Ahh, Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby doing research on the cheap … articles from 2007-08 offer sublime insight in their labor to produce the opposition dossier on Trump. Their prime dossier was focused on Ukraine and Paul Manafort. Red lights were blinking as soon as Manifort joined the Trump campaign.

Looking beyond the most obvious, the deep investigation by Lee Smith of the TabletMag may lead to a covert action by the Israeli intelluigence service to revenge Barack Obama for his Middle-East policy and in particular the Iran nuclear deal … more to come!

Articles @TabletMag authored by Lee Smith!

    Lee Smith is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute. Smith has led an impressive career in writing and publishing. He has worked at a number of journals, magazines and publishers, including the Hudson Review, the Ecco Press, Atheneum, Grand Street, GQ, and Talk Magazine. He is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. He was also editor-in-chief of the Voice Literary Supplement, the Village Voice’s national monthly literary magazine.

More below the fold …
More troublesome references, from RightWeb  …

    Lee Smith is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute who is known for his belligerent defense of hawkish U.S. and Israeli policies. Formerly a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Smith contributes to several media outlets, including Tablet Magazine, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, where he frequently lambasts the purported weakness of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, attacks writers who are critical of Israeli policies as being anti-Semitic, and promotes hardline “pro-Israel” views of Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    Smith was an ardent critic of the Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran and strongly opposed the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the P5+1 group on nations in July 2015. Smith alleged that the Obama White House favored Iran from the outset of the talks and desired to empower the country at the expense of traditional U.S. regional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    “The sanctions relief that the IRGC will enjoy only underscores a disturbing trend in the Obama administration’s Middle East policy: the White House is coordinating with Iranian hardliners and their allies,” Smith argued in an August 2015 piece for the Weekly Standard. “It seems that the president has something of a soft spot for the IRGC, or at least its expeditionary unit, the Quds Force.”

    [Source: Lee Smith, “Obama and the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps,” The Weekly Standard, August 10, 2015]

Tablet Magazine: “Hip, Hawkish” and the Darling of Pro-Israel Philanthropy by Richard Silverstein @Tikun Olam -  Dec. 2014

I want to credit Tablet as a serious, but deeply flawed attempt to create a cultural institution that embodies the richness and vitality of contemporary American Jewish life.  In this age of cheap gotcha-gossip journalism and ersatz kitsch passing for Jewish identity, it was a bold stroke to put forth such vision. In an era when organized American Jewry seems in retreat on many fronts, Newhouse should be credited for creating this vision.  It was even luckier that Tablet found, in pro-Israel philanthropist Mem Bernstein, a deep-pocketed donor who shared the vision.

The problem with the implementation of such a vision is that Tablet assumed so many of the bad habits of the American Jewish “consensus.” There is the suffocating pall of anti-Semitism haunting its pages, along with the unexamined assumptions of solidarity with Israeli state policies, including the embrace of the “13 Principles of [Zionist] faith” by which American Jewish communal life operates.  They say the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Tablet is examining American Jewish life, but barely scratching the surface.

…
The Observer article calls Tablet “hip and hawkish.”  Following on that, I find it an odd amalgam of serious literary journal, lifestyle, spiritual quest, kitsch, schmaltz (literally), gossip, and Jewish identity politics (including a strong dose of bad-will-hunting, in the form of finding anti-Semitism where it exists, and even where it doesn’t).  It’s The Forward meet Rolling Stone. A cross between Jan Wenner and Jeffrey Goldberg.

…
The most controversial aspect of what Tablet does is its vociferous flag-waving on behalf of pro-Israel politics.  It features one of the most notorious, scuzzy of Jewish journalists, the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith.  One of his claims to fame is calling Stephen Walt, Phil Weiss, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald “agents of anti-Israel influence” in a Tablet piece.  Reading him is like reading a pro-Israel version of a pulpy Grade B crime novel in which the bad guys are furtive anti-Semite-leftists and the good guys, the Israel Lobby.  His pieces drip so full of vitriol and hate you feel like you need a shower (or in Tablet’s case, a dip in the mikveh).

The irony of this is that the founding editor, Alana Newhouse, had this to say about the concept of lashon hara (words that can mean ‘gossip’ or ‘speaking ill’ of someone) in an interview with her hometown Jewish newspaper.

…
Newhouse believes that because she commissions her husband, David Samuels, who seems to be the liberal conscience among the writing staff, to do interviews with Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, that she’s fulfilled her obligation to the Jewish left.  To prove this assertion, look at the “left-wing” writers she boasts of publishing: Victor Navasky at age 82, represents the oldest of the Old Guard, who has minimal impact on progressive Jewish thought these days.

Did President Obama Read the ‘Steele Dossier’ in the White House Last August?

To date the investigation into the Fusion GPS-manufactured collusion scandal has focused largely on the firm itself, its allies in the press, as well as contacts in the Department of Justice and FBI. However, if a sitting president used the instruments of state, including the intelligence community, to disseminate and legitimize a piece of paid opposition research in order to first obtain warrants to spy on the other party’s campaign, and then to de-legitimize the results of an election once the other party’s candidate won, we’re looking at a scandal that dwarfs Watergate–a story not about a bad man in the White House, but about the subversion of key security institutions that are charged with protecting core elements of our democratic process while operating largely in the shadows.

A Tablet investigation using public sources to trace the evolution of the now-famous dossier suggests that central elements of the Russiagate scandal emerged not from the British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s top-secret “sources” in the Russian government–which are unlikely to exist separate from Russian government control–but from a series of stories that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and his wife Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal well before Fusion GPS existed, and Donald Trump was simply another loud-mouthed Manhattan real estate millionaire.

    How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington

    Former Federal Bureau of Investigation director William Sessions once condemned Russia’s rising mafia. “We can beat organized crime,” he told a Moscow security conference in 1997.

    Today, Mr. Sessions is a lawyer for one of the FBI’s “Most Wanted”: Semyon Mogilevich, a Ukraine-born Russian whom the FBI says is one of Russia’s most powerful organized-crime figures. Mr. Sessions is trying to negotiate a deal …

    [WSJ report by Glenn R. Simpson and Mary Jacoby – April 2007]

○ Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy

In this book, one of the references is:

The Nation – Ukraine’s Untold Story by Jonathan Steele – Dec. 20, 2004

However Ukraine’s crisis is resolved, it is clear that interference by Russia and the United States has been massive. Viktor Yanukovich, the current Prime Minister, was Moscow’s favorite. Viktor Yushchenko, a former chairman of the Central Bank, was Washington’s. In this long-range competition Moscow’s partisanship was the more blatant and clumsy, highlighted by Vladimir Putin’s two visits to Ukraine to appear alongside Yanukovich and publicly endorse him. Russian state-controlled TV, which can be seen in large areas of Ukraine, has also done what it can to influence voters with the same one-sided coverage it serves up in Russia’s elections.

By contrast, US interference has been subtle and sophisticated, but the degree of American involvement appears to be more comprehensive than anything emanating from Moscow. And it has had minimal coverage in the largely partisan picture the Western media have painted of the Ukrainian crisis.

US funding has ranged from bankrolling opposition websites and radio stations to paying for the exit polls, which play a powerful role in mobilizing street protesters. It follows a template used four times in the past four years. The overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade in 2000 and of Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia in 2003 were US successes. A similar effort to topple Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus in 2001 failed. So too did the campaign against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2002.

The pattern is that US diplomats orchestrate a campaign of financial help and marketing advice to civil groups, which is described as nonpartisan although in practice it is only put at the service of one side. Using consultants and poll experts, they explain how to choose catchy slogans and punchy logos and organize street comedy and rock concerts to create attractive grassroots campaigns to mobilize young people. Exit polls are a crucial tool. By getting their data on the table as soon as voting ends and being widely disseminated in the opposition media, they create an alleged truth against which the official results are measured. Any divergence of the official count is seen as proof that fraud is under way.

Crowds pour into the streets, ready to block public buildings and engage in civil disobedience. This in turn puts the police and security forces under pressure, with the aim (successful in Belgrade and Tbilisi) of getting individual policemen and then whole units to mutiny against their commanders and switch sides. It can also have an intimidating effect on the Parliament and the courts, when they are asked to find compromises or adjudicate, as in Kiev.

[Links added are mine – Oui]

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