A spy inside the NBC tent

Novels have been written about what just happened at NBC News.  One novelist, John le Carré, made a whole career telling stories that the NBC imbroglio mimics.  The FBI and CIA both maintain schools to train new employees in how to avoid what NBC just did.  If you don’t graduate with good grades and a strong recommendation, you don’t get hired.

One of the major jobs of any intelligence agency is to place spies in the top ranks of the enemy’s government, especially of its intelligence agencies.  The Soviets placed the famed Cambridge quartet of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt in the upper reaches of British intelligence.  Blunt even penetrated Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Queens Pictures.  

Why is this a principal goal of intelligence agencies?  So their spies can get close to enemy leaders and report back on the enemy’s plans and intentions. 

What did NBC News do last week?  They lifted a corner of the corporate tent and let a spy inside.  Who’s the spy?  Ronna Romney McDaniel, former Chair of the Republican National Committee, was hired as a paid contributor to the network, earning a reported $300,000 per year salary.

NBC is paying a spy for the Republican Party to come into 30 Rock and report back to Donald Trump, who owns the party of which she was nominally the chair.  She was in that job for all four years of Trump’s presidency.  She ran the RNC during the three years Trump has spent denying that he lost the election of 2020.  She agreed with him that the election was stolen.  It was a bedrock principle of the Republican Party from the day the Associated Press called the election for Joe Biden in 2020.  She was chair of the Republican Party while the entire infrastructure of the party was mobilized to help Trump attempt to overturn the election results. 

According to a report on, yes, MSNBC tonight, she participated in the plot in Michigan to create a fake slate of electors intended to replace the real electors won by Joe Biden.  She called a Michigan Republican Party official, with Trump joining in on the call, and encouraged him to get Republican officials in Michigan to refuse to certify the presidential election in the state.  Her job title and the name of the organization she ran, the Republican National Committee, appears in the federal indictment of Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

Ronna McDaniel was in effect a co-conspirator in Trump’s effort to stay in power after he lost the election in 2020.  She has been either silent or dismissive of the insurrection Trump fomented on Jan. 6, 2021 when he whipped up his crowd on the Ellipse and sent them to attack the Capitol building and delay the certification of the election he had lost.  From 2021 until her departure from the Republican National Committee, McDaniel has been a part of Trump’s campaign of gaslighting about the election, casting doubt on its legitimacy, agreeing with him that it was “stolen” from him and “rigged” against him.  For the last three years, she has raised money to help him run his campaign for president.  Since his several indictments, she has steered money donated to the Republican Party to help pay his legal bills.  She has, effectively speaking, been an active member of his criminal defense team.

Trump has claimed in his defense against the charges brought by the Special Counsel that all of his actions after he lost the election in November of 2020 were part of his presidential duties to ensure the election was “free and fair.”  Ronna McDaniel has agreed with and supported this line of defense.  Trump’s attempts to put up slates of fake electors are not the “duties” of a President of the United States.  They are crimes, and Ronna McDaniel was there when they were committed.  She knows that Trump’s claims are lies, and yet she has repeated them and helped to spread them since November of 2020.

And there is this:  Ronna McDaniel has been a key part of the campaign of the Republican Party to denounce and condemn the news media as “enemies of the people,” in Trump’s notorious words.  She has called reports on Trump’s attempts to overturn the election “lies.”  She has even denounced NBC News and MSNBC. 

It's all of a piece, and it started at the top with Trump and the Republican Party.  Network reporters have faced repeated threats from right-wing websites and podcasters calling them “traitors.”  It's not just rhetoric.  There are right-wing lunatics out there who have acted on such threats, such as the members of the Michigan militia who were arrested for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.  MSNBC had Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes on the Rachel Maddow show tonight to discuss right wing disruptions occurring around the state at city council and county board of supervisors meetings.  At the end of her interview, Maddow expressed regret that the state of Arizona has had to supply Fontes with an armed bodyguard who accompanies him everywhere he goes because of threats on his life.  Other public officials around the country, especially those with jobs involving elections, have had to get protection for their offices and some have been provided with bodyguards.

The Republican Party, during the seven years McDaniel was its chair, did not denounce the threats of violence against public officials even once.  McDaniel, while she was calling the election of 2020 “rigged” and helping Trump with his legal defense fund, had nothing to say about threats of violence against public officials.

In her appearance on Meet the Press yesterday, McDaniel tried to shift her stance on the 2020 election into reverse, admitting that Biden won the election and that he is the legitimate president.  But she refused to agree with Mitch McConnell that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol, telling host Kristen Welker, “I don’t think he wanted the attack on the Capitol.  I don’t hold him responsible for that.” 

Welker pointed out McDaniel’s apparent change of tone about the 2020 election and asked her, “why should viewers, why should people, trust you believe what you’re saying right now?”  McDaniel responded by denying that she has changed her positions and told Welker, “I think you should trust me.”

That’s what every spy who was ever caught and put on the spot told his or her interrogators.  Don’t pay attention to the evidence.  Trust me.

MSNBC has already announced that McDaniel will not appear as a guest on any of the network’s programs.  NBC News should join them, and NBC should cancel McDaniel’s contract for cause, for lying on Meet the Press.  She is not trustworthy.  She is a spy for Donald Trump.