Some revelations from RussiaGate that can change America

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

Summary: Here are excerpts from Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion, showing how its revelations about RussiaGate can change how Americans see our government. We need only look, and set aside our partisan biases.

RussiaGate is a ball of confusion.

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Some insights from Ball of Collusion:
The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (2019).

By Andrew McCarthy.
He is a former Deputy US Marshall and Asst. US District Attorney.

Every new insight is an opportunity to change ourselves. This book overflows with powerful insights that can push us to change the course of American history, if only we will listen. Here are a few of them.

(1) RussiaGate is a parade of lies by government officials.

Lies by high officials and politicians are business as usual in America (see examples in the big list of lies). We fight wars because of their lies. They lie to cover up errors and crimes. Since we do not mind, why shouldn’t they lie? So, of course, RussiaGate was powered by lies of our senior intel and law-enforcement officials. They even lied to Congress (although Congress seems to prefer that to unpleasant truths). McCarthy documents important lies by three key officials.

James Comey – Deputy Attorney General, Director of the FBI.
John Brennan – Director of the CIA, Assistant to President Obama.
James Clapper – USAF Lt. General, Director of the DIA, Director of National Intelligence. “Clapper, the Obama administration’s top intelligence official, could not keep straight why he lied to Congress.”

(2) Washington is a cesspool.

Many in the cast of RussiaGate had side deals with people in Russia. Showing fairness that is rare these days, McCarthy looks at both the Obama and Trump teams and documents the …

“the interplay of shady foreign wealth, American officials, and the lucrative Washington political industry that brings them together. It stinks. And it is a bipartisan odor.”

The “Resistance” describe the contacts of “their” people as sources and those of Trump’s people as agents or dupes of Putin. Supporters of Trump see Hillary’s corruption and close their eyes to the sleazy side of Team Trump. Of course, this kind of corruption is common in history. Imperial capitals are usually cesspools.

(3) Our news media are conduits for propaganda

The New York Times’ articles on RussiaGate won it the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Investigative Reporting. They are still proud of it. In August, Executive Editor Dean Baquet said “We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well.” McCarthy gives an example of their work. Here is origin story #1 for RussiaGate.

“Trump Adviser’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention.” That was the page-one headline The New York Times ran on April 20, 2017. There followed a breathless report that ‘a catalyst for the F.B.I. was a July 2016 visit to Moscow by Carter Page. It was due to the Moscow trip by Page, dubbed a Trump ‘foreign policy adviser.’ that ‘the F.B.I. obtained a warrant for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’ during the stretch run of the presidential campaign.”

McCarthy explains how most key aspects of that story were proven false during the next few months. So the NYT rolled out origin story #2, confident that Americans live in the now and would have forgotten version #1.

“So imagine the dizzy spell seven months later …when the Times premiered its Origin Story 2.0, the Papadopoulos yarn, under the headline ‘How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.‘ This time, with a mere six doughty journalists …, the Gray Lady explained that it was actually young George who triggered the FBI’s massive probe by – wait for it – a night of boozy blather in London. Papadopoulos, an unknown figure back when he had pled guilty a few weeks before the Times’s new blockbuster, was now elevated to ‘the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration.'”

This story too slowly burned away. But the elites that the NYT shills for were creative, and manufactured new stories. Each of which were eagerly believed by the “resistance.” Only our amnesia makes reading the newspapers bearable. Americans claim to be skeptical about the news, and some are. But most are skeptical only about stories that challenge their beliefs – and credulous about those that confirm them. So Leftists well know the sordid history of our intel agencies, but recoil with horror at Republican’s suspicions about the intel agencies’ claims of Russian hacking to influence the 2016 election – despite their providing no evidence.

This is another example of journalists’ bias or incompetence. The aptly named Politifact (aks Political-distorted Facts) said that Hillary was correct when she claimed that …

“We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election.”

Other news media echoed that claim (e.g., USA Today). But we have the DHS press release. It makes no such claim. It uses the vague term “the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident … “No official has said all 17 agencies concluded anything. It is not a formal National Intelligence Estimate, which is a true multi-agency product.

Conclusion

The wonderful aspect about RussiaGate has been its obviousness since the beginning. Our ruling elites have us so well trained that they no longer need even make much effort to hide their manipulations. Perhaps this will be the high water mark, and we will learn skepticism. That will put America on a path to a better future.