Cold War Daily

The anti–free press brigade is pushing a fresh spin on the old “Russiagate” narrative — again –, working overtime to convince audiences that well-documented Russian interference in the 2016 election is suddenly, inexplicably, a myth.

This revisionism is being advanced despite years of bipartisan US intelligence findings, indictments, and public records confirming Moscow’s active measures.

And it’s not even new. Here’s a post from 2019 when I noticed the term being pushed heavily and suddenly across social media.

Figures like Tulsi Gabbard, amplified heavily by Fox News, are reframing the entire episode as some concocted smear — a shift that feels less like a genuine reappraisal of evidence and more like a calculated attempt to erase inconvenient historical facts. Russia interfered brazenly in the US election of 2016. Trump, in public statements, appears to have welcomed to interference.

But the linguistic sleight of hand out of the Russiagate crowd — the one whose objective is to sow doubt about any consensus understanding – – is straight out of Orwell. Interference becomes “meddling” which becomes “hoax,” and objective events dissolve into partisan fiction through repetition.

This pushback against the established record is unfolding at a moment when new, legitimate questions are emerging about Donald Trump’s past connections to Jeffrey Epstein, which has prompts many to see the timing as more than coincidental.

Others point to the Trump administration’s willingness to inject dubious, possibly Russian-generated content into its own “evidence” — as the Durham annex episode suggests — to muddy public understanding.

But this is not the first time such counter-programming has been deployed; earlier waves of narrative inversion appeared within months of the Mueller probe’s conclusion, priming the public for exactly this rewrite.

Viewed sequentially, the rhetorical trajectory reveals a coordinated effort to reframe reality itself, not merely to defend Trump, but to delegitimize the press and the institutions that reported the truth in the first place.

(AI-assisted content).