the most important and effective protections to address the largest U.S. source of climate-causing pollution,” according to Peter Zalzal, associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

…

According to Zeldin, “Repealing [the Endangerment Finding] will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America.”

Even better, he described the coming rule overturn as akin to “basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.”

Ordinary hard-working Americans ought to be rejoicing. This means that the federal government will no longer micromanage carbon-dioxide emissions.

I cannot stress the importance of this enough. Since 2009, the Endangerment Finding has been utilized as a primary weapon in the climate alarmists’ quest to rid the United States of fossil fuels and regulate the gasoline-powered automobile out of existence.

By repealing the Endangerment Finding, Trump is basically lobbing a giant wrench into the climate industrial complex. I don’t know if it will ever recover. Nor do I hope it does.

This is going to ultimately lower your electric rates, it’ll make your car more affordable, gas will be cheaper at the pump, more jobs will be created… virtually every aspect of our economy will benefit from the ridiculous CO2 noose coming off the neck of the American economy.

But best of all, as Talgo notes, the climate alarmism industry has just lost the chief pillar of its foundation. Because what that Endangerment Finding did was predicate a massive amount of spending, both directly by the government and also indirectly, by forcing or inducing the productive sector, on “environmentalist” NGOs who are essentially political grifters. That’s all going to dry up now, and lots of these people will have to get real jobs.

Killing the false economy of leftist activism paid for by theft and extortion is one of the healthiest things we’re getting from the Trump administration. It’s a lot of fun watching this house of cards come down.