Last week, Eli Lake reported on a very specific allegation by a senior Georgian official that the Russian GRU was behind a series of bombings in that country, including the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi. The charge was so detailed that it even included the name of the Russian officer who had coordinated the attack, and his last known whereabouts in the Russian occupied Georgian province of Abkhazia.
But this allegation, coming as it did from a U.S. ally, was immediately dismissed by those on the far right and far left in Washington (who oddly share a mutual affinity for Vladimir Putin’s thugocracy, or maybe just an affinity for the Obama administration’s great power politics which subordinates human rights and democracy to the national interest). Joshua Foust, writing at the Atlantic, accused the Georgian government of “intentionally misleading journalists,” because why would those nice Russians bomb a U.S. embassy? Daniel Larison, writing at the American Conservative, said that Lake just reports “whatever the Georgian government tells him,” and that his “story reads like one designed to stoke anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S.”
