Note On Smears

Like everyone else in media, I have to take even crazy people seriously now

In November of 2000, I had lunch at a Moscow restaurant called Chevignon with a group of Russian reporters. I’d been invited by Leonid Krutakov, just canned by Izvestia after exposing a deal for an interest-free loan to a Yeltsin crony. Leonid had a new paper called Stringer and a staffer named Alexei Fomin came along. (I remember thinking I’d never seen Alexei sober, and he was probably thinking the same about me.) The late Anna Politkovskaya was there, and Oleg Luriye, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, dropped by. NG at the time was facing heat for reporting possible FSB connections to infamous Moscow apartment bombings of 1999.

About a month later, just after appearing on the soon-to-be-raided station NTV to talk about his work, Luriye was attacked by four men, who left him with skull damage and only fled after Luriye’s wife escaped by driving her car through a garage door. Luriye’s editor Georgy Rozhanov got a call telling him he was next if the paper didn’t stop investigating. Fellow Novaya Gazeta writer Igor Domnikov had already been beaten to death with a hammer. Six more NG reporters would be killed in the next decade or so, including Politkovskaya and a kindly man named Yuri Schekochikhin who’d excused my broken Russian to help me early in my career. These memories have prevented me from suggesting American media figures like me can know real intimidation.

Last Friday, Josh Christenson at the New York Post reported on a memo showing the State Department strategizing in response to reporting by me and the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky. Later, Gabe tweeted that a Biden administration official briefed congressional staff that I wasn’t to be trusted because of “unsavory” behavior in younger years in Russia. That second news turned out not as bad as it sounded, but it made me think. Racket readers know I’ve dealt with kerfuffles, from an IRS visit to a threatening member of congress, and there’ve been other things left unmentioned. I wouldn’t call any of it serious, but most everyone I know in media is dealing with something now.

Six weeks before the lancing of the boil that is the Trump-Harris election, officialdom has never been antsier. There’s desperation up there and the more bureaucratically thuggish tactics employed by agencies like GEC have not scratched their itch of uncertainty. Arbitrary removals of content aren’t cutting it. New overreaches are coming, but what? Our goons aren’t Russian enough to smash people with hammers, but as the earlier story today shows, they aren’t sane either. I’m not intimidated, but the days of smooth sailing might be over.