Miranda Devine: Dems bring Russiagate back from the dead to haunt the midterms and former Trump staffer Michael Caputo
Former Trump staffer Michael Caputo endured a decade of lawfare that he says forced him out of his home and gave him cancer from all the stress.
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But just when he thought the Russiagate nightmare was over, he was slapped in the face this month with a lawsuit cooked up by a former DOJ lawyer from the “national security” unit that hounded him and other Trump associates over alleged foreign agent violations without laying a single charge.
It’s a simple $100,000 contract dispute case, but Jack Korba, formerly a prosecutor in the small national security section of the District of Columbia US Attorney’s Office and now in private practice in Washington, DC, has filed a complaint packed with gratuitous smears of Caputo that rehash elements of the DOJ’s failed Russiagate probe.
The florid 85-page complaint, filed on Sept. 8, compares Caputo to traitor Benedict Arnold, accuses him of sabotage, quotes Vladimir Putin and alleges shadowy links to “Russian intelligence.”
Conflict of interest
Korba, who left the DOJ last summer to work for Foley & Lardner LLP, is acting for Gilbert Hyatt, an 88-year-old inventor who paid Caputo’s p.r. firm $100,000 to lobby the second Trump White House to establish a “Pioneering AI Foundation” along the lines of the Smithsonian.
Hyatt is suing Caputo, alleging breach of contract and fraud.
Caputo denies the allegations and accuses Korba of being “obsessed” with him, likening the lawyer to Captain Ahab from “Moby Dick,” forever hunting his white whale.
“Our family thought the political weaponization was over, at least the efforts targeting us. After ten years, we were just starting to breathe again. Instead, one of my obsessed DOJ harassers privatized his Russia fantasy — one he could never prove as a fed,” says Caputo.
“My wife and daughters won’t stop crying.”
On Friday, Caputo lodged an ethics complaint against Korba with the DC Office of Disciplinary Counsel, alleging that the lawyer has a conflict of interest from his time in the DOJ and that he used material he could only have gleaned from the five-year Caputo probe. Caputo also suggests in his complaint that the elderly Hyatt’s “capacity to understand, evaluate, and direct this lawsuit is increasingly impaired.”
Caputo was swept up in two anti-Trump FBI operations — the Russiagate probe after Crossfire Hurricane, and Round River, a Biden protection racket.
The FBI investigated Caputo in 2021 over alleged foreign agent violations tied to “The Ukraine Hoax,” a 2020 documentary that he produced and hosted for One America News about deep state chicanery in Trump’s first impeachment.
The FBI and DOJ secretly obtained the content of his Google accounts, including emails, photos, calendar, contacts, location history and device metadata. But he was never charged, and the case was closed last December, after which he says he was informed of the Google search warrant.
Caputo was among a dozen Trump Cabinet members and allies named as “conduits” of Russian disinformation in the FBI’s recently declassified Round River operation that buried corruption allegations about $4 million paid to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter between 2014 and 2019.
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Round River operated from late 2019 through the 2020 campaign. It discredited multiple separate reports from the FBI’s own confidential informants about Joe and Hunter Biden, Burisma and Ukraine “as Russian disinformation” and named as victims, or “targets,” the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry and George Soros.
‘Shadow government’
Then-Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) were listed with Caputo as “conduits” for Russian disinformation — the default way the FBI and CIA used to discredit derogatory material about Biden, including Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Former FBI deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, Nikki Floris, who oversaw the bureau’s since-disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force when it ran Round River, conducted a bogus “defensive briefing” for Grassley and Johnson in August 2020, which they claimed was a setup and details of which were leaked to the Washington Post to discredit their investigations into Hunter Biden and Burisma.
The following month, in a recently declassified internal FBI chat from Sept. 25, 2020, Floris confides to a colleague: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI.”
Floris left the FBI last May for a lucrative job at Microsoft, where she joined Lisa Monaco, the former deputy AG who directed most of the lawfare against Trump and his allies in the Biden years.
Caputo warns that his may be the first case of what he calls “privatized DOJ lawfare . . . but there will be many, many more if this abuse is permitted . . . They’ve pushed the Russia hoax back into the mainstream right before the midterms.”
There are dozens of victims of anti-Trump lawfare that began with the Russia hoax during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The stress and legal expense has cost them their careers, their financial security and, in the hands of complicit media, their reputations — most without being found guilty or even charged with a single crime.
Families have been torn apart and houses foreclosed on. Yet, because Republicans don’t have the same pull as Democrats in the deep state networks and legal and media ecosystems, the practitioners of this abuse have never received a taste of their own medicine.
The more they escape accountability, the bolder they become, unfazed by the wealth of damning material being discovered and declassified by John Solomon’s White House Government Transparency Task Force, by Trump’s ODNI, FBI and CIA, and by Congress.
As we hurtle toward the midterms, the Russia hoax is the vampire that refuses to die, no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart.
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