PF1 Monday Mini: The Russia Hoax Is a Vampire
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What is the Russia hoax and why does Miranda describe it as a vampire?
Hello,
it's Miranda. I'm back with a new mini-episode of Pod Force One. This feature is a little more topical and relevant to my job as a columnist for the New York Post. Today the topic is the lawfare nightmare still grinding away against some Trump allies. As we hurtle towards the midterms, the Russia hoax is the vampire that refuses to die, no matter how many stakes are driven through its
heart.
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. 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 U.S. Attorney's Office and now in private practice in Washington, D.C., 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 September 8, compares Caputo to traitor Benedict Arnold, accuses him of sabotage, quotes Vladimir Putin and alleges shadowy links to Russian intelligence. Korba, who left the DOJ last summer to work for Foley and Lardner LLP, is acting for Gilbert Hyatt, an 88-year-old inventor who paid Caputo's PR firm $100,000 to lobby the second Trump White House to establish a, quote, pioneering AI foundation along the lines of the Smithsonian.
How does Michael Caputo’s $100,000 contract dispute revive the Russiagate narrative?
Hyatt is suing Caputo, alleging breach of contract and fraud. Caputo denies the allegations and accuses Korba of being, quote, obsessed with him, likening the lawyer to Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, forever hunting his white whale. Quote, quote, After 10 years, we were just starting to breathe again. Instead, one of my obsessed DOJ harassers privatised 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 D.C. 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, quote, capacity to understand, evaluate and direct this lawsuit is increasingly impaired, end quote. Caputo was swept up in two anti-Trump FBI operations, the Russiagate probes after a 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 American News about deep state chicanery in Trump's first impeachment. The FBI and DOJ secretly obtained the contents of his Google accounts, including emails, photos, calendar, contacts, location history, device metadata, metadata, you name it.
What was the FBI’s “Round River” operation and how did it target Trump allies?
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, quote, conduits of Russian disinformation in the FBI's recently declassified Round River operation that buried corruption allegations about the $4 million that corrupt energy company in Ukraine Burisma paid to then-Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter between 2014 and 2019. 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, quote, Russian disinformation, and named as victims or, quote, targets, the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry and George Soros and others.
Then-Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, and Representative Jim Jordan, all Republicans, were listed with Caputo as, quote, conduits for Russian disinformation, which is the default way the FBI and CIA used to discredit derogatory material about Joe Biden, including Hunter Biden's laptop.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the Russia hoax and why does Miranda describe it as a vampire?
0:00–1:53
2
How does Michael Caputo’s $100,000 contract dispute revive the Russiagate narrative?
1:53–3:41
3
What was the FBI’s “Round River” operation and how did it target Trump allies?
3:41–6:31
4
How have anti‑Trump law‑fare victims been impacted financially and personally?
6:31–7:32
5
Why does the Russia hoax remain a political weapon heading into the midterms?
7:32–7:38
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Pod Force One
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