Tag: russiagate

The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media. Now The CIA Is The Media.

Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world. Nowadays, there is no meaningful separation between the news media and the CIA at all.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald just highlighted an interesting point about the reporting by The New York Times on the so-called  “Bountygate” story the outlet broke in June of last year about the Russian government trying to pay Taliban-linked fighters to attack US soldiers in Afghanistan.

“One of the NYT reporters who originally broke the Russia bounty story (originally attributed to unnamed ‘intelligence officials’) say today that it was a CIA claim,” Greenwald tweeted. “So media outlets – again – repeated CIA stories with no questioning: congrats to all.”

Indeed, NYT’s original story made no mention of CIA involvement in the narrative, citing only “officials,” yet this latest article speaks as though it had been informing its readers of the story’s roots in the lying, torturing, drug-running, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency from the very beginning. The author even writes “The New York Times first reported last summer the existence of the C.I.A.’s assessment,” with the hyperlink leading to the initial article which made no mention of the CIA. It wasn’t until later that The New York Times began reporting that the CIA was looking into the Russian bounties allegations at all.

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Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One

That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.

The saga began on July 29, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth. Leading politicians from both parties similarly used this emotional storyline to advance multiple agendas.

The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed. “This is as bad as it gets,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Then-candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s refusal to punish Russia and his casting doubt on the truth of the story was more proof that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin,” while Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) demanded that, in response, the U.S. put Russians and Afghans “in body bags.”

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Fake News Specialists at Daily Beast Finally Admit “Russian Bounties” Hit Piece Was as Fake as the Russia Pee-Pee Tapes

The fake New York Times continues its efforts at disinformation and trying to overthrow the elected government of the USA: Last week Soros-backed „reporter“ Eric Schmitt tried to spark hostility with Russia over alleged “Bounties“ for US soldiers in Afghanistan.

Both the Russians and the Taliban have denied the crackpot claims. On June 29, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the story “a lie” and “absolute BS.”  Speaking on Russia24 television channel, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the story “a Hollywood blockbuster“ that reminded her of the movie “Wag the Dog“, TASS reported. The Taliban are outlawed as a terrorist organization in Russia.

The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid also rejected the claims by The New York Times: “We strongly reject this allegation. Neither is the Islamic Emirate in need of anyone’s help in determining its objectives,” said Mujahid. “These rumors are being circulated to create hurdles for the departure of American troops, to weaken and confuse advocates of peace in America and to attribute the great heroism and achievements of the Afghans to foreigner circles,” Mujahid said, according to Turkish Anadolu News Agency.

The New York Times story, which did not cite any actual examples of a “Russian bounty” being paid for the deaths of U.S. soldiers and offered little in the way of evidence besides unnamed “officials” and “sources”, was principally written by Eric Schmitt, who has been an employee of George-Soros sponsored Democrat Think Tank „Center for a New American Security“ (CNAS) since 2015. The New York Times did not reveal this affiliation in Schmitt‘s articles. It was not clear how working for a partisan Think Tank complies with NYT journalistic ethics.

CNAS was run by Obama-era Ukraine ambassador Victoria Nuland until 2019, a frequent guest at the Soros-funded Ukraine Media Crisis Center, ground zero for the Russiagate conspiracy. Nuland was closely involved with the Biden crime family’s Ukraine Burisma racket, George Soros’ manipulations in Ukraine and the plunged $5 billion taxpayer dollars into Ukraine as part of the “color revolution” 2014.

CNAS was also one of the prime sources for the hit job on Gen. Mike Flynn 2017. Eric Schmitt had already begun writing about Mike Flynn’s threat to the deep state in Dec. 3, 2016, warning of Flynn’s “desire to usurp what he viewed as Washington’s incompetent and corrupt elite.” Closely coordinating with Rep. Adam Schiff, Schmitt became one of the first reporters to begin the takedown of Gen. Mike Flynn on Feb. 12 with an article headed “Turmoil at the National Security Council, From the Top Down” and Feb. 14 with an article claiming “Trump Was Informed 17 Days Ago That Flynn Had Not Been Truthful on Russia”. Amazingly, Schmitt is still on staff at the “New York Times”.

On Thursday, more than six months after our initial reporting the mainstream media finally caught up with Gateway Pundit and admitted their original reporting was as fake as the Russia pee-pee tapes.

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Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Yesterday Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter

Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…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.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

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How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

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9+ Democrats Who Should Be Ousted From Their Committees by the Marjorie Taylor Greene Standard

On Thursday, House Democrats, with the help of a few Republicans, took the unprecedented step of voting to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) of her committee assignments, for her past embrace of QAnon conspiracy theories.

Their action came with a warning from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who said of Democrats, “I would remind them what Leader McConnell said when Democrats voted to nuke the judicial filibuster: ‘You’ll regret this. And you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.’”

“If people are held to what they have said prior to even being in this House, if the majority party gets to decide who sits on what other committees, I hope you keep that standard, because we have a long list you can work with in your own,” McCarthy added.

Make no mistake about it, 2022 is fast approaching, and I’d put money on the GOP retaking the majority. Remember, the GOP managed to gain seats in 2020, despite predictions of losing more seats. Also, historically speaking, midterm elections are usually pretty bad for the party in power. So, in the event that the Republican Party gains control, they will now have a precedent giving them the green light to strip Democrats of committee assignments for embracing conspiracy theories and other unseemly behavior. Here’s a list of Democrats they should start with.

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Jemele Hill Fears Lax Punishment for Trump Supporters Could ‘Weaponize White People’

With the left and their assistants in big tech on the hunt to destroy conservatives everywhere, former ESPN talker Jemele Hill is once again reviving the theme of Russian election interference.

Despite the fact that no evidence has ever been revealed showing the Russians having an outsized influence on the 2016 elections, the Atlantic referenced it in a Sunday tweet.

“The Russians created chaos in the 2016 election by flooding our social media networks with misinformation and racial division. If this coup attempt isn’t dealt with harshly, America’s enemies will know they can weaponize white people to do their bidding without consequence,” she wrote.

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With Biden’s New Threats, the Russia Discourse is More Reckless and Dangerous Than Ever

To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.

This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.

With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.

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WHO THE “RESISTANCE” WAS ACTUALLY ‘RESISTING’ THESE LAST FOUR YEARS

The Resistance™️ was aggressively marketed by cynical liberal spinmeisters like Neera Tanden (who in a brazen middle finger to US progressives is also set to play a role in the Biden administration) with the goal of harnessing and maintaining the enthusiastic grassroots anti-establishment energy of the Bernie Sanders campaign and directing it against Trump.

But what did it actually accomplish? In the end, all the so-called Resisters ended up doing was promoting a bunch of Russia conspiracy theories and an impeachment which failed to remove Trump, all while providing no actual resistance to Trump’s most pernicious policies. They’d yell and shriek on social media and MSM punditry panels any time someone was fired from the administration and falsely get people’s hopes up whenever new information came out about the Mueller investigation, but in terms of actually removing Trump from office or stopping him from doing evil things like starving Venezuelans, assaulting press freedoms with the persecution of Julian Assange, tempting war with Iran and perpetuating the mass atrocities in Yemen, they accomplished literally nothing.

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