Bill Maher, Who Kissed CIA Ass For Years on Russiagate, Remains in Pucker Mode

If you can't be bothered to learn the material, at least respect your guests

AT LEAST I STILL GET OSCAR INVITES: The Wages of Glib

HBO’s Bill Maher has been good to me over the years, showing a professional and personal courtesy. I’ve always been impressed by how hard he and his staff work to make sure they put together a balanced, interesting current events show during volatile times, with Bill himself trying to keep a sense of humor and an open mind about most every subject.

Except one: Russiagate. Bill so far hasn’t suffered the fate of someone like Stephen Colbert because he remained a comic at heart through all these years, while Colbert gave up being funny to become an abject establishment mouthpiece. The flip side of that equation, though, is that when a subject gets too weedsy or difficult, Bill glibs his way through the hard parts and uses his host’s prerogative to bully guests by cutting them off after scripted laughs. He used my friend Walter Kirn as a prop for this act Friday night. If it’d been me in that chair, I might have pulled his arms off:

Two moments stood out in recent weeks.* Bill gave a little speech about how Tulsi Gabbard accusing former intelligence officials and Barack Obama of a “treasonous conspiracy” was “rich,” then sounded off on whether or not Russiagate is a “nothingburger.” It sounded here like he was talking about me:

It has astonished me for quite a while that a lot of people — not just on the right, but people sort of in the middle — have been saying for a very long time now that Russiagate was a nothingburger. I think it makes them feel like “I was the smart one, I’ve said that all along. Russiagate was not a nothingburger. It was a burger. Maybe it wasn’t a juicy steak. But it was a burger. I would like to show you one little piece of tape, and then we can talk about it…

Then he did something amazing, rolling out tape of a joint press conference from July 16, 2018, when Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked a question, and Vladimir Putin after a pause to hear the translation, answered:

MASON: President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election. And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?

PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.

At this, Bill threw his hands up in the air, as if to say, “Who’s smart now?”

I watched that Trump-Putin presser in “real time” and remember it well. I speak Russian and could hear the sense of Putin’s answers in addition to the translation. This snippet at the end was carefully phrased by Mason, who was hoping “I might just get one more in” after multiple attempts at the same collusion-themed question. Bill’s staff left out these prior exchanges between Mason, Trump, and Putin, which were definitive, even strident on the relevant questions. Mason for instance asked Trump if he could please say something negative about Russia for a change:

MASON: Thank you. Mr. President, you tweeted this morning that it’s U.S. foolishness, stupidity and the Mueller probe that is responsible for the decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular? And if so, what would you — what would you consider them — that they are responsible for?

Trump replied:

TRUMP: Yes I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should’ve had this dialogue a long time ago; a long time, frankly, before I got to office… The probe is a disaster for our country… There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it… That was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily. And, frankly, we beat her — and I’m not even saying from the standpoint — we won that race. And it’s a shame that there could even be a little bit of a cloud over it. People know that, people understand it. But the main thing… zero collusion.

Having accomplished the goal of setting up a “Trump Backs Putin on Election Meddling at Summit” story that would be packed with quotes from the likes of CIA chief John Brennan denouncing the summit as “treasonous,” Mason moved to Putin. He asked the Russian president why Americans shouldn’t believe their intelligence agencies over Donald Trump:

MASON: President Putin, if I could follow up as well, why should Americans and why should President Trump believe your statement that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election, given the evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies have provided? And will you consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury?

Trump interrupted to repeat the “no collusion” line a few times, but Putin eventually got to answer. He responded not only to the conspiracy question, but also addressed the much-ballyhooed indictment of 12 GRU officers along with two companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting:

PUTIN: Could you name a single fact that would definitely prove the collusion? This is utter nonsense, just like the President recently mentioned… We heard the accusations about the Concord company. Well, as far as I know, this company hired American lawyers and the accusations don’t have a fighting chance in the American courts. So there’s no evidence when it comes to the actual facts.

When Jonathan LeMire of AP challenged Trump by saying, “Every intelligence agency has concluded” that Russia interfered, and why didn’t he just agree, Trump rambled before Putin asked to step in. “I was an intelligence officer myself, and I do know how dossiers are made up,” he hissed. When LeMire shot back by asking if Russia had “compromising material” on Trump, Putin became frustrated. “Now to the compromising material. Yes, I heard these rumors that we allegedly collected compromising material on Mr. Trump,” he snapped. “Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this: When President Trump was at Moscow back then, I didn’t even know that he was in Moscow.” (A year later, an Obama-appointed Inspector General put out a 400-page report blowing up the “compromising material” story as nonsense.)

Putin’s answers were so unequivocal, LeMire himself summarized it in one of his questions, saying, “Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016.”

Going back to the clip Bill played, Mason asked a two-part question: “Did you want President Trump to win the election, and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?” Putin’s answer, “Yes, I did,” was clearly in reference to the first part only, among other things because his translator was speaking during the first part. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Mason, the Reuters reporter who went all the way to Helsinki to ask dogshit CIA-themed gotcha questions, yet still couldn’t lie about the answer he got. In an interview with NPR two days later, he said:

I think if you look critically at it and, in particular, listen to what he was saying earlier, he as well as President Trump were denying any kind of collusion. So my suspicion is he heard the first part of my question and may not have heard the second part.

To recap: at a press conference in which both Putin and Trump were subject to a stream of questions about interference and collusion and both repeatedly answered with firm denials, a Reuters reporter asked a two-part question that inspired a brief answer to the second part that was in complete contradiction with the others, seemingly because Putin didn’t hear the question. The reporter himself, citing the denials, admitted his “suspicion” was that Putin didn’t hear the second part. Seven years later, after every other element of this WMD-style con job has been exposed, Bill Maher rolled out “Yes, I did” as a smoking gun confession. Holy shit is that weak:

Let’s not forget, there’s subtext to this exchange. Not only did Bill years ago milk the Helsinki summit for boatloads of jokes about Trump being a “Russian ho” and how what Russia did wasn’t meddling, just “white people helping white people,” he invited ex-CIA Director and drone-torture-perjury officianado John Brennan as a guest to comment on all this, in August of 2018. Instead of even gently challenging the former CIA chief who happened to be a central character in the Russiagate story, Bill wrapped his lips all the way around Brennan’s saggy glutes and declared anyone who didn’t defer to “our generals” was guilty of treason. “He’s not on our side. You’re not on our side, if you’re attacking our Generals, you’re not on our side,” Bill said, adding, “He takes their side and not ours. That’s a traitor.”

Now that it’s been revealed Brennan lied to Congress and overrode his own hand-picked analysts to include discarded reports and the bogus Steele Dossier in the secret case against Trump because it “rings true,” Bill’s decision to throw treason charges at anyone who disagreed with the man looks pretty bad. That’s in addition to the dozens of other shows in which Bill and Real Time embraced stories that later went belly up, factually, never admitting prior mistakes.

Bill’s ball-gargling of Brennan looks particularly weak considering a February, 2020 routine in which he counseled Democrats to fight dirtier, just like the Republicans. Watch how he grew somber and self-righteous as he talked about the scourge of deep-fake videos before joking, “It’s the future of sleazy American political advertising, so let’s get in on it now and I know I know just what our first deep fake video should be the pee tape.” Then, for laughs, he played a deep-fake “pee tape” video that ended with the line, “I’m Donald Trump, I like everything covered in gold,” earning applause and plenty of attaboys on social media.

Bill didn’t get, or maybe he did, that “the future of sleazy American political advertising” wasn’t in cheap videos but in a sophisticated cross-institutional mechanism in which intelligence services, law enforcement, Congressional Committees, and the corporate press worked in sync to make more lasting fakes. Those are stories that despite being wholly invented are deemed true by everyone from “authoritative” fact-checking organizations to unscrupulous Reuters reporters to the Pulitzer Committee to late night comics like Colbert and Maher. Deepfake videos are small beer compared to these blatant, institutionally supported intelligence deceptions. Did I mention Bill gulped to the shaft when he interviewed the guy who put the official imprimatur of the United States on the pee tape by sticking it an official government report? That’s a much bigger deal than running a ten-second Twitter deepfake.

In hindsight, can’t we say Real Time’s failure to remind their audience they have a stake in leaving out all this context is pretty rich, too?

I didn’t get really angry until I saw how Bill treated my friend Walter Kirn, one of the world’s nicest people in addition to being a great writer and conversationalist. It clearly bothers Bill that more and more people are getting haughty about the Russiagate story he smugly botched for years. “Russiagate was not completely made up,” he said, to which Walter gently announced that he disagreed, saying, “We’re finding out day by day that it was almost completely made up.”

“Oh, please,” Bill said sanctimoniously. “It’s on tape.”

My ears perked up. On tape? What is? New evidence? No, just Bill, chewing a couple of old Russia gummies. “It’s on tape. He’s asking the Russians for help. He says, ‘Hack some shit,’ and they did it that day. So don’t tell me there’s no smoke.”

The idea that Russian hackers actually tried to break into Hillary Clinton’s personal offices comes from that 2018 indictment by Robert Mueller of 12 GRU officers, the one curiously timed for three days before the Helsinki summit. The relevant item is an unsourced assertion folded into the larger indictment, almost as an afterthought:

On or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.

This isn’t even a weak news story, which might be sourced to “persons familiar with the matter.” There’s no sourcing here at all, which normally isn’t a problem — in an indictment there’s almost always an presumption that the state will be have to prove it at trial — but it’s a big issue if the prosecutor knows he or she will never have to go to court. In this case, Putin of all people turned out to be right, as Mueller dropped the charges against the two shell companies once they appeared in a U.S. court as defendants. The sourcing of this section in the Mueller report was redacted under an “investigative technique” heading, a.k.a. the automatically suspect “sources and methods” trope:

“Investigative technique”

So while we now have mountains of unredacted, definitive documents showing how intelligence officials manufactured a case against Trump using phony research, bits of discarded or rejected intelligence, and a truly conspiratorial agreement that “this is OUR STORY and we’re stickin’ to it,” Bill is still relying on an unsourced, unverifiable assertion that no official or officials ever seriously attempted to assert was evidence of anything. The “one hour later” charge never reappeared after it vanished along with the publicity-stunt GRU case.

Incidentally, when I was asked about this in Congress by Levi’s heir and former impeachment prosecutor** Dan Goldman, who wanted to know if I “agreed” with the GRU case charges, I had to remind Goldman, a prosecutor, that indictments are just accusations and meaningless until the public sees underlying evidence. When I tried to point out that some of those indictments had been dropped, Goldman told me to go back and read them and see if I still didn’t think they were proved. You can see for yourself, above, what a lot of the “proof” in that indictment was: unsourced assertions. Goldman was running a con, and got away with it by invoking a Congressman’s prerogative to tell me to shut up once I started talking. Sound familiar?

Bill meanwhile was so impressed by this ancient, never-proven accusation that he gave nice-guy Walter Kirn his best “Oh, please” sneer, as if he were a child. This, while ignoring the fact that Walter isn’t the one sitting atop eight years of fuckups and tongue-baths of figures like Brennan and California’s Eric Swalwell. When Mueller in early 2019 finished his investigation into Trump without returning new indictments, a development Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate and other reporters instantly recognized as a death knell to the hoax, Bill had Swalwell on and condoled with him on air. “I don’t need the Mueller report to know that he’s a traitor,” Bill reassured Swalwell. “I have a TV.” This has been his story ever since, and he, too, is “stickin’ with it.”

Those of us who covered this from the beginning knew the overwhelming majority of Americans who followed the Trump-Russia scandal made up their minds at the start and would never change. But there were people like Pulitzer-winning reporter Jeff Gerth who spent years deconstructing the infuriating deceptions of Russiagate in a 20,000-word opus for the Columbia Journalism Review in the hope that a key figures with open minds might see it and realize the WMD-size scale of the error.

Most of the people who did this work were not Trump supporters (in some cases, very much the opposite), and many took serious career risks to pursue the story. This was about steering journalism away from total corruption and waking the public up to something that was an incredibly serious crime, even if the victim was Donald Trump. People like Bill were perfectly positioned to open the door to this discussion. He’s one of the only people in media with the leeway to even try it. Instead, out of vanity or embarrassment or sheer smallness of character, Bill has continually blown off all this work and defended his “I don’t need to read shit, I’ve got a TV” attitude by being a dick to people like Walter, who also lost friends and dealt with blowback during the McCarthyite mania that Bill helped inflame. He should be apologizing to the Walter Kirns of the world, not mugging for canned applause with his “Oh, please” sneering-grandma routine.

I previously chalked up Bill’s intransigence to the innocent mistake of a celebrity comic who really is too busy to do the journalist’s miserable job of plowing through thousands of pages of boring documents. Now I see he’s just done the math and realized he can coast by carefully choosing segments and whipping out his touchy star act at key times. I get it, it’s Hollywood, where if you’re not actively buggering babies your eternal soul’s in good shape, but if laziness is the plan, just own it. Don’t demean colleagues to cover your own warts. And if you plan on trying that with Walter again, make sure I’m not within driving distance.

*Yes, I confused a clip from last night’s show with this week’s. It was late.

** Not Mueller deputy.