Gaslighting Grifters

The US Government and Reporters willingly lie[d] to you

In 1975, Idaho Senator Frank Church (D) headed up the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. This committee was, and is, most commonly referred to as “the Church Committee” after Frank Church who was the chairman. This committee’s intent was to investigate US intelligence operations to discover if any illegal, improper or other ethically concerning activities were being conducted by the government against its own citizens. Spoiler alert: yes, there were illegal, improper and unethical activities being conducted by the government. How shocking.

Some of the claims leading up to the creation of the Church Committee were that the US government was spying on its own citizens. The committee uncovered the National Surveillance Agency (NSA) programs, which included spying on Americans, Project SHAMROCK and Project MINARET. Those programs, started in 1945 and 1962, respectively, were massive espionage undertakings conducted by the NSA. SHAMROCK collected all telegrams coming in and going out of the country, whereas MINARET focused on certain US citizens being named in a telegram. Both programs would then pass information onto the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, DEA’s predecessor and the DOD. There was no judicial oversight, no warrants issued and no court order authorizing either program.

COINTELPRO, which was briefly mentioned in FBI, Christmas Lie, was also investigated by the committee, even though it had been halted in 1971. FBI Director Hoover described it as, an effort “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” those the regime found to be outside of their “social order.” The Church Committee’s final report said of the COINTELPRO program that, “the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

Hoover COINTELPRO memo

Hoover referenced accomplishing COINTELPRO’s goals “through the cooperation of established local news media contacts” or through sources that were directly available to him. The Church Committee also discovered that the CIA had official relationships with fifty journalists through its Project CHAOS. Of course, that was a secret prior to the committee uncovering it.

It was later unearthed by Carl Bernstein in his long form Rolling Stone article, The CIA and the Media, that the CIA actually had over 400 American journalists who conducted covert assignments for the Agency. Furthermore, Bernstein ascertained that the Church Committee itself played a role in concealing the full truth about the CIA’s involvement with American news media sources. Even when government sets out to investigate government, it is not as forthcoming as it acts or as the people deserve.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was one of the alleged “remedies” that came in the aftermath of the Church Committee’s findings. Through FISA, the NSA and FBI can go to the additionally secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in order to gain approval for wiretaps and other means and methods for gaining information or surveillance of Americans and foreign nationals.

In 1999, Brit Snider, former CIA inspector general, claimed that the Church Committee, “caused NSA to institute a system which keeps it within the bounds of US law and focused on its essential mission. Twenty-three years later, I still take some satisfaction from that.” Snider may have been satisfied, however we learned from Edward Snowden about 14 years after these comments, that domestic spying was still occurring; and perhaps worse than with SHAMROCK, MINARET, COINTELPRO and CHAOS.

Some of what Snowden provided to the world included documents that led to investigative journalists piecing together a less murky understanding of TITANPOINTE for instance. Construction of TITANPOINTE began in the waning era of COINTELPRO and was finished in 1974. The FBI played a role in assisting NSA visitors to the site, and perhaps still does today. Like Western Union did with American telegrams for NSA, AT&T did/does with your cell phone content and data. Perhaps more on that in the future.

In the latest Twitter Files, published yesterday by Matt Taibbi, it was revealed that prominent Democrats like Diane Feinstein, Adam Schiff and Richard Blumenthal gaslit the entire country, and anyone else in the world paying attention, about a Russia connection to the “Release The Memo” hashtag and overall “Russian disinformation” on the social media platform. Psychology Today defines gaslighting as the deliberate and systematic feeding of false information which leads those on the receiving end to question what they know to be true. That is precisely what prominent politicians and media outlets propagated.

Twitter executives increasingly grew frustrated with the Russian activity claims, that inevitably led to more “RUSSIA!” claims, even after Twitter had roundly shown to the government officials requesting the information that there was no Russian activity, or at most, no significant activity which impacted users of the platform. Nonetheless, the media and democrats only beat the Russia drum harder.

Disinformation Bots Feinstein, Schiff and Blumenthal

Even though Twitter was time and time again providing information to the government, and individual representatives, that Russia was not involved, they did not publicly say so. Internally, however, they talked about “feeding congressional trolls,” “putting the cart before the horse assuming this is propaganda/bots,” and how “this has become ‘if you give s mouse a cookie’ with members of Congress,” for those of you familiar with the kids book/show. As Taibbi notes, “In the story, if you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want a glass of milk, which will lead to a wave of other exhausting requests, at the end of which he’ll want a glass of milk. And one more cookie.”

Supposedly reliable news outlets were just as bad as the government officials thought. Headlines included, “two ex-DOJ officials on Nunes memo: ‘a bad joke,’’’ “Andrea Mitchell: Nunes has turned House Intel Committee ‘into a joke’,” “the Nunes memo is out. It’s a joke and a sham,” and “Ex-RNC chairman rips Nunes memo for the joke it is: ‘the onion’ is mad you’re ‘stealing their material’” among others. Take headlines like that and compare them to the below video. There’s little wonder that Americans are starting to turn from the legacy media overlords, as well as their government counterparts. Breaking free from years of gaslighting is no simple task. As usual, the full thread of these Twitter Files are worth the read.

In 2016 Taibbi wrote “Something About This Russia Story Stinks” for Rolling Stone. He has since alluded that the Stone’s refusal for him to continue to pursue the story and further uncover the sham that it actually was, unlike the Nunes memo that the vast majority of primary “news” outlets claimed was, led to him leaving that publication. That’s quite the contrast to the Church Committee days where it was because of a Rolling Stone publication that the populace learned of just how in bed with the media the government was.

Today, the right side of the aisle is pitching a new “Church Committee” with their formation of the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Their stated goal, in the title even, is to investigate the weaponization of the federal government, primarily intelligence agencies, against American citizens. Numerous other whistleblowers and others have provided protected disclosures, or otherwise spoken out against the FBI and other demonstrations as to how the US government has once again strayed into illegal, improper and unethical activities as in Church’s day.

Those on the left side of the aisle have mostly belittled the new committee as one primarily focused on “conspiracy theories.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) has called the new subcommittee the “select committee on insurrection protection,” to score political points with his own base. House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D) told TIME, through his communications director, that democrats will be on the committee and do not plan to boycott it. This is not a bipartisan issue. Gaining political points aside, the democrats and republicans who end up on the committee will hopefully work together as much as possible to reveal what illegal, improper and unethical activities are occurring by the intelligence community.

The Church Committee found that the government needed “to place intelligence activities within the constitutional scheme for controlling government power.” They further saw that there was “no inherent constitutional authority for the President or any intelligence agency to violate the law.” The committee concluded that “intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens…primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.” The newly formed committee will likely be able to copy and paste these portions from the Church Committee’s final report.

Just like the Twitter Files, FBI FISA abuse, the debunked Steele dossier and Hunter Biden laptop have shown that Russian influence played no significant role in any “RUSSIA!” based claim, the Church Committee’s final report on the CIA’s abuses of that era “concluded that no significant role was being played by foreign elements in the various protest movements.” Perhaps it is time that journalists, politicians and other government employees stop pointing the finger at knowingly false misnomers and instead get back to legitimate fact finding as a way to start bridging the gaslighting grifter’s gap.