The CIA director Mike Pompeo has come under fire for meeting a former intelligence official, William Binney, over the alleged hacking of the Democratic party back in 2016. The US intelligence community laid the blame for the hack, on Moscow. READ MORE: https://on.rt.com/8rsl
CIA Director Mike Pompeo reportedly met with NSA whistleblower William Binney for an hour at CIA headquarters on October 24 at the request of US President Donald Trump. Binney disputes US intelligence claims over Russian hacking of DNC emails in 2016.
Binney is of the belief that someone “with physical access” inside the Democratic National Committee (DNC) leaked sensitive information during the 2016 presidential campaign, as opposed to a sophisticated hack perpetrated by Russian Intelligence.
Trump allegedly told Pompeo that if he “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to me,” Binney said, as cited by The Intercept. The Intercept interviewed Binney and at least two additional intelligence sources close to the matter for its report.
“I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn’t being honest here,” Binney said. “I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community.”
The meeting to discuss the narrative that directly contravenes the findings of the US intelligence community was so productive that Pompeo is already arranging further meetings between NSA and FBI officials and Binney to discuss his analysis of the alleged DNC ‘inside job.’ Binney also raised the death of former DNC staffer Seth Rich to Pompeo during their meeting.
The CIA has declined to comment on such reports, however. “As a general matter, we do not comment on the Director’s schedule,” said Dean Boyd, director of the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, as cited by The Intercept.
“I think he probably saw me on those programs,” Binney told NBC News of his multiple appearances on Fox News and how he might have appeared on Trump’s radar. Binney has put his reputation on the line to challenge the prevailing consensus among the US intelligence community and mainstream media as to how Donald Trump won the US presidency, namely through alleged Russian interference, despite a dearth of evidence to support such claims.
The meeting indicates that the already-strained relationship between the US commander-in-chief and his intelligence apparatus may be taking an even more bizarre twist. For example, the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center, which would be directly tasked with any investigation into alleged Russian meddling, reports directly to President Trump in a somewhat unorthodox move.
Binney is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former intelligence officials who are skeptical of the intelligence community’s conclusions. “[T]he entire intelligence community needs to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to the American public,” Binney reportedly told Pompeo as cited by CNN.
The VIPS analysis has been disputed among the intelligence community, most notably by one of its co-authors, Thomas Drake, himself a former NSA official charged under the Espionage Act.
“A number of VIPS members did not sign this problematic memo because of troubling questions about its conclusions, and others who did sign it have raised key concerns since its publication,” the counter memo published online reads.
The majority of the fourth estate in the US has bought into the narrative of alleged Russian hacking wholeheartedly.
Several outlets have described Binney’s analysis as a “disputed,” “fringe,” or “conspiracy,” theory (Washington Post, NBC, and CNN respectively) while failing to apply the same level of skepticism to the US intelligence community narrative, which has time and again been undermined, including in testimony by social media giants before Congress.
Pompeo has come under fire for cozying up to Trump in the past. In October, he said that “the intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election.”
The CIA quickly engaged in damage-control operations, however. “The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed, and the director did not intend to suggest that it had,” CIA spokesperson Dean Boyd said clarifying the official stance.
“[M]any people are emotionally tied to this agenda, to tie the Russians to President Trump,” Binney told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in August.
The New York Times has finally detected some modern-day McCarthyism, but not in the anti-Russia hysteria that the newspaper has fueled for several years amid the smearing of American skeptics as “useful idiots” and the like. No, the Times editors are accusing a Long Island Republican of McCarthyism for linking his Democratic rival to “New York City special interest groups.” As the Times laments, “It’s the old guilt by association.”
Yet, the Times sees no McCarthyism in the frenzy of Russia-bashing and guilt by association for any American who can be linked even indirectly to any Russian who might have some ill-defined links to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Monday, in the same edition that expressed editorial outrage over that Long Island political ad’s McCarthyism, the Times ran two front-page articles under the headline: “A Complex Paper Trail: Blurring Kremlin’s Ties to Key U.S. Businesses.”
Buried in the story’s “jump” is the acknowledgement that Milner’s “companies sold those holdings several years ago.” But such is the anti-Russia madness gripping the Establishment of Washington and New York that any contact with any Russian constitutes a scandal worthy of front-page coverage. On Monday, The Washington Post published a page-one article entitled, “9 in Trump’s orbit had contacts with Russians.”
The anti-Russian madness has reached such extremes that even when you say something that’s obviously true – but that RT, the Russian television network, also reported – you are attacked for spreading “Russian propaganda.”
We saw that when former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile disclosed in her new book that she considered the possibility of replacing Hillary Clinton on the Democratic ticket after Clinton’s public fainting spell and worries about her health.
Though there was a video of Clinton’s collapse on Sept. 11, 2016, followed by her departure from the campaign trail to fight pneumonia – not to mention her earlier scare with blood clots – the response from a group of 100 Clinton supporters was to question Brazile’s patriotism: “It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponents about our candidate’s health.”
In other words, the go-to excuse for everything these days is to blame the Russians and smear anyone who says anything – no matter how true – if it also was reported on RT.
Pressing the Tech Companies
Just as Sen. Joe McCarthy liked to haul suspected “communists” and “fellow-travelers” before his committee in the 1950s, the New McCarthyism has its own witch-hunt hearings, such as last week’s Senate grilling of executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google for supposedly allowing Russians to have input into the Internet’s social networks.
Trying to appease Congress and fend off threats of government regulation, the rich tech companies displayed their eagerness to eradicate any Russian taint.
Twitter’s general counsel Sean J. Edgett told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism that Twitter adopted an “expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account.”
Edgett said the criteria included “whether the account was created in Russia, whether the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email address, whether the user’s display name contains Cyrillic characters, whether the user frequently Tweets in Russian, and whether the user has logged in from any Russian IP address, even a single time. We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria.”
The trouble with Twitter’s methodology was that none of those criteria would connect an account to the Russian government, let alone Russian intelligence or some Kremlin-controlled “troll farm.” But the criteria could capture individual Russians with no link to the Kremlin as well as people who weren’t Russian at all, including, say, American or European visitors to Russia who logged onto Twitter through a Moscow hotel.
Also left unsaid is that Russians are not the only national group that uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is considered a standard script for writing in Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbo-Croatia and Ukraine. So, for instance, a Ukrainian using the Cyrillic alphabet could end up falling into the category of “Russian-linked” even if he or she hated Putin.
Twitter’s attorney also said the company conducted a separate analysis from information provided by unidentified “third party sources” who pointed toward accounts supposedly controlled by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), totaling 2,752 accounts. The IRA is typically described in the U.S. press as a “troll farm” which employs tech-savvy employees who combat news and opinions that are hostile to Russia and the Russian government. But exactly how those specific accounts were traced back to this organization was not made clear.
And, to put that number in some perspective, Twitter claims 330 million active monthly users, which makes the 2,752 accounts less than 0.001 percent of the total.
The Trouble with ‘Trolling’
While the Russia-gate investigation has sought to portray the IRA effort as exotic and somehow unique to Russia, the strategy is followed by any number of governments, political movements and corporations – sometimes using enthusiastic volunteers but often employing professionals skilled at challenging critical information or at least muddying the waters.
Those of us who operate on the Internet are familiar with harassment from “trolls” who may use access to “comment” sections to inject propaganda and disinformation to sow confusion, to cause disruption, or to discredit the site by promoting ugly opinions and nutty conspiracy theories.
As annoying as this “trolling” is, it’s just a modern version of more traditional strategies used by powerful entities for generations – hiring public-relations specialists, lobbyists, lawyers and supposedly impartial “activists” to burnish images, fend off negative news and intimidate nosy investigators. In this competition, modern Russia is both a late-comer and a piker.
The U.S. government fields legions of publicists, propagandists, paid journalists, psy-ops specialists, contractors and non-governmental organizations to promote Washington’s positions and undermine rivals through information warfare.
The CIA has an entire bureaucracy dedicated to propaganda and disinformation, with some of those efforts farmed out to newer entities such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) or paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). NATO has a special command in Latvia that undertakes “strategic communications.”
Israel is another skilled player in this field, tapping into its supporters around the world to harass people who criticize the Zionist project. Indeed, since the 1980s, Israel has pioneered many of the tactics of computer spying and sabotage that were adopted and expanded by America’s National Security Agency, explaining why the Obama administration teamed up with Israel in a scheme to plant malicious code into Iranian centrifuges to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
It’s also ironic that the U.S. government touted social media as a great benefit in advancing so-called “color revolutions” aimed at “regime change” in troublesome countries. For instance, when the “green revolution” was underway in Iran in 2009 after the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Obama administration asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance so the street protesters could continue using the platform to organize against Ahmadinejad and to distribute their side of the story to the outside world.
During the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, Facebook, Twitter and Skype won praise as a means of organizing mass demonstrations to destabilize governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Back then, the U.S. government denounced any attempts to throttle these social media platforms and the free flow of information that they permitted as proof of dictatorship.
Social media also was a favorite of the U.S. government in Ukraine in 2013-14 when the Maidan protests exploited these platforms to help destabilize and ultimately overthrow the elected government of Ukraine, the key event that launched the New Cold War with Russia.
Swinging the Social Media Club
The truth is that, in those instances, the U.S. governments and its agencies were eagerly exploiting the platforms to advance Washington’s geopolitical agenda by disseminating American propaganda and deploying U.S.-funded non-governmental organizations, which taught activists how to use social media to advance “regime change” scenarios.
While these uprisings were sold to Western audiences as genuine outpourings of public anger – and there surely was some of that – the protests also benefited from U.S. funding and expertise. In particular, NED and USAID provided money, equipment and training for anti-government operatives challenging regimes in U.S. disfavor.
One of the most successful of these propaganda operations occurred in Syria where anti-government rebels operating in areas controlled by Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamic militants used social media to get their messaging to Western mainstream journalists who couldn’t enter those sectors without fear of beheading.
Since the rebels’ goal of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad meshed with the objectives of the U.S. government and its allies in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Western journalists uncritically accepted the words and images provided by Al Qaeda’s collaborators.
The success of this propaganda was so extraordinary that the White Helmets, a “civil defense” group that worked in Al Qaeda territory, became the go-to source for dramatic video and even was awarded the short-documentary Oscar for an info-mercial produced for Netflix – despite evidence that the White Helmets were staging some of the scenes for propaganda purposes.
Indeed, one argument for believing that Putin and the Kremlin might have “meddled” in last year’s U.S. election is that they could have felt it was time to give the United States a taste of its own medicine.
After all, the United States intervened in the 1996 Russian election to ensure the continued rule of the corrupt and pliable Boris Yeltsin. And there were the U.S.-backed street protests in Moscow against the 2011 and 2012 elections in which Putin strengthened his political mandate. Those protests earned the “color” designation the “snow revolution.”
However, whatever Russia may or may not have done before last year’s U.S. election, the Russia-gate investigations have always sought to exaggerate the impact of that alleged “meddling” and molded the narrative to whatever weak evidence was available.
The original storyline was that Putin authorized the “hacking” of Democratic emails as part of a “disinformation” operation to undermine Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and to help elect Donald Trump – although no hard evidence has been presented to establish that Putin gave such an order or that Russia “hacked” the emails. WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied getting the emails from Russia, which also denies any meddling.
Further, the emails were not “disinformation”; they were both real and, in many cases, newsworthy. The DNC emails provided evidence that the DNC unethically tilted the playing field in favor of Clinton and against Sen. Bernie Sanders, a point that Brazile also discovered in reviewing staffing and financing relationships that Clinton had with the DNC under the prior chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The purloined emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta revealed the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street (information that she was trying to hide from voters) and pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.
A Manchurian Candidate?
Still, the original narrative was that Putin wanted his Manchurian Candidate (Trump) in the White House and took the extraordinary risk of infuriating the odds-on favorite (Clinton) by releasing the emails even though they appeared unlikely to prevent Clinton’s victory. So, there was always that logical gap in the Russia-gate theory.
Since then, however, the U.S. mainstream narrative has shifted, in part, because the evidence of Russian election “meddling” was so shaky. Under intense congressional pressure to find something, Facebook reported $100,000 in allegedly “Russian-linked” ads purchased in 2015-17, but noted that only 44 percent were bought before the election. So, not only was the “Russian-linked” pebble tiny – compared to Facebook’s annual revenue of $27 billion – but more than half of the pebble was tossed into this very large lake after Clinton had already lost.
So, the storyline was transformed into some vague Russian scheme to exacerbate social tensions in the United States by taking different sides of hot-button issues, such as police brutality against blacks. The New York Times reported that one of these “Russian-linked” pages featured photos of cute puppies, which the Times speculated must have had some evil purpose although it was hard to fathom. (Oh, those devious Russians!).
The estimate of how many Americans may have seen one of these “Russian-linked” ads also keeps growing, now up to as many as 126 million or about one-third of the U.S. population. Of course, the way the Internet works – with any item possibly going viral – you might as well say the ads could have reached billions of people.
Whenever I write an article or send out a Tweet, I too could be reaching 126 million or even billions of people, but the reality is that I’d be lucky if the number were in the thousands. But amid the Russia-gate frenzy, no exaggeration is too outlandish or too extreme.
Another odd element of Russia-gate is that the intensity of this investigation is disproportionate to the lack of interest shown toward far better documented cases of actual foreign-government interference in American elections and policymaking.
For instance, the major U.S. media long ignored the extremely well-documented case of Richard Nixon colluding with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam War peace talks to gain an advantage for Nixon in the 1968 election. That important chapter of history only gained The New York Times’ seal of approval earlier this year after the Times had dismissed the earlier volumes of evidence as “rumors.”
In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan’s team – especially his campaign director William Casey in collaboration with Israel and Iran – appeared to have gone behind President Jimmy Carter’s back to undercut Carter’s negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran and essentially doom Carter’s reelection hopes.
There were a couple of dozen witnesses to that scheme who spoke with me and other investigative journalists – as well as documentary evidence showing that President Reagan did authorize secret arms shipments to Iran via Israel shortly after the hostages were freed during Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981.
However, since Vice President (later President) George H.W. Bush, who was implicated in the scheme, was well-liked on both sides of the aisle and because Reagan had become a Republican icon, the October Surprise case of 1980 was pooh-poohed by the major media and dismissed by a congressional investigation in the early 1990s. Despite the extraordinary number of witnesses and supporting documents, Wikipedia listed the scandal as a “conspiracy theory.”
Israeli Influence
And, if you’re really concerned about foreign interference in U.S. elections and policies, there’s the remarkable influence of Israel and its perceived ability to effect the defeat of almost any politician who deviates from what the Israeli government wants, going back at least to the 1980s when Sen. Chuck Percy and Rep. Paul Findley were among the political casualties after pursuing contacts with the Palestinians.
If anyone doubts how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to pull the strings of U.S. politicians, just watch one of his record-tying three addresses to joint sessions of Congress and count how often Republicans and Democrats jump to their feet in enthusiastic applause. (The only other foreign leader to get the joint-session honor three times was Great Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill.)
So, what makes Russia-gate different from the other cases? Did Putin conspire with Trump to extend a bloody war as Nixon did with the South Vietnamese leaders? Did Putin lengthen the captivity of U.S. hostages to give Trump a political edge? Did Putin manipulate U.S. policy in the Middle East to entice President George W. Bush to invade Iraq and set the region ablaze, as Israel’s Netanyahu did? Is Putin even now pushing for wider Mideast wars, as Netanyahu is?
Indeed, one point that’s never addressed in any serious way is why is the U.S. so angry with Russia while these other cases, in which U.S. interests were clearly damaged and American democracy compromised, were treated largely as non-stories.
Why is Russia-gate a big deal while the other cases weren’t? Why are opposite rules in play now – with Democrats, many Republicans and the major news media flogging fragile “links,” needling what little evidence there is, and assuming the worst rather than insisting that only perfect evidence and perfect witnesses be accepted as in the earlier cases?
The answer seems to be the widespread hatred for President Trump combined with vested interests in favor of whipping up the New Cold War. That is a goal valued by both the Military-Industrial Complex, which sees trillions of dollars in strategic weapons systems in the future, and the neoconservatives, who view Russia as a threat to their “regime change” agendas for Syria and Iran.
After all, if Russia and its independent-minded President Putin can be beaten back and beaten down, then a big obstacle to the neocon/Israeli goal of expanding the Mideast wars will be removed.
Right now, the neocons are openly lusting for a “regime change” in Moscow despite the obvious risks that such turmoil in a nuclear-armed country might create, including the possibility that Putin would be succeeded not by some compliant Western client like the late Boris Yeltsin but by an extreme nationalist who might consider launching a nuclear strike to protect the honor of Mother Russia.
The Democrats, the liberals and even many progressives justify their collusion with the neocons by the need to remove Trump by any means necessary and “stop fascism.” But their contempt for Trump and their exaggeration of the “Hitler” threat that this incompetent buffoon supposedly poses have blinded them to the extraordinary risks attendant to their course of action and how they are playing into the hands of the war-hungry neocons.
A Smokescreen for Repression
There also seems to be little or no concern that the Establishment is using Russia-gate as a smokescreen for clamping down on independent media sites on the Internet. Traditional supporters of civil liberties have looked the other way as the rights of people associated with the Trump campaign have been trampled and journalists who simply question the State Department’s narratives on, say, Syria and Ukraine are denounced as “Moscow stooges” and “useful idiots.”
The likely outcome from the anti-Russian show trials on Capitol Hill is that technology giants will bow to the bipartisan demand for new algorithms and other methods for stigmatizing, marginalizing and eliminating information that challenges the mainstream storylines in the cause of fighting “Russian propaganda.”
The warning from powerful senators was crystal clear. “I don’t think you get it,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, warned social media executives last week. “You bear this responsibility. You created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it. Or we will.”
As this authoritarian if not totalitarian future looms and as the dangers of nuclear annihilation from an intentional or unintentional nuclear war with Russia grow, many people who should know better are caught up in the Russia-gate frenzy.
I used to think that liberals and progressives opposed McCarthyism because they regarded it as a grave threat to freedom of thought and to genuine democracy, but now it appears that they have learned to love McCarthyism except, of course, when it rears its ugly head in some Long Island political ad criticizing New York City.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
Twitter no longer believes in “speaking truth to power,” according to its latest rules update in the midst of US lawmakers’ frantic hunt for “Russian meddling” in social media.
The microblogging site’s rules, under the section “Abusive Behavior,” currently state: “We believe in freedom of expression and open dialogue, but that means little as an underlying philosophy if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up.” On November 2, it read “We believe in freedom of expression and in speaking truth to power.”
Incidentally, on November 1, Twitter, along with Google and Facebook, was grilled by US lawmakers in an ongoing witch-hunt for “Russian influence” that may have led to interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In its testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week, Twitter revealed it has used a vast array of tenuous criteria to define accounts as “Russia-linked,” and also admitted it had censored the hashtags #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeaks tweets during the 2016 US presidential election campaign in an effort to limit public exposure to leaked documents describing the Democratic National Committee’s efforts to boost Clinton as the Democratic Party’s preferred candidate during the primaries.
Twitter Associate General Counsel Sean Edgett claimed many of those tweets were “automated” and hidden by anti-spam systems. He also admitted that less than 4 percent of them came from potential “Russian-linked” accounts.
Last week, Twitter also announced it was banning all ads from RT and Sputnik, citing the same allegations of meddling in the 2016 US election. That, despite the company previously trying to engage RT in a special US election advertising package, which RT declined.
The changes to Twitter’s rules were apparently made as part of a November 3 attempt to “clarify” them.
In a statement, the company said that it wanted to make it clear that “context is crucial when evaluating abusive behavior and determining appropriate enforcement actions.”
A separate update will be issued on November 14 with more details on how the company reviews and enforces policies, according to Twitter.
RT has reached out to Twitter for comment on the change to the wording of its policy.
Yesterday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson swore into office a new Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Dr. A. Wess Mitchell became the Trump Administration’s top diplomat for Europe, “responsible for diplomatic relations with 50 countries in Europe and Eurasia, and with NATO, the EU and the OSCE.”
Readers will recall that the position was most recently held during the Obama Administration by Kagan family neocon, Victoria Nuland, who was key catalyst and cookie provider for the US-backed coup overthrowing the elected government in Ukraine. Victoria Nuland’s virulently anti-Russia position was a trademark of the neocon persuasion and she put ideology into action by “midwifing,” in her own words, an illegal change of government in Ukraine.
It was Nuland’s coup that laid the groundwork for a precipitous decay in US/Russia relations, as Washington’s neocons peddled the false line that “Russia invaded Ukraine” to cover up for the fact that it was the US government that had meddled in Ukrainian affairs. The coup was bloody and divisive, resulting in a de-facto split in the country that continues to the day. Ukraine did not flourish as a result of this neocon scheme, but has in fact been in economic free-fall since the US government installed its preferred politicians into positions of power.
You don’t hear much about Ukraine these days because the neocons hate to talk about their failures. But the corruption of the US-installed government has crippled the country, extreme nationalist elements that make up the core of the post-coup elites have imposed a new education law so vicious toward an age-old Hungarian population stuck inside arbitrarily re-drawn post-WWI borders that the Hungarian government has blocked Ukraine’s further integration into NATO, and a new “Maidan” protest has steadily gathered steam in Kiev despite Western cameras being uninterested this time.
Fortunately Donald Trump campaigned on and was elected to improve relations with Russia and end the Obama Administration’s neocon-fueled launch of a new Cold War. He raised eyebrows when he directly challenged the neocon shibboleth — amplified by the mainstream media — that Russia was invading Ukraine. But candidate Trump really blew neocon minds — and delighted voters — when he said he was looking into ending US sanctions on Russia imposed by Obama and may recognize Crimea as Russian territory.
Which brings us back to Wess Mitchell. Certainly President Trump, seeing the destruction of Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nuland’s anti-Russia interventionism, would finally restore a sane diplomat to the position vacated by the unmourned former Assistant Secretary. Would appoint someone in line with the rhetoric that landed him the Oval Office. Right?
Wrong!
If anything, Wess Mitchell may well prove to be Victoria Nuland on steroids. He was co-founder and CEO of the neocon-dominated Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Mitchell’s CEPA is funded largely by the US government, NATO, neocon grant-making mega-foundations, and the military-industrial complex. The “think tank” does the bidding of its funders, finding a Russian threat under every rock that requires a NATO and defense industry response — or we’re doomed!
Last month, CEPA put on its big conference, the “CEPA Forum 2017.” Speakers included central European heavy hitter politicos like the president of Latvia and also Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, who gave a talk on how “the unity of the NATO Alliance” is “what Russia fears the most.” The grand event was funded, as might be expected, by war contractors Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin. But also, surprisingly, significant funding came from the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, who is seen as somewhat of a maverick in central Europe for refusing to sign on to the intense Russia-hate seen in the Baltics and in Poland.
The no-doubt extraordinarily expensive conference was funded by no less than three Hungarian government entities: the Embassy of Hungary in Washington, DC, the Hungarian Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Hungarian Presidency of the Visegrad Group. Again, given Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s reputation for bucking neocon positions vis-a-vis Russia it is surprising to see the virulently anti-Russia CEPA conference so awash in Hungarian taxpayer money. Perhaps there is something to explore in the fact that the recently-fired Hungarian Ambassador to Washington, Réka Szemerkényi, was recently named executive vice president of CEPA. Hmmm. Makes you wonder.
But back to Mitchell. So he founded a neocon think tank funded by a NATO desperate for new missions and a military-industrial complex desperate for new wars. What about his own views? Surely he can’t be as bad as Nuland. Right? Wrong! Fortunately Assistant Secretary Mitchell is a prolific writer, so it’s easy to track his thinking. In a recent piece for neocon Francis Fukuyama’s American Interest, titled “Predators on the Frontiers,” Mitchell warns that, “From eastern Ukraine and the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, large rivals of the United States are modernizing their military forces, grabbing strategic real estate, and threatening vulnerable US allies.”
Mitchell continues, in a voice right out of the neocon canon, that:
By degrees, the world is entering the path to war. Not since the 1980s have the conditions been riper for a major international military crisis. Not since the 1930s has the world witnessed the emergence of multiple large, predatory states determined to revise the global order to their advantage—if necessary by force.
We are on a path to war not seen since the 1930s! And why are our “enemies” so hell-bent on destroying us? Because we are just so isolationist!
Writes Mitchell: “Over the past few years, Russia, China, and, to a degree, Iran have sensed that the United States is retreating in their respective regions…”
We are “retreating”?
So what can we do? Mitchell again does the bidding of his paymasters in advising that the only thing we can do to save ourselves is… spend more on militarism:
The United States should therefore enhance its nuclear arsenal by maintaining and modernizing it. It needs to sustain a credible nuclear extended deterrent at a time when revisionist states are gradually pushing their spheres of influence and control closer to, if not against, U.S. allies. Moreover, it should use the limited tactical nuclear weapons at its disposal and seed them in a few of the most vulnerable and capable frontline states (Poland and Japan, for instance) under “nuclear sharing” agreements.
There is our new Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia. Our top diplomat for Europe. The only solution is a military solution. President Trump. Elected to end the endless wars, to forge better relations with Russia, to roll-back an “outdated” NATO. President Trump has replaced Victoria Nuland with something far more dangerous and frightening. Heckuva job, there, Mr. President!
Are you a western journalist or analyst with an issue you cannot explain? Do your symptoms include an unwillingness to learn anything from history and an unconditional embrace of western exceptionalism? Then we have just the thing for you: RussiaDidIt! Taken in the appropriate dosage, RussiaDidIt can be used for just any issue, small and large, old and new, near and far. Call your local US embassy or EU office and order your RussiaDidIt talking points. Side effects may include total paranoia, loss of credibility and a desire to wear the EU flag as a cape.
It seems like all the evils that plague the western world these days have a common cause. Brexit, Catalonia, Trump, racial tensions, the lack of credibility of the EU, all of these have a simple explanation, if we are to believe the mainstream media and pundits: Russia is behind it. And not just Russia, but Putin himself. He must be the busiest villain in history.
True journalists like Robert Parry have analysed and exposed the rise of this new McCarthyism, and how uncorroborated, or sometimes outrightly false, allegations gradually become unquestionable facts.(1)
Screenshots from the Washington Post and Politico
In this piece we examine three articles that have different angles of this RussiaDidIt approach. They have the paranoia of Russian meddling in US elections as a background, but everything applies just as well to similar stories about the EU. Inevitably it all ties back to an inability, or unwillingness, to learn anything from history, and this disgusting myth that everyone should look up to the West as a beacon of superior values. We start of course with the ineffable Guardian.
Cheap journalism and cheap meddling
One day journalism students will study the spiral of lowering standards that took hold of the Guardian. One can sense the denial taking hold of the newspaper as their liberal centrist paradise crumbles. They yearn for a knight in shining armour who can come and save them from Brexit, even if it is Tony Blair, because, believe it or not, the idea of the EU has been here since the Renaissance!(2)
As expected, the Guardian has embraced the idea that the Russians “hacked” the 2016 US elections (whatever that means) wholeheartedly. And it recently reported on new, ground-breakingrevelations:
“Russian trolls posing as Americans made payments to genuine activists in the US to help fund protest movements on socially divisive issues […]
[…] the newspaper RBC published a major investigation into the work of a so-called Russian “troll factory” since 2015, including during the period of the US election campaign, disclosures that are likely to put further spotlight on alleged Russian meddling in the election.”
So far it sounds very serious. We then learn that the main “socially divisive issue” was race relations.
“RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
Last month, CNN also reported that US authorities believed the Blacktivist Facebook group and Twitter account were the work of Russian impostors.”
The liberal media have often thrown these outrageous suggestions that activism like Black Lives Matter is part of a foreign agenda, as opposed to a reaction to the structural racism that exists in the US (more on this later). But the main point that needs to be addressed about this cunning plan is the following: how much did the Russians spend in these devious activities of inflaming tensions in the US? A whopping… 80,000 dollars! The Guardian thinks the activities of some alleged troll factory engaging in social media activity and paying activists a grand total of $80,000 represents unacceptable Russian “meddling”!
Billboard accusing Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist
Let us put this number in perspective. Hillary Clinton made $3 million out of 12 speeches to big banks. The entire spending in the US presidential election was almost $2 billion. And the Guardian is worried about $80,000 worth of meddling. For comparison USAID spent $4.2 million advancing US interests in Venezuela in 2015 alone. Even if these $80,000 had been spent in a single year, it would still be 50 times smaller than what one of the US empire’s foreign policy branches spent only in Venezuela.
The Guardianpiece closes by mentioning that the evil Russians also bought ads on Google and Facebook for “tens of thousands of dollars” and “$100,000”, respectively. So in essence, the Guardian is reporting that it found suspicious grains of sand in the desert.(3) It would seem Putin is not just an evil mastermind, he is also a legendary bargain hunter. It should also be clear that the tech giants are more than happy to play their part in the witch-hunt and the crusade against “fake news”, which is nothing but an attempt by the dominant classes to monopolise their control over information.
Trump is a closet Marxist!
Next we look at anopinion columnwhich has got to be one of the most ludicrous texts ever written. At first glance it could be mistaken for satire, but it was actually written by Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard and former member of the Obama administration, for Bloomberg News. The title is “Russia Is Using Marxist Strategies, and So Is Trump”!
While the entire piece should be framed for posterity, we will just quote some of the highlights:
“Karl Marx and his followers argued that revolutionaries should disrupt capitalist societies by “heightening the contradictions.” Russia used a version of that Marxist idea in its efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign. […]
What is more surprising, and far more important for American politics, is that President Donald Trump is drawn to a similar strategy.
Marx contended that as the conditions of workers started to improve, they would cease to be content with their lot, or to regard their alienation as inevitable. Lenin seized on this idea and transformed it into a revolutionary strategy. […] The job of the communist revolutionary was to “heighten” or “accelerate” those contradictions.
During the 2016 campaign, Russians did something very much like that, not to produce a revolution, but to deepen and intensify social divisions (and to help elect Donald Trump).
In short, the Russians tried to foster a sense of grievance and humiliation on all sides. […] Lenin would have been proud.”
The Russian actions that Sunstein is talking about are none other than the buying of social media ads and fostering of activism that we described in the previous section. But how about that for a deep understanding of Marx and Lenin? Sunstein does try to shield himself with a footnote that says:
“I am giving a brisk summary of some famously complex and ambiguous arguments from both Marx and Lenin.” (my emphasis)
Marx, Engels, Lenin… and Trump? Cass Sunstein of Harvard University and Bloomberg News is on the maximum dosage of RussiaDidIt !
There is nothing ambiguous about Marx and Lenin. Sunstein’s argument, on the other hand, is unambiguously idiotic. The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society is that one (large) group, the working-class, sells its labour, while another one, the bourgeoisie, profits from it because it owns the means of production. These two groups have fundamentally different interests and are irrevocably at odds, this is called class struggle. Marx’s work is monumental because it was the first truly scientific analysis of the capitalist system, which meant it also explained how it could be destroyed.
The “accelerating of these contradictions” means accelerating this class conflict in order to do a little more than “disrupting” capitalism. The goal is to overthrow capitalism altogether, have the workers seize power and the means of production, and have a society free of exploitation(4) and where production is directed to satisfy human need and not the profit of capitalists. In other words, socialism.
Lenin’s contributions to Marxism, both in theory and practice, are of course way beyond the childish arguments in this piece, from his understanding of capitalism’s inevitable development into imperialism, to his development of the role of the vanguard party. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were responsible for the October Revolution of 1917, the first time that capitalism was overthrown, and the starting point for all the liberation movements that followed.
The whole argument, if it were taken seriously, would be about the strategy to “divide and conquer”, which has nothing to do with Marxism. Just like Trump, the real-estate mogul and reality-TV star, has nothing Marxist about him. If anything, Trump is the highest embodiment of western capitalism.
Surely among the vast libraries at Harvard there must be a “Marx for dummies” book that Professor Sunstein can read. But of course, writing these disingenuous pieces is much easier. The goal of course is to simultaneously push the RussiaDidIt argument and discredit a true alternative to the (capitalist) system, which has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and a lot (or everything!) to do with Marx and Lenin.
Black Power and Red Baiting
The final article we wish to examine appeared in The Atlantic magazine, and it focuses on the long history of Russia’s “involvement in America’s race wars”. First of all, for a country with a history of slavery and segregation of African-Americans, not to mention the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, the term “race wars” seems like an awful understatement. One thing that actually has not changed is the red-baiting practices of the mainstream media, accusing anyone who deviates from the approved narrative of being a Soviet/Russian agent.
The article explores the history of the Soviet Union taking advantage of racial injustice in the United States for propaganda purposes. How dare those commies bring up the plight of black people in the US?Anyone who knows a bit of history knows that this is not entirely out of place. For example, in the struggle against apartheid, notably in the war in Angola, the US was on the side of apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union was on the side of the Angolans (and of black South Africans), even if their hand might have been forced by the Cubans.
Soviet posters about the struggle against colonialism: Left: “Capitalism is doomed!” (Artsrunyan, 1966); Right: “People of Africa Will Overpower the Colonizers!” (Kukryniksy, 1960)
There is plenty to be said about the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, but the fact is that there was not a single liberation struggle in the Third World in which the Soviet Union was on the side of the oppressor/colonist and the US on the side of the liberation movement. In fact it is the opposite that was true in most cases, if not all.
This takes us to the crux of the matter. According to historian Mary Dudziak, quoted in this piece,
“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,”
Dudziak and all these analysts and journalists take for granted that the US, and the west in general, are supposed to lead the world. According to them, these issues of treating black people as second class citizens are a problem mainly because they make the US look bad, and its noble mission of spreading freedom and democracy becomes much harder! It would seem that if racism was a little more polite (or if the Soviets did not bring it up!), then the Sandinistas would have been happy with Somoza, the Viet Cong would have had nothing to fight for, etc.
This unquestioned embrace of US exceptionalism, coupled to a complete ignorance of history, is what ensures that these analysts completely miss the point. For them, people rejecting and resisting US imperialism, or rejecting the EU after years of austerity policies, is just a misunderstanding, which needs to be explained by nonsense such as RussiaDidIt. Had these people actually read Marx and Lenin, as opposed to spewing these idiocies, they would understand that backlash against neoliberalism, or resistance against US imperialism, is to be expected. And there is no amount of fancy speeches by the likes of Obama, saying “freedom” and “democracy” in every other sentence, that will fix that.
The loyal flag-bearers of the imperial establishment are outraged at the idea of someone paying $80,000 to US activists, but the US spending tens of millions funding NGOs and political parties all over the world is more than natural. They are outraged that RT reports on Occupy Wall Street or Ferguson, but Voice of America and Radio Martí are supposed to be welcomed by the rest of the world. Because they stand for the better values… Apart from all the death and misery that is caused by US imperialism, it is this belief in American exceptionalism that makes the US so despised around the world.
Finally, we should stress that our argument is not whataboutism. We are not saying that this issue in place X should not be discussed because there is this other issue in the US. Outlets like RT and Sputnik should have their editorial lines and journalism standards analysed and criticised. The same holds true for Russia’s foreign policy. But, paraphrasing someone who was also accused of being a Soviet agent, it cannot be the greatest purveyor of meddling in the world and media outlets with ever lowering standards bringing these charges forward and pretending to be the Guardians of truth.
Notes
(1) We have also written on the ridiculous report published by the CIA, FBI and NSA on the Russian “hacking” of US elections.
(2) One wonders why the EU is symbolised by the Medici paying Leonardo da Vinci or by Erasmus and Thomas More being friends and not, for example, by the bubonic plague or Lucrezia Borgia’s antics. You know what else was common to all of Europe before the EU? The slave trade.
(3) More recently the Guardian published another bombshell piece, saying that Russia’s Facebook posts reached 126 million Americans. But we are talking about 80,000 posts, only 0.004% of news feed content according to Facebook, during a two year period. The big number is perfect for propaganda, but conveniently it is not made clear whether 126m different users saw the posts, or if for example 10m users on average saw 120 of these posts.
(4) We should clarify that exploitation does not mean having an evil boss that pays low salaries and forces workers to work weekends. Workers in capitalism are exploited simply because there is a value difference between what they earn and what they produce. In other words, profit comes from unpaid labour. Exploitation is the foundation of capitalism and should not be framed in moral terms, which imply that the problem is not the system but a matter of finding “good capitalists”.
Whether preplanned or inadvertent, one of the most likely and far-reaching consequences of the fake news RussiaGate scandal is that Facebook and other social media giants might soon come under strict regulation by the state.
The artificially contrived and “deep state”-driven RussiaGate scandal has been inflated to epic proportions and has already resulted in the unexpected suicide of the US’ soft power, but this never-ending conspiracy theory is now poised to affect the rest of the world in a completely different way due to the likely “regulation” that Washington might soon impose on social media giants like Facebook. “Traditional” media has long been clamoring for the American government to do something about the astronomical rise of social media, which has poached millions upon millions of people away from newspapers and TV stations and redirected them to their smartphones instead. From the perspective of social media and many of its users, however, these people weren’t “poached”, but liberated from their prior status as a captive audience to conventional influence techniques and allowed to roam freely in cyberspace as they searched for alternative non-mainstream interpretations of current and past events.
The rise of social media coincided with that of Russia’s publicly funded RT and Sputnik media outlets, whose reporting and analyses soon went viral all over the internet because they satisfied the crucial information desire that so many people were craving for years. Their explosive popularity led to them gaining a sizeable following among Western audiences, who voluntarily shared their content online and contributed to what Facebook describes as “organic growth”, or the natural trending of non-advertised posts. While posing a challenge to Establishment narratives all across the world, neither RT nor Sputnik were seriously viewed as “threat” by the US and its allies because they had yet to be blamed for affecting any real-life change outside of the internet “matrix” of clicks, likes, and shares.
That all changed during the 2016 US election, however, since the Mainstream Media’s monopoly on information was wielded in such a blatantly and obviously biased nature against Trump that countless Americans began countenancing what would have previously been unthinkable to many of them just a year prior, and that’s trawling foreign-based media outlets in order to get a more accurate sense of the truth that their own country’s media barons were suppressing. This certainly says a lot about the deep distrust that was already prevalent among many Americans towards their own government, but it hit its climax the more that the Mainstream Media began concocting openly fraudulent “news” stories about Trump in a bid to derail his candidacy, with this effort becoming unquestionably clear when compared with the flowery coverage given to anything that Clinton said or did. As is now known, Americans rebelled against the Establishment by voting Trump into office, and the “deep state” was left scratching its head about how this could happen.
The author explained the domestic dynamics at play in his November 2016 article right after the election titled “Dear Foreign Friends, Here’s Why Trump Won (From A Clevelander)”, but the general idea is that the Democrats’ weaponization of identity politics miserably backfired as Americans sought out a radical solution to bring balance to their “deep state”-destabilized country. Nevertheless, the Establishment couldn’t bring itself to recognize the obvious, take the loss, and move on to fight another battle later on, hence why they decided to continue pressing the cringe-inducingly ridiculous narrative that “Russian trolls” somehow swayed the election due to their social media activity, and hinting that there might even be a whiff of outright collusion between Presidents Trump and Putin in organizing this movie-like conspiracy.
This narrative is convenient for many geopolitical reasons that are outside the scope of this analysis, but the domestic benefit that was expected to be derived from this storyline is that “traditional” media and the Establishment finally had the pretext that they were looking for to “regulate” social media. Bringing Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others into compliance with already existing American laws about revealing the source of election-related advertisements is one thing, but pressing these platforms to restrict the activity of Russian publicly financed media outlets like RT and Sputnik, as well as speculatively “shadow banning” some of their staff and supporters, is a bridge too far into dystopia, as is doing so on the US governments’ double-standard FARA witch hunt which alleges that the two are “foreign agents”. As a result, it appears as though the “good ‘ole days” of “freewheeling” across Facebook and sharing whatever content one finds enjoyable is soon coming to an end as Washington begins to “regulate” social media on the basis of “safeguarding democracy”.
Of course, the real reason is that some vested power interests also have a stake in supporting their decades-long allies in the “traditional” media against their new social media rivals, to say nothing of the self-evident imperative in suppressing non-mainstream news and analyses through the US’ War on Russian Media. The forthcoming “regulation” might even go further than what’s presently being observed, as there’s a chance that Washington could seek to label social media platforms like Facebook as being “media companies” in their own right, which would then instantly force them to comply with the existing legislation that their “traditional” media counterparts have had to contend with for years. In a sense, this would “level the playing field” between “traditional” and social media, but it could also destroy the very essence of social media itself. Not only that, but if the US comes to consider Facebook and Google as “monopolies”, then they could be broken up and “regulated” even further.
What’s terribly ironic about all of this is that the US government’s international stance has always been in favor of “internet freedoms”, routinely attacking Russia, China, and Iran for implementing national security-based legislation aimed at thwarting the risk that Color Revolutions and Hybrid Wars could dangerously recruit across social media, but now all of a sudden “the land of the free” is doing the same thing as the countries that it regularly smears as “dictatorships”, though without any convincing reason and depending solely on a trumped-up fake news conspiracy theory. As is typical, the ruling Establishment and their “deep state” supporters condescendingly believe that their true intentions are invisible to the naked eye because of their presumption that the populace is stupid and politically unaware, though the very fact that their “perfect candidate” was defeated by a “dark horse” like Trump totally disproves this notion.
The reality is that most Americans, and the rest of the world at large, see the US government’s “regulation” of social media for what it actually is, and that’s a dictatorial power grab which crushes any remaining doubt that “the land of the free” is anything but, and that the “freedom of speech” is only allowed if one is either supporting the Establishment or behaving as its “controlled opposition”. The number one thing that “American Democracy” can’t accept is the free flow of information and interpretations that challenge the prevailing state-supported narrative, which in and of itself negates the very basis of what the world always thought that “American Democracy” was supposed to be about, and this powerful revelation proves that the US government’s accusations that its geopolitical rivals are “authoritarian” was never anything more than a psychological projection of its own self.
On Monday, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and business partner Richard Gates on twelve counts, including conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to launder money, and various charges of failure to file Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR), and failure to register as a foreign agent, concerning activities in the Ukraine that ended in 2014. (Read the indictment here.)
I’m not alone in pointing out that absent Manafort’s involvement in Trump’s campaign, his failure to register as a foreign agent– would not have been targeted, as many lobbyists are not conscientious in fulfilling this reporting requirement. See, for example, this National Review account:
The offense of failing to register as a foreign agent (Count Ten) may be a slam-dunk, but it is a violation that the Justice Department rarely prosecutes criminally. There is often ambiguity about whether the person’s actions trigger the registration requirement, so the Justice Department’s practice is to encourage people to register, not indict them for failing to do so.
Much has been made of the absence of any tax charges in the present indictment, one which alleges conspiracy to commit money laundering. The lawyers I spoke to weren’t unduly concerned about such seemingly missing counts, pointing out that the indictment can be amended later to include tax charges, as investigations proceed.
In fact, this indictment should probably be read as a warning shot– the first step in a lengthy, wide-ranging investigation. I was reminded by one lawyer I spoke to yesterday that special prosecutors have virtually limitless powers, and certainly no major lobbyist could expect to survive unscathed the level of scrutiny that will be brought to bear in this investigation.
Unsurprisingly, the New York Times published a piece reinforcing that line, Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s Legal Pit Bull, that reads like the work of a legal fanboy, and the message of which is Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid:
Two decades later, Mr. Weissmann has turned his attention to a more prominent set of prospective conspirators: He is a top lieutenant to Robert S. Mueller III on the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links to the Trump campaign. Significantly, Mr. Weissmann is an expert in converting defendants into collaborators — with either tactical brilliance or overzealousness, depending on one’s perspective.
It is not clear if President Trump and his charges fear Mr. Weissmann as they gird for the slog ahead. It is quite clear, former colleagues and opponents say, that they should.
The million dollar question: Will this implicate or threaten Trump? So far, I think no. But we must all stay tuned– and pass the popcorn.
Bottom Line for Trump
One goal in indicting Manafort was to force him to give up the goods on Trump regarding alleged Russian collusion in the election campaign. Yet the offenses alleged in the indictment concerned activities in the Ukraine during a specific time period ending before Manafort’s campaign involvement. (The indictment also include a charge of making false statements to prosecutors in 2016, concerning these earlier activities.)
The most striking news is that none of this involves the 2016 election campaign. The indictment makes clear that Mr. Manafort’s work for Ukraine and his money transfers ended in 2014. The 2016 charges are related to false statements Mr. Manafort made to the Justice Department.
There’s reason to think Manafort might not have such goods to deliver. Recall that Trump initially brought Manafort into his campaign in March 2016, elevated him to campaign manager in June, and tied [cut loose] him in August, according to The Washington Post.
Now, there’s no denying that Manafort kept some very sleazy company (see, for example, this September post from John Helmer). The Journal noted (drily): “Mr. Manafort has lobbied for a rogues gallery of dictators, with the occasional domestic scandal (HUD contracts).” But lobbying on behalf of unsavory foreign clients isn’t per se illegal (reminding me of Michael Kinsley’s quip, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal”.)
The Journal further notes:
One popular theory is that Mr. Mueller is throwing the book at Mr. Manafort so he will cop a plea and tell what he knows about Russian-Trump campaign chicanery. But that assumes he knows something that to date no Congressional investigation has found. Prosecutors typically try to turn witnesses before they indict, and Messrs. Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty on Monday.
Issues With Manafort Indictment
In the interests of keeping this post of readable length, I’m going to limit my focus.
The National Review account cited above is worth reading in full. I am of course aware of the ideological slant of that publication, but I found little to fault in its analysis– admittedly, making the case for the defense and summarized thus: “On first glance, Mueller’s case, at least in part, seems shaky and overcharged.” Since Manafort has pleaded not guilty, he can and will draw on high-priced legal talent that will certainly make these and similar arguments, zeroing in on weaknesses in the government’s case.
In particular, while even this National Review account concedes that the failure to register as a foreign agent seems to be a slam-dunk (leaving aside the clear political motivation of taking a particularly Javertian line on this lapse), whether this will result in a win for the government isn’t wholly clear, due to possible prosecutorial overreach:
Specifically, Congress considers false statements in the specific context of foreign-agent registration to be a misdemeanor calling for zero to six months’ imprisonment. (See Section 622(a)(2) of Title 22, U.S. Code.) That is the offense Mueller charges in Count Eleven. But then, for good measure, Mueller adds a second false-statement count (Count Twelve) for the same conduct — charged under the penal-code section (Section 1001 of Title 18, U.S. Code) that makes any falsity or material omission in a statement to government officials a felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment.
Obviously, one cannot make a false statement on the foreign-agent registration form without also making a false statement to the government. Consequently, expect Manafort to argue that Mueller has violated double-jeopardy principles by charging the same exact offense in two separate counts, and that the special counsel is undermining Congress’s intent that the offense of providing false information on a foreign-agent registration form be considered merely a misdemeanor.
Possible Fourth Amendment Violations Taint Manafort Evidence?
Continuing with another potential defense argument, I’ll mention another possible problem with the government’s case, discussed in a Rachel Stockman opinion piece published by LawNewz. Again, lest I be accused of pro-Manafort or– shudder– pro-Trump bias, I want to emphasize if I can spot these issues and develop such arguments, based on on-line research, assorted back and forth email exchanges, and telephone calls conducted over the last couple of days, certainly Manafort’s defense team will do this and more– so please do not shoot your humble messenger.
While calling the indictment “very detailed and well-documented” Stockman continued:
… there is one area that could hurt Mueller’s investigation. Mueller’s team may have obtained evidence in the raid of Paul Manafort’s home that was not covered by the search warrant. That could be problematic.
In a surprise raid on July 26th, FBI agents busted into Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia to collect documents and other materials related to the FBI probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. At the time, Manafort’s attorney raised concerns about how the raid was conducted. In order for the feds to obtain a warrant, a federal judge would have to determine that probable cause existed that a crime was committed. As part of the warrant, investigators attached an affidavit which contained a list of items that FBI agents hoped to collect. That’s where the trouble appears to be in Manafort’s case.
The key issue is whether this constituted an illegal search, and exactly what was seized. Here, the Stockman piece relies on a September CNN report:
During that raid, Mueller’s investigators took documents considered to be covered by attorney-client privilege, sources told CNN.
Lawyers from the WilmerHale law firm, representing Manafort at the time, warned Mueller’s office that their search warrant didn’t allow access to attorney materials. The documents in question have now been returned, the sources say.
The episode raised questions about whether investigators have seen materials they weren’t entitled to obtain.
“You can’t unsee something,” one source said.
It’s not an uncommon problem in FBI investigations. US attorneys typically have separate document-review teams to prevent investigators from handling materials they aren’t allowed to have. It’s not clear what procedures Mueller’s office uses.
I’m not taking a position on this issue one way or another, but merely flagging this as a potential problem for the government’s case.
Attorney-Client Privilege Pierced
Finally, I’d like to mention a another LawNewz opinion piece, this by Elura Nanos, which spotlights a potential problem for the defense. The piece discusses a Memorandum Opinion, unsealed at the end of October, in which D.C. federal district court chief judge Beryl A. Howell compelled grand jury testimony from a lawyer representing Manafort and Gates under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. The attorney-client privilege isn’t absolute, and judges can order an attorney’s testimony if it falls within certain exceptions.
Over to Nanos:
Now we know that the grand jury proceedings culminated in indictments, and Judge Howell’s ruling on the this motion to compel testimony is more than a little foreshadowing. The Court’s opinion on this issue allows us to peek into the generally secret grand jury proceedings, and that peek isn’t looking so good for the defendants.
Now, frustratingly, Judge Howell’s opinions was heavily redacted– interested readers may wish to click the link above to see just how extensively for themselves. I’ll again rely on the Nanos account which lays out the key concern:
The court’s memorandum was heavily redacted, so at this point, it’s unclear which statements the judge meant, but this portion of the document sure sounds bad for the defendants:
“… the above statement is false, a half-truth, or at least misleading because evidence shows that Target 1 and Target 2 were intimately involved in significant outreach in the United States on behalf of the ECFMU, the Party of Regions and/or the Ukrainian government.”
Yeah, things can change at trial, but even at a preliminary phase, it’s not good for a judge to make a finding that you’re “intimately involved” in sinister foreign misdealings. Oh, and there was also this:
“Through its ex parte production of evidence, the [Special Counsel’s Office] has clearly met its burden of making a prima facie showing that the crime-fraud exception applies by showing that the Targets were “engaged in or planning a criminal or fraudulent scheme when [they] sought the advice of counsel to further the scheme.”
Those seven little letters should strike fear in the hearts of Manafort, Gates, and their lawyers. The SCO hasn’t just met its burden – it’s done so clearly. Allow me to translate from judge-to-English: “You guys are screwed. Take a plea or watch everyone around you– even your own lawyers — go down.”
For more in a similar vein lauding Mueller’s “serious, deliberative, and far-sighted inquiry”, see this Atlantic account, which extensively discusses the plea agreement of Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulus– and which I lack space to discuss further in this Manafort indictment post.
Trump Response
I’d like to point to a New York Times piece, headlined In Call With Times Reporter, Trump Projects Air of Calm Over Charges that suggests that Trump is managing to keep it together, and dare I say it, respond to the Manafort indictment in a ‘presidential’ way– in the traditional pre-Trumpian sense of that word.
Permit me to quote from the Grey Lady’s account at length:
President Trump projected an air of calm on Wednesday after charges against his former campaign chief and a foreign policy aide roiled Washington, insisting to The New York Times that he was not “angry at anybody” and that investigations into his campaign’s links to Russia had not come near him personally.
“I’m not under investigation, as you know,” Mr. Trump said in a brief telephone call late Wednesday afternoon. Pointing to the indictment of his former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, the president said, “And even if you look at that, there’s not even a mention of Trump in there.”
“It has nothing to do with us,” Mr. Trump said.
He also pushed back against a report published Monday night by The Washington Post, which the president said described him as “angry at everybody.”
“I’m actually not angry at anybody,” Mr. Trump told The Times.
The phone call seemed intended to dispel the impression of a president and a White House under siege. The indictment of Mr. Manafort and his longtime deputy, Rick Gates, on Monday came as little surprise to Mr. Trump or his team, and they were relieved that the charges were not directly related to last year’s campaign. Instead, both were indicted on charges including money laundering, tax evasion and failing to properly disclose lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.
Jerri-Lynn Scofield has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends much of her time in Asia and is currently working on a book about textile artisans.
The US’ obsession with “proving” alleged “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election and America’s subsequent institutional destruction as a result will go down in history as representing the suicide of this former superpower’s soft power.
The US spent decades building up its soft power reputation as “the land of the free” and portraying itself as the most “democratic” society in the world, only to have generations’ worth of soft power investments dramatically done away with over the past twelve months as the media-manufactured “RussiaGate” scandal transforms into an institutional inquisition. It’s presumed that the reader is already generally aware of what’s going on and why, namely that hostile elements of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (the “deep state”), in full collusion with academia, the Mainstream Media, and Hollywood, are vehemently working to subvert Trump’s surprise election victory by alleging that he only won because of secretive Kremlin support.
This is a completely false narrative that’s regularly debunked every time a newly invented accusation arises, but instead of crafting a different political approach to complicate Trump’s Presidency, the Democrats and their “deep state” accomplices have continued to advance this made-up storyline, and in the process they’ve inflicted irreparable soft power damage to the US’ international prestige. The country that was once the unquestioned superpower of the world has all but committed soft power suicide in the course of only a single year by confirming the same “conspiracy theories” that it’s worked so hard to belittle in the past, thereby exposing many of its international information campaigns as lies and ultimately contradicting the very essence of “American Exceptionalism”.
The “Deep State”
Take for example the existence of the “deep state”, which no objective observer would have ever countenanced to be a “conspiracy theory” in the first place because it’s just a method of analyzing inter-elite rivalries within any given country. Nevertheless, the US and its surrogates consistently insisted for years that nothing of the sort existed, at least not in the US that is, and that anytime this was brought to the global masses’ attention by the mainstream media, it was usually framed as “democratic” or “Western” forces in a foreign government struggling against “authoritarian” ones. Only sometimes was it suggested that corrupt interests were behind this rivalry, but mostly in the cases when a Western government was implicated due to some sort of scandalous behavior. By and large, however, the prevailing American-imposed “groupthink” was that the “deep state” didn’t exist within the US.
Now, however, it’s irrefutable that “deep state” elements are sabotaging the Trump Presidency, and the most immediate consequence is that the global masses are realizing that the previous Mainstream Media-driven narrative denying the existence of the American “deep state” was just a lie, and that not only was it there all along, but that it had conspired to discredit anyone else who had previously tried to discuss it.
Social Media Manipulation
Another “conspiracy theory” that the RussiaGate scandal has proven is that the American government finally acknowledges that voters could be manipulated by social media. Russia, China, Iran, and others had long been alleging this for some time, but because they’re attacked as “non-Western dictatorships” in the American and Mainstream Media discourses, the implied message was that they had just invented these threats in order to have a pretext for “cracking down on democracy and free speech”.
The US and its partners never took Russia or the others seriously when they said that people could be manipulated by foreign intelligence services over social media, but in a sudden about-face, Washington says that Moscow is capable of doing this within the US though without ever explaining why the CIA apparently can’t do the same in Russia or elsewhere. Just as with the commonly denied existence of the “deep state”, the former “conspiracy theory” of social media manipulation has been revealed to actually be a truth that the US government was long suppressing until some of its hostile elements decided to wage their War on Trump.
Misled Masses
It follows that if Russia was purportedly able to engage in social media manipulation, that the American masses are therefore easily misled, though this has been something that the US government denied for decades in order to portray its population as the most “democratically enlightened” in the world.
If the fake news narrative is to be believed, then Russia’s “weaponization” of social media was so successful that it caused masses of Americans to be misled into voting for Trump, thus negating at least 18 years of “democratic conditioning” in effortlessly submitting to crude “propaganda” and blindly voting for the candidate that the Russian “dictator” preferred. This of course isn’t what happened at all, but the fact that prominent American voices are inferring as much carries with it a degree of “authority” in showing the world that even the US “deep state” (which “officially” didn’t exist until after Trump’s victory) thinks that Americans are stupid.
Again, another pillar of American soft power crumbles as the “deep state” relentlessly attacks Trump with no concern being given to the profound collateral damage that they’re inflicting to their country’s reputation abroad.
Imperfect Democracy
Most people across the world had some idea or another about the imperfect nature of American Democracy, but it was still regarded by some as being superior to the other competing systems out there. After all, the thinking goes, if it wasn’t so effective, then it wouldn’t be the longest continually existing governmental model still around today, nor would so many wars have been fought to spread it across the rest of the world. The controversial Electoral College is assumed to be a unique characteristic of the US and therefore omitted from its “export package”, but that and a few other issues aside (Super PACs, lobbyists, etc.), the other shortcomings of American Democracy weren’t really all that well known, until now, that is.
Throughout the course of the RussiaGate inquisition, the world found out all about the “deep state”, social media manipulation, and the misled masses, thereby collapsing the very foundation of American soft power – its presumably better-than-average “democratic” model – by showing that it’s in fact imperfect and not much different than most of the rest.A large part of America’s international attractiveness rested for years on the “revolutionary brilliance” of its governing model, which was supposed to have been responsible for enabling people to “live their dreams” in the “land of the free”, but the end result is that the structural core of “American Exceptionalism” was revealed to have been nothing more than a carefully crafted perception management operation which was ultimately discredited by none other than the American elite themselves.
Just days after the Mueller investigation came up short on Kremlin involvement in the US presidential election, a source in the Department of Justice says the names of the Russians who hacked the DNC computers are known, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In yet another effort to make a connection between the Kremlin and Hillary Clinton’s loss in the November 2016 US presidential elections, the Wall Street Journalreported that the Justice Department “has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information.” The leaked materials divulged a mountain of unsavory information related to the Clinton campaign.
Although relations between the world’s two preeminent nuclear powers hang in the balance over the charges, the accusations about “Russian meddling” in the US democratic process come without the outlet offering any evidence to support the claims. This much was admitted by the authors of the WSJ article early in the report.
“US intelligence agencies have attributed the attack to Russian intelligence services, but haven’t provided detailed information about how they concluded those services were responsible, or any details about the individuals allegedly involved,” authors Aruna Viswanatha and Del Quentin Wilber wrote.
Curiously, the US mainstream media has only shown interest in pursuing the “Russian hack” narrative regarding the release of thousands of the DNC’s emails, which were made public by WikiLeaks last year. Yet there were possible other suspects in this case, not least of all Seth Rich, former Voter Expansion Data Director, who was gunned down on July 10, 2016, in Washington DC.
WikiLeaks offered $20,000 reward for information regarding Rich’s death, while saying their offer should not be taken as implying Rich had been involved in leaking information to them. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, stated emphatically that Russia was not the source of the DNC data leak.
“We can say, we have said, repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” he said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.
Nevertheless, despite providing zero evidence to support these extremely severe charges, the Obama administration took the unprecedented step of expelling 35 Russian diplomats right before the New Year, and the changing of the presidential guard, as well as imposing sanctions.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time the Wall Street Journal has produced “evidence” allegedly incriminating Russia in some conspiracy, only to be debunked later.
In early October, the influential business newspaper reported that the Russian government used software, created by the Moscow-based company Kaspersky Lab, to “secretly scan computers around the world for classified U.S. government documents and top-secret information.”
Without identifying its sources, WSJ accused the respected anti-virus company of being aware of “an adjustment to its normal operations,” allowing the company to search for terms as broad as “top secret,” as well as the “classified code names of US government programs.”
These accusations were immediately refuted by Germany’s BSI federal cyber agency.
“There are no plans to warn against the use of Kaspersky products since the BSI has no evidence for misconduct by the company or weaknesses in its software,” BSI said in an emailed response to questions about the latest media reports. “The BSI has no indications at this time that the process occurred as described in the media.”
The unsubstantiated report by the WSJ comes as Robert Mueller’s investigation into “Russian interference” in the 2016 presidential election has failed to turn up any evidence.
Attempts by US investigators to find alleged Russian collusion with President Donald Trump’s campaign have led to the discovery of a “Ukrainian trail,” Russia’s FM Sergey Lavrov said, suggesting Washington should now investigate Kiev’s role.
Over the past several years, Washington has attempted to blame any negative world events on Russia, “be it political protests, companies going bankrupt, or man-made disasters,” Lavrov said. “I’ve already heard we’ll soon be not only interfering in elections, but also manipulating the environment in order to create floods,” he added.
The disclosure that the Clinton campaign, using white-shoe law firm Perkins Coie as a cutout, financed the so-called Steele dossier confirms what we have known all along.
The Trump-Russia collusion story was a joint invention of the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign. It enabled the Obama administration to make use of the nation’s security and intelligence services to spy on Trump and his associates and to use whatever information they thereby gleaned to try to get Hillary into the White House. The failure of the scheme didn’t stop either Obama or the Clintons. Following the election debacle, an enraged Obama administration sought vengeance by disseminating the dossier as widely as possible with a view to undermining the incoming Trump administration and to ensuring that no rapprochement with Russia would be possible. In doing so, Obama and Clinton have thrown American politics into turmoil and have perhaps pushed the United States and Russia toward armed confrontation.
We have known the basic outlines of the Steele dossier story since January. The Steele dossier, we have been told, started off as a piece of opposition research prepared by Fusion GPS and financed by a Republican rival of Trump’s or perhaps a GOP NeverTrumper. Following Trump’s victory in the GOP primaries, the Democrats took over its funding. Fusion hired Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk at MI6 who now ran his own corporate intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Using the leads Steele had developed during his years at MI6, he reported back to his paymasters his shocking discovery: The Russians had been cultivating Trump for years in preparation for his run for the presidency. So shocked was Steele by this that he rushed to alert the FBI, MI6 and even select reporters.
Most of this story is pure fiction. Neither the GOP nor a primary rival of Trump’s had any involvement with the dossier. To be sure, in October 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, a neo-conservative Web site funded by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, did hire Fusion to undertake opposition research on Trump. However, money for this undertaking dried up by May 2016.
The Steele-crafted Trump-Russia collusion story was from start to finish a Democratic Party operation. Its origins can be traced back to April 2016 and the leak of the Democratic National Committee e-mails. The DNC announced that it had been “hacked.” However, instead of reporting the matter to the proper authorities, the DNC turned to attorney Michael Sussmann, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm. Sussmann got in touch with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Inc. Now, CrowdStrike is no geeky, techno-gee-whiz firm. Its founder is Russian-born Dmitri Alperovitch, a senior fellow at the NATO-funded, intensely Russophobic Atlantic Council. “Within a day, CrowdStrike confirmed that the intrusion had originated in Russia,” the New York Times wrote. On June 14, CrowdStrike announced that the DNC hack perpetrators were two separate hacker groups employed by the Russian government.
Even though no one other than CrowdStrike had examined the DNC servers, U.S. intelligence agencies immediately declared that they were in agreement and that they had “high confidence” that the “Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents” from the DNC.
It was at this moment that the Clinton people made the strategic decision to tie Trump to Putin and to make the centerpiece of its campaign the idea that a vote for Trump was a vote for the Kremlin. Perkins Coie—yet again—got in touch with Fusion, which, in turn, got in touch with Christopher Steele. Steele had contacts at MI6 and, perhaps more important, contacts at the FBI. He had allegedly worked with the FBI in the takedown of FIFA.
Steele, who had many contacts at the FBI, understood what was required of him. On June 20, six days after CrowdStrike’s announcement, he filed his first report. It was exactly what the Clinton campaign was looking for: lurid, unsubstantiated but nonetheless juicy allegations. Russia had supposedly been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years.” Trump had hired prostitutes to “perform a ‘golden showers’ show in front of him” at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. “Trump’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities… with enough embarrassing material… to be able to blackmail him.”
Steele’s first memo enticed the Clinton people and they eagerly turned on the money spigots. Steele followed up with a memo revealing that the Russians were behind the DNC leak, that Putin “hated and feared” Hillary Clinton and that there existed a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump and the Russians. The recently-indicted Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, managed this co-operation on behalf of Trump by using “foreign policy advisor” Carter Page as an intermediary. “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise U.S./NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”
Carter Page, whom no one had ever heard of and who had never even met Trump, featured prominently in the Steele memos and in subsequent U.S. media coverage of the campaign. A July 19 memo from Steele had Page holding a “secret meeting” with Igor Sechin, executive chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, in which the two men discussed future bilateral energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related” sanctions against Russia.
The Clinton campaign theme was set. By July 23, 2016, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, was telling ABC News on Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke in to the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these Web sites. . . . It’s troubling that some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” A couple of days later, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was to lead the post-election “Trump-Russia collusion” charge in Congress, declared:
Given Donald Trump’s well-known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the D.N.C. and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party.
In August, it was reported, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote to FBI Director James Comey demanding disclosure of the contents of the dossier: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government… The public has a right to know this information.” And, of course, Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of being “Putin’s puppet” during their third presidential debate.
The Steele dossier was now driving the Obama administration’s scrutiny of Trump’s people as well as media coverage of the campaign. Steele, the BBC reported, “flew to Rome in August to talk to the FBI. Then in early October, he came to the US and was extensively debriefed by them, over a week. He gave the FBI the names of some of his informants, the so-called ‘key’ to the dossier.” The FBI went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and obtained an order to “monitor the communications” of Carter Page, as “part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.” According to the Guardian, the FISA court turned down its first application (an unusual event, if true), asking the agency to narrow its focus. Eventually, the FBI managed to convince the court that “there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.” What was the basis of this probable cause? CNN reported that the FBI based its application on the claims made in the Steele dossier. That’s very serious business. If the FBI was presenting the FISA court unverified material from the dossier as if it were verified then it was clearly deceiving the court in order to obtain a politically-motivated warrant.
By September 2016, U.S. media were reporting that Carter Page had become a person of interests for the U.S. government: “U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials—including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president.” Words straight from the dossier. The same media report had “U.S. intelligence agencies” receiving reports that Page met one Igor Diveykin, who “serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” This too is almost verbatim from Steele’s July 19 memo.
The U.S. government has actually made very little pretense that it didn’t make use of the dossier. FBI Director James Comey admitted to Congress that the dossier had been “one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation.” Then, on Jan. 11, 2017, following Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s meeting with Trump during which he and Comey presented the president-elect a summary of the dossier, Clapper issued a strange statement: The intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” This was a classic non-denial denial. That he and his friends did not “rely” on the dossier doesn’t mean that they didn’t make full use of it.
Federal investigators also wiretapped Paul Manafort, both before and after the election and indeed right through to the last days of the Obama administration. According to CNN, the FBI launched an investigation of Manafort in 2014 shortly after the Feb. 22, 2014, coup d’etat in Ukraine. Manafort had worked as a political consultant work for former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. However, the “surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence.” In other words, by the time Manafort went to work for the Trump campaign in May 2016, he was no longer under FBI surveillance. The FBI resumed its surveillance at just about the time the first of Steele’s memos started arriving in Washington.
The wiretaps had nothing to do with the charges Special Counsel Robert Mueller has just brought against Manafort. Mueller’s charges involve activities that took place long before Manafort joined the Trump campaign. What the FBI was looking for was evidence that Manafort was a conduit between the Kremlin and Trump.
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also featured prominently in the dossier. He too came under Obama administration surveillance. Indeed, Obama’s people used the wiretaps in order to get him ousted from his newly-appointed position. Obama administration holdover, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, listened in on a conversation Flynn had had with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak, on Dec. 29, 2016, and decided that the incoming national security adviser was susceptible to blackmail from the Russians. She never really explained on what grounds the Russians could or would blackmail Flynn. Her argument seemed to be that because Flynn had discussed the possible lifting of sanctions—a policy that would run contrary to that of the Obama administration that was still in office at the time this conversation had supposedly taken place—he had violated the Logan Act, which prohibits private individuals conducting U.S. foreign policy. No one has been prosecuted under this statute for 200 years. Why the Russians would want to invoke an obscure statute to threaten Flynn, an official well-disposed toward them, with a prosecution that could never succeed and thereby to undermine the very policy they were seeking, namely, the lifting of sanctions, was never explained. Nonetheless, armed with this nonsense, Yates rushed over to the White House demanding dismissal of Flynn. He was susceptible to blackmail and was therefore a security risk. It seemed to be a joke, but for reasons that remain baffling, the White House meekly complied with Yates’s demand.
We now know that the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump’s people reached pathological levels following the election. It is almost certain that the FBI did pay Steele to continue his work. The Washington Post reported that the bureau had “reached an agreement with [Steele] a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.” The Post claims that “Ultimately, the FBI did not pay Steele. Communications between the bureau and the former spy were interrupted as Steele’s now-famous dossier became the subject of news stories, congressional inquiries and presidential denials.” This seems highly unlikely. According to a number of news stories, the Clinton campaign stopped paying Steele sometime at the end of October. Yet Steele continued sending memos through December. Somebody had to have paid him. Steele is not the type to work pro bono.
Obama people such as Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes went on an unmasking rampage during the election and after. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has claimed that the Obama administration made “hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.” The requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed. More sinister were the activities of the Obama people after the election. Trounced by Trump, they vented their fury doing everything possible to undermine the incoming administration. The New York Times reported that during the last days of the Obama administration “White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential… across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.”
A former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration official, Evelyn Farkas, revealed that she was telling her former colleagues:
Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration, because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people that left…. That the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.
The full extent of the Obama administration’s campaign of surveillance, espionage and sabotage has yet to be revealed. The right-wing media have excitedly latched onto the Clinton revelations in order to put out a ridiculous story of their own. Americans are still innocent victims; Russians are still villains interfering with our gloriously pristine elections. The new victim-in-chief is Trump and the new Russian colluder-in-chief is Clinton. As ever, nothing changes in Washington.
At a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) put RT in her crosshairs, asking Kent Walker, the general counsel at Google, why his company has not yet banned RT from YouTube.
Walker said that Google “carefully” reviewed RT’s history on the social media platform and said they have “not found violations of our policies against hate speech and incitement to violence and the like.”
“It’s a propaganda machine, Mr. Walker,” Speier interjected. “The Intelligence Community – all 17 agencies – says it’s an arm of one of our adversaries. I would like for you to take that back to your executives and rethink continuing to have it on your platform.”
Walker responded that Google is looking into ways to increase transparency for “all government-funded sources of information.”
However, when Walker would not agree to the lawmaker’s wishes, Speier asked him if Google would at least consider putting a disclaimer on RT’s YouTube page that would say: “the Intelligence Community in the United States believes it’s an arm of our adversary, Russia.”
Walker said that they would “take a look at all forms of transparency.”
Speier also claimed that during the 2016 election, President Donald Trump’s campaign was “mimicking” stories from RT. Specifically, she referenced a video from CNN that was posted to Trump’s Twitter account on August 31, 2016. The tweet featured Trump speaking before a crowd and questioning former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s “strength and stamina.”
Speier said RT “hammered” the same message, comparing Trump’s tweet to a video posted to RT’s Twitter account, which featured footage of Clinton stumbling at the 9/11 memorial on September 11, 2016. Clinton’s campaign repeatedly changed its story as to the circumstances of Clinton’s fall at the time.
“What I would like to understand is who is mimicking who,” Speier asked, without acknowledging that Clinton’s stumble was covered by every major media outlet.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) also appeared to be grasping at straws during the hearing when he called out RT for reporting an event that was covered by other major news agencies.
Swalwell pointed to a July 2016 report about Ted Cruz being booed at the Republican National Convention (RNC) and suggested that the factual story, which was widely reported, could somehow be interpreted as election meddling or “propaganda.”
Referencing a large poster board display of an RT tweet promoting the story, Swalwell concluded that “if this interference campaign has taught us anything, it’s that the Russians don’t care.”
“They’re not pro-Republican, they’re not anti-Democrat, they’re just pro-Russian,” Swalwell said, warning his Republican colleagues that they could be targeted in the next election.
However, Swalwell failed to mention that the story about Cruz was entirely true and carried by numerousmediaoutlets.
Swalwell also asked if RT made any money on the ads they posted.
“The same is true beyond the internet, of course, because RT is featured on cable stations, satellite stations, hotel television networks, they buy advertising in newspapers, magazines, airports, etc,” Walker said.
Walker then went on to explain that the money comes from advertisers and Google gets a small percentage of that money while the majority goes to the publisher.
House Intelligence Committee members accusing RT of being “fake news” were only able to point to accurate and widely reported stories on the network, during the hearing with social media executives on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.
‘Red flag’
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Alabama) directed most of her questions to Facebook, suggesting that it should have been a “red flag” that some of the ads in question were paid for in Russian rubles.
In response, Colin Stretch, the general counsel at Facebook, said that all ads on the social media platform go through “a combination of automated and manual review.”
Sewell, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, interrupted Stretch at that point, seemingly distracted from the official purpose of the hearing.
Instead of pursuing a line of questioning about Russia, Sewell asked who vets material posted on Facebook and if they are a “diverse group of people.”
Stretch explained that Facebook has vetters speaking a “number of languages” based “around the globe” adding that the company is “committed to building a workforce that is as diverse as the community we serve.”
“With all due respect, I have to stop you there,” Sewell interrupted again. “I don’t know if you know exactly how many racially diverse workforce that you have, what the percentage is, but I can tell you if you don’t know. It’s very low.”
Sewell went on to say that Facebook’s overall racial ethnicity was poor, with black employees making up 8.8 percent of the total workforce and only 2.3 percent of the leadership roles.
Later in the hearing, Sewell asked all three companies if they would agree with legislation that would require them to add a disclosure of who paid for any given ad.
The executives from all three companies responded by saying they were in agreement with the “general direction” of that notion, to which the other two companies agreed.
In October, lawmakers introduced the Honest Ads Act, which would subject social media outlets to the same transparency and disclosure laws as television and radio ads.
Wait, how do Facebook ads work?
When Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) took the floor, he asked how each of the companies helped RT target the audience that would see their ads.
Sean Edgett, the acting general counsel at Twitter, said the company did not have much of an interaction with RT and most of the ads were promoted content.
“So, they take a tweet of a news story and they promote it so that it is seen by users who don’t follow them and potentially want to drive viewership to their own platform or then have them follow back,” Edgett explained.
Edgett went on to explain that RT used “very general targeting,” which included US citizens who follow other media or news organizations. He added that the RT en Español account specifically targets users in California and Florida.
When asked if Facebook was aiding RT, Stretch said that all of the ads that the company has released to the committee were bought through their “self-serve ad platform,” adding that there was “no human interaction with any of the advertisers.”
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
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