Matt Taibbi’s New Russiagate Meltdown

Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Taibbi are fueling a new conspiracy theory that has absolutely no basis in reality.

by Ben Cohen

When I confront my seven-year-old about making something up—say, claiming he cleaned his room when it’s clearly still a war zone—I try not to call him a liar. It’s a strong word that can damage kids and create a negative self-image.

But when he continues telling me with increasing militancy that he did in fact clean his room despite it being messier than when I told him to clean it, I have told him on occasion to “stop lying”. My seven-year-old doesn’t want to be a liar, so he does what a lot of adults do: he doubles down and concocts increasingly ludicrous stories to explain why he did clean his room, but his younger brother messed it up, and the clothes fell out of the cupboard all by themselves, and the banana skin under his bed was put there by someone else after he threw it away etc, etc.

I can’t get too mad at him because a) he’s seven, and b) the stories are quite funny. But it is an interesting phenomenon to observe — and a very human one. When we get caught in a lie or a big mistake, sometimes we think the only way to get out of it is to double down and go for broke.

You see this quite often in public debates where one person gets confronted with irrefutable facts and instead of accepting their argument is false, they get angry and begin hurling accusations.

This is particularly embarrassing when you are a credible journalist with some big stories to your name. Getting something horribly wrong is humiliating, and it takes a lot of courage to accept fault. It takes even more courage if the topic is something you’ve spent months reporting on and have invested a great deal of your professional credibility.

In the age of self-publishing, algorithms, and tribalized audiences, that kind of courage is vanishingly rare. Journalists aren’t held accountable—they’re insulated by curated fanbases and rewarded for reinforcing audience biases, not challenging them. They are also incentivized to perpetuate narratives popular with their audiences regardless of their veracity. Their “job” is to feed their audience what they want, rather than what they need.

Matt Taibbi has been probably the greatest example I’ve seen of a journalist succumb almost entirely to these unseen, but very real forces.

Case in point — his obsession with the Russiagate story and the thoroughly debunked conspiracy that it was a giant hoax. Despite there being a new administration committing all sorts of crimes against the constitution, Matt Taibbi is still desperately telling his audience that dammit, Russiagate really was a hoax and all the Dems should be in jail!

Here he was after Tulsi Gabbard planted an obviously fake story that President Obama had committed treason against the United States by manipulating key intelligence about Russian interference in the election:

If you read the documents Gabbard released, they do nothing of the sort — but more on that later.

Gabbard helpfully posted this hilarious image explaining her conspiracy theory:

She then posted more “proof” including selective intel quotes declaring Russia did not conduct “malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure”:

The problem is, no one ever claimed Russia was “conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” While it’s correct that Russia didn’t hack vote-counting machines or change ballots, the broader, well-established intelligence assessment from January 6, 2017, concluded Russia absolutely did engage in a broad influence campaign—including hacking (such as the DNC and Podesta leaks), social media disinformation, and cyber infrastructure probing—to influence the election. Multiple investigations confirm broader interference. The bipartisan U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report (Vol. I) found Russia targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states—probing databases, voter registration systems, and other backend tools—even if no votes were changed.

Gabbard constructs a straw man: that because Russia didn’t change vote counts, there was no malicious cyber activity. But that’s never been the claim. This ignores the documented hacking of campaign emails, database breaches (DNC, RNC), social media disinformation efforts, and infrastructure scanning. Russia's cyber efforts were malicious, and no one outside of MAGAworld and the alt-left believes it.

As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler dryly noted:

Gabbard has a problem. How can she discover new evidence that somehow eluded four previous investigations: a 2019 report released by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III; a 2019 Justice Department inspector general report; a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee issued in 2020 by a GOP-controlled Senate; and a 2023 report released by special counsel John Durham, appointed in Trump’s first term?

There are two explanations here. The first is that Tulsi Gabbard isn’t very bright and genuinely doesn’t understand that the evidence she has “uncovered” doesn’t mean what she thinks it means. The second is that Gabbard knows the evidence is bogus, but believes Trump and his base aren’t bright enough to understand it.

My guess? It’s a bit of both. Gabbard clearly isn’t smart or qualified enough to run America’s intelligence agencies—frankly, it’s terrifying to imagine what she has access to. But she’s smart enough to know she wasn’t hired to expose the Deep State—just to pretend to."

I went over this in the F**king Monday column, but the timing of this alleged bombshell is extremely suspicious. Trump desperately needs to shift attention away from the Epstein Files he claims don’t exist, and Gabbard has given him a much needed lifeline.

Either way, the narrative fell apart almost immediately and no reputable outlet has taken Gabbard’s claims seriously.

Enter Matt Taibbi — a journalist previously used by Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk to push demonstrably false stories about the TSA and the Democrats suppressing stories on Twitter.

There is, according to Taibbi “No doubt. None”, that Obama invented a “phony espionage” story. He followed this up with a ridiculous mini-essay sent out to his readers claiming Gabbard really had uncovered a giant conspiracy.

Regurgitating Gabbard’s talking points, Taibbi argues there was a top-down Obama-led plot to manufacture the Trump-Russia narrative. Again, the problem is that the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was backed by the FBI, CIA, and NSA — and concluded with “high confidence” that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. The assessment was affirmed by:

• The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report (2020).

• Former Trump officials including Dan Coats, Fiona Hill, and even Mike Pompeo who have acknowledged Russian interference.

• Current Trump officials, most notably Marco Rubio, who has repeatedly emphasized the Senate findings. “We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling” said Rubio, who called the counterintelligence threat “grave” (Rubio also highlighted that Russian hackers even targeted his own campaign staff in 2016).

Taibbi implies — without any evidence — that the ICA was hastily thrown together as political propaganda, but completely ignores the actual months-long effort and wide inter-agency input that went into it.

So unless there was a massive, bipartisan, interagency conspiracy covered up by both the Trump and Biden administrations, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and even Trump’s own allies like Marco Rubio — Taibbi’s theory makes absolutely no sense.

So what exactly is Taibbi’s game here? Like my seven-year-old, I suspect Taibbi knows on some level that the story is garbage. But he is too far gone. He has built a brand around exposing the so-called ‘Russiagate hoax,’ and admitting fault now would mean losing face, losing subscribers, and losing his slot in the anti-Establishment media pantheon. So he is doubling down, telling his audience what they want to hear while telling himself he really was right all along.

In today’s era of self-publishing, this kind of gaslighting can be called journalism But it isn’t. It’s performance art for the paranoid, and Taibbi is just too greedy to quit the act.

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