Programming note: Please join me tonight for the conclusion of our seventy-second Tale for Our Time - Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll be back for a special edition of my weekend music show paying tribute to a great lyricist, Alan Bergman. Mark Steyn on the Town airs at 5pm British Summer Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~America's corrupt media are going full Hunter's laptop on the latest developments re their beloved "Russia investigation":
The Washington Post and New York Times are PURE propaganda and Democrat activism. They pushed the false Russia collusion hoax FOR YEARS. They are willfully suppressing the truth about it now. Because they are guilty. https://t.co/G1r7AraSZM
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 25, 2025
Just to take the most obvious example, The New York Times - from whose agenda every colourless monodaily in every town across the land takes its cues - has yet to mention that the Director of National Intelligence has referred Barack Obama to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. You would think that the Times's readers would want to get properly up in arms over this outrageous provocation against a revered saintly icon by the pee-tape Russian asset in the White House, wouldn't you? But no: as with so many other fascinating stories, the Times prefers to eschew it entirely. In the immortal words of NPR:
We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.
Shortly thereafter, the heads of all 743 US intelligence agencies signed their famous letter agreeing the laptop with its state-of-the-art images of Hunter smoking crack with his AI-generated hookers was an obvious Russian op.
Question: why does anyone take the US "intelligence community" seriously? Sample glimpse of their lavishly over-funded insights:
Kabul Could Fall To The Taliban Within 90 Days, U.S. Intelligence Warns
That was August 12th 2021. Kabul fell on August 15th. So less than ninety hours. Which is close enough for US intelligence work.
The entire "intelligence community" should be dissolved, and replaced by the Amish community or the trans community or any other available community. These guys should all be broke and sleeping under a bridge. The aforementioned Mollie Hemingway's fine publication The Federalist, unlike The New York Times, decided to engage in some actual journalism and managed to get hold of the actual assessments of career "intelligence community" members on being ordered, by Obama via Brennan and Clapper, to include the obviously bollocks Steele dossier in their official "ICA" (intelligence community assessment). I was struck by this cove:
"My overarching concern is that inclusion of this sensationalist data would lead to many problems," an exasperated senior intelligence official responded to the FBI's demand that the ICA include the dossier, apparently not realizing that the problems Steele's claims would cause were precisely why the boosters of the dossier wanted it included in the ICA.
Exactly. If this is a "senior intelligence official", it's no wonder they never saw the Taliban coming. I'm not a "senior intelligence official", merely a niche Canadian, but I figured it out at the time of the "senior" guy's befuddlement. As I distilled it over seven sodding years ago:
As I think most persons paying attention now realize, the investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 election was created as a cover for domestic interference with the 2016 election.
That's all it ever was. The "intelligence community" co-opted its allies in the Five Eyes and elsewhere to foreign it up a bit, so they could invite Carter Page to bogus "international conferences" at which Madeleine Albright would make goo-goo eyes at him and coo, "Ooo, you're such a sexy beast; why do you just sit at the back and say nothing instead of asking a long and detailed question about, say, the Russians?" And Alexander Downer would do the same while pumping George Papadopoulos at an upscale wine bar.
Mr Downer was the then Australian High Commissioner in London - as his dad, Sir Alec, had been. He's also Canberra's longest-serving foreign minister, and a chap who "spent many years on the 'advisory board' of Hakluyt, a curiously named body set up by former MI6 chaps". (Said board is currently chaired by another former foreign minister, "Lord" Hague, recently glimpsed in these pages hosting HM The King at last weekend's big Islamo-beano). The High Commissioner had taken the precaution of having a high-class honey-trap in tow. She eventually loosened young George's tongue:
As longtime readers may recall, I have drunk with Alexander Downer and that is not something to be undertaken lightly. Somewhere in the course of the evening a pretty squiffy Papadopoulos lifted his head up from the bowl of cocktail olives and started blabbing about Russian 'dirt' on Hillary.
Which turns out to be true. As was officially and very belatedly revealed in recent days, the Kremlin knew that Mrs Clinton had "'psycho-emotional problems' that were being treated with severe sedatives".
Yet Putin chose not to use the "dirt". Why? Because he wanted Hillary to win. And both he and Obama were confident that Trump was such an obvious "f**kwit" (as an Australian PM described him to me) that she would win.
Unfortunately, she was so sedated, she lost and the "f**kwit" won. So Obama had to move to Plan B - or what Peter Strzok called the "insurance policy". Which, fortunately, they had spent months putting in place, with the aid of the Five Eyes (who, like the US "intelligence community", should also be laid off):
It was run at the highest (or deepest) Deep State levels by the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan, whose frantic and hysterical Tweets are like no utterances of any CIA director in history.
Hence the "Russia investigation":
As for the nominal subject of his investigation, well, [Mueller]'s indicted a bunch of no-name Russian internet trolls who'll never set foot in a US courthouse. That's not even worth the cost of printing the complaint. Rush Limbaugh has been kind enough to quote, several times, my line that 'there are no Russians in the Russia investigation'. Which is true.
Well, just to be clear, there is Igor Danchenko, who has since been revealed to be the Steele dossier's "primary subsource" - and the "IC" knew he had credibility issues before Trump took office. Plus Mr Danchenko has lived for many years in Virginia, which is not in the Russian Federation, where he cannot set foot. From Virginia, he commutes into Washington, DC, where he worked for many years with Fiona Hill, the curious British subject who served on the US National Security Council and testified against Trump during the Ukraine impeachment bollocks. Igor Danchenko then became an employee of Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, and then an FBI employee. So that's the first alleged "Russian in the Russia investigation".
Then there is Mr Danchenko's high-school sweetheart: "a 40-year-old Russian public-relations executive named Olga Galkina fed notes to a friend and former schoolmate who worked for Mr. Steele". Ms Galkina was doing this in expectation of a job in President Hillary's State Department.
So no, there are no Russians recognisable as such in the Russia investigation.
It was only ever an obvious crock, soup to nuts. So obvious that it took John Durham four years and bazillions of dollars to establish its crock-ness sufficiently to indict the "intelligence community"'s deputy janitor. If it sounds like the set-up of a lame-o Cold War Z-movie, that's because it was. They even named it after one. Me, channeling me from forty bloody years ago:
That's from the first line of the Rolling Stones' 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'. The song ['Crossfire Hurricane'] and its key signature figure in the plot of a ho-hum Cold War thriller of the same name, about a British spy trying to get info from the Russians to an heroic American woman.
Yes, really. Jonathan Pryce played 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', and I asked him about it when I moderated a panel on acting at St Catherine's College, Oxford with him and Patti Lupone a few years later.
The name was chosen because the still known boomer-rock dirge would distract from the totally forgotten Cold War snoozefest. They're laughing at you.
As I noted the other day, there is a direct line between the Obama "Plan B" meeting of December 2016 and the Ukraine war, in which hundreds of thousands - maybe more - are dead. That conflict remains ongoing, presumably because Obama wants to up his body count to match that of Pol Pot or whoever. So these are not just wanker Beltway games: it turns out that sabotaging an incoming American presidency has real-world consequences for some poor schlub living his life in an apartment house in Mariupol.
As James Carville would say: It's the corruption, stupid. As I have been saying for years: the lesson of the Trump win and the Brexit referendum and multiple European elections is that you can vote for whoever you want but there will be no change on anything that matters. With the December 16th meeting, Obama and his associates determined to destroy the incoming presidency - and for the most part they succeeded.
There is no republic; there is no constitution. There is only Obama and Brennan, Comey and Clapper, Durham and Strzok, Fiona Hill and Stefan Halper. The subversion of the 2016 election is the biggest scandal in American history.
Which is why it's not in The New York Times.
~The most important, critical element of The Mark Steyn Club is its members - and I'm very touched by all those who signed up in our first month and who are still with us in our ninth year. It means an awful lot to me to know you value what we do here.
- Deep State machinations, transient politics, big-picture civilisational collapse, audio fiction, video poetry, live music. If you've become a bit jaded by all that and want something new for Year Nine, well, I hope to see many of you on our sixth annual Mark Steyn Club Cruise from Quebec City to New York. For a full week we will quaff like Alexander Downer and pitch the woo like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. For more information on the Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership.
