Substack Note: there’s new content over at Nagan of Copenhagen, including a lengthy article featuring a substantive interview with the apparently uber-woke ChatGPT.
Anyone who’s followed this blog for any length of time knows that Berlingske Tidende’s U.S. correspondent Mikkel Danielsen might as well be a paid shill for the Democratic National Committee.
I’ve chronicled it too many times, citing his crimes against journalism thoroughly and in deep detail, to feel any obligation to hash it all out again here, but if you’re an empirical sort of person who likes claims like that substantiated, go ahead and use the blog’s search function to look them all up.
I’d love to ignore Mikkel Danielsen completely, but when one of the biggest news dailies in Denmark continues to employ him as their explainer-in-chief of America, I just can’t let his grotesque distortions stand.
The biggest liar in American politics has some very mysterious accounts. Now the former FBI chief is getting nervous
Mikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, January 29
The headline caught my attention immediately: I knew the “biggest liar” had to be the almost comically dishonest George Santos (about whom plenty more later), but which former FBI chief was “getting nervous?” McCabe? Comey? Mueller?
Nope. Turns out it’s none of the above. It’s Peter Strzok.
Yep, that Peter Strzok—the smug and smirking little jackalope who was drummed right out of the agency for carrying out an adulterous affair with a colleague while using federal law enforcement tools as political weapons against Donald Trump. You know: the guy so determined to install Hillary Clinton as president that he was working on an “insurance policy.”
Highest rank ever achieved: Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
Rank bestowed by Mikkel Danielsen: FBI Chief.
“Well,” you say, “you can’t really blame Danielsen for the headline. Those are usually written by editors, after all.”
Fair enough.
But he’s called a former FBI Chief in the article itself, and in its lede.
The article actually contain’s a link to a column Strzok wrote on Substack (they’ll let anybody write there), where Strzok’s own bio identifies him only as a “26 year FBI and Army veteran.”
But shouldn’t a major national newspaper’s American correspondent actually know the directors of the FBI? There’ve only been four in the past ten years and Danielsen has written about all of them at one point or another. But it suddenly slipped his mind that Peter Strzok wasn’t one of them?
We’re left, here as elsewhere, with only two possibilities: Mikkel Daniels is either very inattentive to details or very mendacious. That’s the nice way of phrasing it. The blunter way would be to say he’s either a big fat idiot or a lying sack of shit.
But let’s keep it polite.
And let’s also move away from the Strzok issue and get to something even more important:
With everything going on in America right now, why has Berlingske commissioned their ace U.S. correspondent to write a long and thoroughly researched piece on this?
If the answer has anything to do with the story being Important and Significant because it involves a member of Congress telling a lot of lies and possibly being “owned” by Russia (a theory floated entirely by Democrats and leftist partisans in this article), isn’t there a bigger story in America right now about the lies of an even bigger politician, along with suggestions that he may be “owned” by China?
Mikkel Danielsen hasn’t written a word about President Joe Biden’s confidential document problems since January 12th. (I’ve written about the peculiar lack of Danish coverage in previous posts.)
But some rink-a-dink Congressman gets the full Monty exposé because (a) he’s a Republican, and (b) a “former FBI director” (who was never more than the deputy assistant director of a division within the FBI) is worried about the implications.
George Santos is a documented fabulist. I’m not going to defend him. He really does seem to lie about everything.
But America has 435 Representatives in the House, and 535 total members of Congress: it has only one president, and the president controls the entire executive branch of the federal government.
Whose travails are more newsworthy?
Earlier I wrote that the article only got support for the theory that Santos was somehow “owned” by Russia from Democrats and leftist partisans. That’s not entirely true: Danielsen also cites Jim Geraghty of National Review as having said “It could be that a foreign power has bought a member of Congress. It’s not entirely unthinkable.”
Danielsen includes a link to Geraghty’s piece. Here’s the full context of the excerpted bit:
For all we know, some foreign power may have bought itself a congressman. This isn’t outlandish speculation, as one of his largest donors has ties to the Russian government. The Daily Beast pointed to a February 12 tweet from Santos that reads, “We are going to enter a war in the middle of the Eastern Europe winter against Russia, to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine. Meanwhile this is the sight at the US southern border, where our sovereignty is no longer a priority.”
Shockingly, pathological liars aren’t all that consistent in their foreign-policy beliefs, because ten days later Santos was telling Fox News that President Biden was too weak in standing up to Russia.
[Here Geraghty excerpts a bit from the interview, in which Santos comes out hard against Russia and Putin.]
Could you imagine if there was some Russian plot to elect a congressman, and that congressman then turned around and called for tougher sanctions on Russia? Then again, based on what we know so far, does George Santos seem like the kind of crook who could stay bought?
Geraghty isn’t buying into the theory: he’s just saying it isn’t as outlandish as it sounds—and then providing some evidence that would seem to contradict the theory before conceding that when someone is as fundamentally dishonest as Santos, who knows?
Who knows, indeed.
But did you hear that former CIA Director Marjorie Taylor Greene is worried that China may own Biden?