The other day there was a mysterious situation where suddenly a US military transport plane was detected flying into Moscow, nobody knew what it was, the Kremlin was lying and saying it didn’t know, and so forth. Sending Natalie back to the factory for routine maintenance? Changing her out for a new replicant? We don’t know.
But then the truth came out, or at least a tiny part of it. It was CIA Director James Ratcliffe who touched down in Moscow, stayed for eight hours, reportedly met with intelligence counterparts, and left. Vladimir Putin was reportedly briefed immediately afterward. It was such an important trip that the Trump regime asked Ukraine to hold off on droning the shit out of Moscow long enough to make sure Ratcliffe would be safe.
And still nobody is talking about why.
Something about Iran, the war Donald Trump is currently losing, without the help of Russia, which is explicitly helping Iran? Something about Ukraine, the war Vladimir Putin is currently losing? Something about something else? A combination of all these things, as former CIA guy Michael Sellers speculates on his Substack?
Sellers’s analysis is interesting enough to read on its own, so we won’t cheat off the entire thing, but some questions he raises are related to:
How it wasn’t Marco Rubio, or real secretaries of state Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff; instead it was an intel thing, with Ratcliffe meeting with the intel people.
Could it have been some kind of message from NATO, perhaps related to recent reports that Vladimir Putin is itching to start poking and prodding at NATO to identify weak points? We all know what a strong NATO believer the Trump regime is. Of course — and Sellers alludes to this — as much as Trump hates NATO, we imagine he’s not thrilled with the possibility of Putin forcing his hand to defend an alliance he doesn’t like, with resources the US doesn’t have because of Pete Hegseth’s lost war in Iran.
Does the CIA know something Russia is up to, and this was a trip to say “We see you” and/or “Please stop”?
Maybe some sort of package of concerns related to Iran, Ukraine, NATO and God-knows-what-else? Some sort of Art-Of-The-Dealing?
Nobody is even considering the possibility that Donald Trump sent John Ratcliffe to Russia to end the Ukraine war on Day One.
That’s highly unfair of all of us.
It’s a weird trip, any way you look at it.
Donald Trump, an absolute liar, told reporters that the trip was “semi-routine.” We imagine his “semi” is doing a lot of work — haha, probably an evergreen statement for him, about sex — because the last time the CIA director went to Moscow was when Biden CIA chief William Burns went to Moscow in late 2021 and said hey, we see you planning to attack Ukraine, and we will fuck you so hard if you do.
Something we haven’t seen a lot of people connect in these articles is the fact that it was reported this summer that Keystone Kash Patel would also be going to the Kremlin this fall, that his likely host would be the FSB, and that it wasn’t just because his real (not from Canada) girlfriend Alexis was invited to sing the national anthem at a Russian tiddlywinks tournament.
Kash Patel, who’s been on Trump’s election-stealing team since he first weaseled his way on it during Trump’s first term?
Could that thing be related to this thing?
We think it’s worth bringing up because Donald Trump is a man who arguably would never have made it into office the first time if it hadn’t been for the machinations of the Russian government, working with its intelligence services, loyal oligarchs and subservient, compromised Americans on the Trump team. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee — the MARCO RUBIO-led Senate Intelligence Committee — enumerated the evidence in painstaking detail in its reports on the 2016 election attack on Trump’s behalf by Russia.
Now, here we are, approaching midterm elections that are increasingly likely to catapult Democrats back into control of both houses of Congress, leading up to a 2028 presidential election where, if it’s free and fair, the Democrats should beat the Republicans so hard their heads spin all the way off.
This is the time when dictators and wannabe dictators try to consolidate power. And who knows that better than the dictator Trump cum-bubbles all over the hardest, Vladimir Putin? Who most people are pretty sure staged his own terrorist attacks against his own people in 1999 in Moscow in order to consolidate his own power? The Russian government blamed the bombings on Chechen separatists, AKA some Muslims.
We have perhaps never been in a political moment where the atmosphere for some staged authoritarian bullshit like that wasn’t more ripe in the US. We’ve got the tyrant who’s terrified of losing power, we’ve got the people Trump wants to blame, to scapegoat, in Spanish-speaking immigrants and Muslim American people who dare to believe the protections and promises of citizenship apply to them too, up to and even including being senators. And we’ve got the elections that, if they go the people’s way, will likely be the beginning of the fascists’ full unraveling.
Raise your hand if you can see the Trump regime allowing a terrorist attack to happen on American soil, one that they can immediately blame on undocumented immigrants or pro-Palestine protesters, something that would give Donald Trump that pretext he needs to declare a national emergency and try to cancel the elections?
To be clear, we don’t have any more evidence for such a scenario than we have for the other speculative reasons John Ratcliffe might have been in Moscow. But if such a thing were going to happen, reckon you’d need the CIA and the FBI directors on board. (And if you doubt John Ratcliffe is up Russia’s hole or if you’ve bought the fiction that he’s somehow more serious than Kash Patel …)
Again, we have no idea what this was. But our spidey senses are up, and so should yours be.
As it happens, historian and authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder chatted with Katie Couric about just such a possibility very recently.
“The US is not immune from leaders faking terrorist attacks to stay in power,” Snyder writes. “These kinds of things happen all the time,” he told Couric. “Whether it’s a real terrorist attack, whether it’s with a fake terrorist attack, whether it’s a false flag you organize yourself, this is a totally normal, mainstream part of politics. It’s how Putin came to power. And Putin is Trump’s, basically, favorite person. Putin came to power in connection with a fake terrorist attack organized by the Russian secret services, on Russian territory. They blew up their own apartment buildings and then blamed Muslims for it. How did Hitler come to power? Who set fire to the Reichstag is still not entirely clear almost 100 years later, but nevertheless when it happened it was the pretext that he used to declare a state of emergency and basically get permanent hold on power. These things happen over and over and over and over again.”
Snyder concludes in the clip above that we shouldn’t be surprised if/when it happens, as “this is the kind of thing people like Trump do. It’s just the kind of thing they do.” And likewise, he says, if we’re in that mindset, “when they do it, we can turn it against them.”
So hey, why did John Ratcliffe just go to Moscow and who did he meet with while he was there? We’re so curious.
Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!
Follow me on Instagram!
Subscribe to me on YouTube!
And on BlueSky!
And on Facebook!
So yes, Dok just accidentally posted himself and five minutes later I accidentally posted Robyn. Both posts have been unpublished and will be posted again in an hour and two hours. I don't know what the fuck is up today.
First Dolly, now Tim Curry. I think I'm done with this year now.