The confirmation hearings of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr showed we’re still trapped in an endless fight between Defenders of the Great Russia Conspiracy, and everyone in their way.

Gabbard, Patel, and Kennedy faced questioning that was similar in tone to hearings of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC), which many forget was a feature of American life for 31 years, from 1938 to 1969. It feels like we’re just starting down a similar long road. All three nominees shared a connection (see below), having been smeared by the same actors, some of whom just resurfaced as accusers. The story goes back at least eight years.

In late January, 2018, reporters like NBC’s Ken Dilanian began publishing claims that Russia was advancing Patel’s work. The accusations were made by Democrats like Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal and California’s Adam Schiff and Dianne Feinstein, but also Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The central claim was that Russian bots were driving enthusiasm for the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, which called for publication of a classified report into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe by House Intelligence chair Devin Nunes. The so-called “Nunes memo” was based on Patel’s investigation. Donald Trump’s own Justice Department shrieked that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release the memo, while Schiff said the memo’s release would “politicize the intelligence process.”

Nearly a year later, December 16, 2018, news broke that a Senate-commissioned study on Russian meddling in the 2016 election had been completed. Titled “The Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” the report was commissioned by Virginia Senator Mark Warner’s Intelligence Committee. It described “comprehensive anti-Hillary Clinton operations” by Russian Internet accounts expressing “pro-Bernie Sanders and pro-Jill Stein sentiments,” whose tactics “overlapped with the pro-Trump portion of the operation.” Breathless coverage ensued, from NPR to the Washington Post to the New York Times, with Stein and Donald Trump roundly denounced for accepting support of “Russian troll farms.”

Two weeks after that, on February 2nd, 2019, NBC launched a third campaign, timed to coincide with the launch of then-Democrat Gabbard’s presidential campaign. The report said that “Russia’s propaganda machine” had discovered Gabbard, and was now “promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat.” The campaign would continue throughout her run. Hillary Clinton in October of that year claimed Gabbard was a Russian “asset.” In November, Dilanian essentially re-wrote NBC’s February story, claiming Gabbard was “popular with Russian propagandists.”

Whether or not Patel, Gabbard, and Kennedy are confirmed as FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, and Secretary of Health and Human Services will depend significantly on how committed both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate continue to be to defending those three stories. It’s the chief subtext to the hearings. Key figures on all sides of the confirmation drama, from the nominees to Senate questioners like Republicans Susan Collins and James Lankford and Democrats Schiff to Blumenthal have links to those three P.R. campaigns.

All three came from the same now-discredited source:

America's Smear Machine Put on Trial

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