In light of the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s plan to slash the intelligence office workforce and its budget, I’m revisiting a couple Peter Zeihan videos where he warns and provides evidence that the Russians have penetrated the White House. Speaking of Gabbard, he said in March 2025:
“The Russians are now starting to call her nashego cheloveka [“our man in”], because she’s in a position to operate almost with impunity inside the White House. She oversees the CIA, which produces the President’s Daily Brief—the most important intelligence document. The question is: does she let that report even reach the president, or is she just whispering Russian propaganda directly into his ear? There’s an open debate among Russian intelligence about how successful they’ve been with her. But judging from U.S. policy outcomes, it looks like they’ve done very well.”
Gabbard is dismantling defense and intelligence. RFK Jr. is undermining public health and science. Trump is pushing reckless tariffs that risk an economic crisis. Trump is siding with Putin in his war against Ukraine. These aren’t isolated moves but part of a broader pattern: the Trump administration advancing policies that serve Russia’s interests, not ours.
The Russian Reach: Categorizing Intelligence Agents
By Peter Zeihan (published March 10, 25)
The Russian intelligence system is comprised of a vast and interconnected network of agents. Each of these pawns plays a different role in supporting the “king” back in Moscow.
Zeihan updated the Russian Reach Series in April 2025:
A Concerning Update to the Russian Reach Series
Well, the Russian Reach series needed an update, and it’s not a pretty one. The infiltration of the US government by Russian interests is growing and I don’t see an end in sight.
We have figures like Tulsi Gabbard with a foot in the White House and the Kremlin. The very institutions which were created to protect the US from these threats are being dismantled under the Trump administration. Don’t even get me started on ‘SignalGate’. Grenell is spewing pro-Russian narratives to whoever will listen. Navarro is echoing Russian propaganda as it relates to economic policy. Trump is still repeating disinformation…
Transcripts:
The Russian Reach: Categorizing Intelligence Agents
(generated by AI, edited by me)
Hey everyone, Peter Zeihan here. You’re about to watch a video in a series I’ve put together called The Russian Reach, which examines the role of the Russians in manipulating the current White House as well as the U.S. government in a broader sense.
[…]
All right, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. We’re doing our latest in the series of “holy crap, what’s going on in Washington,” working from the possible theory that the Russians have penetrated the White House. The Russians have the best intelligence system in the world when it comes to human intelligence.
The U.S. excels at signals intelligence—that’s basically electronic eavesdropping of various forms. But when it comes to face-to-face contact and getting people to do things, that’s where the Russians have always excelled. It’s in their geography, they’ve been doing it for centuries. We’ll link to a piece we just posted explaining how we got to that point.
As you might expect from someone who’s very good at something, there are different classifications. Every once in a while, you’ll hear someone—myself included—throw around the term “foreign agent” or “Russian agent.” People get upset because their favorite ideologue has now been accused of working for someone else. Tough. But there’s a lot more nuance than those words suggest.
The Russians basically use a multi-step classification system to determine how close someone is to them and how loyal they are. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up.
The lowest category is something called polezniy, which roughly translates as “useful idiot.” This is someone who openly and willingly regurgitates Russian talking points and propaganda without really understanding what’s going on. These are people who are too ideological, too arrogant to believe they’ve been fooled, or maybe just too stupid to realize what’s happening. Maybe all three.
The two leading candidates for polezniy classification in the United States today are Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican from northern Georgia—her newest claim is that the only reason Americans don’t trust the Russians is because of mass media. Nothing to do with them killing Americans or pointing nukes at us for 70 years. Yeah, right, MTG, whatever you say. It’s amazing what the Russians can get her to say, because she says some truly stupid stuff.
The other would be David Sachs, the crypto billionaire, who definitely falls in the “too arrogant to think he’s being manipulated” category.
Next up is vliyaniya, which roughly translates to “agent of influence.” This is someone who has a platform, a following—not necessarily in policy circles, but they’re not nobodies either. The Russians have been able to inject their worldview into this person’s or this organization’s work.
Two good modern examples: Michael Moore, the leftist activist—you may remember his movie Gasland, basically an anti-fracking film (correction: the film was made by Josh Fox). The Russians were very active in making sure that film happened. And as an organization, Greenpeace. It’s not that the Russians founded or control Greenpeace, although they did play a very big role in the development of the green movement in the 20th century. But they’ve been able to inject and encourage certain ideological angles in Greenpeace’s environmental campaigns.
For example, during the Cold War, the West was capitalist and the Soviet Union was communist. The Russians were able to convince Greenpeace to put anti-capitalist, anti-industry themes into their environmental messages—not because it was pro-Russian, but because it was anti-Western. And that worked out very well for the Russians.
Third is something called nashego—roughly “our guy” or “one of us.” This is someone who has internalized the Russian message, maybe even generates some of their own propaganda, and sometimes has a role in policy circles.
The best example is Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont. He’s the guy who famously took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. He’s been parroting Russian propaganda for years, especially on things like socialism, even though the Russians themselves had been “socialist” for a long time. To the degree that, on a couple of occasions, he disrupted U.S. presidential elections. The Russians were very happy with that.
But unfortunately for them, Sanders woke up when the Ukraine war started. He realized maybe associating with rapists, murderers, and child kidnappers wasn’t the best look for a progressive. So he dialed it back. He’s still an asshat, but he’s no longer the Russians’ asshat.
Now, what these first three categories—polezniy, vliyaniya, and nashego—have in common is that the people in them might not even realize they’re serving Russian interests. They’re too ideological, too arrogant, too stupid. They’re doing what the Russians want, but the Russians can’t exactly call them up and hand over the next batch of propaganda. They have to be more subtle, even with someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The next categories can make no such excuse. These people know full well they are working for the Russians, at least part-time.
The first is rezident. This is someone who always has a platform, typically in media, typically with a following. Because of their profession, there’s a façade of independence. They can pretend to be unbiased, even though they’re not. The best example today is Tucker Carlson. He’s climbed the rungs of Russian management until he’s basically a full-time mouthpiece for anything that undermines American democracy, professionalism, the military, or serves Russian goals.
Next is verbovanniy. This is a flat-out recruit—someone the Russians have approached, maybe even flown to Moscow to meet Putin. They’ve essentially sold their soul. Jill Stein, leader of the Green Party, is at the top of this list. She’s been in and out of Russia, meeting Putin repeatedly, and has twisted a fragment of the American left into a direction that consistently serves Russian interests.
Then we have Krot—a mole. This is what people usually assume when they hear “foreign agent.” This person is embedded in a foreign organization and regularly provides information to the Russians that they couldn’t otherwise get. It’s not about propaganda—it’s espionage. Aldrich Ames is the most famous recent example. Edward Snowden may also fall into this category, but that hasn’t been fully proven.
And finally, the grand prize: nashego cheloveka—“our man in.” This is someone who has been fully subsumed into the Russian system while still officially working for a foreign power. They act as eyes, ears, and influencers at the very top levels. The difference between a plain nashego and a nashego cheloveka is placement, commitment, and how directly the Russians can operate them.
There’s debate in the Russian intelligence community about how successful they’ve been lately. One person they long called nashego is Tulsi Gabbard, the former congresswoman from Hawaii. She ran for president as a Democrat, switched to supporting Trump, and now serves as Director of National Intelligence.
The Russians are now starting to call her nashego cheloveka, because she’s in a position to operate almost with impunity inside the White House. She oversees the CIA, which produces the President’s Daily Brief—the most important intelligence document. The question is: does she let that report even reach the president, or is she just whispering Russian propaganda directly into his ear? There’s an open debate among Russian intelligence about how successful they’ve been with her. But judging from U.S. policy outcomes, it looks like they’ve done very well.
And then there’s the last question—the one that drove me to do this series: how successful have the Russians been with President Trump himself?
I’m not one of those people who believes the Russians have kompromat—compromising material—on Trump. Supposedly there are sex tapes from when he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and they threatened to use them unless he cooperated. I don’t buy it. For one thing, a Trump sex tape has already been made public—through the Stormy Daniels court cases. For another, the Russians are better at corruption than at intel blackmail. Something with that kind of potential value would not have been kept unused by anyone but Putin. That doesn’t add up.
Still, what has happened around the world in the past few weeks has been so wonderful for the Russians and so awful for long-term American interests. Of course that doesn’t mean this is the only theory.
A Concerning Update to the Russian Reach Series
Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Atlantic City. Today we’re going to update a series that we did last month called The Russian Reached what looked at the logic and the actions of the Russian government and how they were attempting and probably successfully attempting to penetrate deep into the American government right up to and including the White House. So the purpose of this is to give you an idea of how much is involved in just the last 3 or 4 weeks, and it’s unfortunately a very long list.
First off, keep in mind that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is somebody who most of the intelligence community who is has thought of as a Russian agent for quite a few years and one of the first actions that she… well, let me let me put it this way. If she’s not a Russian agent, she’s probably a traitor because the Venn diagram of her worldview and Vladimir Putin’s are pretty much identical. I mean, there might be a little bit of not overlap like a half of 1%, but that’s largely just hairstyles because, you know, Putin is bald and Gabbard’s hair is fabulous.
Anyway, she’s pretty much completed gutting the counterintelligence arms of our various intelligence agencies. So most of those staff aren’t even doing the jobs that they once did, allowing the Russians to really plow into American society however they want. Also, the Trump administration has largely dismembered the parts of the intelligence community and the State Department that were there to protect our election integrity from Russian intervention. Same thing for web hacking. And, the Department of Justice has largely stopped investigating white collar crimes, most notably fraud and cryptography. Cryptography. Wrong word, like Bitcoin scams.
Which are another way that the Russians really, really enjoy getting their claws into American society. In the American government. We basically just stopped enforcing those laws. The same goes for white collar crimes in general, which, of course, for a country like Russia that is corrupt and uses US intelligence systems to undermine societal stability all around the world, is something that has made their job a lot easier.
The next big issue is, of course, Signal Gate. Now, Signal Gate, happened back in March, mid-March, when the United States was preparing military assaults against the Houthis, which are the militant group in Yemen. And basically the entire top tier of the American national security team, including defense and intelligence. And Gabbard, of course, basically participated in a chat on the signal chat program. Signal is a platform that supposedly secure, but the week that this all went down, the Defense Department’s internal Intel, indicated that the Russians had probably hacked the encryption protocols.
So, basically, the American national security apparatus were all using what had become an unsecured platform to communicate, basically, operational intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard, again, testified, about halfway through the revelations to Congress that this really wasn’t a big deal. And no one should be overly concerned about it, because, of course, it’s not.
All right. Let’s see what’s next. Rick Grinnell. He is an on-again off-again semi-diplomat who is, working for the Trump administration. He worked for Trump one, did a really bad job, basically just went around talking to German neo-Nazis the whole time so the Germans wouldn’t deal with him at all. Anyway, he’s back in the administration now, and he’s one of those people that is so unlikable that even Donald Trump doesn’t like to have him around in person.
So he kind of hovers outside of the West Wing and is basically spewing anti-Ukrainian Russian propaganda in the ears of Trump Jr because he can’t get the ear of Trump himself. Specifically, he likes talking about the Budapest Agreement, which was something that dates back to the immediate post-Cold War years, when, the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons. Basically, Grenell is a spouting the Russian equivalent of that deal. Their interpretation of it 15 years on, and basically trying to get the Trump administration to disenfranchise Ukraine as a state and suggesting that they’ve never had a claim to anything in the first place, which is, of course, exactly what the Russians would love the Trump administration to believe.
Let’s see. Next up, we’ve got Peter Navarro. Who is the manufacturing advisor to the president. Very pro-tariff guy. He started using Russian propaganda that has been recently designed and released into the ecosystem. That’s specifically targeting Canada. So Navarro has always been an anti-free trader. Don’t really have a huge problem with that. But it’s interesting to see Russian propaganda popping up in his statements on TV now that are very, very specifically tailored to a very specific issue that really wasn’t an issue in, the Russian propaganda sphere until just a few weeks ago.
Then we have Donald Trump reporting Russian propaganda on everything from broad strategic issues, to very tactical issues. So, for example, near the end of March, Trump started talking about how Ukrainian troops in Kursk had been encircled by Russian forces, and, you know, this or that should happen. I mean, that never happened.
The Ukrainians were able to withdraw from the Russian province of Kursk fairly, I don’t want to say easily, but without a lot of casualties. And in fact, that withdrawal had been completed more than 48 hours before Trump is supposedly asking the Russians to modify their operations in Kursk. So this is something that actually came from internal Russian Federation propaganda that was designed to shape attitudes within Russia itself. But somehow it got on Trump’s desk. If I was a guessing man, I would say that that probably happened via Gabbard directly.
On Greenland, the Russians are trying to convince, the MAGA spear that a joint invasion, Russians in the North and Americans in the South would be a keen idea, something that would obviously shatter NATO overnight and end America’s defense alignments with, the Scandinavian countries that, in my opinion, are going to be the future of the American alliance network in Europe, which, of course, is something that the Russians would love to see destroyed.
You may have heard of Tim Poole. He is a far right influencer that’s very tight in the MAGA space. He has a number of podcast and, video vlogs. Kind of like me, a little bit. He’s been basically indicted, I think is the technical term for taking somewhere between $400,000 and $10 million from, the Russian state.
Basically, they’re shoving money into his platform to help spread disinformation throughout the American MAGA sphere. He claims he didn’t realize that it was going on. That’s his official stance and the investigation is impending. But, you know, he has on any given day, somewhere between a number of followers similar to me and twice as many. And I can guarantee you that if $100,000 per video release that I did suddenly showed with my bank account, I would not need the FBI to tell me to investigate the shit out of that.
So let’s just say I don’t take it very seriously.
But the most important part of this is that Tim Pool is now part of the white House press pool. The Trump administration has brought him into the inside while kicking out, you know, those liberal rags like AP and Successful Farming.
And then finally, a name that, you may have started to hear bouncing around Alexander Dugan. He is basically a run of the mill Russian fascist who has been advising Vladimir Putin for over a decade now, basically making up the ideology to justify genocide against anyone they feel is necessary. And until a year ago, most of his vitriol was ultimately, reserved for the United States.
So preemptive nuking, death camps, that sort of thing. He’s a real peach. Anyway, he has started making the rounds of MAGA, publications, in the United States recently. And of course, the first one in that role, the first of the big ones that he did was none other than Tucker Carlson. Now, you guys may remember, Tucker Carlson used to be a Fox News host.
Tucker has been fired from every media job he has ever had for lying on air about things on purpose. And since he left Fox, he has now basically migrated directly into the orbit of Russian propaganda. And most of his shows deal with Russian propaganda from a sharing it with the world point of view. Perhaps the most concerning thing I have in the information space as regards the Trump administration is not this Tim Pool thing, although that’s, you know, not minor.
But this is the American administration throughout history that has had the least contact with the media of any form. It’s not just that they’re not talking to more liberal groups like, say, the New York Times. They’re not really talking to Forbes or Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. They basically shut out everybody. But many members of the Trump cabinet have done extensive one on ones with Tucker Carlson.
So we basically have a gutting of the normal means by which an administration would normally interact with the country and focused on a very, very few, avenues, of which the bigger ones are already in the Russians’ pocket. Anyway, I don’t have a lot of great news on that front, and I will leave everyone to their own recognizance as to what’s going to happen next.
