CIA-Loyalist Ken Dalanian and NBC Are Still Pushing Russiagate

Since World War II, the CIA has sought to influence foreign elections. Today, however, such CIA operations have been turned against the American people. On the front line of that charge is Ken Dilanian, a National Security Correspondent for NBC News, who has become an Operation Mockingbird poster boy by readily reporting CIA-proffered propaganda and making unsupported claims.

Dilianian has earned this reputation. His fealty to the CIA was first reported by Ken Silverstein in The Intercept in 2014. A review of email correspondence obtained through FOIA revealed that Dilanian routinely submitted story drafts and detailed summaries for review by the CIA while writing for the Los Angeles Times. “Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship” with the spy agency, Silverstein wrote. 

As the LA Times itself reported on the scandal, “Dilanian sent a full draft of an unpublished report about drone strikes along with the subject line, ‘does this look better?’ In other words, he directly asks the agency officer: ‘You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?’”

Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein is credited with first exposing Mockingbird — CIA’s infiltration of the media — in a 25,000 word piece he wrote for Rolling Stone in 1977. David Corn of Mother Jones, who has also been the subject of an Honest Media letter, and has been suspected of being part of Operation Mockingbird.

Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald says that “major media outlets are explicitly preparing to label everything they dislike in this election year, from criticisms of Joe Biden to questioning the war in Ukraine and everything in between as Russian disinformation.” We can call it Russiagate 2.0; as recently described by New York Post opinion writer Miranda Devine, it will be a variation of what happened ahead of the 2016 and 2020 elections when the legacy media said Donald Trump benefited from Russia meddling. 

In October 2020, just before the presidential election, 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” that sought to influence the outcome of the election. The disgraceful and obscene contents of the laptop alongside claims of corruption in Ukraine were used politically by Trump to taint Joe Biden in the waning days of the election. Biden, however, was able to tout the letter to blunt the impact of the laptop’s contents and instead attack Trump by claiming the entire story was a conspiracy. In doing so, he deflected to a narrative of foreign interference, rather than a real personal scandal.

Claims of Russian meddling going back to 2016 have been widely discredited, including through the Hamilton 68 disclosures analyzed by Honest Media. Perhaps most convincingly, independent counsel Robert Mueller, found no evidence to charge Donald Trump with conspiracy of collusion following a 22-month long investigation. Now, however, it appears that none other than Dilanian himself is again serving as a mouthpiece for the national security state by banging the Russia drum ahead of the 2024 election. 

On February 24, Dilanian wrote a story for NBC saying that the 51 ex-spies who had likely altered the course of the 2020 election by their unsupported claims of Russian meddling in the U.S. election now felt “vindicated.” The group of former spies feel vindicated because a former FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, was arrested (though not yet convicted) in February 2024 for allegedly lying to his FBI handler years earlier when he claimed Joe and Hunter Biden each received a $5 million bribe, as reported by CBS.

Consortium News has since raised suspicions about lawyer and Biden loyalist David Weiss, specifically his “past conduct and motivations;” and because the F.B.I. had “used Smirnov as an informant for roughly a decade and, having concluded several investigations successfully, found him highly reliable.”

Following Dilanian’s lead, NBC’s Chief Washington Correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, also of NBC, was quick to share Dilanian’s X post of the article.

As if on cue, Dilanian has since re-tweeted another NBC News report, “Russia's 2024 election interference has already begun.”

In this NBC article, Gavin Wilde, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who specializes in Russia and information warfare, suggests the propaganda war is domestically driven: “I am very skeptical, whether it’s 2016 or 2024, that the United States political and media culture needs any push from Russia.”

Back in 2021 and fresh on the heels of Russiagate, a former head of Russia analysis at the CIA, George Beebe exhorted in The National Interest, “Democracy perishes when its institutions fall prey to false information and ignore objective standards of truth. It is time to revive them.”

Beebe offered a solution:

The answer is more likely to be found in a return to the methodological and ethical standards that have traditionally governed institutions designed to uncover truth. Journalists have a well-developed set of evidentiary standards and professional ethics. The intelligence community has clearly defined rules on sourcing and analytic objectivity. Had either of these professions adhered strictly to their own rules during the Iraq WMD and Russiagate episodes, it is likely that their errors would have been less severe. These standards become more important during times of crisis, not less.

Dilanian, once labeled by Greenwald as a “CIA loyalist,” is now aiding the efforts of the national security state to again point the finger at Russia. Dilanian’s reporting could prove to be the opening salvo in a new Russiagate, but it must be treated with great suspicion given his history. The journalistic record clearly shows Dilanian to be more than a willing dupe for disinformation and he cannot be trusted as a journalist, for NBC or any media outlet.

Notably, it was Ken Dalanian who claimed in a televised NBC segment last night that the “majority” of Supreme Court justices are skeptical of limiting the government’s ability to control speech on social media in the Murthy v. Missouri case; Honest Media covered this case yesterday and described how it is more nuanced than the mainstream media has claimed.

Dilanian has become not only an Operation Mockingbird poster boy (echoing the CIA) but also epitomizes why the legacy media is no longer trusted by the American people and is collapsing before our eyes, as described in another recent Honest Media report.