“Putin’s Party?” a Weekly Standard headline asked.
It was the summer of 2016. Trump had won the nomination, but Bill Kristol, the most recognizable figure in the Never Trump camp, was laying out a case against him that rested heavily on Russia.
“Honest and patriotic Republicans who support Trump,” Kristol urged, should review the evidence of his “many troubling connections with Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
These days, Kristol is using Defending Democracy Together, a 501c4 dark money organization of “conservatives and Republicans “, to try and primary Trump. Components of DDT include, Republicans Against Putin and an analysis of Russian troll tweets. Beneath the concerns about national security and Russia, Kristol’s organization shares a funding source with a platform for the greatest Russian intel coup.
As Julie Kelly of American Greatness recently revealed, DDT is heavily funded by Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund. Omidyar is a French-Iranian billionaire who is known for funding campaigns against national security, not for it. Omidyar’s best known media investment is The Intercept, a site that does everything from distributing Qatari propaganda to defending anti-Semitism.
But it’s best known for its role as a platform distributing classified materials stolen by Edward Snowden.
Snowden, currently hiding out in Moscow, was at the heart of the most devastating Russian intelligence coup against the United States in a generation. The damage that he did to our national security, both in the surveillance of Islamic terrorists, and rival powers Russia and China, is incalculable. The Intercept was crucial in not only distributing stolen documents, but in allowing Russia’s intel coup to pass under the cover of domestic journalism and whistleblowing.
The Snowden operation has largely been occluded by a conspiracy theory hatched by the Clinton campaign that Trump was secretly working for the Russians. This conspiracy theory was fed into the Obama DOJ and was then transmogrified into the Muller investigation, and was embraced by the Never Trumpers who inveigh against Russia, yet share a common funding source with Snowden’s site.
Never Trumpers accuse Trump supporters of ignoring intelligence conclusions about Russia’s election role, yet they seem quite satisfied to ignore the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on Snowden, his links to Russian intelligence and the fact that his stolen information mostly had “no connection to programs that could impact privacy or civil liberties, but “instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.”
After all the calls to put country ahead of party, this was a report that both Rep. Nunes and Rep. Schiff had signed on to. Meanwhile it’s the Never Trumpers who refuse to put country ahead of Omidyar.
Former hawks are now reduced to being funded by a ferocious opponent of America’s military and formerly pro-Israel pundits have sunk so low as to take money from one of the leading funders of media anti-Semitism putting them in the same company as Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal and assorted defenders of Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet they accuse Trump supporters of having no standards.
Omidyar’s funding of Kristol’s anti-Trump efforts is not unique. Instead the French-Iranian billionaire has become a subtler version of George Soros, funding the organizations and outlets of the radical Left, like The Intercept, The Nation and Mother Jones, but also funding Never Trumpers.
While Kristol’s attempt to challenge Trump in 2016 came to nothing, Omidyar has also become the backer of another Never Trumper “national security” challenger in 2016.
Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer, launched an independent bid against Trump. McMullin, like Kristol, accused Republicans of being the “party of Putin”. “It’s patently clear that the president is under the influence, control of Vladimir Putin,” he claimed. At BYU, McMullin huffed about impeachment and treason. “There are things I know that I haven’t made public.”
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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