Summary: Most of the analysis about RussiaGate, even after the Mueller report, is nonsense. I wrote a bare bones nuts and bolts analysis. Here is a bold and critical analysis by a Leftist willing to challenge their tribal truths. Just as Jonathan Swift did in 1700, let’s read the sharpest insights on both left and right – then put the pieces together.
Russiagate Implodes,
Pleasing Trump But Leaving the Left in the Cold
By Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report.
28 March 2019.
The “Deep State” escalated a dispute within the U.S. corporate electoral duopoly
into a geopolitical crisis, an “attack on America.”
Robert Mueller has finally put a plug in the noxious fart that has oozed for almost three years from the conjoined bowels of the Democratic Party and the national security state – but the stain remains, and may yet be lethal to us all.
Russiagate began as a lame excuse for Hillary Clinton’s spectacular failure to defeat her supposedly ideal opponent, a “deplorable” straw man who could easily be knocked down by the supremely “qualified” corporate battle axe. As Wikileaks revealed, Clinton campaign chief John Podesta urged Democrats and cooperative media to make Donald Trump a “Pied Piper” of Republicans in the belief that a Democratic landslide would result. Corporate media came through for the Democrats, bestowing a total of $5 billion in free air time on the Trump campaign – more than Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio combined. Thus, the Democrats and Democrat-friendly corporate media gave us the Trump presidency – with decisive help from Black voter suppression in the GOP in Midwestern “swing” states.
“Russia and Wikileaks were framed in a media show trial.”
However, Russiagate would never have exploded into a screaming marathon of madness were it not for the machinations of the national security state – the CIA, FBI and spooks like former national intelligence director James Clapper, the man that swore to the U.S. Congress that the government was “not wittingly” spying on hundreds of millions of Americans. Appalled at Trump’s campaign rhetoric against U.S. “regime change” and “nation-building” policies and his snipes at NATO, the spies, disinformers and militarists moved en mass into Hillary’s “Big Tent.”
Without their decisive collaboration, “Russiagate” would have soon passed into history as merely a case of electoral losers’ sour grapes. The “Deep State” escalated a dispute within the U.S. corporate electoral duopoly into a geopolitical crisis, an “attack on America” and a new “Pearl Harbor.”
“The Democrats and Democrat-friendly corporate media gave us the Trump presidency.”
Simply put, the real rulers of the U.S. empire could not depend on Donald Trump to maintain the momentum of the U.S. military offensive that had begun with Barack Obama’s attack on Libya in 2011 and continued with the jihadist proxy war against Syria, the coup that toppled the elected, Russia-friendly government in Ukraine, and the “pivot” against China.
It doesn’t take an algorithm to figure out that the U.S. is rapidly being eclipsed by the rising powers of the east: China and its geopolitical partner, Russia. At this late stage in the imperial game, the only strong cards Washington holds, are military. Hillary Clinton was “all in” with the global military offensive, including a willingness to play “chicken” with Russia in Syria and Ukraine. The fate of empire could not be left in Donald Trump’s erratic little hands, so he was to be hobbled by Russiagate from day one of his presidency. The main objective, however, was not to knock Trump off – which was always a dangerous long shot – but to control him, and to keep the war hysteria going.
In that sense, and from the standpoint of the National Security State, Russiagate has been a success. Under Trump, relations with Russia and China have been firmly re-set on State of Permanent Near-War, and Washington has escalated its economic aggressions against Venezuela and Iran to levels that are nearly indistinguishable from military assault.
“The fate of empire could not be left in Donald Trump’s erratic little hands,
so he was to be hobbled by Russiagate.”
Thanks to Russiagate, the Democratic Party stepped forward to fill the imperial void that was temporarily created in the corporate duopoly by Trump’s takeover of the GOP. The Democrats became the most aggressive wing of the War Party – as if, for foreign policy purposes, Clinton had not really lost the election, at all.
- Democrats overwhelmingly supported both of Donald Trump’s record-breaking war budgets – including majorities of the Congressional Black Caucus.
- Congresswoman Maxine Waters strutted around the Capitol waving an American flag and blabbering about how Vladimir Putin was “continuing to advance into Korea” – apparently confusing that country with Crimea.
- Ostensible “Black Lives Matter” activists like Shaun King identified fully with former FBI director Robert Mueller and felt “betrayed” by Trump’s distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies – as if Cointelpro never happened, the FBI isn’t out to frame “Black Identity Extremists,” and the CIA doesn’t tell lies for a living.
Having accomplished its purposes, the longest-running of the CIA-FBI’s lies has now become inoperative with Mueller’s admission that there is no evidence of “collusion” between Trump and the Russians. But the corporate media, the Democrats, and most Republicans continue to insist that the Russian government “hacked” the Democratic National Committee emails and gave the contents to Wikileaks for distribution. That was the CIA’s “high confidence” assessment, although the agency’s report clearly stated that it offered no “proof.” But Wikileaks has always insisted that the DNC data was not electronically hacked, but hand-delivered – not by Russians or any other state actor. And Wikileaks, unlike the CIA and the FBI, has never been caught in a lie.
“Ostensible ‘Black Lives Matter’ activists like Shaun King
identified fully with former FBI director Robert Mueller.”
The FBI has never attempted to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about the nature of the delivery, even though Assange is easy to find, locked up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Neither have they attempted to speak with Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who claims to have accepted the hand-delivery of data on the campus of American University, in Washington, DC. The reason the FBI has avoided talking to the most important witnesses in the case, and that they never inspected the DNC server, is obvious: they know that the whole Russiagate story is bogus.
Any valid investigation would begin with the two most important witnesses, Assange and Murray. There was no investigation, and there will be no judicial resolution of Russiagate because any such proceedings in a court of law would be a disaster for the State. Instead, Russia and Wikileaks were framed in a media show trial.
“Wikileaks, unlike the CIA and the FBI, has never been caught in a lie.”
Selected analysts from three other intelligence agencies signed on to the CIA’s “assessment” — essentially, a theory – that Vladimir Putin himself directed that “hacked” DNC data be transferred to Wikileaks in order to embarrass Clinton and assist Trump. But almost two years ago, four members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), including William Binney, the former NSA technical director for world geopolitical and military analysis, who designed many of the agency’s spying and tracking systems, concluded …
“There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year – not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak – a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial ‘hack,’ as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.”
Rolling Stone writer Matt Tiabbi and lots of other observers think Donald Trump now has a compelling message for his base in 2020 …
“Given that ‘collusion’ has turned out to be dry well, to the ordinary viewer it will look a hell of lot like the MSNBCs of the world humped a fake story for two consecutive years in the hopes of overturning election results ahead of time. Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that ‘elites’ don’t respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It’s hard to imagine what could look worse.”
“The MSNBCs of the world humped a fake story for two consecutive years.”
Taibbi believes Russiagate has done more damage to U.S. journalism credibility than the lies told to justify the invasion of Iraq. Maybe. But this is not really about the credibility of media corporations; it’s about the legitimacy of the ruling class. The most important function of U.S. corporate media is to fashion narratives that serve the imperial interests of their owners, the ruling class.
Ever since Donald Trump smashed his conventional Republican rivals in the primaries and captured half of the governing duopoly, the ruling class has been waging a lop-sided rich man’s civil war, with most of the Lords of Capital bent on making Trump a transitory phenomenon. These behemoths of finance interpreted Trump’s white nationalist victory, on the GOP side, and Bernie Sanders’ phenomenal Democratic challenge to the corporate consensus on austerity as a warning that they had lost control of the narrative – of reality as told to the masses in the exceptional USA. Therefore, in addition to stoking the fires of never-ending war, Russiagate would provide the rationale for a new McCathyism, to justify a purge of dissenting voices from the Internet, the last partially unconquered communications arena.
“The most important function of U.S. corporate media is
to fashion narratives that serve the imperial interests of their owners, the ruling class.”
The purge began only two weeks after Trump’s victory at the polls, when the oligarch-owned Washington Post debuted a hit list of 13 leftist web sites deemed “Russian propaganda outlets and sympathizers” by a shadowy outfit called Prop-or-Not. The Post allowed Prop-or-Not’s principals to remain anonymous, ostensibly to safeguard them from harm by the blacklisted left-wingers. But we knew this was a ruling class orchestration — a Jeff Bezos project – and the beginning of a very cold season for the left in the U.S., as the Lords of Capital and their minions struggled to regain their mandate to interpret reality.
With Mueller’s “no collusion” verdict, Donald Trump can claim to have been vindicated in the Russiagate saga, but there will be no respite for the real left – not to be confused with the phony “resistance” that has run on Kremlin-hate (and Syria hate and Venezuela hate) for the past two years. For the Lords of Capital, taming Trump was just an episode. They see smashing the Left as a necessity, in pursuit of endless wars and austerity.
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This is a follow-up to The next chapter of RussiaGate: more hysteria!
About the author
Glen Ford has worked in broadcast news since 1970. In 1977, Ford produced and hosted “America’s Black Forum” (ABF), the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial TV. Never before – and never since – had a Black news entity received attention from the major world news services (Tass, the Soviet news agency). In 1979 he created “Black Agenda Reports,” which produced more short-form programming than the two existing Black radio networks, combined.
Ford also produced music shows. In 1987, Ford launched “Rap It Up,” the first nationally syndicated Hip Hop music show, and organized three national rap music conventions.
Ford co-founded Black Commentator in 2002, an influential weekly journal. In 2006, Ford and its writing team left BC to launch Black Agenda Report (BAR).
In addition to his broadcast and Internet experience, Ford was national political columnist for Encore American & Worldwide News magazine; founded Africana Policies magazine, and authored The Big Lie: Analysis of U.S. Press Coverage of the Grenada Invasion
See his tweets, and his articles at the BAR and at Common Dreams.
About the Black Agenda Report
Founded in 2006, Black Agenda Report is your source for news, commentary and analysis from the black left since 2006. Find their weekly Black Agenda Radio program on Soundcloud, iTunes, or Stitcher.
Their “About” page gives (impressive) bios of their key staff. Also see their Twitter feed. Google suppresses Black Agenda Report in search results. Subscribing to their email updates is the only guaranteed way to see them.
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For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
This failure of the news media and our political system is an example of the broad institution failure I discuss in A new, dark picture of America’s future.
Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about RussiaGate, about propaganda, about ways to reform America’s politics, and especially these …
- A review of Russiagate, its propaganda and hysteria.
- Secrets untold about the DNC hack, the core of RussiaGate.
- Debunking RussiaGate, attempts to stop the new Cold War.
- The secrets of RussiaGate, and what it all means.
- RussiaGate: fragments of a story large beyond imagining.
- We learn the secret origins of RussiaGate.
- Read RussiaGate propaganda, the first step to fighting it.
- Hot fake news about RussiaGate! Read all about it!
- News from the Left: Russiagate & the Democratic’s Defeat.
- The next chapter of RussiaGate: more hysteria!
Understanding one of our big mistakes
Who Lost Russia?
How the World Entered a New Cold War.
By Peter Conradi, Foreign Editor of the Sunday Times (2017).
From the publisher …
“When the Soviet Union collapsed on December 26, 1991, it looked like the start of a remarkable new era of peace and co-operation. Some even dared to declare the end of history, assuming all countries would converge on enlightenment values and liberal democracy.
“Nothing could be further from the truth. Russia emerged from the 1990s battered and humiliated; the parallels with Weimar Germany are striking. Goaded on by a triumphalist West, a new Russia has emerged, with a large arsenal of upgraded weapons, conventional and nuclear, determined to reassert its national interests in the ‘near abroad’ – Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine – as well as fighting a proxy war in the Middle East. Meanwhile, NATO is executing large-scale maneuvers and stockpiling weaponry close to Russia’s border.
“In this provocative new work, Peter Conradi argues that we have consistently failed to understand Russia and its motives and, in doing so, have made a powerful enemy.”
The people that have made the most of this mostly fake story are the neoliberals of the DP–NOT LEFT. They might be a bit left of the RP in their rhetoric on social issues, but not left on foreign policy, war as foreign policy, the national security state, etc.
Award-winning journalists Ben Swann and Glenn Greenwald have been completely scathing — check out their videos at YT.
Charles,
Did you read the post? Ford doesn’t say the Left pushed RussiaGate. He says something quite different: that the Left will suffer from the results of RussiaGate.
I always thought the gobs of free media for Trump during his primaries was just more stupidity on the part of the media and Trump’s clumsy showmanship. I am still skeptical that it was some grand design, but as a conspiracy it is way more likely than the Russian Collusion story.
Bernie,
“I always thought the gobs of free media for Trump during his primaries was just more stupidity on the part of the media ”
Since “the media” – like most Americans – like money, they laugh at people saying they’re stupid as they count their lavish profits from the high ratings during the Trump era. Rachel Maddow is so stupid her descendants wont’ need to work for several generations.
“but as a conspiracy it”
I don’t understand why people why the concept of “conspiracy” in such weird ways. People react to the same environment in similar ways. There is no need for secret meetings in basements. In Spring, people in Iowa mow their lawns. We don’t form a secret society to decide that’s the right thing to do.
Fast food chains use lots of salt and fat, but have no secret conspiracies that tell them to do so. The companies that make breakfast cereal don’t have multi-national conspiracies telling them about the magic of sugar.
The US public, of all flavors, loved reading about Trump’s antics. We believe reading about policies is so boring. Competent politicians are so boring. We want excitement! Hot wild librarians saying crazy things, like Sarah Palin. Black saviors like Obama, making big promises with overtones of salvation. Now Trump. These people dominate the news because we have little interest in governing America as citizens. We want to be entertained, not reminded about our obligation to bear the burdens of self-government.
The news media give us what we want. Being Americans, we eagerly watch – and whine that they don’t give us boring stuff that we won’t watch.
A lot of people confuse confederacy and conspiracy, as well as misunderstanding the copy cat function of obtainment. When someone obtains something that someone wants; then theft, copying, etc fuel the appearance of a conspiracy. Whereas, it is just part of the response of competition and desire.
A cautionary note about assuming facts that aren’t in evidence.
The claim that the theft of material from the DNC server was the result of a hack is false, and probably so. Someone with physical access to the server was responsible. I don’t think this can be disputed. The claim that trump somehow colluded with Russia in some kind of scheme never held water, and now we have the Mueller report admitting this. So no hack, no collusion. Done.
What I will say is that if you don’t know who took the emails, you probably be making claims about who didn’t do it. There’s an argument that Russia was behind the theft. That argument is unproven and I’m not going into all of it here because writing a comment longer than the original post is uncouth. That argument could be also be flat out wrong. I’m keenly aware that a lot of people pushing Russiagate swill had some very dodgy views about how the US should behave towards Russia and what the Russians call the Near Abroad, but I don;t think the possibility of Russian fingerprints on the theft of DNC emails should be dismissed out of hand. But since the FBI was very selective in what it did and did not investigate, we may never know the truth. So if you disagree with me, well…we don’t need to get the sharpened screwdrivers out.
To quote a line from Plan 9 From Outer Space “One thing’s for sure. Inspector Clay’s dead. Murdered. And someone’s responsible.” Someone’s responsible for those emails. No one should be ruled in or out.
Except me, of course. I was never anywhere near that damn server.
The Man,
The DNC hack story is one of the many RussiaGate stories that make little sense in their official form – despite the government’s endorsement. But that’s what this era is like, as seen in the official – but contradictory – stories about the Anthrax attack that occured just in time to boost passage of the Patriot Bill.
For more see Secrets untold about the DNC hack, the core of RussiaGate.
For the record, I had seen that post. It’s one of your better ones. I think we’re in agreement that we aren’t being told anything like the truth about the DNC server by the Government. And we may never know what the truth is.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that Russiagate was in part a coverup for something, and that something likely had to do, at least in part, with the truth about the DNC server. if the FBI didn’t go there, and do a proper investigation of a real crime, and do a proper forensic examination of the server, it was because upper management already knew what was there and didn’t want it found. Further than that I will not go here.
Apologies for my occasional syntax and typing errors. I type like a drunk, even when I’m sober.
The Man,
“Apologies for my occasional syntax and typing errors.”
Don’t think twice about that. Content is king in comments. Grammer, spelling, and such are secondary. Your comments are cogent and much appreciated!
Some see this (not really failed) RussiaGate as a warning to anyone who would dare to threaten the status quo in the future.
And, as The Donald backed-down on all what the Deep State was worried about, perhaps by coincidence, but possibly by design, he may have gotten a ‘reward’ — a good ammunition for the 2020 circus round. Had the Mueller’s “inquiry” concluded just a few moths later (fall 2019), there would be no doubt about that…
The Nunes Memo; https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/20180129/106822/HMTG-115-IG00-20180129-SD001.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1da2bs3_54kf6fNnH00EScup9QGuL010CkRPSXAip31TztUYdexqekLQE
Let’s see. This Peon of few words sezs this…No collusion, no obstruction, as per AG Barr. Case closed. The Dems will tie it up in court until it doesn’t matter anymore.
On the other hand, I see a lot of Dems from the Obama era in court about FISA warrants and such.
Ron,
That’s unlikely. Prosecutorial discretion is almost unlimited.
Ron,
“No collusion, no obstruction, as per AG Barr.”
That’s not what he said.
(1) Barr said the “investigation did not establish”, which is not saying there was none.
(2) Barr said “The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion – one way or another – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction.”
(3) Barr’s second letter (released Friday) thru the first one into the trash.
(4) There are concerns that Barr might not have accurately summarized the Report. We’ll have to wait and see.
The way I understand it, Mueller left it to Barr on obstruction, and Barr made the decision, it’s his call.
The Dems will not get grand jury testimony by law, correct me if I’m wrong. And yes, we’ll have to wait and see.
Ron,
“and Barr made the decision, it’s his call.”
It is the call of Congress, since the DoJ does not file charges against sitting presidents. Nobody cares what Barr thinks.
Larry,
From my Congressman to the local. Paywall is down as far as I know. An op-ed “Time to move on from Mueller” by Congressman Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) in the Lancaster paper.
Ron,
He’s dreaming. Nobody is moving on until the Mueller Report is released. Then people will decide what to do.