There is a long-worded Washington Post story gaining lots of attention as the definitive article outlining the ‘vast Russian election conspiracy‘. However, anyone who walks in the deep weeds of DC propaganda constructs will immediately note the Ben Rhodes styled fingerprints of obfuscation and disingenuous nonsense.
The article is transparently presented for several aligned purposes; all of them political, including the intensely political objectives of John Brennan and James Clapper, and all of them transparently spreading the truth-sauce way too thin.
As a deep weeds walker myself, and having inoculated against the nonsensical -albeit fashionable to believe- infection, here’s my take. [All emphasis mine]
(WaPo) Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.
Ah yes, the “just four people” dispatch from CIA Director John Brennan. The small circle makes fiction much more difficult to disprove, and simultaneously stops the larger circle from refuting the entirety of the inherent false and political claims. See how that works?
Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.
Ah yes, again the innocuous and carefully chosen word “sourcing”. Notice the ambiguity, the entire article is fraught with disingenuous use of ambiguous indirectness. The more specific the claim: “Putin’s direct involvement“, the larger the need for ambiguity.
But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.
The Washington Post couldn’t have it any other way could they. The underlying premise behind such a long-worded enterprise is to soothe the sentiments of fellow travelers. Forget the basic reality that all “real evidence” (insert Steele Dossier here) points to numerous ideological factions, including Russia, trying to damage candidate Donald Trump.
At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year.
In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.
Ah-ha.. those damn pesky Macedonians again. Always with the Macedonians. And yes, in July the FBI, more specifically James Comey under the auspices of a counterintelligence investigation that he admitted was never briefed to congress, needed some basic premise for the political surveillance and unmasking used by the White House to monitor political opposition.
The material was so sensitive that CIA Director John Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, concerned that even that restricted report’s distribution was too broad.
What, you mean Evelyn Farkas, a recipient amid 30+ others of the PDB wasn’t going to read this stuff? No. What’s really inherent in this paragraph is the authors need to explain how an entirely fabricated premise within the article is “news” to those who would otherwise have known. This is how you construct propaganda, by claiming those who would be in a position to refute propaganda didn’t have access to the information. See how that works?
The CIA package came with instructions that it be returned immediately after it was read. To guard against leaks, subsequent meetings in the Situation Room followed the same protocols as planning sessions for the Osama bin Laden raid.
Insert dramatic music here. This is called the build-up…
It took time for other parts of the intelligence community to endorse the CIA’s view.
Only in the administration’s final weeks in office did it tell the public, in a declassified report, what officials had learned from Brennan in August — that Putin was working to elect Trump.
The other real intelligence agencies, namely the NSA (Mike Rogers), were not buying John Brennan’s bullshit. Go figure. Everyone knew Brennan was a political operative, not a CIA Director. And then the drop from the build-up: “Putin was working to elect Trump“. See how they just drop that in there?
Over that five-month interval, the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could “crater” the Russian economy.
Remember, this is written post-facto, and generally meant to provide some form of justification for the actual political surveillance behavior of the White House crew. There was no ‘there’ there to generate a response to; that’s evident by the do-nothingness they now seek to justify in hindsight while claiming there was actually a ‘there’ there.
But in the end, in late December, Obama approved a modest package combining measures that had been drawn up to punish Russia for other issues — expulsions of 35 diplomats and the closure of two Russian compounds — with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic.
Well, they had to do something to cover their surveillance asses and drum up a good story. It was only six weeks earlier the entire White House and (Brennan, Comey and Clapper) realized President Trump was winner and their posteriors were seriously at risk. Quick, time to work up a good ‘muh russia’ narrative, and, and, throw in some disingenuous sanctions or something… yeah, yeah… that’s the ticket.
In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy.
Oy vey, that paragraph reads like Ben Rhodes wrote it himself.
It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin through cyber-forensics and intelligence on Putin’s involvement. And yet, because of the divergent ways Obama and Trump have handled the matter, Moscow appears unlikely to face proportionate consequences.
“no time to solve” they say. Do you notice the contradictions inherent in the presentation of this? That’s one of them. It is also a tell-tale sign of creationary fiction.
Those closest to Obama defend the administration’s response to Russia’s meddling. They note that by August it was too late to prevent the transfer to WikiLeaks and other groups of the troves of emails that would spill out in the ensuing months. They believe that a series of warnings — including one that Obama delivered to Putin in September — prompted Moscow to abandon any plans of further aggression, such as sabotage of U.S. voting systems.
Again, when creating post-facto justifications for manufactured nonsense there’s always a need to explain why nothing claimed by the author’s build-up of fiction actually takes place in reality. “They abandoned plans”… ok, gotcha.
Denis McDonough who served as Obama’s chief of staff, said that the administration regarded Russia’s interference as an attack on the “heart of our system.”
“We set out from a first-order principle that required us to defend the integrity of the vote,” McDonough said in an interview. “Importantly, we did that. It’s also important to establish what happened and what they attempted to do so as to ensure that we take the steps necessary to stop it from happening again.”
Well, there’s the first named source for this fictional storytelling. Denis “the fixer” McDonough. And with that name we also now know the circle of sourcing for this ridiculous article, needed to prop up the narrative, is definitively Ben Rhodes.
Does WaPo ever get to the part where they explain U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s need to unmask Trump officials in surveillance reports? Nope. Move along comrades, move along….
The post-election period has been dominated by the overlapping investigations into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia before the election and whether the president sought to obstruct the FBI probe afterward. That spectacle has obscured the magnitude of Moscow’s attempt to hijack a precious and now vulnerable-seeming American democratic process.
Or put another way. We have failed to get any traction on the “collusion” and/or “obstruction” narratives, and so therefore we find a need to fall back upon the “Russian Hacking the Election” narrative. See how that works?
Beset by allegations of hidden ties between his campaign and Russia, Trump has shown no inclination to revisit the matter and has denied any collusion or obstruction on his part. As a result, the expulsions and modest sanctions announced by Obama on Dec. 29 continue to stand as the United States’ most forceful response.
Where “allegations” would be more aptly and accurately written as “media allegations”, and because there’s no ‘there’ there only Obama’s silly faux-sanctions stand as evidence that anyone was ever buying this nonsense.
[…] The CIA breakthrough came at a stage of the presidential campaign when Trump had secured the GOP nomination but was still regarded as a distant long shot. Clinton held comfortable leads in major polls, and Obama expected that he would be transferring power to someone who had served in his Cabinet.
The CIA “breakthrough” they speak of here is the Steele Dossier. The “Trump paid hookers to pee on Russian beds” opposition research file, initially begun by candidate Jeb Bush and later passed along to fellow traveler Hillary Clinton and never trumper John McCain.
[…] The Washington Post is withholding some details of the intelligence at the request of the U.S. government.
Ah, convenient that.
In early August, Brennan John Brennan CIA director alerted senior White House officials to the Putin intelligence, making a call to deputy national security adviser Avril Haines and pulling national security adviser Susan Rice aside after a meeting before briefing Obama along with Rice, Haines and Denis McDonough in the Oval Office. (continue reading)
It’s the missing names that reveal sources. Notice the absence of Ben Rhodes from this paragraph. The fingerprints of Rhodes upon this entire article are transparent. The article continues, but it’s much more repetition of the same. There simply is no ‘there’ there, and there never will be.
Political intelligence operatives John Brennan (CIA), James Clapper (ODNI) and James Comey (FBI) weaponized intelligence as surveillance before the election, and as tools to undermine President-Elect Trump after the election.
[ To their chagrin NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers refused to join the club, and kept his focus solidly on facts; just the facts. That’s ultimately why Brennan and Clapper continued to call for Rogers to be fired. ]
Together with a willfully blind Loretta Lynch (DOJ) and Jeh Johnson (DHS) this entire ‘muh Russia’ fiasco is layers upon layers of narrative-building, justification and manufactured constructs all in an effort to avoid sunlight upon their own political endeavors, and simultaneously frame some basic premise behind the intended goal of undermining the Trump presidency.
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