Why would Black people laud the FBI or criticize protection against self-incrimination? The FBI search of Donald Trump’s home has reawakened Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism.
Trump did what he usually does, play fast and loose with the truth. Of all former presidents only he would ignore subpoenas and claim to have declassified documents when he hadn’t done so. He can’t get out of his own way and thus makes himself a target. But Democrats should know that the search is seen as nothing more than a personal attack against him. Millions of people who love Trump will love him all the more and conclude that the raid was meant to keep him from running for president again. Liberal dead-enders will be happy, but everyone else will say that something rotten was conducted at Mar a Lago.
Attorney General Merrick Garland says that the documents were subpoenaed but the former president didn’t respond. The FBI search warrant states that the search encompassed three different issues: gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which is part of the Espionage Act; concealment, removal, or mutilation concerning the handling of records and reports; and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy, which is part of a section dealing with obstruction of justice. The warrant also states a search for information on Roger Stone and on the President of France.
Aside from the item descriptions, no one knows what Trump had or what the FBI found. Leaks from the Justice Department indicate something about nuclear weapons, but no one knows what that means. The lack of information hasn’t stopped the speculation which Trump always causes. There is conjecture that he was selling information to Russia or to Saudi Arabia or was plotting some other treason. There are even claims that documents were buried with his recently deceased ex-wife. It is fascinating that there can be so much guesswork about issues no one can know.
The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.
Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.
It is truly shameful to see Black people exalt the FBI and act as if punishing Trump is the organizing principle of all political activity. The Trump organization is also under investigation by the New York Attorney and the former president refused to answer questions put to him in a deposition. The right to remain silent is one of the most important in American law and should be used a lot more often. But copaganda television shows and Trump hatred have caused their own form of insanity, and his exercise of a fundamental right was widely lampooned. No one should ever be condemned for utilizing their fifth amendment right, not even Donald Trump.
Of course, this spectacle is also used to deflect from Biden administration failures. His approval rating is still low, for the simple reason that he didn’t do what he claimed he would for American voters. He continues to pour public money into the losing effort in Ukraine and needlessly provokes Russia and China. But who is paying attention if there is speculation that Trump put files in Ivana’s casket?
It is time to nip this foolishness in the bud before it goes any further. Trump should not live rent free in our collective consciousness any longer. He cannot be allowed to distract from the current president’s actions or become a rallying point for politics which will inevitably be useless. No one has to follow Trump’s shenanigans any longer or allow the corporate media or the democratic party to make him their focus. Doing so only makes it harder to do the already hard work of recreating Black politics.
The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle. The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don’t know what’s going on.
The LSM should be confronted: “At long last have you left no sense of decency?” But who would hear the question — much less any answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine in journalism, is a thing of the past.
Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls.
The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided the occasion to “catapult the propaganda,” as President George W. Bush once put it.
As the the Times‘s Mark Mazzetti put it in his article Wednesday:
“Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.”
Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce: regarding that interference four years ago, and the “continued-unabated” part, you just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin’s pocket.
Incidentally, Mueller’s report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee’s magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages — and fortified. So there.
Iron Pills
Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller’s anemic findings in spring 2019. His report claimed that the Russian government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” via a social media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by “hacking” Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges could not bear close scrutiny.
You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller’s ipse dixit did not suffice, as we explained a year ago in “Sic Transit Gloria Mueller.”
The Best Defense …
… is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of its study — call it “Mueller (Enhanced)” — and the propaganda fanfare — come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.
One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he expects “developments in Durham’s investigation hopefully before the end of the summer.”
FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying on the president.
The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.
The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness — particularly with regard to Covid-19 — he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious.
So, the stakes are high — for the Democrats, as well — and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition (as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale (“enhanced” or not).
Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM — and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch “Mueller Report (Enhanced)” and catapult the truth now with propaganda, before it is too late.
No Evidence of Hacking
The “hacking of the DNC” charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.
Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.
Here’s a brief taste of how Henry’s testimony went: Asked by Schiff for “the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data”, Henry replied, “We just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”
You did not know that? You may be forgiven — up until now — if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The New York Times still publishes “all the news that’s fit to print.” I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep Henry’s testimony hidden; Schiff’s record of 29 months will be hard to beat.
Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian ‘Tampering’
Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller’s findings last year enabled Trump to shout “No Collusion” with Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller’s findings.
After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned to keep it that way.
In Wednesday’s article, for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:
“Like the special counsel … the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was ‘no collusion’.”
How could they!
Mazzetti is playing with words. “Collusion,” however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.
‘Breathtaking’ Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)
Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report “showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin,” and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee’s vice chairman, said the committee report details “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections.”
None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known — even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort “sharing polling data with Russians” who might be intelligence officers. That data was “mostly public” the Times itself reported, and the paper had to correcta story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.
Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to “justify” eavesdropping on Trump associate Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI’s decision to investigate Page. The committee may wish to revisit that endorsement — at least.
On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium Newsexplained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate.
Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that revealed that Steele’s “Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.”
Smearing WikiLeaks
The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly debunked myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears. Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report’s treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread:
2. the description of #WikiLeaks‘ publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee‘s Report appears a true #EdgarHoover‘s disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive
3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee’s Report completely rely on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo’s characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent approach
4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– “[WikiLeaks’] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies” (p.200)
– “WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries” (p.201)
5. it’s completely false that “#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value” (p.200) and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].
Titillating
Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday’s Times with the blaring headline: “Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump’s Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller’s Findings on Election Tampering.”
Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti’s piece will learn that the Senate committee report “did not establish” that the Russian government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn’t have] as leverage against him.” However, Mazzetti adds,
“According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they ‘might have had a brief romantic relationship.’
“The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow.”
This is journalism?
Another Pulitzer in Store?
The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
And that’s not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, “The Plot to Subvert an Election,” trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.
That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.
In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter commented:
“The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia’s threat to U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media … Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the heart of the Times’ coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change.”
Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory
“It’s too much; it’s just too much, too much”, a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News.
It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what he titled “An Apology & Explanation” for “spotty production in recent days.” A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able to summon enough strength to write an Apologia — his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was “just too much”.
Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the “unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. … Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent … this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media.”
What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. “The U.S. media’s approach to Russia,” he wrote, “is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times’ or The Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? … Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia.”
Parry, who was no conservative, continued:
“Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for ‘hacking’ Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks.”
Bob noted that the ‘hand-picked’ authors “evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren’t asserting any of this as fact.”
It was just too much.
Robert Parry’s Last Article
Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether miss the importance of the text-exchanges.)
Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a “sanity check.” Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts; we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff investigating alleged Russian interference, until Mueller removed him.
Strzok reportedly was a “hand-picked” FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered “intelligence community” assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s right-hand lawyer.
His Dec. 13, 2017 piece would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article. All three of the earlier ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here arethelinks.
Bob began his article on the Strzok-Page bombshell:
“The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling “scandal” into its own scandal, by providing evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.?
“As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American ‘deep state’ exists and that it has maneuvered to remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government’s intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump.”
Not a fragment of Bob’s or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled “Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?”, only three out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.
And so it goes.
Lest I am accused of being “in Putin’s pocket,” let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity included in our most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on “Russian hacking.”
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and as a downtown morning briefer of the President’s Daily Brief.
The House Judiciary Committee opened its first formal hearing on the impeachment of President Trump Wednesday with a statement by committee chairman Jerrold Nadler that confirmed the right-wing character of the Democratic campaign.
Nadler openly declared that the effort to impeach Trump for withholding military aid from Ukraine was a continuation of the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections in support of Trump.
He first recounted Trump’s withholding of military aid to browbeat Ukraine into opening an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, an action that Trump hoped would benefit him in the 2020 election. Nadler then said, “Of course, this is not the first time that President Trump has engaged in this pattern of conduct.”
He continued: “In 2016, the Russian government engaged in a sweeping and systematic campaign of interference in our elections. In the words of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, ‘the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome.’ The President welcomed that interference.”
In invoking the bogus claims of massive Russian intervention in the 2016 elections—and raising the even less credible suggestion that Ukraine’s actions could play a major role in the 2020 elections—Nadler revealed the essential falsehood that underlies the entire Democratic impeachment campaign over Ukraine.
The United States is not the victim of global efforts to subvert its electoral processes. The reality is just the opposite. The US government is the most active and aggressive saboteur and manipulator of democratic processes all over the world, routinely intervening to ensure that pro-American regimes are placed in power. Its intelligence agencies regularly organize political overturns, up to and including bloody military coups, in those cases where the people of a targeted country vote the “wrong” way, from the perspective of Washington.
Ukraine is one of the most prominent recent examples of this, as the CIA and State Department backed a right-wing coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, viewed as too sympathetic to Moscow. US agencies financed and mobilized ultra-right and neo-Nazi forces who spearheaded the uprising that drove Yanukovych into exile in 2014. Since then, the US and its NATO allies have been preparing feverishly for a war with Russia in which Ukraine would serve as a key battlefront, even though such a conflict would bring with it the danger of nuclear conflict.
The Judiciary Committee’s opening hearing took testimony from a panel of four law school professors on the legal and constitutional requirements for a legitimate impeachment proceeding. This was an effort to mimic the initial hearings that began impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon in 1973-74 and Bill Clinton in 1998-99.
The three professors chosen by the Democratic majority all testified that Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses. Each cited historical instances to demonstrate that those who drafted the US Constitution were deeply concerned about the possibility of foreign intervention into US elections, particularly as it related to the election of the president, the chief executive of the new government.
Citing these 230-year-old concerns of a small and newly independent country, in a world dominated by powerful foreign empires, only underscores the contradiction with today’s power realities. The United States is the most powerful imperialist nation. It is Ukraine that has been the target of a two-decades-long campaign of subversion and manipulation by Washington, aimed at transforming the country into a base of operations directed against Russia.
As several witnesses in the previous round of hearings held by the House Intelligence Committee asserted—and as reiterated in the Democrats’ 300-page impeachment report released Tuesday—the United States’ client regime in Kiev is already engaged in a “hot war” with Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.
The campaign to transform Ukraine into a US subject state and military staging ground against Russia, on which the CIA, State Department and Pentagon have expended more than $10 billion, was threatened by Trump’s withholding of military aid. It was this action that sparked the retaliatory “whistleblower” complaint by a CIA officer formerly assigned to the White House, which then became the pretext for the launching of the impeachment inquiry.
Again and again, throughout the eight-hour hearing, Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee returned to the theme of alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections and the ongoing US military-diplomatic operations directed against Moscow.
Eric Swalwell of California, for example, declared, “We’re here because of this photo,” while having a photograph displayed on a huge television screen showing President Volodymyr Zelensky dressed in combat gear in eastern Ukraine, where he stood on the “front line against Russia.” Swalwell added that the US was aiding Zelensky to fight Russia “so that we don’t have to fight them here,” as though Russian soldiers were about to parachute onto the streets of Washington DC.
The anti-Russian hysteria was combined with claims that Trump’s conduct in relation to Ukraine bore comparison to Watergate. One of the legal witnesses, Noah Feldman of Harvard University Law School, flatly stated, “Richard Nixon sent burglars to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. This president just made a direct phone call to the president of a foreign country asking for his intervention in our election.”
Another witness, Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina Law School, went even further, declaring in his opening statement that Trump’s conduct was far worse than Nixon’s in Watergate—because Nixon used American operatives against his political rivals, while Trump resorted to foreign ones.
These comparisons collapse as soon as one considers the stark difference between the current political crisis and the situation that led to Nixon’s resignation in Watergate, as well as the crisis that shook the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. In both these cases, the president engaged in criminal conduct in order to pursue unpopular and illegal wars—in Nixon’s case, the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; in Reagan’s case, the “contra” war against Nicaragua.
It was the massive popular opposition to these imperialist wars that led the president in each case to resort to criminal actions. Nixon approved the formation of the “plumbers” unit of ex-CIA agents to spy on his political opponents and collect information by illegal methods, including, ultimately, the burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex.
Reagan authorized his National Security Council, with Lt. Col. Oliver North taking the lead, to organize the sale of weapons to Iran to obtain funds that could be routed to the “contra” forces engaged in CIA-backed terrorist attacks in Nicaragua, in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, which prohibited such aid.
In the case of Ukraine, it is not Trump but his Democratic opponents who are demanding a more aggressive pursuit of illegal and militaristic foreign policy objectives, including the arming of the regime set up in the Ukraine by the CIA-backed “Maidan Revolution” of 2014. In this, the Democrats are acting as political attorneys for the CIA, Pentagon and State Department, as was made clear in the parade of national-security officials who defied Trump’s orders and testified before the House Intelligence Committee.
This embrace of the CIA-backed overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine makes nonsense of the Democrats’ claims that their concern in bringing charges against Trump is to defend democracy in America.
There would be no lack of grounds for a legitimate political indictment of Trump on charges of anti-democratic criminal actions: the forced separation of parents and children by his border Gestapo, the illegal diversion of congressionally appropriated funds to build the border wall, the “Muslim ban” on travelers from targeted countries, or Trump’s incessant appeals to racist and fascist forces.
The Democrats choose not to raise these issues because their invocations of democracy are entirely false and hypocritical. Trump’s drive towards fascism cannot and will not be fought by appealing to the CIA and State Department. These are merely two different roads to the same end: the establishment of an authoritarian regime in America.
The hypocrisy of the Democrats is demonstrated in the choice of the witness who led off the impeachment hearing. Professor Noah Feldman is not just a Harvard Law School professor. He has a long and noxious record as an apologist for American imperialist intervention, most notably serving in 2003 as a political adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council, the provisional administration set up after the US invasion.
After helping the Bush administration set up its puppet regime in Iraq at the onset of an imperialist war that has cost the lives of more than a million people and set in train a series of catastrophes in the Middle East, Feldman is hardly in a position to posture as an expert on the defense of democratic rights and constitutional processes.
Similarly, Pamela Karlan from Stanford University Law School, the second legal expert to testify, served in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice in 2014-2015, at a time when this agency was spearheading the attack on Edward Snowden and Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes and mass surveillance, and when Chelsea Manning was serving a 35-year prison term for her leaks of classified information detailing these crimes.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
– Arundhati Roy
Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian assets on a podcast. More specifically:
“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians,” said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep. Gabbard, who’s been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” She added: “That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.
Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you’re as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn’t help but cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.
Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The “let’s blame Russia for Hillary’s loss” epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see: Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of “Russian Propaganda” Websites).
This is when it became clear it wasn’t just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that “respected” mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence operation than journalism, which shouldn’t be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media in the Trump era.
Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just cashed in at NBC News as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst” and served his first expert views on last Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity. Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News. CNN’s bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa; former FBI agent James Gagliano; Obama’s former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken; former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers; senior adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration Samantha Vinograd; retired CIA operations officer Steven L. Hall; and Philip Mudd, also retired from the CIA.
Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can’t help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren’t easing up.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a “Russian asset.” Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
It’s partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she stepped down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.
Tulsi’s mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party. She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris’ chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something no one else in the race had the guts to do.
In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody’s actually willing to stand up and say it. It’s why the agents of empire — in charge of virtually all major institutions — go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed to as little truth as possible. It’s also why they lie and scream “Russia” instead of debating the actual issues.
But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial foreign policy.
To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven’t noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare touch the issue, you’ll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There’s nothing logical about this, but then again there typically isn’t much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering specific emotional responses.
There’s a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell “Russia” whenever an individual with a platform criticizes empire and endless war. They know they can’t win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they’ve decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they’ve got. These people are telling you 2+2=5 and if you don’t accept it, you’re a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves “liberal.”
Importantly, it isn’t just a few trollish kooks doing this. It’s being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions in the country, including of course mass media.
This inane verbal vomit is considered “liberal” news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national guard simply because she dared call out America’s perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.
To conclude, it’s now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn’t become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary, it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she’s just a vessel. What’s really got the agents of empire concerned is we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national security state doesn’t want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.
Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of national significance, you’ve lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen to the “experts” who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.
Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and incessantly promoted, it crumbles into rubble as we speak. The mini-empire of allegations, presuppositions, fallacious syllogisms, leaps of logic, imagined connections and mis– and disinformation marshaled to support charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections is more or less a ruin.
The total collapse of the Russiagate orthodoxy now appears within reach — this for the first time since the Democratic National Committee set the narrative in motion after its email servers were compromised during the Trump–Clinton presidential contest. There is a good chance — though this is not a certainty — that Attorney General William Barr’s just-launched investigation will fully expose the numerous charges of Russian intervention as fabrications. Evidence of these fabrications, long available but ignored in a remarkably prevalent case of willful blindness, continues to grow such that it may be difficult to obscure it much longer.
It is now officially acknowledged that there is no credible evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. At this point, the demonstrably bogus assertion that Russian intelligence hacked into the DNC’s email system in mid–2016 is the one remaining feature of the Russiagate orthodoxy that is commonly considered rock solid.
The mythology on this question remains deeply embedded, the absence of any supporting evidence notwithstanding. Press and broadcast reports rarely miss an opportunity to cast Russian responsibility for the DNC email intrusion as a foregone conclusion. But this, too, is a tower built on sand. To put Russiagate decisively in the past now comes to demolishing this last, unsound edifice. The rest is already too discredited for anyone but naïve liberals, wishful-thinking “progressives” and the most committed ideologues to take seriously.
This focuses attention on the evidence — considerable and accumulating — that Russian intelligence agencies, officially charged with intrusion into the DNC’s servers, had nothing to do with it. It is now two years since technically qualified intelligence professionals of long experience reported viaConsortium News that the theft of Democratic Party email in 2016 was neither a hack nor a Russian intelligence operation. In July 2017 Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity presented persuasive evidence that the DNC’s servers had been compromised by someone with direct access to them.
The email messages subsequently posted by WikiLeaks had been pilfered by an insider of unknown identity: This was the conclusion VIPS drew in VIPS50, the group’s report on the mail incident, on the basis of the evidence it had gathered while working with other independent forensic investigators. The “hack,” in short, was not a hack. It was a leak.
A cacophony of objections erupted after Consortium posted VIPS50. Much — vastly too much — has been made of a group of “dissenters” within the VIPS organization who did not endorse the report. But neither these dissenters nor the many others attempting to discredit VIPS50 have succeeded in doing so. No countervailing evidence from any quarter has been presented. Based on continuing research, VIPS subsequently altered some of its initial conclusions, as noted in this space a year ago. But its principal findings stand.
VIPS50
This puts VIPS50, while still officially excluded from the record, among the most consequential documents to be published since the Russiagate narrative took shape three years ago. If we are to recover from the destructive, divisive nightmare Russiagate has become, VIPS50 will be key to the process. There are indications now that its findings, based on impartially conducted data analysis and forensic science, will soon get the consideration they have deserved from the first. My sources suggest Barr’s office is making use of VIPS report and subsequent findings as it begins its investigation into the genesis of the Russiagate allegations.
Much anticipation preceded the publication in mid–April of the report on Russian interference completed in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Contrary to prevalent expectations, however, the 448–page document failed to confirm the case for Russiagate and did much to weaken it. Not only did the report conclude that neither President Trump nor anyone in his campaign colluded with Russia as he fought the 2016 election; it also made clear that the special counsel’s office did not undertake a credible investigation of the charge that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC’s mail servers.
Mueller failed to call numerous key witnesses, among them Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, and Bill Binney, formerly a technical director at the National Security Agency and one of several technical experts in the VIPS group. He also failed to pursue alternative theories in the email-theft case; a duty of any investigator in Mueller’s position. Only the willfully blind can accept these irregularities as legitimate conduct.
Remarkably enough, Mueller’s investigation appears to have conducted no forensic tests of its own to verify allegations of a Russian hacking operation. It relied instead on the patently faulty findings of Crowdstrike, the disreputable cyber-security firm that was working for the DNC by mid–2016. Critically, the special counsel also appears to have neglected to consult the NSA for evidence pertaining to the DNC incident. Had the intrusion been a hack conducted over the internet, by Russians or anyone else, the agency would have a fully detailed digital record of the operation and the means to trace the intervention to its perpetrators. Why, it is perfectly logical to ask, was such a record not cited prominently in the Mueller report?
Mueller’s testimony before two congressional committees on July 24 was a further blow to the Russiagate thesis. The special counsel came over as a detached, out-of-touch figurehead with a very loose grip on his own investigation and poor knowledge of the report bearing his signature. Soon afterward, even Trump’s adversaries in the Democratic camp began to give up the ghost. “In the hours and days after Mr. Mueller gave his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee,” wrote Samuel Moyn, a Yale law professor, “it became clear how tenaciously many liberals and progressives are clinging to fantasy.” Moyn’s piece appeared in The New York Times. The headline reads, “The Mueller Fantasy Comes Crashing Down.”
Despite the stunningly anticlimactic outcome of the Mueller report and his subsequent appearance on Capitol Hill — which was intended from the first to be a matter of spectacle rather than substance — new allegations of Russian interference continue to arrive on front pages and in news broadcasts. The latest came the day after Mueller’s testimony, when the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Russia intruded into the election systems of all 50 states during the 2016 campaigns. The report offered no supporting evidence, per usual. It was heavily redacted at the request of the relevant intelligence agencies, again per usual.
Question of Evidence
This brings us to the question of evidence. To go back to the initial allegations of Russian interference three years ago, at no point since have any of these commonly accepted charges been accompanied by hard, legally and logically sound evidence to back them up. This astonishing lacuna, while intently papered over in the media, on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department, in the intelligence apparatus, and among law-enforcement agencies, has rendered the Russiagate orthodoxy vulnerable from the first. It now emerges that the evidence problem is worse than even the most committed critics of the Russiagate narrative had thought.
This came to light this spring, during the pre-trial discovery phase of the case against Roger Stone, the onetime Trump aide charged with obstructing justice and misleading Congress. When Stone’s attorneys requested Crowdstrike’s final report on the DNC email theft, which they said was relevant to his defense, prosecutors returned with the stunning revelation that Crowdstrike, the DNC’s cyber-security firm, never submitted a final report. “The government does not possess the information the defendant seeks,” the Justice Department responded via a court filing.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s failure to take possession of the DNC’s email servers from Crowdstrike after the mid–2016 intrusion, a shocking case of official malfeasance, has long been dismissed as an unimportant detail. We now know that the FBI, the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation relied on nothing more than three Crowdstrike drafts — all of them redacted by Crowdstrike — to build the case for Russia’s culpability in the theft of the DNC’s email.
Not only did the FBI fail to establish a proper chain of evidentiary custody after the incident at the DNC; it is now clear the bureau knows of the email theft only what Crowdstrike chose to tell it. There is no evidence that the FBI asked the NSA for its records of the incident. Nor is there any indication that Crowdstrike has ever given the FBI or prosecutors in the Stone case the data it used to produce its never-completed report. “Crowdstrike appears to have destroyed evidence or is hiding it,” Bill Binney said in a telephone interview.
The corporate media continue to pretend in their press reports and news broadcasts that the official investigation of the DNC email incident was conducted according to the highest standard of legitimacy. Democrats on Capitol Hill, still pursuing their own investigations, never question the validity of the officially constructed case alleging Russia’s responsibility. The revelation of negligence the Stone trial brings to light, which amounts to corruption, could hardly expose this prolonged charade more starkly.
Forensic investigators, meantime, continue to gather evidence supporting the leak-not-hack case made in VIPS50. The gap thus widens between the official story of the DNC mail incident and the case supported by forensic research done by VIPS and other independent investigators working in association with it.
Last February these investigators discovered that email pilfered in 2016 and subsequently conveyed toWikiLeaks had been stored according to a system called File Allocation Table, or FAT. The FAT system time-stamps data according to their last modifications and, because it is less precise than other storage systems, it rounds up time stamps to the next even number. If the FAT system is used to store data, it is a strong indication that the data were stored on a memory key or another such portable device.
In the 35, 816 email messages investigators examined, the FAT system assigned even-numbered time stamps to all of them. Binney, a mathematician by training, puts the chance of this occurring without the use of a portable storage device at 1 in 2 to the 35,816thpower — meaning it is a virtual impossibility.
The FAT numbering pattern detected in the email messages tested does not indicate at what stage or where a portable device was used. It shows only that such a device was used at some point in the handling of the data; a portable device may or may not have been used to execute the initial download. But the presence of the FAT system in the metadata of the emails tested adds another layer of circumstantial evidence supporting the VIPS case that the theft of DNC mail was a leak executed locally via a portable device and not a remote hack conducted through the internet. At the very least, it is an additional line of inquiry the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Mueller investigation have left unexamined.
VIPS Dissenters
Among the critics of VIPS50, none has influenced public opinion as much as the dissenters within the group’s membership. The presence of these dissenters has been evident since VIPS50 went through repeated drafts over a period of nearly two weeks. This is a group of honorable, in many cases brave people. But they advanced no coheren objections to the VIPS document prior to its publication, and this remained the case for some time after Consortium News posted it on July 24, 2017. Having begun reporting on VIPS50 shortly after that date, I found — and continue to find — the dissenters’ position heavily inflected with personal animosities and political leanings having no bearing on the validity of the VIPS50 findings.
A number of dissenters signed a contribution to a forum The Nation hosted after the magazine published a piece I wrote on VIPS50 in August 2017. This was the first time the dissenters publicly presented substantive objections to VIPS50, and they focused on the core of the VIPS case. This case continues to rest primarily on the speed at which a mail theft could be executed in mid–2016. The transfer speed, identified by an analysis of metadata found on documents stolen at that time, was considerably faster than the rate possible over the internet at the time of the intrusion, indicating a leak by someone using a portable storage device and with direct access to the DNC’s servers.
The dissenting group took specific issue with these findings. “Data-transfer speeds across networks and the Internet measured in megabits per second (or megabytes per second) can easily achieve rates that greatly exceed the cited reference in the VIPS memo,” the dissidents wrote.
It was at this point the dissenters repeated the failures of the intelligence apparatus and the Mueller investigation: They produced no evidence. There is no indication the dissenters conducted tests to support their assertion on the speed question. The VIPS memo applied scientific method to the DNC mail theft for the first time and was intended as an “evidence to date” document. This marked a transformative advance in how the DNC incident can be understood: The imperative since has been to bring countervailing evidence to the investigative process, which continues. No one —not the dissenters, not the DNC, not the “intelligence community,” not Mueller, not the press — has done so.
The dissenters have been silent since their contribution to The Nation’s forum. Members have declined invitations to work with VIPS50 signatories to develop further the evidence presented in the memo. When I queried a number of dissenters for this commentary, one replied. This person did not address the findings of forensic investigators while reproducing what VIPS50 signatories term the “emotional arguments” that have characterized the dissenters’ response to the memo since the drafting phase two summers ago. These continuing difficulties appear partly to reflect a desire not to be seen defending either Trump or the Russians.
Barr’s Investigation
The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Mueller investigation, the press — none has shown the slightest interest in the findings outlined in VIPS50. This can come as no surprise, given the heavy investments all of these entities have made in the Russians-did-it explanation of the DNC email incident. But this omission is nonetheless negligent when one considers the contradicting evidence VIPS and those associated with it continue to amass. A key question now arises: Will the Barr investigation into the genesis of allegations of Russian interference, begun three months ago, transcend this politically inspired ignorance to expose official accounts of the mid–2016 mail theft as fallacies?
The early signs were that Barr’s investigators would at last explode the Russiagate narrative. Trump was unmistakably determined to do so when he urged Barr to “investigate the investigators” last spring. In mid–May Barr appointed John Durham, a federal prosecutor, to direct this effort. Ten days later Trump gave Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” related to the conduct of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department.
It was clear very early that Trump was aware of VIPS50 and entertained a lively interest in its findings. In September 2017, two months after Consortium published the memo, he ordered Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA, to interview Bill Binney, the leading technical expert within the VIPS group. Pompeo did so in October 2017, but by Binney’s account he flinched: Pompeo heard Binney out at the president’s insistence, but he never pursued the forensic findings the former NSA technical director walked him through.
This was an early sign, it is now plain, that even efforts to unearth the truth of the allegations against Russia that emanate from the White House would meet political resistance. Another came last Friday, when Trump was forced to drop John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican who pledged to support a full investigation of Russiagate, as his nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. While Ratcliffe considered the orthodox Russiagate narrative bogus, Coats was vigorous in his promotion of it.
This makes political will another key question to ask of the Barr investigation: Full exposure of the travesty of Russiagate is almost certainly within Barr’s power to achieve. Will he do so?
Whether Trump will remain consistent in his backing of Barr is another such question. While Trump habitually terms Russiagate “a hoax,” he has also indicated on a number of occasions that his true objective is simply to escape the charge that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election,” Trump tweeted earlier this year. “I said, ‘It may be Russia, or China, or another country or group, or it may be a 400–pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.’ The Russian ‘hoax’ was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia—it never did!”
I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said “it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.” The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!
A president who slips and slides, an administrative state — the Deep State if you like — thoroughly committed to defending falsified accounts of the mid–2016 intrusions into the DNC’s email servers, a supine press: It is impossible to say when or whether the truth of the events of three years ago will emerge. The evidence is there, sufficient now to conclude the Russigate case. The greatest remaining obstacle is the willful ignorance that incubated the Russiagate narrative and now prolongs it. We reach a point when evidence and more evidence, along with political integrity, are the only effective replies to this cynical, foolish, and costly recalcitrance.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for theInternational Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
For anyone who lives in the West (the US, the EU and its various adjuncts such as Australia, New Zealand) and wants to know what really goes on in the world, a major hindrance is the powerful filter imposed on reality by Western mass media. It uses two methods to prevent reality from leaking through to the public, one active, one passive.
The passive method uses omission and obfuscation: certain events and facts are simply not reported. Some are willfully suppressed, others carefully underemphasized, yet others are presented in a context designed to disguise their significance. For example, anybody attentive enough could have easily ascertained that Robert Mueller is senile and in no way shape or form was ever capable of running any sort of investigation or writing a report. And yet this salient fact was not reported at all; that’s willful suppression.
But now that Mueller has provided six hours of congressional testimony to prove this fact before anyone who cared to watch, outright suppression has become impossible and context substitution has come into play: those who draw attention to Mueller’s obvious senility are accused of being right-wing extremists. But how can a readily observable medical fact be dismissed as political bias? How could he have failed to recall important details from a report he supposedly wrote (or at least read)? Mind you, I am just using the Mueller disaster as a handy example. As I have explained many times, it doesn’t matter who is president and the entire ridiculous witch-hunt is an instance of fiddling while Rome burns.
The active method is to label all those who try to circumvent their filter as “conspiracy theorists”—a derogatory term that is easy to apply, although making it stick is rather tricky. It is easy to fall into the trap by insisting on a certain version of events without being in possession of specific physical proof. But it is equally easy to act as an independent collector and connoisseur of conspiracy theories (which are popular because they are interesting) in which case your accusers must be on par with you in their depth of knowledge of conspiracies or else be ready to forfeit their position as preeminent authorities on all things conspiratorial.
If none of the major Western news outlets reported a certain salient fact that can be readily exposed and attested by multiple sources by some people who, each one separately, do a bit of research, then how are these people conspiring, and how is that a theory? It can perhaps be argued that there is indeed a conspiracy—on the part of the major Western news outlets—to suppress this salient fact. That would indeed be a theory, but a difficult one to prove, and so why would anyone care to argue this point? Why not just let the salient fact speak for itself?
In short, the trick for avoiding the label of “conspiracy theorist” when reporting an unreported or underreported fact is to always couch it in the form of a question—“Here’s some evidence of something quite important, but Western mass media has failed to cover it; why?”—and leave Western mass media with the burden of proof that they didn’t conspire to suppress the coverage. Of course, no mass media outlet would ever accept such a challenge. Alternative responses include stony silence and, when that tactic starts looking ridiculous, resorting to ad hominem attacks and name-calling. But that leads to an inevitable loss of face because it automatically reduces to the childish game of “I know you are, but what am I?” As, for instance, in “Is refusing to report on Mueller’s obvious senility a sign of political extremism?”
Western mass media malfeasance doesn’t stop at suppression of facts; there is also its massive failing to provide any sort of meaningful analysis, or even to form rather obvious conjectures that we can then consider on their merits. For example, I might wildly conjecture that Robert Mueller was chosen as a senile stooge behind whose back Hillary Clinton’s political operatives conspired to unseat Donald Trump by a combination of falsified and coerced evidence, entrapment and various other forms of prosecutorial misconduct.
Again, I don’t have a dog in this race because I believe the US is in the process of flushing itself down the same golden toilet no matter who is its president. I have no particular love of “Donny, Putin’s man in Washington” (that’s a joke; Russians find it hilarious), but I do enjoy the comedic elements of watching this “Art of the Deal” president fail to close a single deal with anyone. In any case, I am perfectly happy to wait until the truth of the matter comes out. Sure, maybe it was Putin’s clever plan to make Americans spend four years beating each other up over an orange-haired buffoon who, as ordered by Putin, has been working tirelessly to wreck the relationship between the US and China and to ease China into an alliance with Russia, and also to wreck the relationship between the US and Europe, leaving a weakened and faltering US stranded all alone on the wrong side of the planet, but that’s just a conspiracy theory, isn’t it?
For over two years Russiagate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections,jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.
In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.
The Russiagate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.
U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the U.S. “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral campaigns.
Free and Open Exchange of Ideas
Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists. Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.
The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point.
The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during “persuasion” campaigns. Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.
Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency.
Russian Contacts Deplored
Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, Russiagate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.
Even if we address Russiagate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and investigations implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign. In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.
The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.
There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.
The most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.
Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.
Who Benefits?
Why then does the Russiagate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?
Russiagate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.
In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.
While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).
A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.
Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.
The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.
Where are Clintons, these dog days of summer? The Hamptons? Salty, sunny Martha’s Vineyard? Under a rock somewhere in the Chappaqua woods? Fate is turning in more than one uncomfortable way for the once-charmed couple of Boomerdom.
There is, of course, the freshly re-issued Jeffrey Epstein underage sex scandal, come ‘round again with a vengeance this time because there are fewer Clinton partisans left in the Department of Justice where the matter has festered for decades like a fistula slowly seeping its rot through the body politic. The vengeance emanates from the Clinton’s nemesis, the uppity Golden Golem of Greatness who dared to “steal” Hillary’s place in the Oval Office (and history). To put it plainly, Mr. Trump had enough of the two-year-plus persecution he endured from the Clinton-inspired Mueller investigation into the Clinton-propagated Russia Collusion flim-flam. And having patiently survived this audacious, seditious effrontery, is now out to squash the Clintons like a pair of palmetto bugs.
At this fraught hour of a frightful age, one turns to a metaphysical contemplation of these two Clintons, Hill-and-Bill, and just what it is that they represented in our national life these many years. Mainly, what I wonder is just how much power and influence they exerted behind-the-scenes in Washington since their exit from the White House in 2001. For example, starting with the most recent shenanigans, the curious composition of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team, spiked with obvious Clinton insiders such as Andrew Weissmann, present at HRC’s aborted victory party on election night 2016, Jeannie Rhee, a lawyer for the Clinton Foundation, and several other former Obama-era DOJ staffers. How did that happen? How did Mr. Mueller get away with that?
One obvious answer: the media titans ignored it. This leads the casual observer to ask; how did it work that revered pillars of The News, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CBS, and so many others became captives of the Clinton narrative? What is the reality there? Probably not so much that the Clinton’s actually control persons and agencies, but that they are figurehead monarchs of the bureaucratic monster called the Deep State; and that this Deep State has been doing everything possible to preserve its increasingly corrupt perquisites against the call to dismantle them — a.k.a. “draining the Swamp.”
Can there be any shred of doubt left in this land that if anyone “colluded” with Russians to interfere in the 2016 election it was the Clinton Campaign’s Fusion GPS disinformation unit, which assembled The Narrative, with the assistance of CIA Director John Brennan, and peddled it to the willfully credulous FBI led by James Comey and the news media. We won’t rehash any more of this excruciatingly complex criminal project, except to note that it is now unraveling with equally painful blowback to the people responsible, including Hillary Rodham Clinton who may be liable for a heap of felony charges in the matter.
All of that nasty business may redound to the various intrigues emanating from HRC’s years as Secretary of State, namely the fantastic hoovering up of hundreds of millions of dollars by the Clinton Foundation from foreign parties doing business with the State Department, including the Russian Federation. How did all that indecency slip through the cracks? Once again, the media ignored it because it would not advance their interests in gender and identity politics to investigate the avatar of the party promoting those crusades. And because the Obama Justice Department under Loretta Lynch deliberately looked the other way for similar reasons.
And now there is the Epstein matter, which threatens not only former president Bill Clinton, but a cosmos of political, financial, and entertainment “stars” in countless ugly incidents that involve a kind of personal corruption that has no political context but says an awful lot about the obliteration of moral and ethical boundaries by the people who ended up running things in this fretful moment of US history. President Clinton has already kicked off this debacle by lying to the media about the number of rides he took on Mr. Epstein’s notorious airplane.
I voted for Bill Clinton twice. When they came up from the backwater of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992, they seemed like the fresh, bright antidote to twelve years of fusty Reaganism with the GHW Bush moldy cherry-on-top. Governor Bill, so glib and charming. Tall and catnip to the ladies, too! And almost immediately he was in deep shit over that part of his act, but he wiggled through it all with the aid of his perky, stalwart wife and partner, who defended him sedulously on nationwide TV. (America had never even heard about her misadventures on the Watergate Committee, where, age 27, she gained a reputation for being less than honest.) And that was followed by the first instance of Hillary moneygrubbing when she turned a few thousand bucks into a six-figure bonanza almost overnight in a wired commodities trade.
After all that bother they mostly minded their manners in the White House until Bill got all sexed up by Miss Lewinsky, and they managed to slip through that fiasco without penalty. It was really in the years following — after they left the White House copping some historic GI furnishings, and got caught doing it — that they put together their fabulous empire of grift known as the Clinton Foundation, with its do-good cover act called the Clinton Global Initiative. Curiously now, we learn that Bill was pretending to be on various world-saving missions during many of those trips he took on the Epstein Travel Service plane. We’ll see how that pans out going forward.
When all is said and done, the official business of going forward with these various scandals and their unwindings may prove to be the most nauseating and destabilizing period in our nation’s history. Nemesis is rising.
After the Crash 