The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 23, 2019 3:17 pm

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liminalOyster » Sat Mar 23, 2019 1:16 pm wrote:The lionization of Robert Mueller is quite a thing to behold, btw.



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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Sat Mar 23, 2019 5:59 pm

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 23, 2019 6:47 pm

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And here we are. An able autopsy by Taibbi. I wish I could feel Schadenfreude and satisfaction in the I told you so. I did tell you so, starting in 2016. But I don't feel anything good about this. This has been a tragic waste of terrible consequence. Two years of opposition energy have been channeled into Cold War fantasy, legitimation of the bloody empire, and now the vindication of Trump. It never had to be.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagat ... -a-million

taibbi.substack.com

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD


Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.

The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, not an act of faith.

The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him, a tune featuring the rhymey line, “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”

The Times story today tried to at least preserve Santa Mueller’s reputation, noting Trump’s Attorney General William Barr’s reaction was an “endorsement” of the fineness of Mueller’s work:

In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.

Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia “contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections.

But even the Times, in a separate piece by Peter Baker, noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:

It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole…

This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also just ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question. He asked, “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic error by betting so heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that perhaps thanks to this story is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…

Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.

The betrayal narrative was not reported at first as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have “leverages of pressure” on Trump.

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.”

Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the Trump campaign was “in on the deal” to help Russians with the leak.

None of this has been walked back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”

Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

#Russiagate debuted as a media phenomenon in mid-summer, 2016. The roots of the actual story, i.e. when the multi-national investigation began, go back much further, to the previous year at least. Oddly, that origin tale has not been nailed down yet, and blue-state audiences don’t seem terribly interested in it, either.

By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been funded by the Democratic National Committee through the law firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS), were already in the ether.

The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

Some early stories, like a July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called “Putin’s Puppet,” outlined future Steele themes in “circumstantial” form. But the actual dossier, while it influenced a number of pre-election Trump-Russia news stories (notably one by Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be used in a FISA warrant application), didn’t make it into print for a while.

Though it was shopped to at least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no one bit, for the good reason that news organizations couldn’t verify its “revelations.”

The Steele claims were explosive if true. The ex-spy reported Trump aide Carter Page had been offered fees on a big new slice of the oil giant Rosneft if he could help get sanctions against Russia lifted. He also said Trump lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague for “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers.”

Most famously, he wrote the Kremlin had kompromat of Trump “deriling” [sic] a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama by “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show.”

This was too good of a story not to do. By hook or crook, it had to come out. The first salvo was by David Corn of Mother Jones on October 31, 2016: “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

The piece didn’t have pee, Prague, or Page in it, but it did say Russian intelligence had material that could “blackmail” Trump. It was technically kosher to print because Corn wasn’t publishing the allegations themselves, merely that the FBI had taken possession of them.

A bigger pretext was needed to get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four intelligence officials presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect Trump and outgoing President Obama.

From his own memos, we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern for Trump’s welfare, told the new President he was just warning him about what was out there, as possible blackmail material:

I wasn’t saying [the Steele report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold [sic].

Comey’s generous warning to Trump about not providing a “news hook,” along with a promise to keep it all “close-held,” took place on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment.

Even Donald Trump was probably smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first broke the story of “Classified documents presented last week to Trump” on January 10.

At the same time, Buzzfeed made the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate phenomenon as a never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.

Comey was right. We couldn’t have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.

This same trick is found in politics. A similar trajectory drove negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation by the FBI for underage sex crimes (although some were skeptical). The initial story didn’t hold up, but led to other investigations.

Same with the so-called “Arkansas project,” in which millions of Republican-friendly private research dollars produced enough noise about the Whitewater scandal to create years of headlines about the Clintons. Swiftboating was another example. Private oppo isn’t inherently bad. In fact it has led to some incredible scoops, including Enron. But reporters usually know to be skeptical of private info, and figure the motives of its patrons into the story.

The sequence of events in that second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now know, from his own testimony, that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had some kind of role in helping CNN do its report, presumably by confirming part of the story, perhaps through an intermediary or two (there is some controversy over whom exactly was contacted, and when).

Why would real security officials help litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world’s most powerful investigative agencies acting like they were trying to move a stock, pushing an private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could see had factual issues? It made no sense at the time, and makes less now.

In January of 2017, Steele’s pile of allegations became public, read by millions. “It is not just unconfirmed,” Buzzfeed admitted. “It includes some clear errors.”

Buzzfeed’s decision exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing material whose veracity you doubt. Although a few media ethicists wondered at it, this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith is still proud of his decision today. I think this was because many reporters believed the report was true.

When I read the report, I was in shock. I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction (I should know: I write fourth-rate suspense fiction). Moreover it seemed edited both for public consumption and to please Steele’s DNC patrons.

Steele wrote of Russians having a file of “compromising information” on Hillary Clinton, only this file supposedly lacked “details/evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior” or “embarrassing conduct.”

We were meant to believe the Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an empty kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the reading public.

There were other curious lines, including the bit about Russians having “moles” in the DNC, plus some linguistic details that made me wonder at the nationality of the report author.

Still, who knew? It could be true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would need a lot of confirming. This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20, 2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From Schiff’s opening statement:

According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft… Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company.

I was stunned watching this. It’s generally understood that members of congress, like reporters, make an effort to vet at least their prepared remarks before making them public.

But here was Schiff, telling the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in Rosneft – a company with a $63 billion market capitalization – in a secret meeting with a Russian oligarch who was also said to be “a KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s.”

(Schiff meant “FSB agent.” The inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became increasingly maddening over time. Donna Brazile still hasn’t deleted her tweet about how “The Communists are now dictating the terms of the debate.” )

Schiff’s speech raised questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the subject is tied to Russiagate? What if Page hadn’t done any of these things? To date, he hasn’t been charged with anything. Shouldn’t a member of congress worry about this?

A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in his reports. In a written submission, Steele said his information was “raw” and “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified.” He also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report “with the intention that it be republished to the world at large.”

That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele’s British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times.

I contacted Schiff’s office to ask if the congressman if he knew about Steele’s admission that his report needed verifying, and if that changed his view of it at all. The response (emphasis mine):

The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and which was leaked publicly several months ago contains information that may be pertinent to our investigation. This is true regardless of whether it was ever intended for public dissemination. Accordingly, the Committee hopes to speak with Mr. Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of the allegations contained in the dossier.

Schiff had not spoken to Steele before the hearing, and read out the allegations knowing they were unsubstantiated.

The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start.

For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there. Post reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to run down” the Cohen story.

“We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there,” he said, “and came away empty.”

This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen’s name in a hotel ledger, it would have been on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn’t get a mention in Miller’s own paper. He only told the story during a discussion aired by C-SPAN about a new book he’d published. Only The Daily Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.

It was the same when Bob Woodward said, “I did not find [espionage or collusion]… Of course I looked for it, looked for it hard.”

The celebrated Watergate muckraker – who once said he’d succumbed to “groupthink” in the WMD episode and added, “I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder” – didn’t push very hard here, either. News that he’d tried and failed to find collusion didn’t get into his own paper. It only came out when Woodward was promoting his book Fear in a discussion with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.

When Michael Cohen testified before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same. Few commercial news outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to congress on national television about this issue?

There was a CNN story, but the rest of the coverage was all in conservative outlets – the National Review, Fox, The Daily Caller. The Washington Post’s response was to run an editorial sneering at “How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s testimony.”

Perhaps worst of all was the episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already been part of one strange tale: the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind who was supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.

In its FISA application, the FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff’s September 23, 2016 Yahoo! story, “U.S. Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The Isikoff story, which claimed Page had met with “high ranking sanctioned officials” in Russia, had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.

This was similar to a laundering technique used in the WMD episode called “stove-piping,” i.e. officials using the press to “confirm” information the officials themselves fed the reporter.

But there was virtually no non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington Post story pooh-poohing the issue. (Every news story that casts any doubt on the collusion issue seems to meet with an instantaneous “fact check” in the Post.) The Post insisted the FISA issue wasn’t serious among other things because Steele was not the “foundation” of Isikoff’s piece.

Isikoff was perhaps the reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones, who also dealt with the ex-spy, wrote a bestselling book that relied upon theories from Steele, Russian Roulette, including a rumination on the “pee” episode. Yet Isikoff in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out to be “mostly false.”

Once again, this only came out via a podcast, John Ziegler’s “Free Speech Broadcasting” show. Here’s a transcript of the relevant section:

Isikoff: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we have not seen the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven, and are likely false.

Ziegler: That’s...

Isikoff: I think it’s a mixed record at best at this point, things could change, Mueller may yet produce evidence that changes this calculation. But based on the public record at this point I have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been borne out.

Ziegler: That’s interesting to hear you say that, Michael because as I’m sure you know, your book was kind of used to validate the pee tape, for lack of a better term.

Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and that was the visit that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this raunchy Las Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called “Hot For Teacher” in which dancers posing as college Co-Ed’s urinated – or simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence at best. I think, you know, it is not implausible that event may have inspired...

Ziegler: An urban legend?

Isikoff: ...allegations that appeared in the Steele dossier.

Isikoff delivered this story with a laughing tone. He seamlessly transitioned to what he then called the “real” point, i.e. “the irony is Steele may be right, but it wasn’t the Kremlin that had sexual kompromat on Donald Trump, it was the National Enquirer.”

Recapping: the reporter who introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to reference him as a source), who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as “validating” the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn’t matter because Stormy Daniels, etc.

Another story of this type involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and Buzzfeed over the mention their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009 post on CNN’s "iReports” page.

Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who’d been fact-checked, Steele replied, “I do not.”

This comical detail was similar to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq invasion had been plagiarized in part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University, not even by intelligence people, but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair’s press office.

There were so many profiles of Steele as an “astoundingly diligent” spymaster straight out of LeCarre: he was routinely described like a LeCarre-ian grinder like the legendary George Smiley, a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied by his “average,” “neutral,” “quiet,” demeanor, being “more low-key than Smiley.” One would think it might have rated a mention that our “Smiley” was cutting and pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.

That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.

This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

This has been the main difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David Remnick’s post-invasion protestations that “nobody got [WMD] completely right,” the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get it right, and protested on the streets. There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press landscape from the start, with people like Jack Shafer tearing apart every Judith Miller story in print. Most reporters are Democrats and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there was political space for protest.

Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.

Early in the scandal, I appeared on To The Point, a California-based public radio show hosted by Warren Olney, with Corn of Mother Jones. I knew David a little and had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington. In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:

So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true…? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn’t happen. I think that’s looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

I wrote him later and suggested that since we’re in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding “things that may not be true,” maybe we had different responsibilities than “Democrats”? He wrote back:

Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that's just not high on my personal list.

Other reporters spoke of an internal struggle. When the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency was met with exultation in the media, New Yorker writer Adrian Chen, who broke the original IRA story, was hesitant to come forward with some mild qualms about the way the story was being reported:

“Either I could stay silent and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat,” he said, “or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies.”

After writing, “Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic,” poor Blake Hounsell of Politico took such a beating on social media, he ended up denouncing himself a year later.

“What I meant to write is, I wasn’t skeptical,” he said.

Years ago, in the midst of the WMD affair, Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper’s standard had moved from “Don’t get it first, get it right” to “Get it first and get it right.” From there, Okrent wrote, “the next devolution was an obvious one.”

We’re at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.

In some cases the stories are only partly wrong, as in the case of the famed “17 intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking” story (it was actually four: the Director of National Intelligence “hand-picking” a team from the FBI, CIA, and NSA).

In other cases the stories were blunt false starts, resulting in ugly sets of matching headlines:

“Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility”

Washington Post, December 31, 2016.

“Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility”

Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2017.

“Trump Campaign Aides had repeated contacts with Russian Intelligence,” published by the Times on Valentine’s Day, 2017, was an important, narrative-driving “bombshell” that looked dicey from the start. The piece didn’t say whether the contact was witting or unwitting, whether the discussions were about business or politics, or what the contacts supposedly were at all.

Normally a reporter would want to know what the deal is before he or she runs a story accusing people of having dealings with foreign spies. “Witting” or “Unwitting” ought to be a huge distinction, for instance. It soon after came out that people like former CIA chief John Brennan don’t think this is the case. “Frequently, people who are on a treasonous path do not know they’re on a treasonous path,” he said, speaking of Trump’s circle.

This seemed a dangerous argument, the kind of thing that led to trouble in the McCarthy years. But let’s say the contacts were serious. From a reporting point of view, you’d still need to know exactly what the nature of such contacts were before you run that story, because the headline implication is grave. Moreover you’d need to know it well enough to report it, i.e. it’s not enough to be told a convincing story off-the-record, you need to be able to share with readers enough so that they can characterize the news themselves.

Not to the Times, which ran the article without the specifics. Months later, Comey blew up this “contacts” story in public, saying, “in the main, it was not true.“

As was the case with the “17 agencies” error, which only got fixed when Clapper testified in congress and was forced to make the correction under oath, the “repeated contacts” story was only disputed when Comey testified in congress, this time before the Senate Intelligence Committee. How many other errors of this type are waiting to be disclosed?

Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump “as a candidate” instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross was suspended.

Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of other individuals’ records. Fortune said C-SPAN was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran the story, and it’s still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own “internal routing error” likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.

CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network’s journalists resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.

In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction.

The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.

The Times ran this quote high up:

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:

We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet…

The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was “not convinced” on the whole “bot thing.”

But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.

Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.

With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.

But a judge threw out the sex charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.

It’s pretty hard to undo public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in the New York Times.

Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn’t I believe them?

How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.

As noted before, from World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the “missile gap” that wasn’t (the “gap” was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the smears of people like Martin Luther King, it’s a wonder newspapers listen to whispers from government sources at all.

In the Reagan years National Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist plots to The Wall Street Journal and other papers. In the Bush years, Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.

The New York Times ran a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or “just five months before the terrorist attacks.” The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed shaky because American officials were putting the sourcing first on foreign intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in subsequent TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits and then selling reports as independent confirmation.

It wasn’t until three years later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed the Atta-in-Prague canard (why is it always Prague?) in a story entitled “No evidence of meeting with Iraqi.” By then, of course, it was too late. The Times also held a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,” until days after war started. This is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.

This failure to demand specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been involved. One of the biggest “revelations” of this era involved a story that was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian’s Luke Harding) and followed up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker). The key detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.

Mayer’s piece, the March 12, 2018 “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” in the New Yorker, impacted the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials of the dossier author. But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan, then-head of the GCHQ (the British analog to the NSA) intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.

When I read that, a million questions came to mind, but first: what did “illicit” mean?

If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?

I asked the Guardian: “Was any attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence of these communications confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear these intercepts, or transcripts?”

Their one-sentence reply:

The Guardian has strict and rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.

That’s the kind of answer you’d expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.

I asked Mayer the same questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had originally been broken by Harding, whose own report said “the precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public.”

She added that “afterwards I independently confirmed aspects of [Harding’s piece] with several well-informed sources,” and “spent months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice for it.” But, she wrote, “the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive national security issues, is difficult.”

I can only infer she couldn’t find out what “illicit” meant despite proper effort. The detail was published anyway. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were “illicit” contacts between Trump and Russians in early 2015 or before. But if there were such contacts, I can’t think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from the public.

If authorities can share reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American voters not be so entitled? Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret to protect sources and methods and “tradecraft” (half the press corps became expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like “SIGINT” like they’ve known them their whole lives), why are we leaking news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheering Trump’s win?

Failure to ask follow-up questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports that went sideways involved a similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked DNC emails were forgeries.

MSNBC’s “Intelligence commentator” Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable #Russiagate news this side of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch, tweeted on October 11, 2016: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”

As noted in The Intercept and elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of David Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host Joy Reid. The reports didn’t stop until roughly October of 2016, among other things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting to reporters the emails were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had been demanded from the Clinton campaign earlier.

Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they’ve told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign. “I can deny it,” he said.

It soon after came out this wasn’t true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he’d had his “wires tapped.” Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of “incidental” surveillance.

Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn’t know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely. Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.

Reporters repeatedly got burned and didn’t squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the scads of anonymous “people familiar with the matter” who put reporters in awkward spots in the last years? Why isn’t McClatchy demanding the heads of whatever “four people with knowledge” convinced them to double down on the Cohen-in-Prague story?

Why isn’t every reporter who used “New Knowledge” as a source about salacious Russian troll stories out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling? How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?

How do the Guardian’s editors not already have Harding’s head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most dubious un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I’d be dragging Harding’s “well placed source” into the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.

The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources. Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.

Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route?

This posture all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan – the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that “work”?

This catalogue of factual errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at why the “MSM” became a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.

A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called “connecting the dots.” This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would never be permitted in normal times.

Such was the case with Jonathan Chait’s #Russiagate opus, “PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his Counterpart – or his Handler?” The story was also pitched as “What if Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987,” which recalls the joke from The Wire: “Yo, Herc, what if your mother and father never met?” What if isn’t a good place to be in this business.

This cover story (!) in New York magazine was released in advance of a planned “face-to-face” summit between Trump and Putin, and posited Trump had been under Russian control for decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back “fired up with political ambition.” He offered the possibility that this was a coincidence, but added:

Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely.

I searched the Chait article up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a Russian agent dating back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters, Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.

Only two facts in the piece could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a visiting Soviet official in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That’s it. That’s your cover story.

Worse, Chait’s theory was first espoused in Lyndon Larouche’s “Elephants and Donkeys” newsletter in 1987, under a headline, “Do Russians have a Trump card?” This is barrel-scraping writ large.

It’s a mania. Putin is literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we’re lucky, New York might someday admit its report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just because it seems absurd on its face, but because its source is the same “New Knowledge” group that admitted to faking Russian influence operations in Alabama.

But what retraction is possible for the Washington Post headline, “How will Democrats cope if Putin starts playing dirty tricks for Bernie Sanders (again)?” How to reverse Rachel Maddow’s spiel about Russia perhaps shutting down heat across America during a cold wave? There’s no correction for McCarthyism and fearmongering.

This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

It’s hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by the intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.

We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.

The WMD mess had massive real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and trillions in lost taxpayer dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear conflict, we’re unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.

Still, Russiagate has led to unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left, right, and in between in the name of preventing the “sowing of discord.” The story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates River from one another, two amped-up nuclear powers at a crossroads.

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 23, 2019 7:39 pm

.

Belligerent Savant » Sat Dec 16, 2017 11:03 pm wrote:.
Spoiler alert:

This Mueller sideshow ("investigation") will result in no substantive result -- certainly not an impeachment.

After the smoke clears (or rather, the stage hosting this production drops its curtain), if I'm proven wrong I'll happily never post here again.


Unfortunately for you all, I (along with a number of other folks in here and elsewhere) was/were right.

(Edited for more 'inclusion', per JR's response below)
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Sat Mar 23, 2019 7:44 pm

I predict that Seth Abramson's tweet-sagas will grow steadily longer to the point of achieving perpetual tweet-motion with each day that now passes and possibly continuing for the rest of his life.

Also Taibbi is on fire today:

It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009 post on CNN’s "iReports” page.Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who’d been fact-checked, Steele replied, “I do not.”

There were so many profiles of Steele as an “astoundingly diligent” spymaster straight out of LeCarre: he was routinely described like a LeCarre-ian grinder like the legendary George Smiley, a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied by his “average,” “neutral,” “quiet,” demeanor, being “more low-key than Smiley.” One would think it might have rated a mention that our “Smiley” was cutting and pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 23, 2019 9:03 pm

.

Yes. So much of the above Taibbi article (posted by JR) can be re-quoted it'd quickly become redundant.

This bit is telling, however:
Taibbi:
It doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.


...shouldn't be a revelation to those frequenting this board.

And yet...
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Mar 24, 2019 3:35 am

Belligerent Savant » Sat Mar 23, 2019 6:39 pm wrote:.

Belligerent Savant » Sat Dec 16, 2017 11:03 pm wrote:.
Spoiler alert:

This Mueller sideshow ("investigation") will result in no substantive result -- certainly not an impeachment.

After the smoke clears (or rather, the stage hosting this production drops its curtain), if I'm proven wrong I'll happily never post here again.


Unfortunately for you all, I was right.


You, me, the majority of the posters here, a certain Mr. Jeff Wells of Facebookland agreeing, etc. etc. etc. I seriously have never been so unmoved, at least positively, by receiving the inevitable confirmation that I was right on a supposed debate of the time. What's the fun in watching a car crash unfold in slow motion for two years finally come to a standstill? Also, oh yeah, we're in the car. But it's important not to crow, but to insist on the lesson.

Who were the drivers? An MI6 veteran hired for opposition research. The braintrust of the Clinton campaign, the likes of Neera Tanden and Podesta, and the campaign's suspect contractor (Crowdstrike) hired to establish the hack story. Brennan, Clapper and sometimes Comey: CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Sec with their ludicrous "reports." A cluster of "Transatlantic" spook-universe disinformation fronts (GMF, NK, II, etc.) with a bit of Ukrainian diaspora flourish. Frum, Boot and Kristol, primary players of the Iraq war propaganda embraced as Friends of the Democrats. Soon enough everyone wanted to drive, the whole non-FOX corporate media and the #Russiagate blogosphere cottage industry jumped in for a long haul. Some big, some small, the self-appointed Treason Inquisitors arose, or rather played themselves as such on TV and Twitter: Corn, Maddow, Tribe, Mensch, Wheeler, etc. Abramson, who I somehow missed until now. Like a wave of religious revival preachers. Who cares about a planet on fire? Who cares that there's an actual Trump-Pence regime one could fight instead, or an actual Trumpian history of business crime already exposed in decades worth of real journalism? Whole committees and agencies hunted for the perpetrators of Facebook memes and gunloving Russian grad students who introduced division and strife to America.

Who were the passengers, besides everybody? Who were the real victims, the target audience. Everyone appalled rightly by Trump but incapable of letting go of the idea that the opposition must always mean Democrats, or Clinton. Everyone who fell for the hope of a legalist solution handed down by the former chief of the COINTELPRO agency. Who were the beneficiaries, it is now evident, though it was always in the cards? Trump himself. The supposed target. The people of MAGA.

And here is the great hope, a man who in 2003 delivered these words:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTDO-kuOGTQ

It's March again. NEVER FORGET.

This was posted by Mr. Wells:

Derrick O'Keefe wrote:
March 21 at 7:31 AM

I love the first day of Spring so much and then always remember that this is the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. So many of the global horrors we're confronting now trace back to it. Let's never forget that massive crime - for which no one was ever held responsible.

With impunity comes societal amnesia, so we have to work at reminding ourselves about this world historic crime that happened just 16 years ago. Only in such an ahistorical, instant-disposable culture could a Donald Trump come to power, and could a David Frum front as 'resistance.'

We fought like hell to stop the Iraq War. Feb. 15, 2003 was the largest coordinated global protest ever. The night the war started, here in Vancouver a few dozen of us were meeting at the Maritime Labour Centre to plan an emergency response demonstration. In mid-discussion someone's cell phone rang -- the invasion had started. Within an hour hundreds had gathered and eventually a bigger crowd marched angrily to the U.S. Consulate, where across the street a Peace Camp and a makeshift memorial for Rachel Corrie had been set up in the park. Once I'd lost my voice that night I remember a few of us going into one of the fancy hotel bars nearby to watch CNN and see the first images of Shock and Awe. We didn't order a drink, just stood and stared.

The simplistic/defeatist line that set in pretty quickly was that that movement was just proof that protest doesn't work. But I really think that's totally wrong. The protests did work, but didn't go far enough such as into general strikes (although Spain and a few other places saw major labour actions). In most countries movements and sympathetic political forces couldn't quite tip the scales. But remember we kind of did tip the scales here. The 250K+ marching in Montreal was a big reason the Liberal government of the day decided against signing Canada up as a full partner with mass deployment to Iraq. (The movement drove the Canadian state's war contribution underground.)

All this to say we need a much stronger and internationalist anti-war movement again today. We didn't stop the crime but our side was right, and the movements we built showed the previously unimaginable potential of global mobilization in the digital age. Everyone working on climate justice needs to play a part in the revival of anti-war movements, or a stronger convergence of these causes. We'll never solve the climate emergency without dismantling imperialism and militarism.



.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Jerky » Sun Mar 24, 2019 6:43 am

All you guys gloating (even those who are just humble-bragging) are being way, WAAAY premature. You're like all those neoconservatives who were laughing at the doomsayers claiming Iraq would be tough, after it turned out to be the proverbial "cakewalk"...

Or, at least, that's how they were behaving in the months after the invasion. As the years ground on and the American death-toll surpassed that of 9/11 (not to mention the civilian casualties), they slowly began to change their tune, to the point where now you can hardly find a one of them who claims they ever supported that damn war in the first fucking place.

Taibbi, whom I otherwise admire, is all wet here.

Somebody pre-emptively mocked Seth Abramson's (excellent, informative) tweet storm in response to all the panicking and gloating, apparently for being too long. It's got a lot more valid info than Taibbi's premature toldyaso BS. I post the whole thing here and now, because I didn't notice if anyone else had.

Here it is:

BREAKING NEWS: Mueller has sent a report to DOJ that DOJ is representing is "comprehensive" and will shortly be publicly summarized. A lot of the reporting surrounding this major event is *wrong*—so I'll try to report things accurately. I hope you'll read on and retweet.

1/ At the risk of sounding like Mike Myers' famous SNL talk-show host Linda Richman, "Mueller's final Trump-Russia report" is neither "Mueller's," final, about "Trump-Russia" or a "report." So all the breathless "reporting" today suggesting otherwise is inaccurate and misleading.

2/ What we call the "Trump-Russia" investigation is a web of criminal, counterintelligence, and Congressional investigations that intersect with the work of the Special Counsel's Office. So there are three key "c"-words here—"criminal," "counterintelligence," and "Congressional."

3/ Special Counsel Mueller is part of the "criminal" investigation; Mueller's work *intersects* with the "counterintelligence" investigation; and his work feeds into and draws from the Congressional investigation. And here's the key: all three of these investigations are ongoing.

4/ As part of the "criminal" investigation, Mueller investigated some things his office then prosecuted; he investigated some things his office handed off to others; he investigated some things he chose not to prosecute; he investigated some things he is letting Congress handle.

5/ Mueller's "criminal" investigations—that is, the information he derived during his nearly 24 months of *criminal investigative work*—then fed directly into multiple "counterintelligence" investigations and will undoubtedly feed into many ongoing "Congressional" investigations.

6/ The news we got today is that Mueller will not *himself* be bringing any more indictments. That's it. That's *all* that has just happened. Any reporting that says the "Russia probe is done" is false. Any reporting that "Mueller's work is done" is false. It is only what I said.

7/ Focusing *exclusively* on what Mueller's office will be doing going forward and *exclusively* on the criminal investigation—so, a small part of what we somewhat misleadingly call the "Trump-Russia scandal"—we can see that Mueller may be done indicting (*maybe*) but that's it.

8/ As of today, Mueller had ten attorneys working for him (himself not included, I believe) down from seventeen originally. But we found out this week that certain attorneys who "left" his Office will *still be doing work for it*. Why? Because the Office has some work left to do.

9/ That Office, whether still formally constituted or not, will see its attorneys prosecute Roger Stone in November, eight months from now. It will see its cooperating witness Rick Gates participate in "multiple" ongoing federal criminal investigations. And that's just the start:

10/ The Office will see its cooperating witness Mike Flynn testify in the Kian trial in July (Kian was a NatSec official on Trump's transition team whose case intersects with all the other parts of the Trump-Russia investigation). Flynn is also involved in *multiple* other cases.

11/ The Office will continue to pursue grand jury testimony from a Roger Stone witness, and continue to pursue a substantial trove of documents (for its grand jury, which is seated through July as far as was last reported) from an as-yet unnamed state-owned foreign corporation.

12/ The Office has—it appears—referred to DOJ for prosecution at least one man it previously promised to prosecute (Corsi) and presumably has referred to DOJ for *possible* prosecution a whole host of "Trumpworld" figures who Congress has recently accused of perjuring themselves.

13/ We also heard from major media over the past few weeks that Bob Mueller's office was referring out an unknown number of new cases to other federal prosecutors, including presumably—based on past cooperation and information-sharing practices—prosecutors in SDNY, EDVA, and DC.

14/ We *also* know from major media that there are many ongoing cases for which Mueller's office conducted some of the investigation, all of the investigation, or shared information with the case's primary investigators, such as Cohen's SDNY cases and the Maria Butina case in DC.

15/ What some in the media decided—I do not know why—is that the only cases they would associate with Mueller would be (a) indictments Mueller's office brought, (b) that were completed before he issued any report to the DOJ, and (c) immediately (on their face) involved collusion.

16/ So you have reporters today blithely saying that "Mueller is done" when Mueller will be prosecuting Roger Stone for most of 2019. You have reporters saying "he's done" when cases he initiated are not only ongoing in multiple jurisdictions but may well provide new intel there.

17/ If Roger Stone decides to cooperate—before or after conviction—that's Mueller. The same is true for Kian. The same is even true for Manafort (who can cooperate to reduce his sentence for the next year). But the same is also true for the many cases Gates and Flynn are working.

18/ The same is true for Butina. And for indictments that arise from the ongoing counterintelligence investigation(s). Or any new criminal referrals that go from Congress to DOJ. The same is true for cases Mueller began—that then went elsewhere—that could lead to new indictments.

19/ So Mueller has indicated not just all the charges he himself brought, but all those he sent elsewhere that we know of and all those he sent elsewhere that we *don't* know of. As for the "counterintelligence" investigation—quite possibly still ongoing—we'll get nothing at all.

20/ There may then be *another* category in what Mueller has submitted which includes cases he referred back to Main Justice. And a final category (possibly) that includes cases he suggests be referred to Congress because an indictment is impossible (e.g., cases involving Trump).

21/ As to what Mueller will do with one other category—inculpatory evidence he discovered involving potential offenses he regarded as outside his purview—I have no idea whether those will be in the report, were sent to other federal prosecutors, or will be given to Main Justice.

22/ What we have today are a large number of non-attorney journalists who don't understand what a *small part* of the big picture is being dealt with and discussed today because they want to believe they have a handle on a story they do *not* have a handle on. That's distressing.

23/ Imagine that tomorrow Bijan Kian says, "I saw things on the national security team during the transition—I want to talk." Imagine Stone says that. Imagine that any of the cases Mueller's cooperating witnesses are working on now—including Gates and Flynn—beget new indictments.

24/ Under those circumstances, what would today's too-oft-heard pronouncement—"no new indictments"—even mean? Or what would it mean if any of the cases Mueller referred to SDNY, EDVA, DC, state courts, or Main Justice—whether in the past or just recently—lead to new indictments?

25/ What if the counterintelligence cases that do not appear to have been subsumed by Mueller's investigation return to the criminal sphere in the future as new indictments? What if Congressional investigations spurred by Mueller's work produce new evidence, and then indictments?

26/ Thus—given all this—my statement that this investigation isn't "Mueller's." It now resides within—besides, still, Mueller's grand jury—the Stone case, the Kian case, Gates' cases, Flynn's cases, Cohen's cases, SDNY, EDVA, DC, NYCDA, NYAG, Main Justice, FBI, CIA, and Congress.

27/ And "new indictments" in *any* of those spheres may not be prosecuted by Mueller himself—but they will be the product of his work and the fact that his investigation has unleashed a snowstorm of legal hurt upon Donald Trump the likes of which no president has previously seen.

28/ This explains, too, why "final"—applied to today's "report"—is false. There is only a finality to Mueller himself bringing new indictments (with the exception that many things could happen that *would've* led to new indictments for Mueller that he'll now allow DOJ to handle).

29/ But Mueller did something else for America that we are only just beginning to appreciate: news stories tracking down what Mueller was working on informed us that what we call "Trump-Russia" isn't really "Trump-Russia" at all—that Trump's malfeasance goes *well* beyond Russia.

30/ That is, no matter the scope of what Mueller "reports," we know he investigated—and may have sent to other prosecutors outside Main Justice—data on pre-election Trump collusion with Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, and Qatar: all intersecting with Russian collusion.

31/ The extent to which Mueller pursued these leads is partly mandate-based and partly due to the imposition of urgency upon his work by voters, media, politicians, possibly DOJ itself. Investigation of these other courses of collusion—many quite baroque—can't be wrapped up soon.

32/ So for instance, major media reported that Mueller was looking into Trump-Saudi collusion—and soon after Representative Schiff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence picked up that thread, and will pursue it even if Mueller left it out of his "report" to DOJ.

33/ I keep putting "report" in quotes because what Mueller has made is a "report" by DOJ *regs* but not as we generally understand the term: it is not a conclusive statement that addresses all complexities of a given issue. It is a narrow perspective on a single subset of issues.

34/ DOJ can't charge someone with something *or discuss in much detail that they considered doing so*—or perhaps even *any* detail—unless they can prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt: with 90%+ certainty. But would a full "report" tell us there was 78% proof of conspiracy?

35/ To put this in concrete terms: If Mueller found 81% proof that Trump criminally conspired with the Kremlin, it's entirely possible you wouldn't find that anywhere in any "report" Mueller files. Would you then call that a full and final "report on conspiracy"? No—you wouldn't.

36/ Just so if Mueller had 78% proof Trump Jr. perjured himself. Or 86% proof Erik Prince did. Or 69% proof that Kushner committed espionage. That's all stuff you'd like to know—and that we'd expect in any "report" deserving that name on those topics—but you wouldn't see it here.

37/ To be clear, this isn't sour grapes—as the fact that this intel *won't* be in this "report" media is over-hyping only means that, instead, you will see this 78% (or 86%, or 69%) proof of harrowing federal felonies *paraded before Congress on your TV screen at home*. And more:

38/ It will *continue* to be—invisible to you and me—the subject of ongoing investigations by the FBI/CIA such that, if/when proof of Kushner committing espionage (say) goes from 69% to 90%, it *will* reappear in the criminal justice system as a "new indictment." You bet it will.

39/ So when I say "Mueller's final Trump-Russia report" is neither Mueller's, final, "Trump-Russia," or a report, I mean it—it isn't any of those things. That doesn't mean it's not an important milestone in an historic test of our rule of law, democracy, and civic fabric—it *is*.

40/ We're not jurors—we don't need 90%+ proof of conspiring with Russia to find a POTUS unfit or shun Kushner the rest of his life. My book PROOF OF COLLUSION—and upcoming book PROOF OF CONSPIRACY—establish these things at the high level of certainty informed citizenship demands.

41/ As for offenses underlying collusion and conspiracy—obstruction, witness tampering, perjury, bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, RICO and more—as to both Donald Trump *and* his family and aides I have every reason to believe such investigations and cases proceed onward.

42/ As for collusion and conspiracy—the latter a charge in itself, the former chargeable when it arises in conduct qualifying as conspiracy, aiding/abetting, bribery, fraud or even offenses like obstruction—there's *another* group that isn't jurors requiring 90%+ proof: Congress.

43/ PROOF OF COLLUSION and PROOF OF CONSPIRACY—taken together as a duology of Trump/Trumpworld treachery—make a fulsome case for impeachment in the context of the offenses alleged being national security threats no Congress can demand 90%+ proof of for an impeachment to proceed.

44/ And it's for this precise reason that *another* investigation will not be stopped should there not be found (by Mueller) 90%+ proof of conspiracy: the counterintelligence investigations that preceded Mueller's investigation and that are—as far as any of us know—still ongoing.

45/ In short, as to any offense which isn't a high crime or misdemeanor and involves Trump and his family, the investigation of such crimes continues; as to high crimes and misdemeanors, 90%+ proof not only won't be required and isn't expected, it *cannot* be set as the standard.

46/ I'd have liked Mueller to handle the prosecution of Don Jr., Prince, and others lying to Congress, but if others do so that's fine; I'd have liked Mueller to hold Kushner accountable for all that he's done with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others, but have *no* doubt he will be.

47/ I'm sad that—for the sake of clicks, eyeballs, ratings, and the salaries of those who live by a breaking-news chyron—what happened today has wrongly been cast as the end of something rather than (as @neal_katyal wisely said) the beginning of something. But that's media today.

48/ The reason I often remind people that I was a practicing criminal attorney for years—and am still an attorney—and that I was trained as a criminal investigator at two universities and then practiced as a criminal investigator, is because I stand by my professional judgments.

49/ Trump is what I've said he is, and he's done what I've said he's done. Hundreds of hours of professional research for two books leave no doubt for me. Whatever we receive from Barr in the coming days—whether comprehensive and transparent or opaque and elusive—that remains so.

50/ You—whoever you are, reading this—want this to end *now*. I want it as much as you do—maybe far more. But it won't end anytime soon. What we see when we see Mueller's work will be the end of just *one* chapter of U.S. history's longest, most complex, most harrowing epic. /end

PS/ I just want to acknowledge a couple things I chose not to address in this thread: most notably, whether "no new indictments" from the SCO right now means no sealed indictments to unseal, or the fact that no obstruction indictment means nothing because Trump can't be indicted.

PS2/ Folks wisely note that Mueller gave great deals to a lot of people to get them to give info on people higher up, e.g. Flynn, Gates and Nader. That's why I noted that Flynn and Gates are still being used in multiple cases and Nader's help on Saudi Arabia may still be active.

PS3/ Folks likewise wisely note that many people you'd expect to have seen interviewed either weren't (Ivanka) or only narrowly (Jared). That's why I noted that there are investigations ongoing in several jurisdictions that may well see these individuals *eventually* get noticed.

PS4/ The wisest thing I heard this evening was a smart progressive pointing out that the only thing we know now that we didn't know a few hours ago is that some sort of report exists. Basically everything else we read online and see on TV about what Mueller has said is a *guess*.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Jerky » Sun Mar 24, 2019 6:55 am

It's one hell of a competition, but at last, we have a winner for the single most stupid article ever written by an arguably conscious human being who thinks they're far, far more intelligent and informed than they actually are.

Seriously, if you're amused (or, God help you, intellectually swayed) by ANY PART of this spittle-flecked garbage, re-assess your life choices.

J

stickdog99 » 21 Mar 2019 19:29 wrote:
Spiro C. Thiery » 21 Mar 2019 15:04 wrote:
https://consentfactory.org/2019/03/21/m ... dammerung/
Mueller-Dämmerung

If Nietzsche was right, and what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger, we can thank the global capitalist ruling classes, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media for four more years of Donald Trump. The long-awaited Mueller report is due any day now, or so they keep telling us. Once it is delivered, and does not prove that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset, or that he personally conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, well, things are liable to get a bit awkward. Given the amount of goalpost-moving and focus-shifting that has been going on, clearly, this is what everyone’s expecting.

Honestly, I’m a bit surprised. I was sure they were going to go ahead and fabricate some kind of “smoking gun” evidence (like the pee-stained sheets from that Moscow hotel), or coerce one of his sleazy minions into testifying that he personally saw Trump down on his knees “colluding” Putin in the back room of a Russian sauna. After all, if you’re going to accuse a sitting president of being a Russian intelligence asset, you kind of need to be able to prove it, or (a) you defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, (b) you destroy your own credibility, and (c) you present that sitting president with a powerful weapon he can use to bury you.

This is not exactly rocket science. As any seasoned badass will tell you, when you’re resolving a conflict with another seasoned badass, you don’t take out a gun unless you’re going to use it. Taking a gun out, waving it around, and not shooting the other badass with it, is generally not a winning strategy. What often happens, if you’re dumb enough to do that, is that the other badass will take your gun from you and either shoot you or beat you senseless with it.

This is what Trump is about to do with Russiagate. When the Mueller report fails to present any evidence that he “colluded” with Russia to steal the election, Trump is going to reach over, grab that report, roll it up tightly into a makeshift cudgel, and then beat the snot out of his opponents with it. He is going to explain to the American people that the Democrats, the corporate media, Hollywood, the liberal intelligentsia, and elements of the intelligence agencies conspired to try to force him out of office with an unprecedented propaganda campaign and a groundless special investigation. He is going to explain to the American people that Russiagate, from start to finish, was, in his words, a ridiculous “witch hunt,” a childish story based on nothing. Then he’s going to tell them a different story.

That story goes a little something like this …

Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and jabbered about building “a big, beautiful wall” and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?

The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people’s decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit … which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup.

This is the story Donald Trump is going to tell the American people.

A minority of ideological heretics on what passes for the American Left are going to help him tell this story, not because we support Donald Trump, but because we believe that the mass hysteria and authoritarian fanaticism that has been manufactured over the course of Russiagate represents a danger greater than Trump. It has reached some neo-Riefenstahlian level, this bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, cult-like behavior … worse even than the mass hysteria that gripped most Americans back in 2003, when they cheered on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the murder, rape, and torture of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children based on a bunch of made-up horseshit.

We are going to be vilified, we leftist heretics, for helping Trump tell Americans this story. We are going to be denounced as Trumpenleft traitors, Putin-sympathizers, and Nazi-adjacents (as we were denounced as terrorist-sympathizers and Saddam-loving traitors back in 2003). We are going to be denounced as all these things by liberals, and by other leftists. We are going to be warned that pointing out how the government, the media, and the intelligence agencies all worked together to sell people Russiagate will only get Trump reelected, and, if that happens, it will be the End of Everything.

It will not be the End of Everything.

What might, however, be the End of Everything, or might lead us down the road to the End of Everything, is if otherwise intelligent human beings continue to allow themselves to be whipped into fits of mass hysteria and run around behaving like a mindless herd of propaganda-regurgitating zombies whenever the global capitalist ruling classes tell them that “the Russians are coming!” or that “the Nazis are coming!” or that “the Terrorists are coming!”

The Russo-Nazi Terrorists are not coming. The global capitalist ruling classes are putting down a populist insurgency, delegitimizing any and all forms of dissent from their global capitalist ideology and resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism. In the process, they are conditioning people to completely abandon their critical faculties and behave like twitching Pavlovian idiots who will obediently respond to whatever stimuli or blatantly fabricated propaganda the corporate media bombards them with.

If you want a glimpse of the dystopian future … it isn’t an Orwellian boot in your face. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Study the Russiagate believers’ reactions to the Mueller report when it is finally delivered. Observe the bizarre intellectual contortions their minds perform to rationalize their behavior over the last three years. Trust me, it will not be pretty. Cognitive dissonance never is.

Or, who knows, maybe the Russiagate gang will pull a fast one at the eleventh hour, and accuse Robert Mueller of Putinist sympathies (or appearing in that FSB video of Trump’s notorious Moscow pee-party), and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the special prosecutor. That should get them through to 2020!

#

CJ Hopkins
March 21, 2019


Great article. It's as if TPTB rubbed their hands in the aftermath of 9/11 and challenged themselves.

"Next time, let's see if we can pull this off with even less evidence and opposing teams!"

"We are the 99%." -----> We are the fully ideologically Balkanized 99%.

Fake News Consciousness is to False Consciousness as McDonaldization is to Rationalization.

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Mar 24, 2019 7:08 am

.

Oh man, so as not to derail this thread, someone should just start one to debate the superfluous works of CJ Hopkins, a lame comedian and de facto apologist for Trump and his most deplorable followers, who adds absolutely nothing in the way of research, interest, or analytic value (and a lot of AJ-style noise and confusion) to examination of #Russiagate and MAGAism, or whatever it should be called. Who wants to bother threading the needle between a rigorous deconstruction of the biggest failed psyop of recent years while having to disassociate from the trivial thinking of this character? (His schtick at times even receives boosts from a Mr. Jeff Wells of Facebookland -- no one is perfect -- and of course he's a Counterpunch regular.) Every view has its, so to speak, Louise Mensch. Learn to spot'em people.

Please please start a CJH thread, so I can avoid it! Thank you.

Oh, and stickdog, what the fuck is this?

I have seen the enemy, and she is a Radical Feminist and he is she.


Is it a joke? Or are you serious? Are you looking to gin up the right-wing witchhunt, now?

If so, in the spirit of Spartacus: I am a radical feminist.

.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Mar 24, 2019 7:40 am

.

Crosspost, in reply to the "best" the #Russiagate rearguard action and attempted retrenchment has got going, i.e. the posts by John Dean and Seth Abramson in the linked thread, just above my reply, which is this. (And now I see the Abramson thing was posted in full above by Jerky, which I missed before.)

JackRiddler » Sun Mar 24, 2019 6:37 am wrote:.

Is Trump a national security threat?

[That is what Abramson suggests in recapitulating all the usual stuff about Stone and Manafort as the back-channels to Moscow-Mordor.]

Trump threatened to start a nuclear war in front of the United Nations, and he withdrew from the Iran deal and the INF treaty, raising the odds of nuclear conflict by happenstance. These things were done on live TV. Does that rise above the 90% evidence level? The initial hostility to peace in Korea and the Iran and IMF moves both received some Democratic Party backing.

He IS in bed with two belligerent foreign powers, and he tells you this every day. Regarding the Saudi case, he even details the sums he's claiming to get for supporting their barbaric acts and their ongoing genocidal wars in the Middle East. As for Israel, they are the light of the world and the only democracy in the region, don't you know? I'm sure Kushner was soliciting or receiving bids for the 666 rescue from Saudi and Qatar while they were having their near war, and negotiating it on hot phone lines. #Russiagate and Mueller, I submit, is not the reason why this may/will become judicially actionable. On the contrary, #Russiagate is the reason why it hasn't been Scandal #1 since 2017. The problem with Kushner's almost starting a war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, or other Trump Org or regime crimes, is that these are capitalist business as usual or imperialist business as usual. Catering to Saudi and Israeli insanity is considered a boon to "national security." It's too real and connected to the system, and to the leadership of the so-called "opposition." The #Russiagate construct was highly preferable, and its effect was to degrade "security" by any credible definition of the term.

The accomplishment of #Russiagate was to make all of this worse, by escalating tension with a nuclear power on bullshit grounds invented to exonerate the incompetence of Clinton and serve imperialist and natsec/deep state interests, and by distracting away from everything that Trump Org (the criminal business) and the Trump-Pence regime (the "national security" threat or rather active danger to all humanity as a matter of policy) actually do and should be fought on.

Sure, I'm all for the spinoff state-federal investigations of Trump business and emoluments -- which should have been the ORIGINAL MOVE, and almost none of which has jackshit to do with the "Russian collusion" myth concocted by a coalition of dubious interests. What this guy Abramson is urging is to continue to downplay political opposition that can actually defeat Trump, and instead keep vesting all trust in the patriotic CIA, FBI, NSA, etc., whom he is confident can and should also deliver righteous "extra-judicial" neutralizations of threats.

Abramson wrote:11/ No—a counterintel investigation continues until a) a threat is neutralized by one means or another (i.e., with certain foreign nationals neutralizing can take extra-judicial forms) or b) the threat has be translated into an ongoing criminal prosecution with 90% proof or more.


.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Mar 24, 2019 9:41 am

.

JR:
What this guy Abramson is urging is to continue to downplay political opposition that can actually defeat Trump, and instead keep vesting all trust in the patriotic CIA, FBI, NSA, etc., whom he is confident can and should also deliver righteous "extra-judicial" neutralizations of threats.


Nail on head. The 'Russiagaters' have been fooled into frothing at the mouth for 2+ years with this misdirection, and are now apparently all too eager to take more lumps, desperate as they are to cling to whatever scraps remain on the table.

Nothing substantive will happen because the actual crimes ('business dealings') perpetrated are part of the status quo --- part of the standard routine for this system, regardless of sitting president.

To quote JR again, it's
...capitalist business as usual or imperialist business as usual. Catering to Saudi and Israeli insanity is considered a boon to "national security." It's too real and connected to the system, and to the leadership of the so-called "opposition." The #Russiagate construct was highly preferable, and its effect was to degrade "security" by any credible definition of the term


They may be better served targeting Trump's business dealings prior to going into office, but that's unlikely to happen, given statute of limitations. And it'll make for poor optics, adding to the 'witch hunt' refrain.

Edited to add: there's still plenty of incriminating data out there, outside of "Russiagate" , that can take the beast down and out of 2020 contention. Let's see how the next ~6-12 months transpire.

They may yet find value in keeping him around for the next election cycle, at least.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sun Mar 24, 2019 11:57 am

I really enjoy the spectacle of Russiagate Grifters quadrupling down.

Trump's real estate empire is exposed right now and being attacked on the state level. That's the leverage that will keep him from running again in 2020, which is a pity because he'll be fully demented by then and he would *still* murder most of his opponents in a televised debate, the man is a born bullyshark, naturally gifted.

And once the dust settles, a majority of Democrats will march towards their graves still believing Trump was taken down for colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 Election, a prize that Hillary Clinton left undefended, clearly marked, and lying in the middle of the street in downtown New York.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Mar 24, 2019 12:05 pm

Let me be 100% clear. I support Radical Feminists. I hate Trump and all of his apologists.

I never felt that praying to Superlawyers to deliver us from Trump was a wise resistance strategy, so I have tried my damnedest to ignore all the sound and fury surrounding Russiagate. I have spent less than a grand total of one day of my life discussing it, reading about it, and thinking about it, I have spent zero minutes watching talking heads drone on about it. Before this week, I had written absolutely nothing about it. Not a single word.

Therefore, I have no informed opinions about any "players" in the analysis of Russiagate. But think of all the time and energy I saved myself and everyone else! As I tried to tell all my friends, sometimes it is better not to watch. I do not mean to gloat about this, but I am the sort who takes a strange pride in never having watched Survivor, American Idol, or The Bachelor.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Mar 24, 2019 12:11 pm

Wombaticus Rex » 24 Mar 2019 15:57 wrote:I really enjoy the spectacle of Russiagate Grifters quadrupling down.

Trump's real estate empire is exposed right now and being attacked on the state level. That's the leverage that will keep him from running again in 2020, which is a pity because he'll be fully demented by then and he would *still* murder most of his opponents in a televised debate, the man is a born bullyshark, naturally gifted.

And once the dust settles, a majority of Democrats will march towards their graves still believing Trump was taken down for colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 Election, a prize that Hillary Clinton left undefended, clearly marked, and lying in the middle of the street in downtown New York.


Weird how the fiercest of the Russiagate true believers are by and large the exact same folks who assured us just as fiercely that we had to ignore our political consciences and select Hillary Clinton because she was the only one who could assure us victory over Trump.
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