Cia

Tuesday

Peter Van Buren

The five stages of Mar-a-Lago grief

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

Friday

Peter Van Buren

The Clinton campaign’s plot to politically assassinate Trump

There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them. According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn't use the word "spy," but that in no way changes what happened. The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm.

durham

Thursday

Grace Curley

Don’t be surprised by the inconclusive ‘intelligence’ report into COVID’s origins

What do you do when a health crisis gets politicized beyond reason? You send in a bunch of hyper-partisan agencies to investigate, of course! For months, anyone who doubted that the coronavirus originated from a wet market in Wuhan was labeled a fringe, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. The 'serious people' in our media, as Jonathan Karl labeled them, mocked the likes of former president Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Rand Paul for even broaching the subject. However, towards the end of Trump’s administration, classified information revealed that in November 2019, three workers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to a hospital due to flu-like symptoms. The press would have been totally fine ignoring this inconvenient information.

wuhan lab leak intelligence

Thursday

They/Them

Don’t worry, the Central Intersectional Agency is watching you

A regular column by an anonymous whistle-blower operating deep within the heart of the Social Justice Movement. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks is a confidential news leak organization for anyone who wishes to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. To any would-be Edward Snowflakes out there: leak your woke-culture war crimes to wokeyleaks@protonmail.com. We promise to protect our sources. Since its inception only a few months ago Wokeyleaks has had whistle-blowers coming forward from multi-billion-dollar arms companies, British spy agencies and multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions.

cia langley

Thursday

James Walton

Incoherent and conspiracy-fuelled: Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head reviewed

From our UK edition

‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In this respect, though, history has nothing on the work of Adam Curtis, whose latest documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head has now arrived on BBC iPlayer — all six episodes and eight and a half hours of it. Anybody who’s seen Curtis’s previous series (including The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and The Trap) will know what to expect. Once again, he mixes terrific news footage, short clips of more or less anything, mood-inducing songs and a lordly commentary to remind us just how hopeless — in both senses — human beings are.

Saturday

Toby Harnden

The spy’s spy

Sitting beneath the pergola of the historic Roycroft Inn, J.R. Seeger looks the part of a successful thriller writer. He is wearing an immaculate white shirt, blue jeans and boat shoes, his blue-green eyes peering over a camouflage-style face mask. The western New York hotel, some 20 miles from the city of Buffalo and the Peace Bridge crossing into Canada, was a centerpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement when it opened in 1905. It is also the setting for one of the most gripping scenes in Seeger’s debut novel, Mike 4, in which a Russian double agent tries to lure an American protégé into a life of treason. The rendezvous involves a splintered oak door, a Colt Python .

seeger

Thursday

Michael Hann

The power of cheap music: pop podcast round-up

From our UK edition

Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music can be. Its potency, however, is not innate. Amanda Prynne, from Coward’s Private Lives, would not have been especially struck by ‘Some day I’ll Find You’ had it been playing on a wireless in a shop; its impact came from hearing it as she again encountered her ex-husband. For cheap music to be potent, context is everything. Without a wider meaning, a cheap little pop song is just notes and chords. With meaning, the most throwaway frippery can become an object of fascination. That’s often true of the best known of songs.