1. Aloha, Comrade!
When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.
By the dinner time Trump issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.
The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.
Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.
But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset.
In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.
Let me tell you her story.
It began in 2013, when Assad’s military used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The Obama administration was mulling over responses and Gabbard argued that America should not intervene. She said she would vote against authorizing Obama to use force.
Why Syria?
Syria and Russia had long enjoyed a cooperative relationship. In 2015, that partnership blossomed into direct Russian military intervention on Assad’s behalf. In March of 2016, 392 members of the House voted for a non-binding resolution holding Assad accountable for his crimes against humanity. The only Democrat to vote against it was Gabbard.
In December 2016, Gabbard sought an audience with the newly-elected Trump to promote a bill she called the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act.” The goal of this bill was to withdraw U.S. military support for the Syrian rebels fighting against the combined forces of Assad and Putin.1
And in 2017, Gabbard made an unannounced trip to Syria. She did not give her congressional colleagues advance notice that she was traveling to the region and she refused to disclose who had funded the trip. While there, she met with Assad. Twice.
In fact, Gabbard’s only notable break with Trump came in 2017, after Trump authorized a cruise missile strike on Syria in retaliation for Assad deploying nerve agents against civilians. Gabbard called this—Trump’s action, not Assad’s—“dangerous,” “rash,” and “reckless.”2
And she kept going. In 2019, she proclaimed that Assad “is not the enemy of the United States.”
For an on-the-make politician, that’s an awful lot of political capital spent defending a mid-level war criminal. Curious, no?
But of course, it wasn’t really about Syria. It was about Russia.
When Gabbard made her failed presidential run in 2020, she was surreptitiously backed by Russian cyber assets. Russia’s interest in promoting Gabbard was obvious enough that Hillary Clinton publicly observed that it was clear the Kremlin was grooming her.
The extent of Gabbard’s affinity not just for Assad, but for Putin, spilled into the open when Russia invaded Ukraine. Gabbard defended Putin’s invasion even before it began, blaming the Biden administration for forcing Russia’s hand.3
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, she said that it was the Biden administration who wanted war in Ukraine:
President Biden could end this crisis and prevent a war with Russia by doing something very simple. . .
Guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO because if Ukraine became a member of NATO, that would put U.S. and NATO troops right on the doorstep of Russia, which, as Putin has laid out, would undermine their national security interests. . . .
The reality is that it is highly, highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever become a member of NATO anyway. So the question is, why don’t president Biden and NATO leaders actually just say that and guarantee it?
Which begs the question of why are we in this position then? If the answer to this and preventing this war from happening is very clear as day. And really, it just points to one conclusion that I can see, which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.
Why did Gabbard think Biden wanted Russia to invade Ukraine? So that it could impose sanctions on Putin. And to be clear here: Gabbard thought that imposing sanctions on Vladimir Putin would be terrible. She explained:
It gives the Biden administration a clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people.
Sanctions, by the way, are a long-standing bugaboo of Gabbard’s. In 2020, she introduced a bill designed to prove that U.S. sanctions kill children in foreign countries so as to make it harder for the U.S. to deploy sanctions against adversaries.
So in case you’re keeping score: Gabbard is opposed both to U.S. military intervention and to U.S.-imposed sanctions.
But she is not opposed to the Syrian dictator gassing civilians or Russia pursuing its “security interests” by invading neighboring countries.
As the war progressed, Gabbard would go on to parrot Russian claims about the United States funding “biolabs” across Ukraine as part of her ongoing attempt to justify Putin’s aggression.
After Putin arrested a Russian journalist who protested the invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard rushed onto TV to defend Putin. She claimed that the media environment in Russia was “not so different” from America.
Last April, Gabbard accused President Biden of trying to “destroy” Russia:
All the statements and comments that the Biden-Harris administration has made from the beginning of this [Russo-Ukrainian] war essentially point to their objective being basically to destroy Russia.
In case you cannot tell: Gabbard viewed the “destruction” of the Putin regime in Russia as a bad thing.4
2. Asset or Dupe?
Is Gabbard a Russian asset? I don’t know if that’s how she sees herself. But the Russians certainly view her that way.
Here’s the thing about intelligence assets: Sometimes an asset is a person you must own and direct. But sometimes an asset will do what you want her to, either with gentle, indirect inputs or completely under her own steam.
Walter Duranty did not officially report to the Kremlin, but Stalin viewed him as a valuable asset and made sure to stroke him and position him in ways that were useful to the USSR. The result was that Duranty’s dispatches to the New York Times were indistinguishable from something a KGB-controlled spy would have written.
Whether or not Duranty saw himself as a Russian agent, Stalin and the Soviet secret services classified him as an asset and were diligent in Duranty’s care and feeding.
So when it comes to Gabbard, ask yourself: What would she have done differently over the last decade if she had been formally controlled by Putin?
Gabbard says, over and over, that the only thing she cares about is “peace.” But in this quest for peace she has, over and over, attacked and attempted to discredit the U.S. intelligence community while embracing propaganda emanating from the Kremlin.
She has attempted to stop U.S. military intervention against Russian allies while also opposing sanctions against them.
She has met secretly with Russian clients.
She has blamed the United States for an invasion conducted by Russian forces, attempted to draw false equivalence between America and Russia, and accused the American president of being unfairly belligerent toward Putin—whose regime has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and abducted 20,000 Ukrainian children.
Even if Gabbard is only an unwitting dupe, from the Russian perspective her elevation to DNI would represent the greatest achievement in the history of espionage. Russia will have fully penetrated the American intelligence apparatus at the very top level.
Having Gabbard serve as DNI would probably set back America’s intelligence services by a generation.
First, asset recruitment would become impossible. Any potential recruit in the field would be a fool to cooperate with U.S. intelligence knowing that the American DNI was at least functionally on Putin’s side.
Second, no secrets would be safe. There is no way Gabbard could pass a security clearance check in 2024. The only way for her to gain access to this level of information is to be appointed to the top of the organization. She could never be considered for a job inside, say, the CIA.5
Third, she’s not even on America’s side. Just objectively speaking Gabbard views the American government as a problem to be resolved and the interests of the Russian government as valid and worth accommodating.
Making Gabbard director of national intelligence simply makes no sense. It’s the equivalent of the American government gouging its own eyes out and purposefully making itself blind to the covert actions of its adversaries.
Or rather, it makes no sense for America.
For Russia, DNI Gabbard makes all the sense in the world.
3. Spies Like Us
What’s doubly tragic about this moment is that the invasion of Ukraine was a boon to American efforts to get inside Russian intelligence.
The opening scene of a social media video that looks like it came straight out of Hollywood shows a Russian intelligence officer in a dreary Moscow apartment, reflecting on the corruption of his country’s elite, as ordinary Russians struggle to make ends meet. The man recalls the words of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote that change starts with oneself, and he dreams of a better future for his family. Eventually, he decides that the best way to put that future within reach is to contact the Central Intelligence Agency.
The video wasn’t conceived in Hollywood. It was an idea that came from inside the walls of Langley, one in a series of short, highly-produced videos that the CIA is posting online, targeting Russians who feel disaffected from their government and telling them in exact detail, how to reach out to the CIA in ways that are tailored to maintain the always critical air of secrecy.
“It’s a little bit different than anything we’ve ever done before,” the official told us. “We’re presenting a compelling option for them to hopefully change the trajectory of their country.”
Last year, CIA Director William Burns said that “disaffection” in Russia over the war in Ukraine was creating a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for the Agency to recruit Russian assets.
“We’re not letting it go to waste,” Burns said. “We recently used social media . . . to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business.”
The first salvos in the CIA campaign came in May 2022, when the Agency produced what an official described as “a very simple video . . . just words on the screen,” that included step-by-step instructions on how to contact the Agency using virtual private networks and the Tor web browser. The Agency posted that video to Instagram and other social media platforms.
The videos were so well-received that since then, the CIA has released three more Russian-language videos—one in May 2023, one in September 2023 and the most recent, in January of this year. With each new installment of the series, the production value gets better and the messages contain “a more emotional appeal, as opposed to just putting information out there,” according to the official we spoke with.
Read the whole thing. Now imagine that you’re a Russian who decided to try to fight back against Putin by contacting the CIA. When you look at Gabbard, you don’t see an American ally.
You see your own death warrant.
1 Gabbard’s contention was that the Syrian rebels were the real threat and that they should be abandoned so that Assad could consolidate power Coincidentally, this was also Putin’s view.
2 Gabbard denied that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attack. Her position on this matter parroted the Russian version of the story and contradicted U.S. intelligence assessments.
3 Russian state TV re-broadcast Gabbard’s remarks in the hours before Russian tanks crossed the border.
4 By the by, this “destruction of Russia” stuff is straight out of Kremlin propaganda. It’s a line they came up with to explain why their failed three-day “special military operation” needed 1,000+ days and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded soldiers—because the West secretly seeks the destruction of Russia. Go figure.
5 And not that it matters, but: She has no relevant experience. Literally none.
Source: Jonathan V. Last, “The Curious Case of Tulsi Gabbard: Is She a Russian Asset or a Dupe?” The Bulwark, 14 November 2024. Please consider subscribing to The Bulwark, as I did recently, because they’ve been fighting the good (anti-fascist, anti-Trumpist fight) from liberal right positions for a while now. (Full disclosure: I’m not a right-wing liberal.) ||| TRR
PUTINOIKA is a multi-genre epic about frenzy and plague in the era of Putin and Trump. Inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies, PUTINOIKA unfolds in three-parts: Palinode, Bacchae, and Putinoika. In a world flooding with collusion, delusion, and pollution, hope not only stands its ground in PUTINOIKA, but it also elevates us to higher realms with exhilarating new literary forms, poetic expressions, and a renewed faith in creativity. PUTINOIKA insists that poets, philosophers, and lovers have the capacity to create on a scale greater than society’s capacity to destroy. If Waiting for Godot is a threnody of hope in the atomic age, PUTINOIKA is the “Invictus” we didn’t know we were waiting for after the global pandemic.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR PUTINOIKA
“In Giannina Braschi’s churning imagination, in her exuberant, upwelling, hilarious and mortifying performances of wonderment, howl, synchronic time, ethical insistence, and linguistic swirl, it’s not unusual to find words such as ‘generosity’ and ‘spirit’ leading, in the same sentence, to ‘welfare,’ ‘radiation,’ and ‘tax deductions.’ If, as in Ezra Pound’s translation of Aristotle, the ‘swift perception of relations’ is truly the ‘hallmark of genius,’ it’s in the brightly lit halls of Braschi’s books where poetry is tested and stamped with such a mark. Like her character, Frenzy, she’s a provocateur who believes in and pledges her fidelity only to ‘everything that exists.’”
—Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of Mojave Ghost
“This powerful, funny, profound, wise, crazed book is a wild ride. It is a bomb (a poem?, a novel?, a play?, fiction? essay?, comedy?, drama? all of the above?). It is a meditation on poetry, art, the pandemia, politics, Trump, his wall, the Putinas, the author, Puerto Rico, Oedipus, and Baudelaire. I laughed to tears here and there while the book displays one of the cruelest portraits of our times. Bravo, Giannina!”
—Carmen Boullosa, award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright
“Putinoika defines quality as ‘experience condensed in a moment’. As such, this book is pure quality, an explosion of literary genre from the dithyrambic roots of Greek drama to current narrative. The sudden release of literary boundaries simultaneously exposes inevitable connections between fictional and real characters and affirms the bond between personal fulfillment and socio-political conditions. ‘There is a crack in everything’ thus, Oedipus predicament, Antigone’s choice, rites of Maenads, doubles of Trump, the recent pandemic, biblical fat and lean cows, all sing a handcuffed muses’ song and let light flow. Through brilliant and incessant juxtapositions Putinoika creates its own time. It takes place in the whenever, at whatever time mundane experiences, struggle, passion, and creativity demand that reason be imbued with feeling. The third and final part of the book, furthermore, perfectly situates the entire work in “the No of furies” and the Yes of their blessing. In short, Braschi’s book sublimely calls readers to experience themselves anew, this time, in full context.”
—Anne Ashbaugh, Chair, Philosophy, Towson University
“Braschi’s Putinoika, like Hegel’s Phenomenology, presents its readers with a gallery of voices in which the collective zeitgeist, dominated by the crumbling hegemony of the United States, may come to recollect the chaotic shapes of its barely figurable past. But unlike Hegelian spirit, the spirits that move through Braschi’s work conclude by inviting us to ‘confront the terror that happens in the void where nothing works’ in order to imagine a future other than the eternal return of the same. Readers familiar with her œuvre will find Putinoika quintessential Braschi: witty, irreverent, and astonishingly lucid.”
—Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Emory University
“Braschi’s most audacious and electrifying creation yet! This thrilling ride spans from classical Greece to front page news, where the supernatural dances with the mundane, and the surreal becomes everyday reality. This isn’t just a read; it’s an experience—a whirlwind of recent history where anything can happen and often does. Eccentric, hilarious, and profound, Putinoika is the rara avis of modern literature—a true original that shatters conventions and leaves an indelible mark on your soul. As Tony Kushner gives us Angels in America marking the AIDS epidemic and Perestroika, Braschi gives us Putinas in America amidst the global pandemic with Putinoika. Her fearless storytelling sweeps you off your feet.”
—Nuria Morgado, Director, North American Academy of the Spanish Language and Correspondent, Royal Spanish Academy
“With Putinoika, Braschi makes a quantum leap which takes the novel from an unprecedented level of experimentation and into a new dimension. A polyphony of voices fizz, crackle, and cackle in a tour de force of philosophical poetry and poetical philosophy, offering a biting and hilarious denunciation of Trump’s America.”
—Madelena Gonzalez, Chair, Anglophone Literature, University of Avignon
“Sheer genius. From the tallest rooftops of Manhattan to the greenest pastorals in Empire of Dreams—and from Segismundo’s peekies under Lady Liberty’s skirt to the foulest scents coming out of the funerary processions of sardines in United States of Banana—Braschi’s penned worlds have irresistibly led us readers to great flats and depths. Her latest book, Putinoika, brings us home to another kind of empire of dreams, where debts of all kinds, sizes, and reaches run rampant alongside the magnificent deconstructor that is her poetic narrative mishmash. In impeccable comic mode, this new chapter of the history of empires ushers in the clash of a new round of bizarre titans. Bravo!”
—María M. Carrión, Professor, Comparative Literature and Religion, Emory University
“A feast of imagination, this modern-day Menippean satire blends Greek tragedy with contemporary U.S. politics, using humor and seriousness to explore the present and future of our contemporary world, doomed for destruction or re-creation.”
—Cristina Garrigós González, President, Spanish Association for American Studies
“While history tells things as they happened, Putinoika tells things as they should have happened. Braschi sees the chaos of our world and rearranges that chaos into an order governed by poetic justice. In doing so, Braschi heals the reader through the catharsis that Aristotle identified as the curative power of poetry. Putinoika is the best medicine for the fragmentation of the contemporary soul. A must read.”
—Manuel Broncano, Regents Professor of English, Texas A&M International
“Braschi teaches us all how the barriers between languages, nationalities, styles, and genres were meant to be torn down. Her ludic intellect and literary innovation have made her a beloved fixture of the global literary ecosystem, and Putinoika will only cement this status. We are honored to have featured the first published excerpt from the book in Latin American Literature Today, and to share in Braschi’s mission of breaking through the illusory boundaries that now, more than ever, seem determined to keep us apart.”
—Marcelo Rioseco, Editor-in-Chief, Latin American Literature Today
Giannina Braschi is an award-winning American poet, novelist, and radical thinker who writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English. Her masterworks include the epic poem El imperio de los sueños/Empire of Dreams, the iconic Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing!, the geopolitical tragicomedy United States of Banana, and the multi-genre epic Putinoika. The U.S. Library of Congress calls Braschi “cutting-edge, influential, and even revolutionary,” and PEN America recognizes her as “one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin America today.” Her texts have been widely adapted and applied to theatre, chamber music, graphic novels, painting, photography, artist books, short films, industrial design, and urban planning. Her life’s work is the subject of the anthology of essays, Poets Philosophers Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer. Braschi’s numerous accolades include honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Danforth Foundation, Ford Foundation, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and PEN America. She has received lifetime achievement awards from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, Cambio 16 in Spain, and her native city of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Terms frequently associated with Braschi include Postcolonial Literature, Latinx Philosophy, Postdramatic Theatre, Hysterical Realism, McOndo, and Post-Boom. She goes simply by poet.
Source: Flowersong Press. Thanks to the American Academy of Poets for the heads-up. I just ordered a copy of this book, although I am nearly sure I’ll regret it. || TRR
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