Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔒) NEW: Here's the updated version of the PROOF exclusive, "The Durham Indictment of Igor Danchenko Is An Embarrassment to the Department of Justice."

This is the article that has Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi mad at me and trolls attacking in droves. sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-durham-i…

1/ Understand that right now we're in the midst of a national disinformation campaign by Greenwald, Taibbi, and even some actual journalists to erase the history of the Trump-Russia scandal and rewrite the whole episode as exactly the "hoax" Trump always falsely claimed it to be.

2/ This disinformation campaign is among the most virulent of any such campaign I've seen from the far right since January 6.

Its purpose is wholly transparent: to clear the way for Trump's re-emergence into presidential politics by whitewashing the history we all lived through.

3/ But what makes this disinformation campaign so dangerous—besides the fact that it aims to reinstall Trump in the White House and thereby end American democracy—is that in 2021, unlike 2018, major media has given up. It *won't confirm for America* events it previously reported.

4/ What we have now are legions and legions of far-right demagogues and their followers who know absolutely nothing about the facts of the Trump-Russia scandal and have hidden their ignorance of recent U.S. history behind a wall of rotting vegetative nonsense and outright deceit.

5/ It's for this crowd—an almost entirely insurrectionist crowd (some openly, some implicitly)—that the recent indictment of Igor Danchenko by Bill Barr's handpicked attack dog John Durham has become a cause célèbre. Whatever sort of lawyer Durham once was, he isn't that anymore.

6/ After the Danchenko inidctment came out, I read it just as I'd read hundreds of indictments back when I was a practicing lawyer. I saw the document's vapidity, insufficiency, and grotesquely partisan smears. I went online believing I'd see *any* journalism on it. But I didn't.

7/ What I saw what a profoundly misleading legal filing—one born in political animus rather than rule of law—being used as an insurrectionist rallying cry. I saw major media cowering in fear of the possibility they'd get dragged by "Russiagate" wingnuts like Greenwald and Taibbi.

8/ So I wrote the PROOF article atop this thread. It is the longest article I've ever written at PROOF and—I believe—the longest thing I've ever published online, *period*. That's how much I believe the thus-far poisonous discourse over the Danchenko indictment endangers America.

9/ This will seem like hyperbole to some on the left, as you may not know—may not have checked the internet's foulest far-right corners—to see with what relish the Danchenko inidctment is being received, and what message insurrectionists think Trump/Barr have sent to them by it.

10/ Greenwald is calling for mass firings in major media. His cultists want America's top Russia expert, Fiona Hill, arrested. Taibbi and his oafish acolyte Aaron Maté imply the indictment proves Trump—Trump!—was right about Russia. Many now call it the "criminal Steele dossier."

11/ And every part of the right's response to the Danchenko indictment specifically and Durham's lawless, never-ending probe generally is—excuse my language—absolute horseshit. These far-right cultists have created an alternate reality the SVR or FSB would be proud to have built.

12/ In this new article—which I admit takes an hour-plus to read—I begin by providing the historical context for the Durham investigation, which seems to have been lost to time even though it was just over a year ago (10/19/20) that Barr secretly appointed Durham Special Counsel.

13/ I feel a responsibility to write this because I'm one of a few authors who wrote multiple high-profile books on Trump's presidency and is considered an expert on the Trump-Russia scandal. If we can't get this right now, by 2030 it will be perverted by time and GOP propaganda.

14/ I can't emphasize this last part enough: we now live in such a segmented society—one in which men like Greenwald and Taibbi lie to millions and are celebrated for it—that we're at real risk of having history be rewritten in a way *we can't recover from* via future historians.

15/ You and I—all of us—suffered through the Trump-Russia era. We read the major-media reports and we know what Trump did. We saw who the villains were. And as the insurrectionists try to resurrect Trump, they're stealing those years of our lives away from us with disinformation.

16/ John Durham is running hog-wild, and his agenda *isn't* that of a prosecutor. It's the same agenda Bill Barr had when he tried to "get out ahead" of the Mueller Report by lying about its contents. Durham, like Barr, is a narrative-maker of a particular sort: a *propagandist*.

17/ I am sorry for those who remember Durham as an honorable man. I'm sure he once was. He isn't the first and he won't be the last person poisoned by Donald Trump. But if you don't think Durham is staging a political cover-up and resurrection for Trump, you're dangerously wrong.

18/ Many on the left think the Trump-Russia scandal is ancient history—and it's exactly this attitude that has given the far right a blank slate to rewrite what is manifestly *not* ancient history but things that happened just 24-36 months ago.

And major media won't stop them.

19/ Corporate media sees no profit in reporting on old stories. Progressives see no profit in hoping for justice from a sequence of crimes the DOJ did nothing meaningful to get justice for. So we on the left and we in media have put Russia in the rear view. But Trumpists haven't.

20/ As I write this, disinformation agents on the right—small-a agents, as these are just self-deputized propagandists—are folding their new Trump-Russia narrative into the existing QAnon/Patriot Caucus/Trumpist conspiracy theory about the Deep State trying to destroy "patriots."

CONCLUSION/ Obviously I'd love it if you would read and share the article atop this thread. But if you don't, that's fine too—the important thing is that everyone *call out* attempts to rewrite the Trump-Russia scandal as a "hoax" whenever you encounter this far-right propaganda.