Tag: russiagate

Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

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The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the Point of Absurdity

Burying the lede just a bit, the New York Times on March 16th published a long, spirited piece about the federal tax investigation of Hunter Biden. This is the 24th paragraph:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless media stooges, many starring in Matt Orfalea’s damning montage above (the Hunter half-laugh is classic, by the way). All cooperated with intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s abandoned laptop and his dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma as “Russian disinformation.” They tossed in terms thought up for them by spooks as if they were their own thoughts, using words like “obviously” and “classic” and “textbook” to describe “the playbook of Russian disinformation,” in what itself was and still is a wildly successful disinformation campaign, one begun well before the much-derided (and initially censored) New York Post exposé on the topic from October of 2020. 

Not to be petty, but — well, yes, let’s be petty, just a little, and point out that many of the people who were the most pompous about this story turned out to be the most wrong, including the conga line of Intercept editors and staffers who essentially knocked Glenn Greenwald all the way to Substack over the issue. There are more important things going on in the world, but for sheer bootlicking conformist excess and depraved journalist-on-journalist venom the “Russian disinformation” fiasco has no equal, and probably needs recording for posterity before it’s memory-holed via some creepy homage to Severance, or a next-gen algorithmic witch-hunt, or whatever other federally contracted monstrosities are being readied for deployment somewhere far up the anus of Silicon Valley.

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Democratic staffer on Jan. 6 committee was part of intel effort to help Biden out of Hunter jam

The top Democratic staffer on the Capitol riot select committee was among dozens of former intelligence officials who signed a letter in October 2020 claiming without evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian operation.

David Buckley, who was formerly the CIA inspector general, is the staff director for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Despite offering no proof, President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, along with many in the media, dismissed the laptop story as being part of a Russian disinformation operation, including by pointing to the letter signed by Buckley.

Buckley is one of the signatories of the letter by former intelligence officials that was published and released by Politico in October 2020 following the New York Post revelations about emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Buckley is among the few signatories to have returned to government.

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SpyGate 101: A Primer On The Russia Collusion Hoax’s Years-long Plot To Take Down Trump

As Special Counsel John Durham continues to expose more details of the “SpyGate” or “Russia collusion” scandal, it can be difficult for any apolitical, non-news-junkie member of the public to grasp the ongoing developments.

After all, for more than five years, the corrupt legacy media has refused to report on scandal or done so with a slanted portrayal of the facts. So most Americans remain unaware of the Democrats’ years-long duplicity that sought to destroy first candidate and then President Donald Trump. Add to that reality the overlapping conspiracies and sprawling cast of characters involved, and it can be difficult to follow the story.

That the scandal is dense, however, does not mean it should be ignored. To the contrary, the duplicity must not be disregarded because what Trump’s political enemies tried to accomplish over the course of five years represents the biggest threat our constitutional republic has seen in the last century.

So for those who care about our country and her future but don’t want to be buried in the minutia of the scandal, here is your big-picture primer.

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15 Media Personalities Claimed Hunter’s Laptop Emails Were Likely Russian Propaganda Before New York Times Admitted

Fifteen establishment media personalities claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop emails were likely Russian propaganda before the New York Times admitted it Wednesday.

After nearly two years of dismissing Hunter’s tantalizing emails uncovered before the 2020 presidential election, the Times admitted the laptop was authentic, in direct contradiction of many in the Democrat-allied media.

The media personalities seemingly went out of their way to connect Russian dots of “disinformation” that did not exist for the purpose of supporting the Democrat nominee for president, Joe Biden, the father of Hunter and who now oversees the Justice Department’s investigation into Hunter’s possible tax fraud and corrupt business dealings with foreign entities.

Those business dealings reportedly took place throughout the world and may have involved Joe Biden himself. Such was the media’s necessity to dub the emails “Russian disinformation” instead of asking journalistic questions like Emma Joe Morris, who now is Breitbart News’s political editor and author of the original “laptop from hell” story from the New York Post.

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“Collusion against Trump” Timeline — New Evidence has Emerged

It’s easy to find timelines that detail Trump-Russia collusion developments. Here are links to two of them I recommend:

Politifact Russia-Trump timeline

Washington Post Russia-Trump timeline

On the other side, evidence has emerged that makes it clear there were organized efforts to collude against candidate Donald Trump–and then President Trump. For example:

  • Anti-Russian Ukrainians allegedly helped coordinate and execute a campaign against Trump in partnership with the Democratic National Committee and news reporters.
  • A Yemen-born ex-British spy reportedly delivered political opposition research against Trump to reporters, Sen. John McCain, and the FBI; the latter of which used the material–in part–to obtain wiretaps against one or more Trump-related associates.
  • There were orchestrated leaks of anti-Trump information and allegations to the press, including by ex-FBI Director James Comey.
  • The U.S. intel community allegedly engaged in questionable surveillance practices and politially-motivated “unmaskings” of U.S. citizens, including Trump officials.
  • Alleged conflicts of interests have surfaced regarding FBI officials who cleared Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and who investigated Trump’s alleged Russia ties.

But it’s not so easy to find a timeline pertinent to the investigations into these events.

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The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s justifiably despised class of media employees.

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The War From TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)

Hear us out here. The Donald himself is the approximate casus belli of the World War III prelude now raging in Ukraine, reminding us once again that sometimes history morphs in the strangest ways.

But the truth is, Trump single-handed generated such a deep, intense and irrational wave of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) in the Imperial City that Washington – berserk with anti-Putin hysteria – essentially shoved Cool Hand Vlad right over the brink.

To to be sure, before Trump came down the escalator in June 2015 Washington was already rife with Russophobia. But that emanated chiefly from the war-loving neocons of the GOP and the porkers and bag carriers for the military industrial complex, including the vast array of think-tanks and NGOs whose livelihoods depend on military threats, real or imagined, to America’s security.

But what turned the Washington of these failed proponents of the Afghan, Iraq, Syria and Libya invasions into an implacable and aggressive foe of Russia’s legitimate security interest in its own backyard was the utter, absolute and unremitting demonization of Vlad Putin himself by the Dems and incumbent Washington political class, which bought hook, line and sinker the hoary RussiaGate story.

That is to say, America was allegedly besmirched and defiled by the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 to such a ghastly degree that the man who single-handedly made it possible–Vlad Putin – deserves a place in the pantheon of historical evil-doers right up there with Adolf Hitler and Attila the Hun.

That’s right. The everlasting blot of the Trump presidency never, ever could have happened, according to the RussiaGate narrative, save for Vlad Putin’s nefarious and sweeping interference in the 2016 election. So this evil needs be avenged and the most effective avenue now consists of raining smack right in Putin’s face on the Ukrainian frontier.

As a result of the Dem establishment’s raging, unquenchable quest for revenge, however, the normal balance of power within the Imperial City and the national security Deep State has been upended.

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The absurd ‘Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post

“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest,” the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, “that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by The Washington Post and The New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.

It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy we now know never existed.

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“Russian Propaganda” Means Disputing US Propaganda

The Associated Press has published yet another article based on unevidenced assertions by anonymous government officials about the scary horrifying frightening Russian menace, this time to accuse another media outlet of promoting propaganda. Without a trace of irony.

“U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday accused a conservative financial news website with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda and alleged five media outlets targeting Ukrainians have taken direction from Russian spies,” AP reports. “The officials said Zero Hedge, which has 1.2 million Twitter followers, published articles created by Moscow-controlled media that were then shared by outlets and people unaware of their nexus to Russian intelligence. The officials did not say whether they thought Zero Hedge knew of any links to spy agencies and did not allege direct links between the website and Russia.”

“The officials briefed The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence sources,” AP adds, repeating the refrain we’re all familiar with now which is always used to justify a complete absence of evidence or accountability for incendiary claims about governments the United States doesn’t like.

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