Biden Appointee Neera Tanden Spread the Conspiracy That Russian Hackers
Changed Hillary's 2016 Votes to Trump
How can Democrats and allied media outlets credibly oppose unhinged
conspiracy theories and attacks on U.S. election legitimacy while empowering
its worst purveyors?
Glenn Greenwald
Nov 30
Neera Tanden participates in a panel discussion during the annual Milken
Institute Global Conference at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on April 29, 2019 in
Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images)
The announcement that Joe Biden intends to nominate Neera Tanden as his
Director of the Office of Management and Budget - a critical position
overseeing U.S. economic and regulatory policy - triggered a wide range of
mockery, indignation and disgust from both the left and the right. That
should not be surprising: though a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary D.C.
swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence,
Tanden's uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest
conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the
corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned
her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her
accomplishments.
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When news of her appointment broke, many of the journalists and activists
she has spent years abusing, slandering, and lying about instantly stepped
forward to compile just some of her worst political and behavioral
lowlights. And some preliminary signs emerged that she might encounter
difficulty in obtaining the Senate confirmation needed for her to assume
this position. The Communications Director for GOP Senator John Cornyn of
Texas announced that "Tanden stands zero chance of being confirmed" by the
Senate.
Former Sanders campaign aide David Sirota hypothesized that "it is not a
coincidence that they are putting Neera Tanden -- the single biggest, most
aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States of America -
specifically at OMB while Sanders is Senate Budget Committee ranking/chair."
Sirota's statement suggests Biden's nomination was intended as yet more
humiliation doled out to the Democratic-loyal Sanders left by cucking the
Vermont Senator even further by forcing him to shepherd the confirmation of
one of his most vicious and amoral attackers (who Sanders himself in 2019
vehemently denounced). But Sirota's point also raises the prospect that
Tanden's nomination could even encounter trouble from that side of the aisle
as well (given Sanders' compliant and disciplined conduct over the last six
months, it's more likely we will see him roll out a literal red carpet for
Tanden to walk on, gently toss red roses on it before she passes, and then
serve her a glass of Chardonnay than meaningfully obstruct her
confirmation).
The list of sociopathic and even monstrous acts from Tanden is too long to
list comprehensively. She punched one of her own employees, a reporter for
CAP's now-abolished blog ThinkProgress, after he had the temerity to ask
Hillary Clinton in 2008 about her support for the Iraq War (Tanden claimed
she "merely" had "pushed," not punched, the undeferential reporter). In
2011, as the Obama administration was participating in the NATO bombing of
Libya, Tanden suggested in internal CAP discussions that the U.S. steal
Libya's oil as a way of reducing the U.S. deficit (a story I was able to
report only because Tanden had abused and alienated so many of her employees
that they worked together to leak her incriminating emails to me).
During her tenure as CAP's President, Tanden accepted millions of dollars
from the regime of the United Arab Emirates, which built Dubai and Abu Dhabi
using slave labor, along with massive donations from Facebook, Google,
Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, the Walton Family and Michael Bloomberg, while
hiding the identity of some of her think tank's largest donors. A huge
chapter on the NYPD's abusive policies toward Muslims under Mayor Michael
Bloomberg was removed from a CAP report after Boomberg donated millions to
Tanden's organization, and he continued to donate even more after that
courteous gesture.
She ordered the supposedly independent journalists of the ThinkProgress
blog, including Muslim writers, to stop writing critically about Israel
after key CAP donors, including Barney Frank's sister Ann Lewis and
long-time Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson, complained. She and Wolfson
plotted in 2016 how to weaponize female journalists and people of color
against Hillary's critics as well to use their identity to stigmatize and
thus stop undesirable coverage from The New York Times. In 2018, she outed a
CAP employee at a staff-wide meeting who had filed an anonymous complaint of
sexual harassment and retaliation against one of Tanden's male allies.
Secure with her UAE-and-corporate-funded large salary, she has long urged
cuts to Social Security. The list goes on and on.
One can reasonably view Biden's choice of Tanden as a positive. She is no
different in character or ideology than any of the faceless, more obscure
DNC operatives who would occupy this position if she did not. But because of
how well-known her sociopathy, militarism and corporatism are to many on the
liberal-left, her face serves as an undeniable and unavoidable reminder of
what the Biden administration and the Democratic Party really are. She
illuminates the truth about who their real aims.
But beyond things like wanting to steal Libya's oil after bombing it into
oblivion, outing sexual harassment complainants, and physically assaulting
and censoring her own employees, there is one uniquely abominable feature of
Neera Tanden. She is one of the most deranged conspiracy theorists in the
United States, and has done more than almost any other Washington
functionary to contaminate Democrats' mental health, capacity to reason, and
faith in the legitimacy of U.S. elections.
________________________________________
Tanden owes her entire career to the patronage of Hillary Clinton, and her
devotion to Hillary approaches restraining-order levels of creepiness (here
you can watch Tanden beam with adoration as then-Senator Hillary Clinton, on
the Senate floor in 2004, explains her steadfast opposition to marriage
equality for same-sex couples on the ground that "marriage is a sacred bond
between a man and a woman" and "exists between a man and a woman going back
into the mists of history" for the primary purpose of raising children -
just a few short years before Democrats changed views on this, after which
it instantly became the hallmark of an unreconstructed hateful bigot to say
this).
Few people took Hillary's 2016 loss to Donald Trump as hard as Tanden, or
handled it as poorly. Indeed, she refused to believe it really happened, and
encouraged others to similarly refuse to accept its reality.
In the weeks after Trump's victory, Tanden joined numerous Democrats in
encouraging electors of the Electoral College to ignore their their states'
votes and refuse to elect Trump as President (many rationale were invoked
for this: Tanden's was a CAP article promoting #Resistance fanatic Richard
Painter's argument that Trump's violations of the Emolument Clause precluded
an Electoral College win). She insisted that Hillary lost because of Russia,
claiming the "Russians did enough damage to affect more than 70k votes in 3
states." And she was not only one of the first to push the Steele Dossier's
claim that Russia held blackmail power over Trump but also one of the last
to do so - insisting in 2018 that "the dossier been mostly proven to be
true" and claiming as late as 2019 that nothing in this discredited junk
report had been disproven.
But what really distinguished Tanden when it came to unhinged and toxic
behavior was her repeated (and obviously baseless) claims that Hillary only
lost because Russian hackers invaded the U.S. voting system and
clandestinely changed Hillary's votes to Trump's, costing the real winner -
Hillary - her rightful place on the throne, behind the Resolute Desk.
Four days after the 2016 election, Tanden began strongly implying, if not
outright stating, that Russian hackers changed the vote totals, and that
this is why "Trump was as surprised as everyone else" by his victory. When I
highlighted her conspiratorial claims, she did not deny their obvious
meaning, but rationalized them by insisting that her conspiracies were not
as bad as Trump's refusal, in advance of the election, to acknowledge the
legitimacy of an election that had not yet taken place:
Tanden's insistence that Russia changed the voting results through hacking
did not end in the weeks after her traumatic shock over Hillary's loss
dissipated (if it ever did). After The Intercept published an anonymous,
evidence-free document in June, 2017 allegedly sent by NSA employee Reality
Winner, which led that site to claim that "Russian military intelligence
executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and
sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials,"
Tanden returned to pushing this bizarre conspiracy theory, demanding that I
"retract" my post-election criticism of her for peddling this
Russia-changed-the-votes madness - as if this NSA document published by The
Intercept proved vote-changing hacking by Russia.
This conspiracy-mongering led by Tanden and other prominent liberal
activists had a corrosive effect on the ability of Democrats to perceive
basic reality, to put that mildly. A 2018 poll from Economist/YouGov -
conducted more than a year after Trump's inauguration - found that a large
majority of Democrats (66%) believe that "Russia tampered with vote tallies
in order to get Donald Trump elected President."
Economist/YouGov poll, published Mar. 9, 2018
Thereafter, Hillary herself took to calling Trump an "illegitimate"
president, further fueling the destruction of confidence and faith among
Democrats in the legitimacy of the vote totals and specifically the outcome
of the 2016 presidential election.
Democratic leaders and their media allies love to patronizingly warn that
conservative media outlets and their audiences are prone to spread and
believe crazy conspiracy theories. They purport particular worry when such
conspiracies are designed to undermine faith and trust in the U.S. electoral
system itself.
Yet few have done more to destroy such confidence and faith than Neera
Tanden, achieved by disseminating over the course of several years some of
the most unhinged, evidence-free and deranged conspiracy theories in which
she deliberately deceived Democratic partisans into believing that Moscow's
dastardly hackers invaded the sanctity of the U.S. voting system to change
Hillary's votes to Trump's. And it worked: at least as of 2018, large
majorities of Democrats believe that this utterly unproven but dangerous
assertion is true.
If Joe Biden succeeds in empowering someone like Neera Tanden without
extreme opposition from supposedly adversarial journalists, not only
Democrats but also these media outlets will lose whatever lingering
credibility they have to denounce conspiracy theories and to defend the
legitimacy of U.S. elections. And they will deserve that fate. You can't run
around expecting people will take you seriously when you warn of the dangers
of toxic, moronic conspiracy theories when you yourself embrace, elevate and
promote the most prolific and reckless purveyors of them.
