Terrified Trump is slinging ‘zombie food’ to distract his base from Jeffrey Epstein

Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

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-1:24:12

Terrified Trump is slinging ‘zombie food’ to distract his base from Jeffrey Epstein

Renée DiResta on the White House’s attempt to rewrite the history of Russia’s 2016 hacking and influence campaign

Matthew Sheffield

and

Renee DiResta

Aug 10, 2025

Transcript

Episode Summary

Donald Trump in an unfamiliar situation. After years of being able to tell his followers what to think about almost everything, many of the MAGA faithful are upset at his administration for refusing to release the government’s files on the infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

When he was running for office last year, Trump and many of the people who work in the highest levels of his administration repeatedly promised that they would release the documents on Epstein, including FBI, director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Now, both Bondi and Trump are saying that they will not be releasing the Epstein files.

This refusal has been extremely upsetting to many Trump voters because believing that imaginary Democratic pedophiles secretly rule the world has become almost the cornerstone of being a Republican in the Trump era. Faced such massive inter-party descent, the administration has taken to a strategy that they reportedly refer to as “zombie food,” throwing out stories that they know know to be nonsense in order to distract MAGA partisans from Trump’s Epstein betrayal.

In the past several weeks, Trump has offered a veritable zombie food buffet of narratives to supporters. But the biggest dish by far seems to be a new effort re-frame the 2016 Russian hack and influence campaign as actually a secret plot by Trump’s former opponent, Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama.

None of this is real, needless say, but I think this particular episode is worth digging into further in right now since we can see in real-time how zombie food is made and served up to the MAGA masses. Joining the show to discuss is Renée DiResta, a long-time friend of the show who has direct knowledge of this particular history because she was one of numerous experts who worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee to analyze the Russian hacking and disinformation campaign.

The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

08:26 — Marco Rubio and Senate Republicans said Russia tried to help Trump in 2016

12:21 — Trump’s “zombie food” distraction strategy

15:13 — The Sydney Sweeney hoax controversy

18:29 — File dumps as fake disclosure

22:25 — Tulsi Gabbard’s desperation to reconcile with Trump after Iran debacle

28:22 — Russian trolls only praised Clinton to damn her

30:06 — Russian troll tactics

34:15 — Right-wing figures falsely conflating media headlines with government actions

37:30 — John Durham turned up nothing compared to Robert Mueller

41:56 — Kash Patel’s burn bag story

44:20 — What the Durham Report annex actually says

48:48 — Right-wing media’s lower reading comprehension?

55:48 — Russian idiom snafus

01:00:05 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So in our past, we've talked about a lot about general ones, but here we are right in the middle of a disinformation campaign.

And so I thought it'd be interesting to kind of talk about it as it's happening in situ, as people say. And in this case what we're talking about is “Retconning Russiagate,” as you call it. and, and it's so funny because when Trump was the president the first time, he and his supporters were always saying, oh, people are obsessed with Russia. They keep talking about Russia, and now the only people who talk about Russia are people who were trying to rip on it into crimes-- [00:04:00] but by Democrats.

RENEE DIRESTA: Right.

SHEFFIELD: So let's, can you just give us the background here just for people? because like I think everybody else has kind of moved on from the Trump-Russia story, so refresh everybody's memory if you would please, on what exactly happened.

DIRESTA: Alright, so, so there were three things that actually happened in the form of Russian interference in 2016. There were attempts to hack voting machines. This is going to become significant. So keep that in mind. The. Did not successfully hack voting machines, but they tried. there was a successful hack and league operation that was conducted by military intelligence, the GRU, and that's where they hacked a whole lot of different things.

This is also going to come back up later. The Clinton campaign, the DNC that was attributed to military intelligence at the time. There were funny enough Russian Russian actors who tried to pretend that was really a leak that was done by a man named Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who was murdered.

And that was a whole thing that became a subject of a bit of a smear campaign for for the poor man who was murdered. Fox News wound up having to pay a large sum of money to his family in a settlement. But ultimately that was a hacking Lee campaign run by Russian military intelligence.

To smear Hillary Clinton. That is what happened. And that is, so that was the sort of second effort. The third line of effort was the one that I think most of the public remembers, which was the Russian trolls, right? The troll factory run by Yi ProGo. they did a lot of the Jesus memes, Jesus fighting Hillary, satan, right? Jesus fighting the, Satan, Hillary. But in all seriousness, that was the work that I did for the Senate was analyzing that data set. So the social media platforms did the attribution there. That's also very important to note. It was not [00:06:00] it was not, me. I did not do the attribution, right.

The attribution was done by the tech platforms. They said these are accounts thousands of accounts that are linked to this troll factory in Russia. And what they are doing is they're creating fake personas. They're creating content, that content in the analysis that we did, and there were multiple teams that did this analysis. We all found that the content was also similarly trying to weaken public sentiment for Secretary Clinton, and in most cases, to boost public sentiment for Donald Trump. There was a very brief moment in the Republican primary. When they were trying to support Rand Paul, that did not work so well.

And then they pivoted support to Donald Trump and they stayed supporting Donald Trump. So that was the sort of third line of effort, was this social media campaign to shift public opinion and to to interfere in that third way. So three lines of effort all during the 2016 election. That's interference now. One other here's where things get a little bit more complicated, though. the. Way that as this is happening. People in government begin to recognize that these efforts are being made and investigations are opened to try to figure out whether the Trump campaign is involved. And that's because these lines of effort appear to be trying to help him to weaken the other candidate.

And so what you start to see. Our our investigations to try to ascertain whether there is the term that the media comes to use is collusion. And so collusion and interference are two separate things. Nobody, anywhere at any point doubts interference. Until now, collusion is the thing that is the matter of some debate and collusion is where you start to see as the investigations are happening, media occasionally being very sloppy with the, terminologies that they use and the words that they use.

And that's [00:08:00] where the Mueller investigation is investigating collusion. And there are a number of other investigations that begin to try to look into whether the Trump campaign knows that this is happening. Whether it solicited the help and whether there were deeper connections between the campaign and the Russian government.

And that is the collusion side of it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: are two separate things. The former was never in dispute, but now again, we're trying to rec on the idea that interference happened as well.

Marco Rubio and Senate Republicans said Russia tried to help Trump in 2016

SHEFFIELD: No. Yeah, that's right. And it's also important to note that with regard to the the hacking campaign and the social media posts that Republicans said that Russia did those things for Trump.

DIRESTA: so.

SHEFFIELD: Senate Republicans, including Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, was in charge of this report of the committee that released the per report about.

DIRESTA: Right. So when the Senate reached out to me that would've been in December of 2017, they reached out to me and they asked me to feel the team and to get together a team of analysts to look at this data set that the platforms were turning over. I. I then in turn reached out to a bunch of people that I knew just through kind of osint research. I reached out to friends at this company called New Knowledge. I knew them through ISIS investigations in years prior. I said, Hey would any of your people be interested in doing this? That was how that process came into being. Simultaneously, the Senate was reaching out to. Other people who I did not know about.

And the reason that they did this blinding process, as they call it, was because they knew that the investigation was going to be politically sensitive. And they knew that because we were going to be looking at this data, whatever it was going to show, they wanted to have multiple different teams of multiple different types of researchers looking at it.

So that if there was some evidence in the data of, of like for example. In the ads that the Russians were running, if it became, if there was some evidence that [00:10:00] they were using, zip codes tied to some sort of voter file or something along those lines, which we did not find just to be clear.

But if we had, they wanted to make sure that if there was some incendiary finding that different independent teams all simultaneously found it. So they couldn't say that one of us was like in the tank for a PA particular political candidate. And indeed, when my report came out, they went and they dug up my political donations and they found that I had donated to Hillary Clinton in the primary, and they tried to use that to discredit my report.

So these are the sorts of things that. That wind up happening, but that process from the, Senate appointment Senator Burr of North Carolina was the was the other person, it was Senator Warner and Senator Burr. So a Republican and a de a Democrat and a Republican came up with this process of what they called the technical advisory groups. To do this work. It was always bipartisan. All of the briefings were bipartisan. There was never at any point anything other than bipartisan agreement that this was happening. Senator Cornin was, who is now making noises about did this really happen? Was, always fully acknowledging that it happened.

And as you note, when Senator Burr had some sort of I think it was a. Insider trading or some sort of stock trading scandal. When he resigned from the committee Senator Rubio became the Republican chair, and Senator Rubio was the chair During the release of some of the later points of the of the report, it was a five volume report from sissy.

SHEFFIELD: It was, yeah. And, that's obviously an important fact to note. And, something that the, the red Connors of course never bothered to point that out, that this was a bipartisan conclusion because

DIRESTA: other

thing.

SHEFFIELD: it's indisputable basically.

DIRESTA: It's indisputable. And the Russians hacked, tried to hack Senator Rubio's campaign in the data sets there were memes and lines of attack, because you'll recall that Senator Rubio was running against Donald [00:12:00] Trump in the Republican primary. So some of the data in that, in the meme campaign by the Russian trolls.

Was attacking Rubio saying he's secretly gay. He's a RINO. All of these things. You should be voting Trump because why would you vote for weak Marco Rubio when you can vote for for Donald Trump? So the Russians went after him as well. He knows that this is true.

Trump's "zombie food" Russian distraction from Epstein documents

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. And I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves here, but, so, okay. So. Because we have to talk about why is it that we're, that, everybody in this propaganda right wing media is talking about the story again. So, because like Sean Hannity has always been obsessed with this topic, but for the rest of them it's been kind of on the back shelf, the back burner.

And the reason of course is that Donald Trump and the administration have broken their. Promises to release the government's files on Jeffrey Epstein. Trump himself, notably, I think we should say, that Donald Trump personally has always been kind of cagey about about whether he would release that information.

In fact, he, Fox News deliberately censored an interview they did with him during the campaign last year in which he basically, he hedged on whether he would do it, but they cut that part off. The last part where he hedged on it and just had him say yes, but then chopped off where he said later, oh, and maybe we won't.

So because they, there was a campaign issue for Trump. Like he campaigned that he, was going to drain the swamp and tell the truth about Jeffrey Epstein. And of course now that he's the president they're not releasing these documents and, we don't have to speculate, on what's in those documents or, whatever it is.

His, obviously, his behavior is making a lot of, Trump supporters, very suspicious of him. But, it's, it seems to be at the very least that there are things that they thought were in there, perhaps, [00:14:00] or they said that were in these data files. And they haven't been able to substantiate, like they, they keep doing this on a bunch of different things.

Like they were going to indict various people and nobody got indicted and, in right wing media that becomes proof of the guilt of these people rather than proof of their innocence, it seems. And of course, and so since since Trump has, not released this information, in fact the Attorney General Pam Bondi has explicitly said she's not going to put it out.

And so since that time, the Trump administration has been desperately tap dancing to find anything to distract the base, and in fact, inside the Trump White House the New York Times reporter, Glenn Thrush before the, Epstein kerfuffle got started, he said that based on the, his sources there, they refer to these distraction techniques as "zombie food."

That is that they love throwing things out that are junk, that they know are trash but that they are appealing to the base. And I think what we've seen since the Epstein controversy for Trump is that he's just been desperately trying to throw about anything. And, they'll talk about anything.

The Sydney Sweeney hoax controversy

SHEFFIELD: They'll talk about Stephen Colbert though. And now the right wing media is talking about Sydney Sweeney and some ad that they imagine everybody on the left is upset about. When I can't find anyone that I know who is on the left that thinks this ad is, American, American Eagle jeans ad, like they might think it's kind of cheesy, but that's it. Like nobody's upset about this, but they want you to think that.

DIRESTA: My, my job. So besides my actual serious job, which involves things like this, like, like studying state actor campaigns and stuff I study rage cycles on the internet and pseudo events and whatnot. And I have to say with this one, I because I had been busy. Looking at actual work, I had been off the main cycle and I don't spend as much time on X and I [00:16:00] saw the pseudo event, right?

Like I, well actually, I mean, the pseudo event is the ad in a sense, but I actually, I saw the rage cycle hit. Almost like the backlash to the backlash. So I didn't even see the tiktoks that the two or three people who were upset about

SHEFFIELD: No one saw them.

DIRESTA: I know. I saw the people upset about the upset.

Right. And I said like, do I even wanna. Find the ad and I said, no, I really just don't give a shit. Like I really, there are too many other important things that I have to do. I just don't have the time. I'm not going to waste my time on this. It's kind of liberating when you just hit a point where you're like, I just don't give a shit.

I'm not going to read any articles about it. I'm not going to read the commentary about it because it's such a machine. And once you've seen one, once you recognize it for what it is. I think I, and that's really, it's funny because I feel like that's been my hope with like, with the books I write, with the articles I write, just saying like, this is how the rage machine works.

This is what it does. This is the point, this is the distraction. This is the, this is exactly how the that sort of rage cycle operates. Nobody actually cares about this. I saw one or two people kind of making fun of the, and actually people on the right sort of making tongue in cheek comments about how like, now woke is dead, here are sydnee, sweeney's boobs again.

Right. the I really just couldn't bring myself to care. Like, there, there are too many other important things that are actually happening that we should be paying attention to in my opinion. And

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: that we can pay attention to frivolous things too. But this was just, too much. I couldn't waste time with it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I, but I do love that, that they call it zombie food. Like

DIRESTA: Right.

SHEFFIELD: this is not you being a.

DIRESTA: telling. No, It wasn't like the, woke academic is not the one saying it or whatever. No, it is, it's a great term and, and we should use it actually, right? People who, it's fantastic. It's wonderful when when, you have the language to describe these things, because otherwise you are using. Geeky terms from the [00:18:00] 1960s, like pseudo event where people look at you like, what does that even mean? And you're

SHEFFIELD: Hyper reality.

DIRESTA: theory. Right? No, zombie food is fantastic. It like gets the point across immediately. So yes. That's great.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: Roll that one into the discourse. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, alright. So, but, so in addition to various other things, because I think, my god, they've rolled out like five or six things declassifying, the Martin Luther King files, even though the family says, please don't do that. They did it.

File dumps as fake disclosure

DIRESTA: Yeah. Well, so this is, let's talk about the notion of files actually, because this is something that is very this is like, the files administration. It's like the time of files. And I as somebody who has spent the last maybe, month now, just reading through all the files that this administration has dumped on the Russia topic, the, it's almost like a DDoS by files like distributed denial of service, like, which is when you sort of like barrage a server with too many requests, rendering it impossible for it to deliver you the information that you're actually requesting, right?

It's like how you prevent information from being returned. You kind of render something incapable of being accessed. And so to. metaphor means when you are DDoSing somebody with a pile of documents, you make it impossible for them to actually figure out what's important because you throw so much chum in the water that. Then what they're left with is they have to rely on the framing put out by the people who have done the document dump. Right. And because they're never going to read it for themselves because there is just too much to go through. And it's a very interesting experience, I think, because when you look at the the process by which this happens. Whenever there is a a release of something, there is usually some small group of media that gets preferential access, right? A small handpicked group of people who get access to the files [00:20:00] early, they choose those media because they know that they're going to give a sympathetic read, or in fact, they're going to literally take the press release.

This is what propaganda is, right? Government and media. Working hand in hand. This is like Noam Chomsky 1 0 1. It was just putting the sort of pre-digested talking points out there to the public, and that's exactly what happens in this case. So. I was going through some of the files that were released and the framing that come out in the sort of Fox News headlines, the breathless headlines about now the truth has been revealed.

The emails are out there, as you read through the documents, the claims are negated midway through the document dump. and they, and nobody gets to that point, and they know that people are not going to read the primary sources because there's so many redactions in there that you're struggling to piece your way through a sentence.

There are so many references. If you've never read a classified a classified material before an intelligence briefing as became something of a. Became somewhat notorious. I worked for the CIA when I was a kid, so I have read many of these things my past. And as I was reading this, I was just thinking like. When you're sort of piecing through it, the awareness of like what is likely blacked out? terms of specifics, but just in terms of like, oh, that was likely some sort of like geographical point that was likely maybe where the intelligence service that turned over the material was like, what is the context? Around, around what is being communicated in this report. Whereas the average person is going to read the Fox News headline and come away with whatever the framing that the administration wants them to have. They're going to read Tulsi Gabbard insane Twitter thread with the, lunatic memes that seem to now be not eight chan shit, but like official government communications.

Right. We've just

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: Moved that aesthetic into this is what the American [00:22:00] government elite puts out and.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: That is where we are at this point. So the, it's like it is a DDoS by document in that it looks like you're revealing the truth by being transparent by putting these dumps out. But what you're actually doing is rendering it such that the facts are going to come out maybe 48 to 72 hours later when you've moved people into something

SHEFFIELD: A narrative

DIRESTA: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: that you preferred. Yeah.

Tulsi Gabbard's desperation to reconcile with Trump after Iran debacle

SHEFFIELD: you noted ga Tulsi Gabert There. It's, I think we should also note the context for her that, she had her, credibility and status within the Trump administration was greatly harmed. Recently during his decision to bomb Iran because she was very against that.

and, because it seems to have a pretty strong affinity for Iran, if I may say. And

DIRESTA: of,

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

DIRESTA: of weird affinities in her and in her history. But the Syria, a number of

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But yeah, so like after that, after she lost though because because Trump himself has has wanted to bomb Iran for a decade at least. So like this was a, this was nothing that was a surprise from him. But she had put out another bizarre video before he did it.

And and it may, and we can know what it, what was going on there at that time. because she, do you remember she had put out this video that was like, we're, I'm afraid of nuclear war of the future. This was her telling Trump, don't bomb me wrong, that's what it was. So, but yeah. So she lost that power struggle though.

And her star got very damned. In fact people were quoting her to Trump saying, oh, there was no. The, Iranians don't have nukes. And he was like, well, I don't believe her. So she, she [00:24:00] herself has been desperate to get back into Trump's good races. And so that's really for her, what this is about, not just about distracting for Epstein.

So anyway.

DIRESTA: Yeah. and what she chose to do. So there have been, just to give a little bit of an overview. There have been now I have my little, my second monitor here. 1, 2, 3, 4, I think five different document dumps that we've had over the last month or so. And with so first we had sort of the first thing that was very interesting was.

The CIA director. So Tulsi is the Director of National Intelligence. She heads up what's called ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So, which is kind of an umbrella organization that sits a atop the various intelligence agencies. That was sort of a reorg that happened after nine 11 to try to make sure that there was some coordination and visibility to make sure that there are no gaps in understanding what the various agencies know. But the CIA director director Ratcliffe, he kind of kicked this process off. On June 26th, they did a reassessment of what's called an intelligence community assessment, right? An ICA. In January of 2017, this assessment came out and there is a line in it that said Russia aspired to help Trump, and there was a confidence.

So in an intelligence assessment, they'll rate it with a degree of confidence that they have in the assessment. In this particular one, it went out with a high confidence assessment and it said that with high confidence. They they, felt the intelligence community felt that Russia aspired to help Trump. Radcliffe did a sort of. of that. It is an interesting report. It's worth reading. I think it is good. I think that the intelligence community does these periodic evaluations of their work, right? This is something that you want to see happen, but when they're politicized, that is bad. In this particular case, what you see from this assessment is they reevaluate that high confidence and they decide that they didn't [00:26:00] have enough evidence to justify high and it should have been a moderate confidence assessment. They have a little bit of a disagreement about the incorporation of the Notorious Steel dossier, which is the sort of piece of raw intelligence that, this British by Christopher Steele pulled together.

This is the sort of infamous pee tape dossier, sort of like a, kind of a garbage product. Ultimately though, again, the aspired to help Trump piece, this is, keep in mind, January, 2017 is when this intelligence assessment is being made. So this is before the social media platforms do that investigation and find all of the data from the Russian trolls. That again, now we can't put ourself into the mind of Putin, but we can say, gosh, overwhelmingly the evidence is that all of these posts, all of these hundreds of thousands and millions of pieces of content are going in one direction and they're, all trying to help one candidate.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and

DIRESTA: we can

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

DIRESTA: about this notion of

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: but ultimately again, it's fine.

You change the quality of the assessment. you move it down from high to moderate. Great. It doesn't change the interference piece. So this is sort of like a they begin to say like, oh, the intelligence was politicized. Okay, again. Fantastic. you do that reassessment. So in June June 26th, so a little over a month ago we had this sort of first wave and this is breathlessly put out there as Ratcliffe saying our intelligence agencies were politicized and I am taking steps to fix that.

Okay. That's a very political thing to do. I was very disappointed, again, as somebody who has maybe naive because I was a college student at the time, but like kind of fond memories of you're, supposed to. B apolitical in intelligence. The whole point is this sort of country over party sort of drilled into [00:28:00] you when you, go in. and it, it felt very disappointing to me in that sense, but it doesn't, he, didn't make any explicit arguments that the ICA was fraudulent or that the conclusion was wrong. Tulsi comes out and does that two weeks later, and that's where the ball really gets rolling.

Russian trolls only praised Clinton to damn her

SHEFFIELD: and, just as a little kind of parenthetical, like one of the pieces in one of the Senate reports, because they did three as you said was that they, couldn't find any pro Hillary Clinton posts by the Russian trolls, if I remember right. Isn't that right?

DIRESTA: well, I looked at all of that data,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: multiple hundreds of thousands of memes. There were a couple of interesting ones that were like sort of tongue in cheek where on they had a page that was pretending to Muslim. It was

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: Muslims, and they had a few posts where they would say things as Muslims, right?

So they were, again, in their persona as Muslims, where they were thanking Hillary Clinton for doing things to support Muslims.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: it was doing it in such a way that the intent was for other people to see that content and, have in their mind that Hillary Clinton was this like Muslim loving this was around the time where they were then using that content to trigger fights.

You, you remember, I.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: how many people know this, but they actually sort of triggered an in-person conflict by having their Muslim page followers and their Texas secessionist page followers show up in person for a the Deis Islamicization of Texas rally that they held. So their Muslim page kind of did double duty.

It was ostensibly a left-leaning Muslim affinity [00:30:00] page, but they also used that content in, in

SHEFFIELD: To make zombie food.

DIRESTA: To trigger the Right, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: So that was where you saw pro Hillary content, if you will, was on the on the Muslim pages, but on the liberal pages, it was like, we as feminists shouldn't support this woman who stayed with her husband, who cheated on her with the black community.

It, they had a lot to say about why Hillary wasn't for black people. And then obviously on the right they had a field day with with all the various. So,

SHEFFIELD: yeah, So, alright, so some of the so Gabbard, as you said, just went, has gone completely nuts. So, and released all kinds of stuff. And then making very serious charges, which again, if these were serious act, if they had actually believed that. The Obama administration had done these things.

They would've put this out on day one or like within the first month. If this was real stuff, they would've done something with it, but they didn't. Only putting it out with Epstein.

DIRESTA: So what she does is, let's go back to, remember I said there were sort of three lines of attack. There was the voting machines, the hack and leak, and the and the Russian troll factory. So in August of 2016, prior to the November election, there is another intelligence community assessment. So this is when Obama is president and that assessment looks at the potential for the Russians to hack voting machines and change votes. And what it says is they don't believe that the Russians have the capacity to do this. They don't believe they have the capability to do this, and they're not sure that they want to. Right? They're so, they're debating in this August assessment whether they have the capability or the desire to interfere. Through these through these infrastructure type attacks, right? Through [00:32:00] actually hacking and changing votes. And that is the August assessment. So t. This is it. It's a rhetorical leigh of hand. It's very, slimy. What she does, she says, see, Obama knew he had been briefed in August that the Russians couldn't hack the election. But then the January the January ICA says, all of a sudden the Russians are trying to hack the election. And it's because one is using hack in that in the literal sort of cybersecurity sense of the word, meaning they are literally like the SVR, the like Russian hacking teams are trying to. Infiltrate and change votes in voting machines, which they did not do though they attempted it. And then the colloquial hack, the election terminology that comes to be how media all over the world begins to describe the hack and leak operation and what happens after, again, the GRU and the Internet Research Agency effort. As it, as the Russia hacked the election narrative begins to come out. And as Obama launches investigations and begins to, speak in those terms tulsi alleges that that he forced a change these that, he forces the change that he launches investigations under false pretenses. So sort of, twists and the, these two things she says he knew they didn't hack the election.

Talking about the voting machines and the assessment there, but then he says that they did. And so if you look at the, if you look at how she's describing it she's arguing that Obama was like concocting intelligence and that this

treasonous conspiracy because he knew that Russia didn't have the capability to do these things.

So that's, where you start to see her relying on the fact that people, the average person again, does not. Pay attention to in the five part senate report, there is one whole volume on the various, like [00:34:00] efforts to, hack things. There is one whole part on the social media operations. There's a whole slew of stuff on various other aspects of it.

There's the Mueller investigation there. I mean, there's so many different, I think maybe also it's possibly worth noting

Right-wing figures falsely conflating media headlines with government actions

SHEFFIELD: The Mueller convictions. Let's make sure to note that in guilty please, like this isn't just him investigating. Know, the, their, the guy who was their hero who we will talk about, John Durham, just was a complete failure and everything blew up in his face repeatedly. Unlike him Robert Moer and his dad, they got a number of convictions and guilty pleas.

DIRESTA: Right.

SHEFFIELD: so, but on that point though, on the hack point it isn't just ARD who's doing this, it's also that, a lot of various, right wing media personalities. Like there's this guy named Mike Benz. Who has really has really been trying to feed this narrative. and it's he's doing this hack obfuscation as well.

And he recently, had a post in which he, you and he's like right wing media figures do this often is that they will quote. A media headline or a media story that is reciting language used by government officials, and then they will say that this is what the government officials said.

Well, no it isn't. They never said that. And if you read the news story, there's not a single quote from any government officials saying that the Russians hack the election of votes. Nobody said that in the Obama administration public.

DIRESTA: Mike Benz went on John Salmon and said that the Russian interference never happened. It was probably people with VPNs, and it might even have been me and the people who did the investigations running VPNs and making it all up. Okay, so this is not exactly a reliable narrator. What he wants to do is, and what he's been doing interestingly, is he's taking [00:36:00] random sentences that are coming out of the, the sort of cables and things that are in these in the matics and other things.

He's pulling out random snippets of sentences, like three words here, three words there. And he is doing the whole, like, you see, this proves the whole conspiracy. This proves the censorship industrial complex hoax well, I. It is a hoax. This is, he says it proves the censorship industrial complex.

The censorship industrial complex is a hoax. That is the problem that we're facing here, right? They it is this process of, again nobody is going to read the full. The full annex here. And so the email that he is pulling these various words out of these various sentences out of is an email that Durham in the report goes on to decide is likely a fabrication of Russian intelligence that was fed. Two, the FBI presumably as a, as a decoy, as a manipulation tactic. So that's one of the things that, that you start to see as you read the report is that, ironically, the, same way the Steele dossier turns out to be BS just sort of material fed to like an overly credulous guy. This is exactly what you see in the Durham report.

You, you see Durham really wanting to believe this stuff. If. Durham left this out of his report. It's not because Durham wanted to help Hillary Clinton, it's because Durham recognized that even despite the fact that he would've probably loved to have included this, he just couldn't get it over the credibility threshold.

And that's why it was stuck in this annex over here.

John Durham's failed investigation

SHEFFIELD: So just going back though, because, I think the Russia gate stuff as they're calling it is very old news for people and people, most normal people have moved on from it. We gotta, we have to review just for a bit here who John Durham is. So for those who had forgotten or didn't pay attention, because he never produced anything notable.

John Durham is a Republican, attorney who worked in the Justice [00:38:00] Department. And he was appointed by Donald Trump to investigate the investigators. and his investigation turned up nothing of any consequence really. And he, tried to indict some people, but he got those cases thrown out very quickly.

DIRESTA: And.

SHEFFIELD: Nonetheless MAGA has been trying to mine his material and they doing it. So I'll let you take it from there.

DIRESTA: I'll try to keep it simple. So there were multiple like investigations of the investigations but the Durham investigation looked at whether the sort of FBI's Crossfire hurricane investigation, which is the investigation into whether the Trump campaign had ties to Russia, it was launched to try to get a sense of whether there had, this was the sort of collusion bit, whether there had been collusion. So what Durham finds in his report is that the FBI shouldn't have launched a full investigation into the Trump campaign, based on unverified intelligence. A lot of, I think this is maybe a misconception. A lot of people think that it was the Steele Dossier that sort of triggered that investigation.

It wasn't, it was a tip from Australian intelligence about George Papadopoulos having some sort of inside knowledge that the that the Russians had bad emails about Hillary Clinton or Hillary Clinton's emails. And so, what What Durham is looking at is whether sort of full on investigation into collusion should have happened. he kind of, he's, what he says in his report is that there was like confirmation bias that the FBI was sort of too willing to to, move into a full investigation. But ultimately there he finds no conspiracy. He doesn't find any evidence that the FBI deliberately and intentionally went on to try to screw Trump.

SHEFFIELD: And including, sorry, that the guy who had talked to him to George Papadopoulos, Josef Mifsud because the Trump people were trying to push the idea that he was an FBI [00:40:00] informant and agent. And that was one of the findings of, of, the report. Was that to know he was not an FBI informant.

In fact, the guy's been missing and hasn't been seen him in public since 2017.

DIRESTA: Right. And so he but it also finds that there is no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians. So that's roughly speaking the Durham report. He did try to sort of prosecute a few people. I don't remember the specifics of those. The convictions I think didn't hold, ultimately it was kind of a. Sort of a nothing burger. It didn't turn out to be what MAGA had hoped it was going to be. This classified annex is a really interesting the sort of drama around this is that Kash Patel a couple days ago on Twitter says, so this is now Kosh Patel. Was an investigator on the House Intelligence Committee at the time, back in 2020, and now he is the Deputy Director of, no, I'm sorry.

He's the director of the FBI. I'm mixing up all of my Bino. The podcaster is the deputy director, gosh, Patel's, the director of the FBI. He makes this bizarre tweet that he has found a secret room in the FBI full of. Burn bags. and then there are secret documents that, that have been like, kept from the public and he is going to take them over to Senator Chuck Grassley to declassify them. And apparently since Chuck Grassley just declassified this Durham annex yesterday, the burn bag documents are this annex, which is these emails. because one of the things that Durham looked at was whether Hillary Clinton. The sort of thing that that they, that has come to be called, like the Clinton plan, was whether Clinton had somehow managed to kick off this investigation into Trump.

Kash Patel's burn bag story

DIRESTA: And so the annex is these [00:42:00] emails that Kash Patel alleges were like stuck in some burn bag. This,

SHEFFIELD: Which conveniently, there's no picture of it and we it's like,

DIRESTA: of the secret room. There's no

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

DIRESTA: of the burn

SHEFFIELD: And it's like, if these things were, yeah, it's the dumbest idea possible because number one, this report obviously is existing on many government files servers like, and obviously people in the various congressional committees probably had copies of it.

Surely like the idea that there's just one copy of it and it's there guarded like the

DIRESTA: which, and it's,

SHEFFIELD: right.

DIRESTA: classifications and it's got a number, which means that all these documents have numbers. It says classified by John Durham right here, which means that it's

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: system somewhere. All of

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

DIRESTA: are in a computer system somewhere.

There's like num, I mean, it's, like. Footnoted. It's well footnoted. These are not random papers found in a burn bag. Also, for those who don't know, the scandal would be that the burn bags didn't get burned. Because, when you throw things into a burn bag, that's material that is classified that you can't throw into the trash.

So this would be like, they didn't take the trash out, or they didn't destroy the classified materials

SHEFFIELD: Yeah,

DIRESTA: literally, just to be clear. For years, for like multiple years. But it's weird because if you were putting stuff in burn bags to destroy it and cover it up, and then you didn't burn the bags, it's also not clear why you would bother shoving 'em in a secret room and not just burning them.

Like, none of this makes any sense. I, it's like.

SHEFFIELD: no.

DIRESTA: It's the, it's like when you sit in a movie and you watch it and like you're entertained as it's happening while you eat your popcorn or your zombie food. But then you leave and you're sitting in the car and you're like, man, that movie had a whole lot of like, plot holes if you spend more than like eight seconds.

Thinking

SHEFFIELD: about it. Yeah.

DIRESTA: anyway, so now we've got this annex here and. Like I said, I, highly [00:44:00] recommend people look at it because it's an interesting if you wanna see like what an intelligence product looks like, you can see again this investigator who is not sympathetic to Clinton here, right?

This is the, again, she's inve, the derm is investigating whether the investigation into Trump should have begun at all, and in this

What the Durham Report annex actually says

DIRESTA: particular,

SHEFFIELD: is a Republican partisan, so like they have to note that.

DIRESTA: And so this is not a person who. Who would have kept this annex secret if it was useful to the purpose of, again, screwing Clinton. Right? So what we have here is, a series of emails and a series of intelligence sort of summaries. And there is a source that is turning them over to the FBI. And the FBI comes to believe that the source is not particularly reliable these documents appear to be sort of, they're translated from Russian. They're, it's sort of, russian assessments of emails that they have and what you see. I don't wanna like spend too long on it because we've like 20 minutes left or something. But, what you see as they're going through it is the this collection of emails in which. They're alleging that Clinton is trying to find a way to spin the investigation into her emails.

And Trump having ties to Russia. That's the allegation that's being made in these in these reports, in, in these, sort of intelligence products. But there, there are sort of two emails that are in there with a person at the Soros Foundation, and they're attributed to this person at the Soros Foundation, the person at the Soros Foundation, when Durham goes and, in the process of investigation reaches out to him, says he's never seen these emails before.

They can't find them on the servers, but what they do find. [00:46:00] they look through all of these, the servers of all of the different people affiliated as they start to kind of comb through all of the different entities that the Russians had hacked. because the way that the Russians supposedly get these emails is they have hacked the Soros Open Society Foundation, sorry, not Soros Foundation.

They've hacked the Open Society Foundation. They've hacked, I think the Carnegie Foundation. They've hacked obviously the Clinton campaign. So they have all of these different hacks that the Russians have successfully achieved. And what they find as they look through the servers and the, emails of all of these other different entities is sentences from the email that this guy purportedly wrote in other people's emails. So this email begins to appear to have been cobbled together sentences that they have cherry picked from other people's emails. And so Durham notes this. So you're reading like the first 11 pages of the Annex, and he is describing these intelligence products and how the FBI doesn't really think this, source is particularly reliable. And then it gets to the part where you're seeing the emails and then you turn to page 12 and you, the sort of reveal, if you will, is that these emails are cobbled together from other people's emails. And so. so Durham can't authenticate this. So it begins to seem that these materials that are being sort of fed to the FBI and I think that as I've read other people's analyses of the docs and what might be in the redactions possibly the sort of CIA is getting some of these also. That this is actually material that is being put out by the Russians deliberately and intentionally to create the perception that this Clinton plan is happening and that there isn't really very much solid evidence that, it is. again, let's just steel manning the argument here. We still keep coming back to the fact that the claims that are being made now about this Durham annex is that like this reveals the plot. This reveals [00:48:00] that Obama and his sort of treasonous band of deep state agents deliberately. to launch an investigation into Trump, and it just doesn't, because that was what the Durham investigation was supposed to be looking at in the first place.

So if this annex here, which was written by Durham, proven that, why didn't Durham release it? And this, is where I just, I can't get my head around like what is being claimed. What this is, what this, what they are saying, this supports versus the fact that investigation was supposed to answer this very question.

So like what Durham forgot to, to include the smoking gun in his own investigation. Like the whole thing makes absolutely no sense. And this is, where I'm like, what am I missing? Yeah.

Right-wing media's lower reading comprehension

SHEFFIELD: I mean, so having been in right wing media myself I can say that based on my own experience that. A lot of people that are in write me media have lower reading comprehension. I'm sorry to say guys, but you do, and I'll give you an example of what I meant by what I mean by that.

So like one day when I was working at the Washington Examiner I had a we had a story tip coming to us claiming that the Obama administration's cash for clunkers program was being politically biased against Republicans. And I thought, wow, that's a huge story. Big is true, right?

One of those allegations. So I didn't have time to look at that because I had received the tip. So I said, well obviously this would be a great story if we can substantiate it. But, and I gave it to one of my colleagues. I said, look, I, can't get into this right now. Sorry. Here's a free hot story for you if, it to, for you to look at.

And but please don't. Please don't put it up without looking at it. And then. Later in the [00:50:00] day I, somebody explain like one of my analytics people was like, oh yes, hey Matt, we're on the drench record. And I'm like, oh, great. Well, okay, so what's it for? And then so I go over there to look at it and lo and behold, the guy that I gave the story to about the story tip about the Obama administration supposedly discriminated against Republicans.

That's the story. I looked at the story and there's no substantiation. He didn't talk to anyone. He just said that it was true. And then then the administration flatly denied it. In fact said that there was no ability to even ascertain whether a car dealer was a Republican or Democrat or anything.

And that it and then other people dug in and found, oh, most car dealers are Republicans. So like by definition, if you had a program that was discriminating against Republicans, why would you? Fund Republicans like it makes no sense. And like it was totally embarrassing for us. And I asked the guy, and, he was like, well, it seemed good enough to me.

And I was like, so, like, this is what they keep doing. They keep doing this stuff over and over. And it's, so, it like, that's the, paradox of the liberal bias machine zombie food processor is. They are the ones with the bias. They're the ones that have this predetermined agenda and they don't look at things from the other side.

And and so this is why they keep making these mistakes, because they just said if Durham truly believed this was the smoking gun, well then why didn't he end diving with. Why didn't he even talk about it publicly? And just that alone, like let alone like, so he, you're either, you have to believe Durham is just impossibly stupid and doesn't understand his own report, what it really says, or it doesn't say what you think it be.[00:52:00]

That's it basically.

DIRESTA: Yeah, it's, I, think my experience with all of this has been on the interference side, right? I, spent many years trying to avoid weighing in on collusion because I felt like the it, it doesn't, it just wasn't my area of expertise. It wasn't my remit. It wasn't something I. Felt like I had anything to contribute to I was asked to evaluate some data sets, the internet research agency one, the GRU one, and and so I read just what was in the media, just the media coverage on it.

and, and so when I, read these things as a person who is very, familiar with the interference side. Is nominally familiar with, I, I read the Mueller indictments because they tied in as, he was indicting the internet research agency trolls that obviously connected to my work.

I've read the senate reports all five volumes. But stuff like this, I'm like, what am I missing? Why wouldn't they have just released this? And then I wait for somebody else to write the article explaining that. But I think it really is just as, as you're, saying, I just it's just an absolute mystery to me nobody on the right is asking Kash Patel on X or any, any of them on X.

Like, why would he have put this in a burn bag? Why would it have been in that building? He wasn't even operating in that building apparently. Like, is the, this, it just makes absolutely no sense and I, I can't get my head around. Particularly for highly conspiratorial people like don't, they want it to fit together a little bit better.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, it is like this was a, even if that actually existed, let's, say it did, for the sake of arming. That this was just a printout that someone made, like that's all [00:54:00] it was. Like that's probably what it was. because obviously Pam Bondy and tons of people in the DOJ have copies of this report.

So like throw, throwing this thing into the furnace. Would not have destroyed the evidence by any stretch of the imagination. The FBI has multiple copies of it, digital copies obviously. So like, and then of course, like this document as a digital copy and probably print copy, exists in probably thousands of places in the Federal Code Bureaucracy.

So this little printout in a burn bag means zero.

So we had a little technical snafu. It was the Trump deep state trying to get Renee.

DIRESTA: browser change, I don't know what that was about.

Okay, so, so

Saying

SHEFFIELD: that Durham, he was either so stupid he didn't read his own report and missed the smoking gun. Or maybe it's not a smoking gun.

DIRESTA: I, I really felt like I felt like I was going to. I, well, so what I plan to do is just continue to read people who cover the derm report in great detail and just see how they process this. that's my plan for for trying to continue to understand it. I think I just don't understand how, if he voluntarily chose to leave this out, if it literally says, classified by John h Derm on the document.

He was the one who chose not to include this evidence for the Clinton plan because he could not verify it. He did not think it, it met evidentiary standards. I just don't understand how they're marketing this as like this is the thing that is going to like indict Obama and send him to gmo.

So here we are.

Russian tactics and snafus

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So much of foreign intelligence is the problem of some, so as somebody who has done investigative reporting myself, I can tell you that when you're on the trail of this story, [00:56:00] the people who you are investigating eventually find out that you're doing. And so they become aware of it. And so, and that often happens with intelligence gathering, that

DIRESTA: Oh yeah,

SHEFFIELD: becomes aware that you are investigating a particular thing about them. And so like that's, as you said earlier with the, with my, with with the steel dossier that the, it was filled with Russian misinformation actually,

DIRESTA: no, I can,

SHEFFIELD: was doing that.

DIRESTA: Yeah, I can say.

SHEFFIELD: here.

DIRESTA: I when I was doing, okay, so I did the, internet research agency dataset research. I did that for the Senate in 2018, and then I did an investigation into the GRU. So military intelligence in 2019. Both of these are up on well, the GRU one is up on Stanford's website, and then the Internet Research Agency one is on the, is on Congress's website.

So the, the GRU. They do hack and leaks all the time. Right. That is the military intelligence mo that is what they do. One of the things that they reference in the Durham report, there are a couple of, I'm sorry, in the annex, there are a few different versions of this email also, which is another giant red flag, right.

And one of the versions of the email alludes to I don't have the specific sentence in front of me, but it alludes to the Olympics. So Russia was. Was extremely pissed about, its athletes being kicked out of the Olympics. it hacked the WADA is the acronym, I think, worldwide Anti-Doping Association.

One of the things that, that they do when they hack. Documents is they leak falsified documents mixed in with the actual documents. This is absolutely canonical. So one of the things that I would do when we got these these, data sets is when you get the documents you have to try to piece together, is this actually real, right?

So when they're releasing, for example. [00:58:00] The, waddle leaks. they're making these allegations about athletes claiming that they have information about athletes, but of course, they're incentivized to leak falsified medical records of athletes because they wanna humiliate other athletes in the way that they feel that they have been humiliated.

And that is the entire point of this entire endeavor. So you're never looking at you like you're never treating the material that you get as. Credible, and that is what as, you see them. germ is alluding to interviews that he does with people trying to figure out, is this real similarly though, like, let's just be candid, right?

If you did, if you were one of the people on the Clinton campaign saying like, Hey guys, let's hatch a plot to. to make Trump look terrible and let's try to suck the FBI into it. That's the kind of thing where if you didn't interview, you would deny that presumably. Right. It makes you look bad. So there's this, effort to try to, figure out what is true.

There's also some very interesting, another thing that you see when you read some of the things that that Russia does, and this is all over the Internet Research Agency dataset. The language is not what we would consider to be native fluent speakers of English. So he has a sentence here. About how the FBI should let me just pull this one up because it's kind of interesting, like the idiomatic pieces, they get wrong a lot of the time. Where he says that they are going to

SHEFFIELD: The

DIRESTA: yeah, put more oil in the fire, which is not how a Native English speaker would would say that. Right? So, and you see this again constantly.

One of the ways that. We used to actually look at and detect Russian accounts was they would just get the slang and the vernacular wrong. And, you would see that a lot in the data sets, which is one of the reasons why actually they moved to, to just like going and plagiarizing, like turning point USA memes when they wanted to make content for [01:00:00] the right and they would just like slap their logo on top of it because then they wouldn't have that sort of like tell.

Conclusion

SHEFFIELD: We'll see what else these guys can come up with out of the zombie food meat grinder in the days and weeks to come, but right now this is just nonsense. So for people who want to keep up with your debunking of the nonsense, what are your recommendations for them?

DIRESTA: I have a newsletter. I guess you can get either the Ghost at reneediresta.com or the Substack. And then I'm on Bluesky and Threads. And yeah, just on the internet.

SHEFFIELD: And Mastodon as well.

DIRESTA: Oh yeah, I'm on Mastodon as well. Yep.

SHEFFIELD: That was how we met

DIRESTA: That was how we met. Yep.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, thanks for being here.

DIRESTA: Thank you.