The left's resort to 'Russian asset' slur

 Miranda Devine:

The phrase “Russian disinformation” lost its sting when Democrats started using it as a domestic political weapon.

Now, even Republican patsies are accusing people who aren’t sufficiently hawkish about waging war against Russia, like Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, of being agents of the Kremlin.

Sen. Mitt Romney this week called Gabbard, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former Democratic candidate for president, of being a “treasonous” liar. Ana Navarro and Whoopi Goldberg, co-hosts of ABC’s “The View,” piled on to demand that the Department of Justice investigate Carlson for “shilling for Putin.”

Ex-MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann said the Fox News anchor and Gabbard should be arrested and jailed as “Russian assets” because “there is a war.”

But smearing someone as a Russian asset doesn’t carry much weight anymore. Everyone knows it’s the catchall excuse for Democrats.

Maybe if they hadn’t used Russia as their personal bogeyman for six years, it wouldn’t be so easy to dismiss their claims that everyone they dislike is a Kremlin asset.

Hillary Clinton crippled the first three years of Donald Trump’s term by accusing him of colluding with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 election. Her campaign ginned up Russiagate, with the assistance of senior adviser Jake Sullivan, whose role is coming to light through court filings by special counsel John Durham. For his efforts, Sullivan was promoted to national security adviser and is currently President Biden’s point man for Ukraine.

“Russian disinformation” finally was rendered meaningless on the eve of the 2020 election when 50 former senior intelligence officials, including John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta, signed a bogus letter designed to rescue Biden from evidence of wrongdoing, found on his son Hunter’s abandoned laptop.

They claimed, without evidence, that incriminating emails from the laptop, published by The Post, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and were being used to “undermine” Biden’s candidacy.

The letter was the excuse used by Big Tech and other media to ensure Joe Biden was never held to account for meeting with Hunter’s corrupt paymasters from Russia and Ukraine — and lying about it during the campaign.

None of the signatories of that scurrilous letter have apologized for misleading the American people, now that everyone accepts that Hunter’s laptop is real. Some, like Brennan, also were implicated in Russiagate.
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While the threat of China grew, and a virus unleashed by China killed millions and crippled our economies, they talked only about Russia. While the virus was circulating, they impeached Trump over his clumsy attempt to get Ukraine to reveal what it knew about the Biden family’s involvement in corruption there.
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Devine goes on to point out Hunter Biden's actual ties with Russia including, "In February 2014, Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina wired $3.5 million into a bank account associated with Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer. A few weeks later, Hunter and Archer flew to Lake Como in Italy and met Baturina."  That was a time when Joe Biden was Vice President.