The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

[JackRiddler]

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I like the drawings.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/liberal-xenophobia

Yasha Levine's Influence Ops

Respectable Racism

This bigotry isn’t coming from the “lower-classes” that liberals love to mock so much, but from very top — the crème de la crème of our media and political class.

Apr 3



I’ve been trying to write about the liberal xenophobia that undergirds so much of today’s elite panic about “Russia” and “the Russians.” Since Trump’s election, the usual stereotypes and tropes about Russians have morphed into an all-encompassing racist conspiracy. It’s become totally fine — and even respectable — in American liberal media circles to bombard viewers and readers with all sorts of plots that feature shadowy Russians infecting “our” society and lurking behind everything that’s going wrong in America and around the world.

As a Soviet-born Jew who grew up in America, it’s been impossible for me not to notice just how similar these conspiracies are to old antisemitic fantasies about “Judeo-Bolsheviks” and the “Elders of Zion” — deadly fairytales about degenerate “easterners” wielding total power in secret, and plotting from the shadows to dominate and exploit white, Christian civilization. This bigoted paranoia also recalls the virulently racist campaigns of the 19th century that targeted Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, as well as Russian and various Eastern European immigrants and laborers, and blamed them for infecting and degrading American society.

The liberal journalists, academics, media personalities, Hollywood stars, intelligence officials, and New York Times documentary filmmakers who’ve been screeching about “the Russians” for the past three years may not be aware that they’re serving up reheated racist fantasies, but they are. And this bigotry isn’t coming from the “lower-classes” that liberals love to mock so much, but from very top — the crème de la crème of our media and political class. One day you get Rachael Maddow working herself into paranoid seizure about a supposed Russian plot to cut power lines and freeze millions of Americans in their sleep. On another, you can watch the screenwriter of Mrs. Doubtfire take to the Internet to theorize about how the Russians are plotting to take down Joe Biden (and I guess to covertly boost Bernie Sanders) by getting an American politician to highlight the creepy and demeaning way Biden treats women.

It’s gross, and it goes to show that the respectable liberal opposition to Donald Trump is no less racist and paranoid than he is — it just operates in a different xenophobic market demographic.

Anyway, I say that I’ve been “trying” to write about this because, well, it’s such a gross and unpleasant topic that it’s hard to find the words. So I’ve mostly been drawing. Well, at least for now.

—Yasha Levine

[RocketMan]

Well now, we don't want actual RUSSIANS commenting on how they are portrayed! No sir.

[liminalOyster]

I like them too.

I had a passing but un-explored thought this week about how, in the big weird paradigm shift, the classic motif of the illiterate, uncouth, masculinist, xenophobic Southern redneck has sort of been transposed onto the working class (as well as criminal class) figure of Russia and the former USSR.

[alloneword]

Well now, we don't want actual RUSSIANS commenting on how they are portrayed! No sir.

I like the cartoons... there's something about the medium - although in this case, there's something almost jarring. Which, considering the subject, there should be. I guess we're conditioned to expect cartoons to be 'funny', so when they are not, there is a certain power exerted as you search for the elusive punchline.

Humour has it's place, though. Not that there's a lot of it to be had when looking at this subject.

I've always found Dmitry Orlov's stuff to be (invariably) entertaining and (often) informative as regards a 'Russian' perspective.

Excerpt from one of his latest:

..there is a definite increase in the level of stupidity displayed by those who are part of the US establishment. This shouldn't come as a surprise; after all, why would anyone possessed of wisdom and integrity want to have anything to do with it by this time? Points of extreme stupidity—so stupid it hurts to watch—are all around us at the moment. Let me point out a few important ones.

While I was busy twinkling my toes in the azure waters, special investigator Robert Mueller finally released his report. He had left no stupid stone unturned, but failed to accomplish his assigned task, which was to prove that Trump had colluded with Russia. In his report he claimed that although he found no evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, his report does not exonerate Trump. Note these two points of extreme stupidity. First point: if there was no collusion, there was no crime, and no course of justice to obstruct. Second point: if, as Mueller admits, no crime has been committed, there is nothing to exonerate Trump from.

The Democrats, who have been hoping to impeach Trump on the basis of Mueller's report, should perhaps take hope in the fact that Mueller has turned out to be so incompetent that he can't understand such basics of his profession; perhaps there was collusion after all, but Mueller was too stupid to find evidence of it. Or perhaps the Democrats should collapse in a paroxysm of despair, because Mueller was their best and last chance and now they look like idiots for believing in him.

Next in the stupids parade we have attorney general William Barr, who, in his summary of Mueller's report, uncritically accepted the claims that Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election did take place. What meddling was that?

There was a St. Petersburg troll farm run by somebody who was said to have once cooked for Putin. The trolls put up click-bait ads on social media. The scope of their operation was minuscule and most of their activity took place after the election, making the claim that they manipulated the election preposterous. Mueller's effort to prosecute them stalled out when their lawyers turned up in court and demanded to see the evidence. Mueller couldn't let that happen because it would have caused the entire courtroom to die laughing.

There was also the claim that Russian hackers hacked into an email server at the DNC, stole a bunch of emails showing an effort to rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders, and leaked them to Wikileaks. But there is evidence that these emails were not hacked but leaked by being copied to a thumb drive by somebody with physical access to the server.

Is Barr too stupid to realize the foolishness of his claims that "the Russians"—whatever that means—had manipulated the US election? Yes, it appears to be the case. With officials this stupid, how stupid was it for the Democrats to spend two years nurturing their dream of getting rid of Trump with their help?

And so Trump is here to stay. Is this where stupidity ends? No, of course not, for here we simply enter the next circle of stupidity...

It's a shame he's put a lot of his stuff behind a paywall (patreon) now, the above is a bit clownish by his (generally acerbic) standards.

..and speaking of clowns, CJ Hopkins offers us a Russiagate Requiem:

..Plus, there is no “deep state.” Not really. That’s just one of those right-wing conspiracy theories that only Trump-loving fascists believe in. I mean, it’s not as if elements of the FBI, the DOJ, and the DNC paid a former MI6 spook working for a Washington PR firm contracted by a Washington law firm contracted by the Clinton campaign to fabricate a “dossier” alleging that “the Russian regime [sic] has been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for at least five years” in order “to sow discord” within the Transatlantic Alliance, and then fed that fabricated dossier to their contacts in the corporate media, who used it to generate mass hysteria, which the Congress then used to justify the appointment of a special prosecutor, whose investigation of the allegations contained in the fabricated dossier the corporate media and deep state types used to generate even more mass hysteria … and so on, until hundreds of millions of people actually believed that Donald Trump was some kind of Russian intelligence asset, and was going to be impeached and tried for treason...

[alloneword]

I'm trying to think of an appropriate comment other that "Fucking mental", but I can't.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YZ9kiJ88LM

Fucking mental.

[JackRiddler]

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Okay, but look at that: you can't see the full surroundings (already a tip-off), but does this look or sound like more than a dozen diehards? In Times Square! A rally of the local Larouche chapter would have no trouble tripling that. #Russiagate has never been a mass phenomenon, though it has been a dedicated fandom. (Probably bigger than the Klingon-speaking community, probably smaller than Trek as a whole.) The low point on the street (i.e., the high point in real numbers) was the truly awful spectacle last November of people protesting the firing of Sessions. Sessions! Reported as "thousands" around the country in the NYT, but the pictures from NY (very likely to be the biggest manifestation by far) looked like hundreds. And that was the ultimate #Russiagate 'popular' mobilization, the long-expectd Day X march to 'Save Mueller'. Utterly dwarfed by the issues-based demonstrations of the Trump years. But #Russiagate definitely robbed the media oxygen, so it's done huge damage.

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[PufPuf93]

Noam Chomsky on Trump-Russia Collusion

Video I can't figure out how to directly imbed here at:

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=sFHo4_1553993589

Edit to add that it is only a 6 minute video.

[JackRiddler]

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This is responding to a thing liminal posted in another thread, but the response fits better here.

In my forthcoming book Republic of Lies, I spent a lot of time thinking about the primacy of conspiracy theories in America,

Dear Anna Merlan,

I don't know if an attribution of "primacy in America" to anything other than capitalism should be allowed as an axiomatic premise to start out. Perhaps you need to outline this conceptually. But of course the 'discursive use of master narratives based on fables or fabrications about malevolent controllers' (commonly termed 'conspiracy theory') has been an important device for rallying political communities against their perceived enemies and their 'others' in countless polities over many centuries, and it has always been Big in America.

While there is so many examples to choose from in this project, I look forward to what your work inevitably must treat at least in part as the two most dramatic and consequential cases of this in the last 20 years of American history:

1. The claim that the Saddam Hussein regime had WMD and was connected to the 9/11 events.

2. The claims that recent 'divisiveness' in American society and the outcome of the 2016 presidential election are attributable to a vast Russian plot in which Trump is merely the most important of the Kremlin's many puppets and assets in US politics, journalism and media.

and talking to people involved in a variety of conspiracy communities.

Now of course the overeall dynamics are much bigger than that, involving not just communities in which ideas originate but also the sociology, politics and social psychology of how the larger society receives these 'master narratives' at different times. But there is no question that 'communities' (or networks or groups) within which given 'master narratives' are spawned -- or fabricated -- are at the heart of any analysis of the phenomenon.

One way of narrowing down examination of the two biggest recent cases, to make the work more manageable, might be to consider a few of the people who were involved as key figures in the production of both the Saddam-WMD-9/11 hoax and the #Russiagate complex. Besides the likelihood of connections among them, you may find they share backgrounds that may help to explain their compulsion to fabricate in the more psychological terms you seem to be most interested in. What inner torments or past traumas drive men like David Frum or Max Boot to make up their 'conspiracy theories'? It may be essential to know, given the role these kinds of propaganda professionals have played: Frum as an example of a man who helped write the script for the war of aggression in 2003 and for the recent media panic that (perhaps unintentionally?) ended up legitimating the Trump presidency.

But of course that's only part of it, there are structural elements independent of psychology, and an analysis of the larger institutions involved in generating both hoaxes is probably going to be unavoidable. I expect among the latter you could focus on CNN and CIA for having been so central to both hoaxes. I also think you might highlight this in the example of Mueller, in 2003 an important supporting player in the WMD fabrication, and in 2016-19 was cast, not as a #Russiagater himself, but as the salvation figure that the adherents of the panic placed at the center of their narrative. Mueller so to speak was the Jesus who, in one dramatic arrival, would behead the fantastic beast and restore the universe to its prelapsarian state (in this case meaning turn the clock back no further than the supposedly happier days of 2016, which is a pretty funny idea -- what makes otherwise reasonable people believe such things?).

Ah, before I forget, as a minor matter:

I wandered the crowd, getting a sunburn in the crisscross pattern of the shirt I was wearing, sweating through my coat, trying to figure out what I was hearing.

While this kind of you-are-there detail is effective with some readers in lending immediacy, and perhaps in bolstering your credibility as someone who 'did the work' so to speak, it's not needed. It's extraneous to building a serious case, and I'd recommend less of it in your final paper.

In any case, I look forward to the results of your research.

Sincerely, etc.

Document II: Abstract of the Final Draft, with comments from Reader 1 and Reader 2.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/111 ... 48212.html

From UFOs to the New World Order, the inside story of how conspiracy theories won over America.

In November 2017, a serial climate change denier and anti-vaxxer was elected President of the United States. The rise of Donald Trump marked the beginning of a new American epoch: the age of the conspiracy theorist.

Now, Anna Merlan goes undercover in America’s sprawling network of conspiracy theorists and uncovers their secrets. She meets the UFOlogist who claims to have travelled to Mars with a young Barack Obama. She chats with the ‘pizzagate’ truthers who think Washington D.C.’s favourite pizzeria is run by a satanic paedophile ring. And she bumps into Alex Jones, the YouTube impresario who thinks the state is using chemical warfare to turn the population gay – and who happens to be on first-name terms with the leader of the free world.

Merlan reveals a world of innuendo and propaganda lying just beneath the surface of US culture. It might just help explain the political turmoil of our time.
_______

‘Anna Merlan reveals that the conspiracy theorists we all once felt a little sorry for (if annoyed by) have become the masters of the universe, lodged in the White House and presidential palaces throughout the world. It’s a rich insight that makes this something more than a good book – it makes it a necessary book.’ DAVID AARONOVITCH, author of Voodoo Histories

‘To understand America you need to understand conspiracy theories . . . Merlan’s exploration into the subject discovers some timely and troubling questions.’ EVENING STANDARD

[liminalOyster]

I hope you expand and CounterPunch this.

[liminalOyster]

When Putin's around, GPS goes haywire, study finds
BY GRAHAM KATES

APRIL 5, 2019 / 4:00 PM / CBS NEWS

As Russian President Vladimir Putin and a convoy of construction vehicles rolled across one of the most controversial new bridges in the world on May 15, 2018, something funky began happening on ships anchored nearby in the Kerch Strait.

The ships' GPS systems suddenly began to indicate they were actually 65 kilometers away, on land, in the middle of an airport.

The incident is one of many highlighted in a new report that found the Kremlin "spoofed" global positioning systems, or GPS, to effectively place a bubble around Putin or properties associated with him. The researchers, with a nonprofit called C4ADS and the University of Texas at Austin, used public marine GPS databases, as well as a GPS monitoring device on the International Space Station to track similar instances.

The yearlong study identified a pattern in which GPS devices near Putin and his entourage suddenly gave incorrect readings. The researchers also identified five buildings associated with the Kremlin that appeared to employ the technique on a rolling basis.

The researchers theorize that one reason "spoofing" is deployed is to protect Putin and other Russian officials from attacks or surveillance by drones that rely on GPS.

"The purpose of this spoofing activity was likely to prevent unauthorized civilian drone activity as a VIP protection measure," they wrote in the study.

However, there's a drawback to creating a GPS bubble around a world leader, said Todd Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who was involved with the study. It also makes it easier to keep track of Putin.

"What's ironic is if you look at these patterns, and if you coordinate it with the movements of the leader of Russia, it appears you have a Putin detector," Humphreys said. In other words, if you detect spoofing, there's a good chance Putin may be nearby.


The technique could also prove dangerous. The 24 maritime vessels that reported the Kerch bridge incident were otherwise unaffected. But Humphreys said a similar tactic in Syria could affect airplanes, which require functioning GPS to stay out of harm's way.

The researchers identified Russian equipment in Syria emitting what Humphreys described as "a whole different signal, one that was much much stronger, but not spoofing." The signal appeared to be jamming airplane GPS units, effectively rendering their navigation systems inoperable.

When the same tactic was apparently deployed during large-scale Russian military exercises in eastern Europe, civilians saw the effects, according to the report.

"Norway and Finland reported severe GPS outages affecting commercial airliners and cell phone networks for several days," according to the report.

Humphreys said the U.S. government has similar capabilities, but when deploying or testing spoofing or jamming equipment, it typically notifies mariners and airmen.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/when-putin ... udy-finds/

[JackRiddler]

I hope you expand and CounterPunch this.

Thank you very much, but I don't got it in me right now. I am at least going to open with Mueller's roles at my academic presentation on #Russiagate, next month.

I also just put in some revisions to the post, only to discover it wasn't EDIT but QUOTE, and edit time has ended. So, if you don't mind the mostly-repeat, I'll have to post that just so as not to lose the extra work.

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(revised repeat of Apr 06 post)

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This is responding to a thing liminal posted in another thread, but the response fits better here.

In my forthcoming book Republic of Lies, I spent a lot of time thinking about the primacy of conspiracy theories in America,

Dear Anna Merlan,

I don't know if an attribution of "primacy in America" to anything other than capitalism, or maybe empire and war, should be allowed as an axiomatic premise to start out. Perhaps you need to outline this 'primacy' conceptually.

But of course the 'discursive use of master narratives based on fables or fabrications about malevolent controllers' (as I would define what is commonly termed 'conspiracy theory') has been an important device for rallying political communities against their perceived enemies and their 'others' in countless polities over many centuries, and it has always been Big in America.

[One element really complicating this issue, of course, is that many notions of criminal conspiracies in high places turn out to be true, or partly true, or far from disproven; and so not everything termed a 'conspiracy theory' is actually mass-hallucinated, vastly exaggerated, manufactured outright, or otherwise mainly false. But let us stick to the latter cases of false stories, as that is usually what is meant by the phrase you have preferred, 'conspiracy theory', and let us assume further the term applies especially to those tales that are most ambitious as master narratives, those that explain, so to speak, why the universe is full of bad things.]

Now that we've provisionally defined the term, and granting that there are so many examples to choose from in this project, I note that your proposal is truly ambitious, as indicated by the title: to describe a 'Republic of Lies'! Given that, I look forward to your treatment of two cases such a work inevitably must treat, at least in part. I refer of course to the two most dramatic and consequential public outbreaks of 'conspiracy theory' in the last 20 years of American history:

1. The 2002-2003 claim that the Saddam Hussein regime had WMD and was connected to the 9/11 events, which facilitated the American war of aggression on Iraq.

2. The claims that recent 'divisiveness' in American society and the outcome of the 2016 presidential election are attributable to a vast Russian plot in which Trump is merely the most important of the Kremlin's many puppets and assets in US politics, journalism and media.

and talking to people involved in a variety of conspiracy communities.

Now of course the overeall dynamics are much bigger than 'communities', involving not just the groups in which ideas originate but also the sociology, politics and social psychology of how the larger society receives these 'master narratives' at different times. But there is no question that 'communities' (or networks or groups) within which given 'master narratives' are spawned -- or fabricated -- are at the heart of any analysis of the phenomenon.

One way of narrowing down examination of the two biggest recent cases, to make the work more manageable, might be to consider a few of the people who were involved as key figures in the production of both the Saddam-WMD-9/11 hoax and the #Russiagate complex. Besides the likelihood of connections among these characters, given their status as prominent repeat offenders, you may find they share backgrounds that help to explain their compulsion to fabricate in the more psychological terms you seem to be most interested in. What inner torments or past traumas drive men like David Frum or Max Boot to make up their 'conspiracy theories'? It may be essential to know, given the damage these kinds of propaganda professionals have wrought: Frum as an example of a man who helped write the script for the war of aggression in 2003, and for the recent media panic that (should we continue to assume, unintentionally?) ended up backfiring and quasi-legitimating the Trump presidency.

But of course the characters are only part of it. There are structural elements at work, independent of individual psychology, and an analysis of the larger institutions involved in generating both hoaxes is going to be unavoidable. I expect among the latter you could focus on CNN and CIA for having been so central to both hoaxes. I also think you might highlight this in the example of Mueller, in 2002-2003 an important supporting player in the WMD fabrication. In the 2016-19 saga he was cast, not as a #Russiagater himself, but as the hero of the show: a salvation figure that the adherents of the panic placed at the center of their narrative. Mueller so to speak was the Jesus who, in one dramatic arrival, would behead the fantastic evil beast and restore the universe to its prelapsarian state (in this case meaning turn the clock back no further than the supposedly happier days of 2016, which is a pretty funny idea -- what makes otherwise reasonable people believe such things?).

Ah, before I forget, as a minor matter:

I wandered the crowd, getting a sunburn in the crisscross pattern of the shirt I was wearing, sweating through my coat, trying to figure out what I was hearing.

While this kind of you-are-there detail is effective with some readers in lending immediacy, and perhaps in bolstering your credibility as someone who 'did the work' so to speak, it's not needed. It's extraneous to building a serious case, and I'd recommend less of it in your final paper.

In any case, I look forward to the results of your research.

Sincerely, etc.

Document II: Abstract of the Final Draft, with comments from Reader 1 and Reader 2.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/111 ... 48212.html

From UFOs to the New World Order, the inside story of how conspiracy theories won over America.

In November 2017, a serial climate change denier and anti-vaxxer was elected President of the United States. The rise of Donald Trump marked the beginning of a new American epoch: the age of the conspiracy theorist.

Now, Anna Merlan goes undercover in America’s sprawling network of conspiracy theorists and uncovers their secrets. She meets the UFOlogist who claims to have travelled to Mars with a young Barack Obama. She chats with the ‘pizzagate’ truthers who think Washington D.C.’s favourite pizzeria is run by a satanic paedophile ring. And she bumps into Alex Jones, the YouTube impresario who thinks the state is using chemical warfare to turn the population gay – and who happens to be on first-name terms with the leader of the free world.

Merlan reveals a world of innuendo and propaganda lying just beneath the surface of US culture. It might just help explain the political turmoil of our time.
_______

‘Anna Merlan reveals that the conspiracy theorists we all once felt a little sorry for (if annoyed by) have become the masters of the universe, lodged in the White House and presidential palaces throughout the world. It’s a rich insight that makes this something more than a good book – it makes it a necessary book.’ DAVID AARONOVITCH, author of Voodoo Histories

‘To understand America you need to understand conspiracy theories . . . Merlan’s exploration into the subject discovers some timely and troubling questions.’ EVENING STANDARD

[JackRiddler]

Now THIS is fucking interesting.

A mirror image of #Russiagate emerges, in which its standard plots are made out as engineered to entrap the Trump side in the apperance of "collusion" (incompetently) by elements long associated with CIA and FBI. (Among these standard plots of #Russiagate lore, it was especially the "Trump Tower meeting" and the Papadopoulos-Mifsud story; Mifsud is reported as a protege or friend of Prince Turki.)

All of this reads facially as more credible than anything in the #Russiagate version. Which isn't to say it's certain, but it makes a very persuasive read. One happy indicator is that while the connections tend to suggest theses rather than demonstrate them with certainty (as the author would admit), at least none of the clues are just fucking made up or insinuated as a function of nationality (aha! here's a Russian! guilty!), like most of the #Russiagate shit.

The thesis is of a "civil war" between anti-Trump technocrats, sigint believers who were Obama officials (Clapper and Brennan at the center), against a pro-Trump group of former Bush ops killers (Prince, Boykin) who felt their extra dose of fascism had been frustrated. But why don't the anti-Trump side just expose his real shit, and their real shit? Well, because it spreads too wide, often with "bipartisan" or even direct Clinton connections. "Russia" is much more convenient. Only problem is it didn't work, and it was never going to work -- at least not as a device to topple Trump -- so for all their top-level connections, these guys were amateurs. (Another motive, to make sure it's "Russia" being demonized in the service of New Cold War imperialism, did work of course).

I had never seen this photo with Clinton and Trump (in opposite corners) before:



Story explained there.

Anyway, is this author one of us? Is this you, WRex?! (I ask because your blog has the same format, but I forget what your tag is there.)

https://visupview.blogspot.com/2019/04/ ... below.html

visupview.blogspot.com
As Above, Revolt Below

After posting some initial thoughts about Russiagate last week, especially in relation to Trump's ambiguous relationship with the FBI, I wanted to follow up this week with a more in-depth analysis. Here I would like to explore the potential reasons for this disastrous hoax, while also considering the motives behind those involved. So grab the popcorn, as this particular exploration is quite the comedy of errors.

One of the most interesting developments in the wake of the Mueller report are revived allegations that various Western intelligence agencies, including those in these United States, attempted to entrap various officials working for the Trump campaign. While these allegations have been floating around for well over a year now, the disastrous fallout from the Mueller report has added additional credence to such charges. Several days after the report was delivered to US Attorney General William Barr, Senator Rand Paul(R-Ky) charged: "So they sent spies into the Trump campaign, they tried to entrap Trump officials to admit they were working with Russia."

Paul alleged to have insider sources feeding him this information, but having direct access to the US intelligence community isn't necessary to gauge the validity of these claims. Indeed, after a precursory examination, it is not difficult to see how sketchy several of the "smoking gun" meetings linked to Russian collusion truly are.

A Few Lowlights

Take, for instance, the much-hyped June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. Also present were Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and lobbyist Paul Manafort, a long time associate of the Orange One. Initially, this meeting was portrayed as a bid by the Trump campaign to receive damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a Russian national who, presumably, had acquired it from Russian intelligence. Veselnitskaya has long insisted, however, that all that was discussed at the meeting were sanctions.

At the time, Veselnitskaya was working for a Russian company known as Prevezon. As part of her efforts on behalf this client, Veselnitskaya had hired Fusion GPS to conduct investigations. That would be the same Fusion GPS, a private intelligence company, that produced the infamous Steele dossier. Indeed, Fusion had just been retained at the time to conduct opposition research into the Trump campaign and Veselnitskaya had even met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson on the same morning as the Trump Tower meeting. Both parties have insisted this meeting was unrelated to the later Trump Tower meeting, which would make the meeting highly coincidental and fortuitous at best. At worst, it has a strong whiff of skulduggery about it.


Veselnitskaya

And what of the ominous Trump Tower Moscow project that was initiated in 2015 and continued throughout the 2016 presidential elections? Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, worked closely on this project and later lied to Congress about how long Trump was involved in it. Financing for the project was to be provided by the VTB Bank, an institution owned by the Russia government and under sanctions at the time. What's more, the loan had been procured by a former GRU (Russian military intelligence) officer.

Sounds pretty serious, right? But here's the catch: the former Russian military intelligence officer has also worked with US intelligence, including passing on information related to Russian military technology, the satellite phone numbers of Osama bin Laden, and photographs of a North Korean official purchasing nuclear materials. Further, the long time backer of a Trump Tower in Moscow is a mysterious figure known as Felix Sater, the former managing director of Bayrock Group LLC who is reputed to have extensive ties to organized crime. Sater had been a senior adviser to Trump and The Trump Organization since the early '00s and had been working on developing a Trump Tower in Moscow since at least 2005.

It was Sater who brought the former GRU officer into the project. And like this former GRU officer, Sater has worked with US intelligence community for years, beginning as an FBI informant during the late '90s. In other words, the alleged links to the sanctioned VTB Bank were facilitated by a GRU officer and a gangster with links to the US intelligence community, the latter having maintained ties for nearly two decades.


Mr. Sater, whom we shall encounter again before this piece is finished
Easily the most pathetic effort are the allegations that Roger Stone met with a purported Russian agent to acquire dirt on Hillary during May of 2016. The individual in question, who used the alias "Henry Greenberg," is a Russian national with a criminal history in the these United States. Stone alleges that Greenberg asked for two million dollars in exchange for the information he possessed on Hillary. Stone promptly dismissed Greenberg as a crackpot and that was the end of that.

Later, Stone would allege that Greenberg had in actuality been an FBI informant, a claim of some merit. "Greenberg" did in fact make regular trips between Russia and the United States on behest of the FBI between 2008-2012 and would continue working with the Bureau officially until 2013. The three year gap between Greenberg's work with Bureau and his meeting with Stone has been used as evidence that Greenberg had gone back to work with the Russians. The Atlantic even dredged up a former FBI special agent, one Frank Montoya Jr., to proclaim: "My read on Greenberg is that he was either working at the behest of the Russians or he was freelancing (which means it was at the behest of the Russians)."

Ah yes, because the famed Russian intelligence services would task a man who had just worked with the American FBI three year prior with contacting the Trump campaign in a bid to steal the 2016 election. Its not like this would have been a sensitive operation or anything, so why not enlist a man with a criminal background who had recently collaborated with the US intelligence community?

The International Man of Mystery

But as sketchy as the Trump Tower meeting and Stone's May 2016 face-to-face with Greenberg are, nothing can quite surpass the curious fortunes of George Papadopoulos, the man who allegedly spurred the FBI's investigation after drunkenly boasting to an Australian diplomat that the Russians were in possession of material that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton (emails were never discussed in this meeting, as is often claimed). As with Stone's curious meeting with Mr. Greenberg, this occurred in May of 2016. The diplomat in question later reported this conversation to the FBI, setting in motion the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.


Papadopoulos
Papadopoulos had officially joined Trump's campaign as a foreign policy adviser on March 21, 2016. Earlier that month, Papadopoulos had visited Link Campus University in Rome, a university that has been used to train Western intelligence agents, including those from the FBI and CIA. It was during this time that he first met a highly mysterious figure known as Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese national who allegedly helped set up the Link Campus. Mifsud is an absolutely crucial figure to the Russiagate narrative --arguably the linchpin. Mifsud has been widely described as a Russian intelligence agent by the Western media.

During their time together in Rome, Mifsud alleged to Papadopoulos that he had high level contacts within the Russian government. Three days after officially joining Trump's campaign, Papadopoulos met again with Mifsud, this time in London. Mifsud was accompanied by a woman whom he allegedly introduced as a relative of Vladimir Putin (Mifsud himself later denied this claim). Papadopoulos would again meet with Mifsud in London a little over a month later (April 26, 2016, to be exact). This time, Mifsud allegedly boasted to Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary in the form of thousands of emails. Apparently, it was this particular claim that spurred Papadopoulos' ill conceived boasts to the Australian ambassador.

The question then becomes, how plausible is it that Mifsud was an agent of the Russian government?


Mifsud
The answer: Not very likely.

While there is no question that Mifsud had dealings with Russian officials at times, and was a regular participant in the Valdai Discussion Club and the Russian International Affairs Council, Russia-based think tanks with ties to the government there, the bulk of his contacts were with fellow academics (Mifsud himself is a professor). Mifsud's highest level contact in the Russian government appears to have been academic Ivan Timofeev, who is involved with both of the above-mentioned think tanks. While Timofeev is highly respected in academic circles in Russia and linked to the nation's Foreign Affairs Ministry, he appears to be a minor official at best.

Conversely, Mifsud appears to have longstanding ties to Western intelligence services. One of his principal patrons at the Link Campus was Vincenzo Scotti, a former Italian Interior Minister and intelligence asset. He also had a longstanding relationship with British diplomat Claire Smith, a former member of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The JIC oversees the UK's entire intelligence community, including GCHQ (the UK's NSA), MI5, and MI6. It is the senior intelligence assessment body in the UK and a part of the Cabinet Office. As such, Smith would have access to much of the intelligence being generated by the UK's secret services.

Another curious link of Mifsud's is to an Riyadh-based think tank, likely the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies. The think tank was run by Prince Turki al Faisal, who headed Saudi intelligence for nearly a quarter of a century before becoming an ambassador to the UK and US in the wake of 9/11. Prince Turki has long maintained close ties to the Bush family and especially the US intelligence community.

"Prince Turki had been a subject of CIA interest ever since his father had sent him to prep school at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Agency talent spotters on the faculty at Georgetown University kept close track of Turki until he dropped out of Georgetown to return home at the outbreak of the 1967 war with Israel. After later completing his education in England, Turki again returned home to prepare himself to eventually succeed his uncle Kamal Adham as director of Saudi Intelligence...
"Both Prince Turki and Sheikh Kamal Adham would play enormous roles in servicing a spy network designed to replace the official CIA while it was under congressional scrutiny between the time of Watergate and the end of the Carter administration. The idea of using the Saudi royal family to bypass the American Constitution did not originate in the Kingdom. Adham was initially approached by one of the most respected and powerful men in Washington, Clark Clifford, who rose to power under Harry Truman and had enjoyed a relationship with the intelligence community for years...
"Prince Turki himself acknowledge the private network for the first time in an uncharacteristically candid speech given to Georgetown University alumni in February 2002: 'And now I will go back to the secret that I promised to tell you. In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa. In the 1970s, there were still some countries in Africa that were coming out of colonialism, among them Mozambique, Angola, and I think Djibouti. The main concern of everybody was that the spread of Communism was taking place while the main country that would oppose Communism was tied up. Congress had literally paralyzed the work not only of the US intelligence community but of its foreign service as well. And so the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe at the time when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don't know. I'm not saying it because I look to tell secrets, but because the time has gone and many of the actors are gone as well.
"Turki's 'secret' was that the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States. It was during this time period that the Saudis opened up a series of covert accounts at Riggs Bank in Washington. Starting in the mid-1970s, bank investigators say, these accounts show that tens of millions of dollars were being transferred between CIA operational accounts and accounts controlled by Saudi companies and the Saudi embassy itself. Turki worked directly with agency operatives like Sarkis Soghanalian and Ed Wilson..."
(Prelude to Terror, Joseph J. Trento, pgs. 100-102)

Prince Turki
Turki had then effectively helped set up a "private CIA" to circumvent Congress during the mid-1970s. The CIA director at the time? George H.W. Bush. For more information on the infamous Safari Club, one of the chief fronts for this private CIA, check here.

Curiously, Mifsud was also director for a time of an entity known as the Centre for War and Peace Studies, a research center based out of the Link Campus University. Link was one of the two principal sponsors behind the Centre, the other being a Saudi charity known as Essam & Dalal Obaid Foundation (EDOF). EDOF is headed by an individual with longstanding links to Prince Turki and Saudi intelligence.

Mifsud's links to the Saudis, besides strongly suggesting connections to the Western security services, also places him firmly within the camp of the neo-liberal/globalist elite. This connection is further bolstered by his friendship with Link Campus colleague Gianni Pittella, a member of the European Parliament who headed the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats group in the parliament from 2014-2018. Pittella attended the 2016 Democratic National Convention where he made a big splash by taking a very vocal position against Republican candidate Donald Trump while also endorsing Hillary. Pittella has had a longstanding friendship with Mifsud.


Pittella
Needless to say, all of this should raise serious doubts about the notion that Mifsud was officially connected to the Russia government, or some type of spy for said government. These notions are further discredited by the actions of US officials after Papadopoulos had first mentioned Mifsud to the FBI on January 27, 2017. The FBI would then interview Mifsud between February 8-12 of that year, with no arrest occurring. Mifsud would continue to meet with senior UK officials during 2017, with the US seemingly taking no actions to warn their European counterparts about Mifsud's potential links to Russian intelligence.

If Mifsud was in fact a Russian spy playing a central role in establishing a channel to the Trump campaign, these actions are completely inexplicable. Further exasperating the credibility of Mifsud-as-a-Russian-spy are the inaction against his former colleagues in the wake of his 2018 disappearance. If in fact Mifsud was a spy for the Russians, he arguably was one of the most well placed in history. Through Link, he had established ample contacts throughout Western intelligence and diplomatic services, meaning that any number of his former colleagues could also be Russian agents. Surely this would have been of great concern to various Western intelligence services, and yet little effort has been made to find Mifsud since his disappearance so as to determine who he had compromised and/or recruited.

In other words, the lack of action on the part of Western security services strongly indicates that they do not take seriously the allegations that Mifsud is a Russian spy. If they did, he surely would have been arrested by the FBI in February of 2017 as he was allegedly the chief point of contact between Trump and the Russians. That he was let go speaks volumes. That no serious effort has been made to find him, despite colleagues insisting that he is hiding out in the Italian countryside with the aid of Italian intelligence (which was worked closely with the CIA since the end of WWII) should close the door on the notion that he is a Russian spy.

A Theater of the Absurd

Of course, the Steele dossier and what appears to have been numerous efforts to entrap Trump officials were not all that was on display. Who can forget the bizarre role of Stefan Halper, an acknowledged FBI informant placed in the Trump campaign. As was noted before here, Halper is a lifelong Republican with strong ties to the Bush family --to the point that he appears to have been running a spy ring within the Carter White House leading up to the 1980 Presidential Election on behalf of former CIA director and vice-presidential candidate George H.W. Bush. Halper had been working with Jeb Bush's campaign (it is widely believed supporters of Jeb are who initially hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump) for the 2016 elections, and then appears to have latched onto Trump's team in the spring of that year with the intention of spying.


Special Agent Walrus
Halper targeted the hapless Papadopoulos, among others. Halper met Papadopoulos several times in London with a Turkish woman described as his assistant. During at least one of these meetings, Halper brought up the the DNC email hack allegedly leaked by the Russians. He reportedly pressed Papadopoulos on this issue, leading the Trump official to believe that Halper was recording him with the intention of entrapping him. Halper's assistant, a woman named Azra Turk, also brought up the emails with Papadopoulos over drinks. She also allegedly flirted with him aggressively and invited him to meet her in Chicago (Papadopoulos lived there at the time). As such, the possibility exists that in addition to being targeted by two separate informants, a honey trap was also being laid for Papadopoulos. How big of a dupe did they think this guy is?

Using Halper was certainly a bizarre choice. After all, Roger Stone had recently written a book (with the son of E. Howard Hunt no less) attacking Jeb Bush and noting Halper's role in 1980 election intrigues on the part of Bush I. Surely, a few red flags were raised when Halper began cozying up to Trump officials. After all, even George Papadopoulos appears to have figured out that something was amiss with the man. But the coup de grace had to have been Halper openly endorsing Hillary right before the election.

***

Then question then becomes --why did the anti-Trumpers go to such great lengths to fabricate Russian collusion within the Trump campaign? After all, its not like there weren't any number of actual crimes that could have been used to stop Trump. If you want collusion with a foreign government, why not address the numerous improprieties between Trump officials and Israel? And what of Trump's numerous links to organized crime, which this blog has chronicled here, here, and here.

Well, the problem with going after actual collusion with a foreign government is that both parties are thoroughly compromised in this sense, as I noted before here. And as for going after Trump's ample ties to organized crime, well, that might turn up somethings that would be very damaging to Democratic royalty as well. Consider, for instance, Trump's potential ties to a Kentucky-based crime syndicate known as the Company, noted before here and here. The Company. whose heyday was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, was comprised largely of former military and law enforcement personnel, was deeply involved in illegal drug and arms trafficking, and appears to have close ties to the administration of Kentucky governor John Y. Brown. During the early 1980s, Trump appears to have become close with John Y. and his wife, Phyllis George.

And so too did the Clintons during this era. As such, a thorough investigation into the Company would potential cause as many issues for the Clintons as Trump. The same could be set for Trump's mafia ties in NYC, where the mob had worked closely with the Democratic Party for decades. Do TPTB really want to dig too deeply into these murky waters?


John Y. Brown, Phyllis George, and Trump are standing for this picture taken during early 1980s in the midst of the Kentucky Derby season. Hillary Clinton looks on at the far left
There are no easy explanations for why anti-Trump forces felt the need to fabricate largely wholesale this Russian collusion narrative. As indicated above, it may have simply been because they needed something that wouldn't blow back on the forces behind the anti-Trumpers. Of course, fabricating this narrative is not without risks, as I'm sure John O. Brennan and James Clapper are just now starting to realize. Was it hubris, a mistaken belief that they could unseat Trump before light was shed on this bogus narrative, that drove them to embrace Russiagate? Or were both factions working together for a more sinister agenda?


Brennan and The Clap
Given the close ties Brennan and Clapper have to the private intelligence racket, and the close links various Trump officials have to the private military industry, such a possibility can not be discounted. Keep in mind, Erik Prince has been vigorously pushing to outsource the war in Afghanistan, potentially the first of further moves to privatize the national security state. If Russiagate proves to be as disastrous to the US intelligence community as the Iraqi WMDs debacle, Prince's proposal could gain real traction.

But there is also a stark divide between the pro and anti Trump forces in the national security state. Brennan and Clapper, the two officials believed to have been at the forefront of launching Russiagate, are career intelligence officers with backgrounds in intelligence analysis and signals intelligence (SIGNIT), respectively. Neither man appears to have had a lot of expertise in covert operations, and appear to have been groomed for top posts in CIA and military intelligence, respectively. By contrast, the bulk of Trump backers drawn from the ranks of the national security state --which include Prince, General Michael T. Flynn, General Keith Kellogg, and General William G. Boykin (more information on this rogue's gallery can be found here) --are all special operations forces veterans with ample experience running covert operations. As such, while men like Brennan and Clapper may have set policy, it often fell to men like Prince, Flynn, Kellogg and Boykin to implement it in the field.

What's more, there appears to be a lot of bad blood between Team Trump and the Obama administration. Of course, we can start with Trump himself. There has been much speculation that one of the catalysts for Trump's presidential run was the 2011 White House Correspondents' Association dinner where Trump was publicly humiliated by Obama himself. Assuming that this blog is correct, and Trump himself has been running black operations involving the mob and other unsavory elements since at least the late 1970s, its easy to see why being called out by a former community organizer might have got in the Orange One's craw.


Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents dinner
And then there's Erik Prince. While still CEO of Blackwater, the company's CIA contracts were canceled once Obama assumed office. To add insult to injury, Prince's CIA work was allegedly "outed" by Leon Panetta (another anti-Trumper), Obama's original CIA director and later Secretary of Defense. Prince left Blackwater in 2010 and did not work for the US government again during the Obama years. Having lost his company and millions of dollars of government contracts surely stung Prince a bit.


Erik Prince during better days
Elsewhere, General Michael T. Flynn was forced to retire before his tenure as director of the DIA was complete due to pressure from Obama officials. One of those, incidentally, was James Clapper. Flynn was not the only Trump backer Clapper has ruffled the feathers of, either. General William G. Boykin had left government service in 2007, after Rumsfeld had been outed as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Robert Gates, a long time Bush family alley. At the time Boykin was serving a the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, his boss being controversial neo-con Stephen Cambone. Gates quickly took steps to change this state of affairs by making Clapper the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence after Cambone resigned.

"... After taking Cambone's job, Clapper moved quickly to dismantle some of Cambone's prized programs. In April 2007, after ordering a review of the Counterintelligence Field Activity Office, he terminated CIFA's massive Talon database, which over a period of six years a compiled dossiers on thousands of U.S. citizens...
"Gates showed his cards again in May 2007, when he accepted the retirement of General William Boykin, who had overseen the Pentagon's counterterrorism operations and command of the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers. Gates replaced him with Major General Richard Zahner, the NSA's director of signals intelligence. This, too, sent a strong message: Boykin have been one of the biggest proponents of dispatching Pentagon intelligence collectors abroad to gather information for future military operations, a practice that Gates and Clapper quickly ended in 2007. Now the military's covert operations would be run by a technocrat skilled in the classified arts of electronic eavesdropping and information sharing. Putting an NSA man loyal to the DNI in Boykin's place meant, first, no more ranting about Muslims following 'the devil'; and, second, someone whose loyalties were to the national agencies – the NSA, the NGA, and the NRO – rather than to the Pentagon."
(Spies for Hire, Tim Shorrock, pgs. 181-182)
During his time as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Boykin had gone to great lengths to increase the Pentagon's HUMINT (human intelligence) capabilities. As Jeremy Scahill reports in Dirty Wars, a staunch opponent of this process had been John O. Brennan. Indeed, Brennan and Clapper appear to have been at the forefront to reverse Bush II era intelligence reforms that Boykin had played a key role in launching. And here Brennan and Clapper are in an all out war with the Trump regime while Boykin remains close to Keith Kellogg, whom he has known for 35 years. It is also highly likely that Prince and Flynn have had dealings with Boykin during his tenure as Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence as well.


Boykin
These connections stretch coincidence and strongly imply that there is bad blood between the pro and anti Trump factions stretching back to at least the Bush II years. As such, I do believe the civil war is quite real, and both ideological and personal in nature. In the case of Trump's national security backers, the whole thing has the air of a revolt against the bureaucratic classes within the CIA and Pentagon from their former subordinates tasked with directly waging the empire's wars. Unfortunately for Brennan and the Clap, despite the numerous high level post they've held over the years, they do not seem to be as well versed in the dark arts as the empire's field operators. And this is hardly a surprise.

Epilogue: The FBI Revolt

In the theme of a revolt from below against the bureaucracy, something similar appears to be happening in the FBI. In the companion piece to this one, I noted the longtime associate both Trump and his political mentor, Roy Cohn, had with the Bureau. There I speculated that this relationship may have influenced the actions of Robert Mueller and James Comey in reversing Trump's political fortunes in 2019 and 2016, respectively.

But upon further research, I have found compelling evidence that Mueller and Comey were being pressured from below. Specifically, from the Bureau's New York field office. Within the FBI, there appears to be a similar divide between field agents and the Washington bureaucracy that I have outlined above within the CIA and Pentagon. Reportedly, the New York office is especially resentful of their superiors in Washington and this came to a head over the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Comey allegedly committed his October Surprise weeks before the 2016 election out of fear that the New York office would soon leak the recent discovery of emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop that were considered relevant into the ongoing Clinton email investigation.

Reportedly, factions within the New York FBI office were fanatically anti-Hillary and pro-Trump. This is interesting in light of Trump's longstanding relationship with mobster and longtime FBI informant Felix Sater. Sater has had dealings with The Trump Organization since the early 2000s, eventually becoming a crucial adviser around 2006 and would continue to work with the organization up until 2016. Sater also worked as an FBI informant for much of this time as well. When Sater was first "turned" during the late 1990s, his original handler was an FBI agent known as Leo Taddeo. At the time, Taddeo was working with the New York office, which he would continue to work (after doing some work overseas) with until 2015, at which point he was the Special Agent in Charge of New York's Cyber/Special Operations Division. Given that Sater has been based out of New York for decades now, it is likely he enjoyed an ongoing relationship with the New York office.


the FBI's New York field office
Isn't it interesting that a longtime business partner of Trump's happened to be an FBI informant with links to the New York office, the same New York office that played a crucial role in forcing Comey's October Surprise? And even more interesting is the fact that several crucial members of Special Council Robert Mueller's staff also had ample dealings with Sater over the years. And what if Sater was aware of damaging information from his time as an FBI informant working with these investigators? Certainly that would have effected Mueller's investigation, to put it mildly.

Final Thoughts

The more I look at these threads, the more convinced I become that Trump's election was driven by a revolt from the lower levels of the national security state against their DC overlords. Despite the tremendous resources these overlords have at their disposal via the neoliberal elite --including control of the media (both old school and social), academia, NGOs, most of the major cities in these United States, and so on --they're proven largely ineffectual at stemming this revolt. While this may seem surprising on the surface, the opposition largely consists of the men (and even a few women) tasked with enforcing the post-9/11 national security state. They have overseen repressive measures at home and toppled numerous countries at home throughout the twenty-first century. As such, Brennan, Clapper, Mueller, Comey, and their ilk are likely in for a very rude awakening.

As is the American public at large if this covert civil war spills out into the open.

[JackRiddler]

.

Excellent lesssons the corporate media will not be interested in learning, from a radio host I'm in love with.

LINK IS BETTER THAN MY ARCHVING OF IT!!!
https://fair.org/home/tips-for-a-post-m ... -skeptics/

But here's another spooky Yasha Levine cartoon.

fair.org
Tips for a Post-Mueller Media from Nine Russiagate Skeptics

by Katie Halper

So many in media got so much so wrong over the past two years as they put all of their eggs in the basket of Trump/Putin collusion in the 2016 election. I asked some Russiagate skeptics to share what they saw as the worst moments or biggest failings during the 22-month spree, and their tips for moving forward.

1. Encourage debate and dissent, not conspiracy theories and clicks.
—Aaron Maté, journalist, The Nation
Aaron Mate

Aaron Maté

I’ll never forget that Rachel Maddow did a segment where she called some alleged Russian trolls, interfering on Bernie Sanders’ fan club page, “international warfare against our country.” Jonathan Chait came out with a story about whether Trump was a Russian military intelligence agent, and then Chris Hayes put him on his program that night, and they discussed it as if this was a serious prospect.

January 2017, basically right as Trump was taking office, was the last time someone who was skeptical of Russiagate from the left was allowed on MSNBC, because in December of 2016, Ari Melber interviewed Glenn Greenwald. But that was the last time for Glenn. And January 2017 was the last time Matt Taibbi was on MSNBC. That means that basically, throughout this entire affair, throughout Trump’s presidency, MSNBC has not allowed on a single dissenting voice. That’s extraordinary. And what does that say about a political media culture, that it’s somehow a fringe position to question the conspiracy between the president and Russia?

So the only possible victory here for politics and journalism is if there’s accountability: On the journalism front, if we learn how to follow the facts, not a narrative that benefits ratings and gets us clicks; and in politics, if we actually learn to start becoming a real resistance, mounting opposition to Trump based on opposing his policies, not based on believing in this fairy tale.



2. Stop playing into Trump’s hands and stop smearing reporters.
—Matt Taibbi, journalist, Rolling Stone
Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi (image: BillMoyers.com)

People are already writing articles accusing me and other journalists of being smug and taking a “victory lap.” I don’t feel victorious! I’d settle for being able to write about this story without being called a traitor.

Because of the way the modern news landscape is divided, we’re really susceptible to groupthink and orthodoxies. Everyone settles on narratives, and it becomes forbidden to explore any alternative themes being pursued on the “other” media. With Russiagate, it was called “shilling for Trump” to wonder about whether any part of it was untrue. That makes it very hard for young reporters, especially, to challenge this.

The only way we could possibly lose with the public in a contest with someone like Trump is if we completely abdicated the standards of the profession and did what he accused us of doing, which would be politicizing our jobs and using trumped-up evidence to try to make him look bad. That was the one option out of an infinite number of ways we could have pursued covering his presidency. That was the one thing that could have really helped him. And we did it. Not only did we do it, but we did it, basically, to the exclusion of everything else, for years.



3. Stop spreading Russophobic paranoia.
—Yasha Levine, journalist, S.H.A.M.E. Project
Yasha Levine

Yasha Levine

The thing is that America’s media obsession with the Russian menace—this idea that Russia is the greatest threat to liberal civilization—predates the Mueller investigation. It predates the 2016 election, and it predates Trump. So this wasn’t a sudden mistake about a single investigation, but something that America’s been moving towards for over a decade. The Russian Menace has been a lucrative racket—paying the mortgages, car loans, kids’ college tuitions, for thousands of think-tankers, military contractors, academics and journalists.

After Trump, the Russia hysteria hit a new level of paranoia and bigotry. There was a need to blame America’s domestic political turmoil, and the failure of its political establishment, on someone or something—to deflect responsibility for what happened. So suddenly liberal media began to see “the Russians” everywhere—part of a shadowy foreign conspiracy to undermine America from within.

They weren’t just threatening Europe and NATO. They were in the White House, in American voting machines, in American electrical grids, in American children’s cartoons. They were hacking people’s minds. They were controlling both the international left and the international right—against the respectable political center. That’s how sneaky and devious and cynical they are. That’s how much they want to destroy America’s liberal democracy.

The Mueller report may provide us some much-needed respite from this insanity for a few weeks or months, but this focus on the Russian menace isn’t going away any time soon. You can already see Joe Biden’s creepy behavior with women being blamed on a devious Russian plot to help elect Bernie. So as we get closer to the election, this kind of stuff is gonna fire up again big time.

To treat this issue as a media problem that we “can solve” and “get right” in the future is a bit too optimistic, in my opinion. It assumes that our political and media establishment wants to actually “get it right.” What does getting it right mean, when they are the problem that needs to be corrected? To “get it right,” they’d have to admit that they’ve been wrong — not just about Mueller, but about the decades of bankrupt neoliberal politics they’ve been complicit in pushing on America and around the world. To get it right, our political and media elite would have to voluntarily deplatform itself. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon.



4. Talk to people with an actual understanding of history and Russia, not fake experts and uninformed pundits.
—Carl Beijer, writer
It’s remarkable how often the problems of Russiagate coverage came down to simple ignorance. From references to Russia as a “Communist” nation to basic translation errors, we’ve seen prominent pundits make mistakes that would embarrass a grade-school Muscovite.

This was in part a problem of people exaggerating their own credentials, but it was also a problem of the media deciding that no real expertise was needed. I don’t want to call for academic entry exams, but I think it’s clear that the media needs to move in the direction of treating Russian studies as a field of knowledge like any other. Do you speak the language? Have you spent more than a few weeks in the country? What and where have you published? Do you have a directly relevant professional background?

There are so many people who could give extraordinary answers to all of these questions, so it says everything about Russiagate when you look at who we heard from instead. From overt operatives to media hacks, corporate news is now overrun by pundits who function as PR professionals for the major parties. All of their professional and social incentives compel them to carry water for their party; if they happen to be right about a given issue, it’s purely by accident.

And with Russiagate, we saw the worst-case scenario play out: Republicans, who will defend Trump over anything, ended up being right—while Democrats, desperate to believe they had caught him in an impeachable crime, got it wrong. The only way around this problem, as far as I can tell, is to talk to pundits who are acting against their own political interests.

In this case, there were plenty of people in liberal-left media who clearly want to see Trump fail, but who were nevertheless Russiagate skeptics. Some of those voices were just being contrarians, of course, but some of them were acting from a place of conviction.


5. Don’t manipulate the truth to justify war.
—Rania Khalek, journalist, host of In the Now
Rania Khalek

Rania Khalek

From the start, we were warning people that pushing this evidence-free conspiracy theory was ultimately going to empower Trump. But even worse, it actually made the world a more dangerous place. In order to prove he wasn’t in bed with the Russians, the Trump administration pushed some of the most anti-Russia policies in the post Cold War-era, moving us closer to nuclear war and increasing the likelihood of more violence in places like Syria, Venezuela and Ukraine, all to prove that Trump isn’t Putin’s puppet.

This entire affair has also resurrected the careers of the neocons, who, until Trump came along, were largely disgraced for the horrors they inflicted on Iraq. Now they’ve been embraced by liberals for being anti-Trump, and they have more influence than ever. Not to mention the new McCarthyism that frames everything, from the NRA to white nationalism to even progressive advocacy groups that challenge the Democratic Party, as agents of the Kremlin, distorting everyone’s understanding of what’s going on today.

The Russiagate narrative has been a disaster, and it’s going to continue to be a disaster, because, despite being proven to be a sham, the corporate media and the corporate Democrats are still pushing it, distracting everyone from the real reasons for our miserable status quo.



6. Be skeptical toward government officials and other authorities.
—Branko Marcetic, journalist, Jacobin
Branko Marcetic

Branko Marcetic

The media seemed to replace caution and wariness with an overeager credulity towards those in power or positions of authority, whether it was the salacious, unproven tales collected by a British spy; the various false and misleading claims disseminated by mysterious, anonymous government officials; or perjury-tainted former intelligence officials asserting that Trump was being blackmailed or controlled by Putin. They seemed to forget the lessons of the Iraq War, that these people, too, have their own agendas and interests.

Given the dangers, and with allegations this wild—particularly the idea that Trump was wittingly doing Putin’s bidding, which is what this scandal has always been about—there was always good reason to be extra careful. Instead, some of those pushing this narrative actually chided people for being too skeptical.

It also would’ve helped if the press gave weight to countervailing views and to experts (Russian journalists, coincidentally, never bought into the scandal), focused less on Trump’s Putin-curious rhetoric than on his administration’s actual policies, and resisted the temptation to take an explicitly nationalistic standpoint when reporting.

It’s not too late to salvage the media’s reputation, but they’ll have to acknowledge what they got wrong, be transparent about how they plan to rectify it and prevent a repeat, and have at least some accountability. None of that seems to be on the menu right now.



7. Focus on the many actual crimes.
—Esha Krishnaswamy, lawyer, host of historic.ly podcast
Esha Krishnaswamy

Esha Krishnaswamy

“Collusion” is a vague word that is not defined as a crime in any federal statute. There are numerous other Trump crimes to focus on, such as soliciting contributions from a foreign national, computer fraud, wire fraud, bribery of a public official, conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to defraud the US, or even a violation of the emoluments clause.

We already know that a Saudi official paid for a “conference” and 500 rooms in Trump hotels. We know about the bizarre ties with a Turkish money-laundering case. Jared Kushner tried to get Qatar to bail him out on a bad building investment, and, when they refused, Trump took aim at Qatar. Trump cut ties with Qatar after the Saudi crown prince bragged that he had Jared Kushner in his pocket.

Since war criminals get a free pass, the media may not notice. But genocide is still illegal under international law (which the US doesn’t really subject itself to) and also under US law. Under 18 USC 1091, “transfers by force children of the group to another group” counts are genocide. During his brutal ICE detentions, Trump separated parents from children, and some of the children were adopted out.

But focusing on “collusion” allowed the media to peddle stories related to Facebook memes instead of talking about the issues, like how our elections are basically auctions to the highest bidder. Trump and Clinton spent nearly $2 billion each but instead of covering this, the media focused on whether or not a random Twitter account with eight followers interfered with bad memes.

The media ignored the brutal bloodbath in Yemen, the Rohingya situation in Myanmar. Domestically, they ignored wage stagnation, the rising prescription drug prices, housing foreclosures, the opioid epidemic.

The media promoted outright bigotry against Russian individuals. Maddow said, “These are the Russians in Davos.” Would she have done the same segment about any other group? “These are the Jews in Davos”?

They also sparked dangerous foreign policy, subjecting Trump to “tests” to prove that he wasn’t Putin’s puppet. Rachel Maddow encouraged NATO’s build-up in Ukraine. Many Democrats continued to encourage Trump to arm Azov Battalion (Nazis) in Ukraine. The only decent thing Trump tried to do was build peace with North Korea, and the media fear-mongered about that. As usual, they chose to push the “national security consensus” over the truth.



8. Pay attention to whom Trump is actually colluding with.
—Kyle Kulinski, host of the Kyle Kulinski Show
Kyle Kulinski

Kyle Kulinski

I’d say the worst example of media fails would be Maddow saying, what if Russia cut off the electricity to the middle of the country during the polar vortex. That’s just hysterical fear-mongering. I also hate the conflation of “attacking the country” with random low-level troll farms.

There’s also a concerted effort to not discuss the substance of the leaks on the DNC, and simply dismiss them because the source might be Russia. Would they do that if the leaks exposed corruption within the RNC? With 100 percent certainty, we can say no. This also gave Trump credibility, because when he screams “fake news” in the future, people won’t be as quick to reject it.

The media should focus on policy and how it impacts regular people. If they did, they would’ve spoken quite a bit about Trump’s dealings with predatory payday lenders. They donated a lot to his inauguration, and recently have been funneling him money through his golf courses. In return, he dropped an Obama-era lawsuit against them, and blocked implementation of new regulations. They’ll now make $7 billion off society’s most vulnerable. You can almost say it was “collusion” between Trump and the industry. Too bad MSNBC and CNN don’t care—and probably don’t even know—about it.



9. Stop fear-mongering and engaging in “acceptable” bigotry.
—Jimmy Dore, comedian, host of the Jimmy Dore Show
Jimmy Dore (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)

Jimmy Dore (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)

When Keith Olbermann pounded his fist on his table, screaming, “SCUM! RUSSIAN SCUM!!!” I couldn’t help but thinking, that’s the only nationality he could insert there and get away with it. He couldn’t scream “Mexican scum” or “Chinese scum” or “Indian scum.” Russian bigotry is, I think, the only acceptable bigotry among the liberal media. Totally acceptable to the liberal media.

Rachel Maddow telling her audience in the middle of a polar vortex that Russia controls their power grid and could freeze them all to death at a moment’s notice was by far the most egregious example of fear-mongering. But that’s not the only bad thing the media’s done. They’re currently pushing regime-change wars in Syria and Venezuela.

The corporate news will never regain my trust or redeem itself, because they are owned and funded by the people they’re supposed to be investigating and exposing, like the richest man in the world, for instance, Jeff Bezos. He controls 51 percent of all the internet sales in the United States, sits on a Pentagon board and has a $600 million deal with the CIA. That’s the guy running the news!

[liminalOyster]

Worth adding: be journalists and break with jingoistic convention/expectation and be unafraid to actually report on Trump/Israel/Kushner/Bibi as well as the Saudi family. If you liked Russiagate, you're going to love what you find.

[Wombaticus Rex]

No, that is not me but thank you. Visup is a superb resource and a careful writer.