Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Peter Strzok, the man of a thousand sneers, reacted to the release of the Durham report by screenshotting the report’s footnote of his own book and recommending people buy it. Despite being fired from the FBI, the disgraced former agent got a book deal, “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump” as well as co-hosting a podcast with ‘Mueller, She Wrote’s Allison Gill and scoring an adjunct professorship at Georgetown University. The Russiagate investigation has been discredited, but the Russiagate grift is alive and well. And none of the participants have any regrets or expect there to be any consequences. Strzok and fellow agent Lisa Page, with whom he had an affair, are suing for wrongful termination from the FBI, and they’ve been fighting to depose former President Trump. Their former boss, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe secured a settlement for his benefits including back pay from the Biden Justice Department. There’s little doubt that Attorney General M...

On Saturday, the FBI arrested one of its own. Charles McGonigal, who used to head counterintel for the Bureau in New York and investigated Trump over Russiagate, was busted at JFK Airport and has been charged with violating the sanctions placed on Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch allied with Putin, has his name scrawled on parts of Russiagate. Before Christopher Steele was brought on board to produce the infamous dossier aimed at Trump, the British ex-agent had been working on a project for Deripaska to go after Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who would also prove to be an FBI target. In the tangled relationship that is an apt metaphor for Russiagate, the Russian billionaire appeared at times to be an FBI asset and at other times employed FBI personnel. McGonigal is reportedly one of a number of ex-FBI agents who became freelance consultants, like American versions of Steele, under investigation. And connections between ex-FBI officials and the Russians hav...

When the Democrats and the media wanted to prove that Russian trolls were everywhere, and supporting Republicans, they turned to Jonathon Morgan and Renee DiResta. Morgan and DiResta had originally been part of Obama’s futile effort to fight ISIS on social media, before discovering a much more lucrative field. ISIS was losing on the battlefield and the Democrats were losing elections. The Hillary campaign had hatched a conspiracy theory blaming its loss on Russian trolls. And Morgan and DiResta soon became the experts providing the data linking Republicans to Russian trolls. Every time there was a story on Russian election interference, Morgan would show up on CNN or NBC. And his message was the same, the Russian bots were everywhere and they were a major threat. Morgan and DiResta soon had a company name, New Knowledge, and were brought on board by the Senate Intelligence Committee to produce a report on Russian influence operations in the 2016 election. Despite the fact that a se...

The Steele dossier, a document produced by Christopher Steele at the behest of the Clinton campaign is ground zero for the Russia conspiracy theory that is tearing apart the country. Even the Mueller investigation has its ultimate roots in the eavesdropping carried out by the Obama administration using the dossier as evidence and the dubious and unverified claims made by Steele in the dossier. But why did the Clinton campaign ever set out to create such a document? The Steele dossier has been described as opposition research and it was certainly circulated among reporters in order to spread the Russia conspiracy theory in the media, but its contents were circulated more in the Obama era FBI and the DOJ, and its media rounds seemed more geared to creating stories that would justify a FISA warrant than to any serious effort to sway the electorate with its attacks. The dossier was never convincing opposition research because its central claim, that Trump was a Russian agent, was too f...

“Why the hell are we standing down?" That was the question that the White House's cybersecurity coordinator was asked after Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, issued a stand down order on Russia. Testimony at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian interference in the election once again raised the central paradox of the Russia conspiracy theory. If Russian interference in the election represented the crisis that we are told it did, why did Obama fail to take any meaningful action? The White House’s own cybersecurity people wanted an aggressive response before being told to stand down. Obama issued a bloodless warning to Russia while his people deliberately crippled our offense. Democrats and the media blamed the Russian hacking on Trump. But it was Susan Rice who had told the cybersecurity team to “knock it off” and Obama’s people who hadn’t wanted him to be “boxed in” and forced to respond to Russian actions. Was this just the usual appe...

In the middle of March,  The Guardian , a British lefty tabloid, rolled out a fake scandal that has dominated the media. Its original article claimed that Christopher Wylie, a "whistleblower", had revealed how Cambridge Analytica, the company he had worked for, had helped Trump win by illegitimately harvesting large amounts of Facebook data and then exploiting it to target users. The story has since fallen apart in every conceivable way that a story is capable of falling apart. Obama’s people had also harvested data from Facebook friends. "We ingested the entire U.S. social graph," his media analytics guru  had boasted . But so had everyone else. A platform operations manager at Facebook  estimated  that hundreds of thousands of developers had gotten access to friend data. So much for  The Guardian’s  claim that, "information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale". Free online services are part of a data marketplace. That’s the real busines...

“I know nothing,” isn’t just the motto of Sergeant Schultz. It’s also the Clinton motto. And Christopher Steele, the Brit whom the Clinton campaign hired to find out things for them, also knows nothing. Or at least that’s the theme of the sprawling New Yorker profile of Steele, his dossier and his associates. Steele, Jane Mayer, its authoress, tells us, is a brilliant researcher and we should take his word about all his allegations involving President Trump. Even the ones that aren’t true and don’t make any sense. But he doesn’t know anything. Take the Cody Shearer memo, the document authored by a Clinton plumber and which Steele passed along to the FBI as confirmation of his claims. The existence of the Shearer memo raised serious questions about whether the Clintons weren’t just paying Steele to dig up dirt, but were providing it. Some have speculated that Shearer’s smears were the original basis for Steele’s dossier. But wait a minute. Steele knew nothing. The New Yorke...

The Democrats went into the election certain that they were going to win. The New York Times rated Hillary’s chances at 93%. The Huffington Post raised that to 98%. That was still too modest for Obama campaign manager David Plouffe who predicted a 100% likelihood of Hillary winning. It wasn’t strategy or statistics that made the Dems think that victory was certain. It was ideology. Obama had spent two terms telling them that they were on the “right side of history”. The more the Dems swung left, the closer to the right side of history they were. Their leftist views were naturally superior. They were based on science while their opponents were superstitious buffoons. They were enlightened while their enemies were bigots. They were smart and conservatives were dumb. Delusions of superiority had convinced them that Republicans couldn’t win an honest election. When Bush won, it was because his brother and the Supreme Court had rigged the election. The Republican victories that swept mu...

After months of denials, the pretext for Susan Rice’s eavesdropping on Trump officials has finally been made public. It had been widely known that Obama’s former National Security Adviser had contrived to unmask the names of top Trump officials who had been spied on by the administration. And the same media that still treats Watergate as the Great American Scandal had claimed that there was nothing “improper” in an Obama loyalist eavesdropping on members of the opposition party. Every time Obama Inc. was caught eavesdropping on opposition politicians, it presented its spin in a carefully packaged “scoop” to a major media outlet. This time was no different. When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress to protect its Iran nuke sellout, it packaged the story to the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress”. The idea was that Obama Inc. was “legitimately” spying on Israel, that it just happened to intercept the conversations of some members of Congr...