Richard Grenell’s Smear Against Bowe Bergdahl – By Michael Ames (Politico) / March 11 2020
President Trump’s new intelligence chief has a history of turning falsehoods into political capital.
After three years warring with his intelligence agencies, Donald Trump has finally decided to take them over. While the fate of his nominee for director of national intelligence, Representative John Ratcliffe, is uncertain, Trump appointed Richard Grenell to serve as acting director in the meantime. In Grenell, Trump chose a loyalist who, as ambassador to Germany, has been happy to shatter diplomatic norms in service of Trumpism. The two men also share a little-known, but well-documented, history of turning misinformation into political capital.
Trump‘s and Grenell’s missions aligned in the late spring of 2014, at the outset of the Bowe Bergdahl scandal. Bergdahl is the Army private first class who walked off his base in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009, was captured by the Taliban and spent nearly five years as a hostage in Pakistan. Grenell, a former aide to then-Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, was running a scrappy media strategy shop at the time. On June 1, 2014—the day after the Obama administration exchanged five Taliban leaders held at Guantánamo Bay for Bergdahl—Grenell taped a Fox News interview in which he suggested Bergdahl had intentionally defected to the Taliban. On “Fox & Friends” the next day, Trump called Bergdahl “a traitor.”
In the chaotic weeks of news coverage that followed, Grenell helped weaponize the prisoner swap into a prolonged political attack on the Obama administration. He recruited several veterans from Bergdahl’s platoon for a media blitzkrieg that demolished the White House narrative that Bergdahl was any sort of hero—or a prisoner who even deserved to be saved. These young veterans spoke the truth: Bergdahl had walked away from his post by his own choice, something Bergdahl himself would later admit. The question was why. Sgt. Evan Buetow, Bergdahl’s former team leader and one of the soldiers working with Grenell, attempted to fill in that blank by repeating the same unfounded theory Grenell had pushed on Fox. In several interviews after the prisoner swap—from Fox to CNN to NPR—Buetow told the world Bergdahl was trying to find the Taliban when he left base. He said it more than 30 times. The next month on Fox, Trump cited Buetow as an expert on the matter, saying he knew “exactly what happened.”
Across conservative media, these accusations grew into a fable that President Barack Obama had freed five Afghan terrorists for a single white-skinned jihadi. (In 2018, the Trump administration would invite the same five Taliban members to peace talks in Doha, Qatar.) Within days of his recovery, Bergdahl’s Idaho hometown canceled its celebration in his honor, and his parents were put under FBI protection amid a swarm of death threats.
Grenell didn’t keep his connection to the platoon secret. He tweeted that his firm was working for the soldiers “pro bono.“ But in hindsight, it would be more accurate to say the soldiers were working for him—a Republican strategist promoting a useful political narrative months before the 2014 midterms. When my co-author and I conducted research for our book, some of Bergdahl’s platoonmates sang Grenell’s praises and assured us the same thing he had assured them: There was nothing political about his work on their behalf.
In fact, Grenell, intentionally or not, had delivered on a promise made by GOP congressional aides two years earlier: If Obama went through with the prisoner trade, the aides told State Department officials in a closed-door briefing, Republicans had a plan to turn it into his “Willie Horton moment” in the war on terror. That threat, first reported by the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, held true, as conservative media outlets and Republicans in Congress seized the prisoner swap as a defining White House scandal. Three weeks after the Bergdahl exchange, Obama’s disapproval rating hit 55 percent, the highest of his presidency.
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