A Conversation with Lee Smith on Lawfare

Hans Mahncke: Lee Smith, it’s such a pleasure and an honor to be here with you today.

Lee Smith: Thank you very much. It’s so nice that we finally get a chance to meet. We’ve spoken for so long, collaborated on so many different things, and interviewed each other in different venues. Now we finally have a chance to meet and spend some time together. It’s a real privilege and an awful lot of fun.

Hans Mahncke: Likewise. You are, of course, the author of The Plot Against the President, the first book that really laid out this entire lawfare project against President Trump. That was published seven years ago. We’ve now had seven years to reflect on it, and the book has aged extremely well. Everything you wrote has been borne out by the documents and everything that has subsequently emerged. The entire thing was made up from day one and used against President Trump in an effort to unseat him and get him out of office. It was the quintessential lawfare operation. You use legal systems to achieve political outcomes you were unable to achieve at the ballot box. And yet here we are seven years later, and I feel as though the lessons of your book still haven’t really been learned. As we speak, for instance, we’re seeing what I don’t know how else to describe except as the AI op. We’re seeing all this panic about AI tearing humankind to pieces and claims that human beings somehow won’t survive AI, a panic that has suddenly been drummed up over the past week or so.

Lee Smith: I would say we are getting better in some respects. Trump himself posted about it on Truth Social. He didn’t quite say, “I see the hoax here” or “I see the op,” but he basically said, “Don’t worry. It’s fine. We’re pushing forward on AI. Don’t listen to what these guys are saying.” So I think people in some places are getting better at recognizing how different institutions have been hollowed out because they’ve been used as political instruments to target the establishment’s opponents. People increasingly recognize it, but I think they still lack their own instruments and their own arsenal. They lack a way to defend against it, combat it, and deter it by using the same instruments against the people who are doing it and saying, essentially, “We’re happy to call a truce if you back off and stop doing this.” We recognize these operations more readily now, but we still don’t have the institutions and instruments necessary to really fight them off and put an end to them.

Hans Mahncke: We don’t. And in a way, I don’t think we truly understand lawfare yet, certainly not on a societal level. These lawfare cases tend to be viewed as isolated events. There’s this case, there’s that case, but the whole scheme and the machinery behind it aren’t really viewed as a whole by almost anyone. When we go back to Russiagate, you had three very important components, and I find that lawfare operations tend to have those same components. First, some private party has a political objective. In the case of Russiagate, that was the Clinton campaign. Second, the government or some other official institution gets co-opted into the process. You need that to give the operation legitimacy. Third, you need the media because you need to spread the story. Every time you look at these lawfare operations, whether Russiagate, the Ukraine hoax, or, I would argue, the COVID cover-up, you see those same elements.

Lee Smith: You reported on COVID extensively, and I think that’s very accurate. People might ask how COVID was lawfare. I think it was lawfare because the institutions that legitimized it were legally based. They were government institutions or government-funded institutions. You were still using regulatory bodies and government institutions to push it.

Hans Mahncke: Absolutely. Look at the COVID regulations that were imposed on people, hollowing out Trump’s economy and driving down support for the incumbent in 2020. Regulations were used to punish people, including people who held church services or violated various restrictions.

Lee Smith: Absolutely. I thought you described it accurately at the time, and I still think you’re right. It was a real lawfare campaign.

Hans Mahncke: And the outcome or objective was always political. In 2016, make sure Trump doesn’t become president. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, make sure he’s removed through obstruction allegations, impeachment, or whatever else. Then you get to 2020 and the end of his first term, and the objective becomes making sure he doesn’t remain president. That’s where the entire COVID operation comes in, although obviously there were different aspects to it. There was the question of the origin. There were the lockdowns. There was the punishment of people and businesses. But what was the ultimate political effect? Joe Biden gets elected.

Lee Smith: Right. The objective was to have a political effect outside of the normal election system. In terms of identifying hoaxes, I do think we’ve become better. You had that fellow from Anthropic who suddenly appeared everywhere. Every newscast had him on. People are becoming better at recognizing that these are coordinated efforts. But the machinery behind them still isn’t well understood. How do we describe people who identify these things? “Op hunters,” perhaps. People who recognize lawfare operations. During Russiagate, this was an elite pursuit. There was a Russiagate corner, and we can name all our friends and colleagues who were part of it. Some people were intensely focused on what was happening, but it wasn’t widely understood, even on the right. A lot of people did know something was going on, which is one reason Devin Nunes became such a popular figure, but it wasn’t nearly as widely understood as COVID. When COVID hit, people suddenly started saying, “Wait a minute. Something really strange and horrific is happening here. It’s everywhere. There is this massive lie, and it’s affecting my life wherever I am. What’s going on?” A lot of people were badly hurt by COVID policies without understanding what was happening. It felt as if the world had been turned upside down. The number of people who can actually explain how these operations work is still very small. And because of the nature of our press institutions, the penetration those people have into society outside social media is also very small. Nonetheless, people are becoming more aware. There is also a negative development, though. After Russiagate and COVID, I think many of us in alternative media, dissident media, or whatever you want to call it hoped that a healthy alternative media would emerge to explain what was happening. People had realized that institutions such as The New York Times and CNN, which they might previously have regarded simply as left-of-center organizations, could not be trusted. Those institutions were broken and were being used to do terrible things. Five or six years ago, we hoped conservative and alternative media institutions would grow. Some of this would take place on social media. Podcasts might help lay the foundations for a new communications architecture. As it turns out, much of it has been incredibly destructive. A lot of podcasters, with their themes, issues, and obsessions, have been destructive. And it’s more than a pity. It’s shameful because Americans need real information to make decisions about their lives, families, and communities. We saw people in the right-wing podcast sphere doing exactly the opposite. They lied to their audiences. They drove them crazy. They drove them nuts. Someone like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens isn’t going to help people understand how lawfare works when they’re throwing their own information operations into the mix and further confusing things. What we would have liked to see were people working for the good of the republic, helping clarify things for American voters and families. That didn’t happen. They saw a country that had taken a beating during and after COVID, and it turns out many of these people were predators. They preyed on the American public instead of saying, “Our people need real information. Insofar as I’m able to provide the truth, I’m going to do it. I know there will be holes in what I can establish, but I’m going to participate in building the foundations for something true, meaningful, and decent.” They didn’t do that. So in some ways, I’m optimistic when I see people like President Trump increasingly recognizing what happened. But there are also people nominally on our side who have turned out to be insanely destructive. And that has been very harmful.

Hans Mahncke: There was a time when I almost think back on Russiagate fondly. That might sound strange, but there was a camaraderie. That’s how we got to know each other and how we got to know many other people involved in investigating it. People weren’t thinking about a paycheck from Twitter, a podcast gig, or whatever else they might get out of it. If somebody found something valuable, they shared it. It was almost open-source research. It was really about the truth. Let’s figure out what happened here. You were the first person to put the entire thing together in your book. But that was seven years ago, and I agree with you about what has happened to the alternative media since then. It has split into different groups, and a lot of people are chasing money, clout, or whatever else. Chasing the truth has become a much smaller part of it. The old media, meanwhile, haven’t been chasing the truth for a very long time. We recently published an article at the Counterlawfare Institute about the media component of lawfare because it isn’t discussed enough. The media aren’t simply standing on the sidelines. They are active participants in these operations. We can expose that. We can’t shut them down, nor would that be the objective, but perhaps we can help people understand the media’s role in this machinery. And perhaps we can eventually recreate something like those earlier days when there was more genuine truth-seeking going on. Obviously, we can do that at the Counterlawfare Institute by publishing truthful articles. But I’m thinking about something larger and more institutional.

Lee Smith: During Russiagate, we were fighting the nonsense being published by the mainstream media. But what we did was take the real information buried in their reporting, along with documents, timelines, and other real data, and use those foundations to dismantle what they had constructed. Then we reconstructed what actually happened. That was enormously helpful, and it was what many people in the Russiagate corner of Twitter were doing. I now feel that Twitter has become a very destructive space for a whole host of reasons. Elon Musk may not have intended that, but the kind of work we were doing then is much harder to find now. There is no reason, however, that it can’t happen again. There is no reason the Counterlawfare Institute can’t carve out a place for this on social media so that people say, “Now I know where to go when one of these things happens.” Because they will continue happening. If you provide timely information on the different pieces of a narrative that people are struggling to understand and say, “Here, we’ve done the work. We’ve put the pieces together. This is a developing story, and we’ll continue following it, but here is what we know right now,” that would be invaluable. That kind of work would hearken back to what we were doing in the earliest days of the Russiagate investigation.

Hans Mahncke: That would be phenomenal. A lot of people who were sucked into Russiagate have come up to me over the years, and especially since we started the Counterlawfare Institute, and said, “I wish you guys had been there back then to help us understand what was happening and simply to help.” There were so many victims. It was death by a thousand cuts. The people who were targeted were individuals. During COVID, it was very similar, except on a much broader scale. One person gets fined for opening his shop. A church gets shut down. Someone else gets arrested. During Russiagate, you had all these different people who were targeted. They each had to hire their own lawyers, figure everything out themselves, and essentially reinvent the wheel. There has never really been an effort to bring all this under one roof, and that has to start with understanding the problem itself. The people conducting lawfare, by contrast, have it all under one roof.

Lee Smith: It’s easier to destroy than it is to build or protect. When we’re talking about groups affiliated with progressive activists and the press, we’re talking about political warfare. They raise enormous amounts of money to conduct it. Lawfare is an instrument of political warfare, and that’s how it has to be understood. This is going to continue. The importance of an institution like the Counterlawfare Institute is being able to say, “Yes, we are engaged in this political warfare. We have experience. We know how to identify these campaigns, and we’ve learned how to defend our friends and people on our side.”

Hans Mahncke: One thing that has always fascinated me, particularly because it went almost entirely unreported, is that very early on, around 2017, lawfare activist groups were openly publishing detailed roadmaps telling government actors what they should do. Then they did the same thing with the Trump prosecutions in 2021, 2022, and afterward. Fani Willis didn’t simply wake up one morning and decide to prosecute Trump. A lawfare activist group had created a blueprint. The same was true with Alvin Bragg and other cases. You can trace this. And they’re doing it openly. It isn’t secret.

Lee Smith: They do it openly, and it’s important to them that they do it openly because they want everyone to understand the shape and direction of what is coming. This is what Rosa Brooks did before the 2020 election. You had these various “democracy” projects that were basically saying, “Here’s how we’re going to defend against Donald Trump. Here are the legal instruments we’re going to use. Here’s how we’ll mobilize crowds. Here’s how the media will be involved.” So yes, they have to be open about it. People often say that conspiracies can’t work because once people start talking about them publicly, they fall apart. But people did talk about Russiagate publicly. You just weren’t there. When they were having their cookouts in Northern Virginia or suburban Maryland, they talked about it openly. It was in The Washington Post. You simply weren’t paying attention, or you weren’t invited to those parties. It was all out in the open.

Hans Mahncke: But very few people understand that. What was presented to the public as neutral governmental action was supposedly just the government doing what government does. The government had to investigate the Trump campaign because this was law enforcement doing its job. The district attorney in Fulton County supposedly had to act because she was an official authority. But on the front end, you had links to the people who had made up the material, created the blueprints, or supplied the underlying political operation, as the Clinton campaign did with Russiagate. On the back end, you had links to the media, which were themselves often intertwined with the operation. In Russiagate, for instance, the media knew about Christopher Steele from the beginning because he was being paraded in front of reporters in 2016.

Lee Smith: Of course they knew who he was. And it’s important to remember that these were national security reporters. It wasn’t somebody coming over from the sports desk and saying, “Wow, a former British spy. You must know exactly what you’re talking about.” It wasn’t a movie reviewer thinking Christopher Steele was James Bond. These people knew who he was. They knew where he came from. And they understood how real, or unreal, his material was. Most of them knew it wasn’t real. One of the problems we have in confronting the press is that Devin Nunes was one of the very few people who decided, “I’m not going to talk to these people anymore.” It becomes very difficult to identify the media as a source of pain and a serious problem for half the country when Republican officials and members of Trump administrations continue appearing on these networks and continue serving as sources for these reporters. Sometimes they’re doing it to advance their own positions against rivals. The president does it himself. I’ve been making this argument for more than a decade. What are you doing? Don’t you know these people are targeting your people? I’ve said the same thing about Republican senators and others. Why are you going to them? So the problem isn’t merely that conservative or dissident media failed to build institutions. The political forces themselves went back to the same media trough they had been feeding from before. Why? They say, “I need to talk to everybody. Not everyone in my district or my state consumes conservative media.” That isn’t the real reason. They wanted to be on CNN because of the prestige historically associated with CNN. They wanted to talk to The New York Times because they wanted a New York Times reporter to validate their position and listen to them. That’s what they wanted. And we have to remember who a lot of these people are. The people who end up sitting in House and Senate offices on Capitol Hill are not always the brightest people in the world. Look at what Trump has been saying for a decade about the media, and yet he still goes back and feeds them material. People continually talk to reporters whose entire purpose is to undermine the Trump administration, and they go back again and again. Then when something leaks, they say they’re going to have a leak investigation. Why? Why can’t the president simply say, “I’m sick of Mr. X. I know it’s him. He’s leaking. You’re fired. And I’m going to shame him publicly.” Why do you need an investigation? It’s insane. The American public is being hurt by bad actors, and the people who are supposed to protect the public don’t appear to have learned how vulnerable the public has been made. Think about all the people who were targeted during Russiagate. How much support do they have from this White House? Looking at it generally, I would say people in this White House still haven’t learned. They haven’t learned how the American public was made vulnerable, how people who voted for Donald Trump and people who worked for Donald Trump were badly hurt simply because they supported him. What are they doing now about it? They can’t even stop talking to the press.

Hans Mahncke: I find the Sunday morning shows particularly odious in that respect. I find them generally odious, but every Sunday they have a collection of Republicans appearing on them and thereby validating them. Those programs, particularly the Sunday shows, then help set the agenda for the coming week. In my view, Republicans shouldn’t be going on them at all. But it demonstrates the institutional power we’re talking about. I saw exactly the same phenomenon with COVID. The natural-origin story was pushed through a journal called Nature. It is supposedly prestigious, and that prestige gives it institutional power. I know somebody who had previously been published in Nature and was completely opposed to the natural-origin hoax. This person saw through what Nature had done and was extremely angry about it. Then, about a year later, that same person had something published in Nature and the reaction was, “Hooray, I got published in Nature.” It’s exactly what you’re describing. “Yes, CNN is terrible. CNN lies about everything. But hooray, I got to be on CNN.” I’m not sure how you break through that except by continuing to push the point. It would have been enormously helpful if this administration, or any administration in this position, had simply said, “None of our people are going to appear on these networks.” Done.

Lee Smith: It’s absolutely insane. It’s like saying, “Here, let me polish the knife you’re going to use to cut my organs out of me. I don’t care, as long as I get to be on television.” “As long as my voice is heard, I don’t care how much you hurt me, how much you hurt my administration, or how much you hurt the country. I’m interested in appearing on your show and having my position heard.” I don’t know what to say about that. It makes these operations very difficult to fight when the people elected to represent you effectively say, “Yes, we understand what the press is doing, but we have other things at stake.”

Hans Mahncke: How important is accountability in tackling lawfare? You mentioned leaks and said that rather than spending all this time investigating, just fire the person. I agree with that, but accountability more broadly doesn’t seem to have happened in almost any respect.

Lee Smith: Of course it hasn’t. First, with leaks to the press, we don’t always know what is actually unauthorized. Some leaks are authorized. Sometimes people want the material out. And in an administration, the right hand may leak against the left. Then when the left hand discovers it was the right hand, suddenly everyone says it was okay because somebody had permission to do it. But why have the administration and the people who voted for it been hurt by all this while their nominal adversaries have profited? It’s mysterious. People are constantly saying there have to be arrests and investigations over leaks. Do there? Why not simply identify someone and fire them? Then let people speculate. Let them ask whether that person was leaking. There is no accountability at all. We’ve heard about people being fired from this administration ostensibly for leaking. Fine. Hang it around their neck. “He leaked. I got rid of him.” Was there an investigation? No. If he doesn’t like it, he can sue the president. Let the president fight it. Why won’t the president fight these things? I’m willing to take my chances on that.

Hans Mahncke: How many of these bad apples do you think are still around? It seems to me there are a lot of them. General Flynn talks about Joe Pientka. Most people have never heard of him, but that’s unfortunate because he was there almost from day one of Russiagate. He was the FBI agent who went with Peter Strzok to interview General Flynn, which was the beginning of the attack on Flynn. He had previously gone to London with Strzok in connection with the Alexander Downer matter that helped set everything in motion. We don’t need to get into all those details. People can read about them in your book and mine. But Flynn has repeatedly asked a very simple question. Whatever happened to this guy? Why was he never held accountable? And there must be many people like that.

Lee Smith: It gets worse and worse because nobody has been held accountable. Because nobody has ever been held accountable, nobody has anything to fear. That’s one of the biggest problems. Trump will go on television and say, “So-and-so is a liar and a leaker.” Fine. Now do something about it. Otherwise you’re telling people there is no accountability and they can get away with whatever they want. Do we need investigations into every single thing? How about firing some people? Look at John Brennan. Remember, they were supposed to take away his security clearance during Trump’s first term. Somehow they had difficulty doing it. As I recall, Brennan continued to have clearances until around 2025, when Tulsi Gabbard finally got the process moving and his clearances were taken away. Why was that so hard? Why are these things so difficult? Is there nobody the president can turn to and say, “I need this done now, and I want you to get it done”?

Hans Mahncke: Let’s look forward. I don’t necessarily mean politically. There will always be periods when Republicans are in charge and periods when Democrats are in charge. But where do you see lawfare going from here?

Lee Smith: It’s going to continue until somebody stops it. Until people fight back. And right now, nobody is really fighting back. Building an institution is extremely important. Institutional memory is extremely important. People need to understand what happened so they don’t wake up five or ten years from now and ask, “What happened here?” Instead, they should be able to say, “We actually have institutional memory because Hans and his people have been tracking this for years.” You need to preserve the pieces so they can be assembled later. You need the names. You need the actions they took. You need the people who were targeted. You need the outcomes. I think you have to start there. Until you build something like that, lawfare will continue because there has been no accountability. Think about all the time, energy, and effort that went into documenting Russiagate and the work people like Devin Nunes, Kash Patel, and that entire team did. Was it all for nothing? At a minimum, we have to preserve the history of what happened. And as we’ve seen again and again, these are often the same institutions and, in some cases, the same players. So yes, the first thing that needs to be done is to build an institution that, among other things, preserves institutional memory.

Hans Mahncke: We are trying to do exactly that. We have the Russiagate Documentation Project, where we are trying to collate everything. The same problem exists with COVID and with all these other hoaxes. Documents are released bit by bit. They are dribbled out over years and years, and people lose their overview of the whole thing. Your book provided that overview for Russiagate. One of the things we are trying to build is a database and archive where somebody can go back and ask, “What happened with that Strzok document? What happened with that court filing? What was that document release about?” All these unredacted documents have dribbled out over the years. We want to put them in one place. It is frustrating, frankly, because this is the kind of thing universities should be doing. Taxpayers are already paying for universities to preserve and study history. But they won’t do it, which itself is part of the problem.

Lee Smith: They won’t do it, and that is precisely what makes your work so essential. I’ve been saying for several years that if we don’t get the real story out, the first Trump administration will eventually be described in public-school systems in Democratic-run districts around the country as a presidency in which the 45th president of the United States was a Russian spy. So we have to tell the truth and get it out. And I still think books, documentation, and archives are the way to do it because those things last. What disappears? Tweets. There will be new social-media platforms. Something else will eventually replace what exists today. What will remain are books and archives. Tweets can get people interested in a subject. Video clips can get people interested. But the real documentation is what lasts, and people will ultimately rely on it. That is essential.

Hans Mahncke: Your book made an enormous contribution to precisely that effort, and it came out at exactly the right time. The movie followed the next year and was fantastic. And it has all been borne out. For anyone who had looked seriously into Russiagate, it became obvious that what you described was what had happened. Yet there are still Wikipedia entries and newspaper articles perpetuating versions of the Trump-Russia story. And now AI feeds on that bad information as well.

Lee Smith: Yes. That is a very important issue.

Hans Mahncke: It perpetuates the problem. We have to break out of that loop, and the best way to do it is to keep putting the truth out there. What I continue to find so fascinating about Russiagate is that there was nothing to it. Usually, even with a hoax, there is some kernel of something. Somebody had a questionable meeting. Somebody had a bad conversation. Somebody did a questionable deal. Then it gets blown completely out of proportion. But Russiagate was simply made up. And I think your book was the first to demonstrate that comprehensively.

Lee Smith: It was all smoke and mirrors.

Hans Mahncke: Exactly. Out of curiosity, I recently looked at the Wikipedia entry on the Steele dossier. It doesn’t really explain the provenance. A huge number of people still think Christopher Steele was this enormously important and credible British spy who went out and discovered all this material. No. Your book was the first place I learned how these stories had originated with the Clinton campaign. Steele supplied the veneer of the British spy. Those are established facts. You even described the proto-dossier, the earlier version of these narratives that existed before Steele entered the picture. He took those same stories, repackaged them, and placed the Steele label on top. But that still isn’t widely understood. My concern is that because there is so much misinformation, and in this case probably disinformation, AI now consumes The New York Times, Wikipedia, The Washington Post, and everything else and feeds the same story back into the information environment. It becomes a vicious loop. Maybe one day AI can also be used to break that loop. But right now, I think AI has in some respects made the media problem worse because it feeds on this material.

Lee Smith: That is an enormous issue. But even without AI, I had more or less resigned myself to the fact that although we have the truth on our side, our view remains the minority view. It’s similar with COVID. A lot of people looking back will remember a tremendous pandemic of natural origin, involving some strange story about a pangolin and a bat or whatever explanation ultimately becomes conventional. That is how many people will remember the world. And some people in the future will look more deeply into it, discover what actually happened, and then be accused in their own time of being crazed conspiracy theorists. But as they follow the evidence, they’ll discover that they were right and that something very bad happened to the communications ecosystem of this country. And this phenomenon is not new. Huge narratives take hold of populations. Think about the Salem witch trials. Think about communism. Think about Nazism. At their heart, these are stories about the world. Narratives moved people toward those ideologies and events. Some of those historical lies are still with us. Future generations will also have to separate truth from lies that served particular political interests. What we saw in the United States was this phenomenon occurring on an enormous scale, aided by advances in communications technology. But in its essence, what happened was nothing new. We were right to write about it and talk about it because it was bad for the country and bad for the republic. This wasn’t simply partisan. Yes, we wanted a president we supported to be able to accomplish certain things. But that isn’t why we did the work. We recognized that something was happening that needed to be addressed, fixed, and fought. And it strikes me that this is what you’re doing now with the Counterlawfare Institute. It isn’t simply, “I care about these things because they hurt people I voted for or people I like.” No. This is bad for a constitutional republic. It is bad for Western civilization. We’ve seen it before. It won’t be the last time. And thank goodness there are people prepared to fight it now, just as others have fought these things in the past and, God willing, others will fight them in the future.

Hans Mahncke: Lee Smith, thank you so much.

Lee Smith: Thank you, Hans. Great to see you.

Hans Mahncke: Good to see you too.