This tweet went out on July 24—two days before the date written on the document Sarah Sanders read on Wednesday announcing that Donald Trump was revoking the security privileges of former CIA director John Brennan and putting nine others under review.
According to Google Translate, that message reads:
Ex-CIA directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden, ex-FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, ex-director of the National Intelligence Service James Clapper, ex-national security adviser Susan Rice say goodbye to access to classified materials. Welcome to the real world!
In addition to starting with Brennan, all of those names are on the list that Trump provided. That list wasn’t made public until Wednesday, despite its July date. And Brennan has stated that he didn’t know his security was being suspended until he was told on Wednesday afternoon by a friend who saw Sanders’s press conference. As this tweet has surfaced, the response has been very strong from many observers.
However, all may not be as it seems, and some caution is recommended around this information.
Artem Klyushin is reportedly a Russian billionaire and associate of Vladimir Putin. He’s also been cited as a friend of Trump’s Russian real estate pal—and the man who set up the Trump Tower meeting via Ron Goldstone—Emin Agalarov. Klyushin has a Twitter account with over 900,000 followers that’s littered with his accounts of his association with Trump, his closeness with Putin, Russian history lessons, and his mostly indecipherable theories on economics. Klyushin has also frequently posted images of his meetings with Trump on Instagram and Facebook, including his appearance at the 2013 Miss Universe contest. His tweets and social media posts have become a regular feature of some sites analyzing Trump’s actions, and he’s been associated with everything from arranging Trump festivities in Moscow to arranging the hotel room that hosted the “pee pee tape.”
However, Klyushin’s press footprint is notably small, excessively so for someone with the wealth, position, and access that his posts claim. Which brings up the possibility that Klyushin himself is some sort of cover story or scam … somewhere between a serial exaggerator and completely fictional.
But none of that would seem to explain a post anticipating Trump’s actions on security clearance that came two days before Trump apparently drafted his order to rescind Brennan’s access.
“Spygate” was one of the labels that Trump put around a supposed conspiracy to plant spies within the Trump campaign, a conspiracy that included the idea that FBI source Stefan Halper was actually a CIA plant out to drag George Papadopoulos into meeting with Russian agents and provide a means of attacking Trump. The elaborate conspiracy theory that spun off this idea—which put ex-CIA director John Brennan at the center—was widely circulated on the right. That theory included the idea that Brennan was working in association with James Clapper and James Comey. Susan Rice was also a supposed member of this imaginary cabal, and had also come in for attack by Trump. Suspending the security of both James Comey and Andrew McCabe had been specifically mentioned by Trump in the weeks before the Klyushin tweet.
Artem Klyushin may be real. Artem Klyushin may be a real Russian billionaire. Artem Klyushin may be a real friend of Vladimir Putin and Emin Agaralov. Artem Klyushin may have had real advance knowledge of Trump’s actions on security clearances.
But every one of those statements deserves a fair measure of examination before reaching the conclusion that Donald Trump was coordinating the access of American intelligence officials with Russian oligarchs. Trump has done more than enough wrong that can be documented—including in his suspension of Brennan—to make something this shaky a central point of argument.
Thursday, Aug 16, 2018 · 7:16:31 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
Since this tweet began being pushed, it’s become clear that statements giving this same list of names were made one day before the tweet was issued. In the White House press conference the day before the tweet, Sanders again restated Trump’s desire to remove security clearances, something that had been discussed at least as early as February, and gave exactly the list of people who were included in the Klyushin tweet.
There is genuinely Nothing To See Here.