September 10, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
The REAL Russia Hoax…and the “Pod People” Who Perpetrated It
Friends,
The
utterly fraudulent “Mueller Report”—despite the best attempts of Deep State
operatives on the Mueller Commission staff and a raving and frenzied Media
hoping for a “kill”—came up a dud. It goes without saying that both you and I,
and many Americans now, are pretty much convinced that the Russia Hoax was a
major and unprecedented gambit in what can only be seen as a very real “attempted
silent coup” to “get” Donald Trump by the establishment managerial Deep State.
The plan was that the administrative
elites, including our Intelligence agencies and foreign policy establishment,
would either sink his campaign as it became obvious that he might well become
president, or, after his election, they would force him out of office or
impeach him for fake “high crimes and misdemeanors."
And it
was the so-called collusion with Russia, said the highly-paid pundits on CNN,
MSNBC, NBC, and in the pages of The
Washington Post and The New York
Times, right before our eyes, which would do the trick and bring the
president down. The fanatical minions of the Deep State, possessed of a
devilish and lunatic fury that continues to control and direct their actions,
were certain of that.
But
despite their best efforts, and to their extreme outrage, that did not happen. So,
since then the demonically-possessed “Orcs of the Night,” those infected
carriers of a venomous ideology which destroys all that is good and right in
our culture, have searched for new weapons with which to undo the 2016 election
and put the genie—the counter-revolution of the Deplorables—back in the lamp.
Even
though the Russia Hoax as a major issue no longer shows up on the front page of
The New York Times and is no longer
spewed forth daily out of the angry and foul mouths of a Rachel Maddow or a Don
Lemon, the issue and its background and origin have not exactly gone away. The
elites want such concerns to be buried: don’t ask any me any questions, and I
won’t tell you any lies.
In
particular, the role of our intelligence agencies—especially the CIA and
its former Obama-era director John Brennan (now pontificating on CNN when he
should be serving a life-sentence in Atlanta federal prison)—needs thorough
examination and exposure.
For, very
simply, it is there even more than with the nefarious head honchos, the Jim
Comeys and Peter Strzoks of the FBI, that we actually had a “secret government within the government.” Despite the
fatuous pundit A. B. Stoddard on Fox and others like her continuing to deny
that Donald Trump was surveilled, and despite the “who, me?” professed
innocence attitude, or the “we were just doing our job” response of the Intel
agencies: despite all that, what we have witnessed, and in some ways continue
to witness, is the face of an actual plot, an orchestrated plan, to overthrow a
president and throw out an election.
And, in
spite of the criticism that some of us have of Donald Trump’s failure to follow
through on certain aspects of his policies, the one very significant thing he
did accomplish through his election was this: he forced those dark powers,
those self-satisfied and condescending elites who have controlled our lives and
destinies for so long (and largely without our knowledge)—he forced them to
emerge from the shadows and show their ugly and vicious faces for us all to
see.
Remember
the classic film Invasion of
the Body Snatchers? [The 1956 movie is the one I recall, although a
second one came out in 1978.] Literally thousands of “pod people” were taking
over the bodies and souls of normal human beings. From all appearances those
possessed persons seemed to be human,
but they weren’t. They weren’t like you and me.
Our
elites are, in effect, modern-day “pod people” who have infected (and control)
our educational system, our entertainment, our media, and most of our politics.
And until 2016 they were on their way to infecting us all, neutering all
opposition and dissolving all doubts about their goal and objective: a
globalist state where our mental and moral enslavement will have become fact.
In the
1956 film, towards the end, Dr. Miles Bennell goes out frantically into the
streets of Los Angeles and screams: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re
next!” That has
become our role in 2019, and that is our clarion call and why we must engage in total warfare against those carriers of destruction and abomination: no
quarter, no compromise, for how can you “negotiate” with someone who wishes to
destroy you, pervert your children, and dismantle your culture and your very
faith?
*****
Among the
dozens of volumes and memoirs published on Russiagate, two have stood out for
me as reasonably decent summaries of what has occurred during this dark period
of American history: Gregg Jarrett’s The
Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump
(2018), and Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of
Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (2019). But
most folks don’t have time to dig deeply into all the accumulated skullduggery
and plotting that went on over the past three years.
If you’ve
watched the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” program during the past couple of years,
you’ve seen appearances by Professor Stephen Cohen talking about the Russian
collusion charge, its background, and its extreme danger to the very existence
to what is left of the old republic.
Cohen, as host Carlson has made clear, is not a “man of the Right.” He’s Emeritus Professor of Russian
Studies at Princeton and New York University, an historian of Russian-American
relations, and, fascinatingly, married to Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, one this country’s most
progressivist magazines, where Cohen is also a contributor.
Back
three decades ago I found Cohen’s writings and scholarship to be far too
friendly towards the old Soviet Union. Indeed, back then I also believed
William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy (1959), which I had to read in my diplomatic history
course at UVa, and the revisionism it represented, to be “anti-American.” But
now in 2019, in retrospect, both Williams’ examination of what the Kennedy
brothers, Ronald and Donald, have called the “Yankee
Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic At Home,” and Cohen’s careful investigation
of Russian-American relations, seem a bit more reasonable, somewhat more defensible in the
days of the Russia Hoax and our failed foreign exploits in Iraq, Somalia, and
elsewhere.
Cohen has
written extensively on the Russia Hoax, and two of his essays are perhaps the
most succinct summaries that I’ve seen: about what we still don’t know, and
about the origins of this silent coup.
Again, Cohen is in many ways a “man of the Left,” not a conservative;
but maybe that’s to his advantage, as he brings to his insights years of
understanding, research, and realism that far too many in the established “conservative
movement” sorely lack…too many of them are still dependent on and, yes, part of
the Deep State.
So, these
following two pieces are excellent encapsulations…you won’t hear Lindsay Graham
or John Bolton or most GOP senators saying these things, but, then, they are part of the problem, and not
part of its solution.
What We Still Do Not Know About Russiagate
Vital questions about perhaps the worst alleged presidential
scandal in US history remain unanswered
It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to
think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one
leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he “colluded”
with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election—and, still
more, that Vladimir Putin’s regime, “America’s No. 1 threat,” had compromising
material on Trump that made him its “puppet.” Or a more fraudulent accusation.
Even leaving aside the misperception that Russia is the primary threat to America in world
affairs, no aspect of this allegation has turned out to be true, as should have
been evident from the outset. Major aspects of the now infamous Steele Dossier,
on which much of the allegation was based, were themselves not merely
“unverified” but plainly implausible.
Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and
operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow
hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed,
high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even
though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election?
Nonetheless, the American mainstream media and other important elements of the US
political establishment relied on Steele’s allegations for nearly three years,
even heroizing him—and some still do, explicitly or implicitly.
Not surprisingly, former special counsel Robert Mueller found no
evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. No credible
evidence has ever been produced that Russia’s “interference” affected the
result of the 2016 presidential election in any significant way. Nor was
Russian “meddling” in the election anything akin to a “digital Pearl Harbor,”
as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than
President Bill Clinton’s political and financial “interference” undertaken to
assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
Nonetheless, Russiagate’s core allegation persists, like a legend,
in American political life—in media commentary, in financial solicitations by
some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own
discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to
dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began—by
whom, when, and why.
Officially, at least in the FBI’s version, its operation
“Crossfire Hurricane,” the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump
campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to suspicious remarks made to visitors
by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This too is not
believable, as I pointed out previously. Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western
intelligence agencies. That is, the young Trump aide was being enticed,
possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation against Trump.
(Papadopoulos wasn’t the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being
another.)
But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies,
prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump’s presidential
campaign? A reflexive answer might be because candidate Trump promised to
“cooperate with Russia,” to pursue a pro-détente foreign policy, but this was
hardly a startling, still less subversive, advocacy by a would-be Republican
president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in the 20th century had been
initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so
far off their rightful reservation and so intrusively into American
presidential politics? Investigations being overseen by Attorney General
William Barr may provide answers—or not. Barr has already leveled procedural
charges against James Comey, head of the FBI under President Obama and briefly
under President Trump, but the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of
having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate,
still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James
Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama
respectively, are the more likely culprits.
The FBI is no longer the fearsome organization it once was and
thus not hard to investigate, as Barr has already shown. The others,
particularly the CIA, are a different matter, and Barr has suggested they are
resisting. To investigate them, particularly the CIA, it seems, he has brought
in a veteran prosecutor-investigator, John Durham.
Which raises other questions. Are Barr and Durham, whose own
careers include associations with US intelligence agencies, determined to
uncover the truth about the origins of Russiagate? And can they really do so
fully, given the resistance already apparent? Even if so, will Barr make public
their findings, however damning of the intelligence agencies they may be, or
will he classify them? And if the latter, will President Trump use his
authority to declassify the findings as the 2020 presidential election
approaches in order to discredit the role of Obama’s presidency and its
would-be heirs?
Equally important perhaps, how will mainstream media treat the
Barr-Durham investigation and its findings? Having driven the Russiagate
narrative for so long and so misleadingly—and with liberals perhaps finding
themselves in the incongruous position of defending rogue intelligence
agencies—will they credit or seek to discredit the findings?
It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees,
are not the ideal investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much
better would be a truly bipartisan, independent investigation based in the
Senate, as was the Church Committee of the mid-1970s, which exposed and
reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US intelligence agencies.
That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable, and
courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.
There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic
presidential debates. First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and
future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have
repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) At
every “debate” or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be
asked about this grave threat to American democracy—what they think about what
happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care
for our democracy.
How
Did Russiagate Begin?
Why Barr’s investigation is important and should be encouraged.
By Stephen F. Cohen MAY
30, 2019
It cannot
be emphasized too often: Russiagate—allegations that the American president has
been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to put him in the
White House—is the worst and (considering the lack of actual evidence) most
fraudulent political scandal in American history. We have yet to calculate the
damage Russiagate has inflicted on America’s democratic institutions, including
the presidency and the electoral process, and on domestic and foreign
perceptions of American democracy, or on US-Russian relations at a critical
moment when both sides, having “modernized” their nuclear weapons, are
embarking on a new, more dangerous, and largely unreported arms race.
Rational (if politically innocent) observers may
have thought that when the Mueller report found no “collusion” or other conspiracy
between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, only possible “obstruction” by
Trump—nothing Mueller said in his May 29 press statement altered that
conclusion—Russiagate would fade away. If so, they were badly mistaken.
Evidently infuriated that Mueller did not liberate the White House from Trump,
Russiagate promoters—liberal Democrats and progressives foremost among
them—have only redoubled their unverified collusion allegations, even in
once-respectable media outlets. Whether out of political ambition or
impassioned faith, the damage wrought by these Russiagaters continues to mount,
with no end in sight.
One way to end Russiagate might be to discover how
it actually began. Considering what we have learned, or been told, since the
allegations became public nearly three years ago, in mid-2016, there seem to be
at least three hypothetical possibilities:
1. One is the orthodox Russiagate explanation:
Early on, sharp-eyed top officials of President Obama’s intelligence agencies,
particularly the CIA and FBI, detected truly suspicious “contacts” between
Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians “linked to the Kremlin” (whatever
that may mean, considering that the presidential administration employs
hundreds of people), and this discovery legitimately led to the full-scale
“counterintelligence investigation” initiated in July 2016. Indeed, Mueller
documented various foreigners who contacted, or who sought to contact, the
Trump campaign. The problem here is that Mueller does not tell us, and we do
not know, if the number of them was unusual.
Many foreigners seek “contacts” with US
presidential campaigns and have done so for decades. In this case, we do not
know, for the sake of comparison, how many such foreigners had or sought
contacts with the rival Clinton campaign, directly or through the Clinton
Foundation, in 2016. (Certainly, there were quite a few contacts with
anti-Trump Ukrainians, for example.) If the number was roughly comparable, why
didn’t US intelligence initiate a counterintelligence investigation of the
Clinton campaign?
If readers think the answer is because the
foreigners around the Trump campaign included Russians, consider this: In 1986,
when Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination, he went to Russia—still Communist Soviet Russia—to
make contacts in preparation for his anticipated presidency, including meeting
with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. US media coverage of Hart’s visit was
generally favorable. (I accompanied Senator Hart and do not recall much, if
any, adverse US media reaction.)
2. The
second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump
commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped
anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what
became known as the Steele Dossier. As I pointed
out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no
sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its
contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed.
Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russiagate premise
insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have
risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”? On the
other hand, there is plenty
of evidence that “researchers” in the United
States (some, like Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign) were
supplying him with the fruits of their research.
3. The
third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in
my recent book War With
Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is
that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy,
first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of
“Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has
said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous
remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.
The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by
apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan
Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk.
What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of
them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.
US
Attorney General William Barr now proposes to investigate the origins of
Russiagate. He has appointed yet another special prosecutor, John Durham, to do
so, but the power to decide the range and focus of the investigation will
remain with Barr. The important news is Barr’s expressed intention to
investigate the role of other US intelligence agencies, not just the FBI, which
obviously means the CIA when it was headed by John Brennan and Brennan’s
partner at the time, James Clapper, then director of national intelligence.
As I
argued in The Nation,
Brennan, not Obama’s hapless FBI Director James Comey, was the godfather of
Russiagate, a thesis for which more evidence has since appeared.
We should hope that Barr intends to exclude nothing, including the two
foundational texts of the deceitful Russiagate narrative: the Steele Dossier
and, directly related, the contrived but equally ramifying Intelligence
Community Assessment of January 2017. (Not coincidentally, they were made
public at virtually the same time, inflating Russiagate into an obsessive
national scandal.)
Thus far,
Barr has been cautious in his public statements. He has acknowledged there was
“spying,” or surveillance, on the Trump campaign, which can be legal, but he
surely knows that in the case of Papadopoulos (and possibly of General Michael
Flynn), what happened was more akin to entrapment, which is never legal. Barr
no doubt also recalls, and will likely keep in mind, the astonishing
warning Senator Charles Schumer issued to
President-elect Trump in January 2017: “Let me tell you, you take on the
intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
(Indeed, Barr might ask Schumer what he meant and why he felt the need to be
the menacing messenger of intel agencies, wittingly or not.)
But
Barr’s thorniest problem may be understanding the woeful role of mainstream
media in Russiagate. As Lee Smith, who contributed important investigative
reporting, has written:
“The press is part of the operation, the
indispensable part. None of it would have been possible…had the media not
linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by
Clinton operatives.” How does Barr explore this “indispensable” complicity
of the media in originating and perpetuating the Russiagate fraud without
impermissibly infringing on the freedom of the press?
Ideally,
mainstream media—print and broadcast—would now themselves report on how and why
they permitted intelligence officials, through leaks and anonymous sources, and
as “opinion” commentators, to use their pages and programming to promote
Russiagate for so long, and why they so excluded well-informed, nonpartisan
alternative opinions. Instead, they have almost unanimously reported and
broadcast negatively, even antagonistically, about Barr’s investigation, and
indeed about Barr personally. (The Washington
Post even found a way to print this: “William
Barr looks like a toad…”) Such is the seeming panic of the Russiagate media
over Barr’s investigation, which promises to declassify related documents,
that The New York
Times again trotted out its easily debunked
fiction that public disclosures will endanger a
purported US informant, a Kremlin mole, at Putin’s side.
Finally, but most crucially, what was the real
reason US intelligence agencies launched a discrediting operation against
Trump? Was it because, as seems likely, they intensely disliked his campaign
talk of “cooperation with Russia,” which seemed to mean the prospect of a new
US-Russian détente? Even fervent political and media opponents of Trump should
want to know who is making foreign policy in Washington. The next intel target
might be their preferred candidate or president, or a foreign policy they
favor.
Nor, it
seems clear, did the CIA stop. In March 2018, the current director,
Gina Haspel, then deputy director, flatly lied to President Trump
about an incident in the UK [the supposed “poisoning” by the Russians of two
Russian exiles, Sergei and Yulia Skripal] in order to persuade him to escalate
measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did. Several
non–mainstream media outlets have
reported the true story. Typically, The
New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without
correcting Haspel’s falsehood.
We are left, then, with this paradox, formulated
in a tweet on May 24 by the British journalist John O’Sullivan: “Spygate is the
first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published
transparently but the media want to cover them up.”
Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of
Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University.
A Nation contributing
editor, his most recent book War
With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is
available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with
the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth year, are available at
www.thenation.com.
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