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How Did Russiagate Begin?
The Nation ^ | May 30, 2019 | Stephen F. Cohen

Posted on 06/01/2019 8:39:21 AM PDT by billorites

It cannot be emphasized too often: Russiagate—allegations that the American president has been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to put him in the White House—is the worst and (considering the lack of actual evidence) most fraudulent political scandal in American history. We have yet to calculate the damage Russsiagate has inflicted on America’s democratic institutions, including the presidency and the electoral process, and on domestic and foreign perceptions of American democracy, or on US-Russian relations at a critical moment when both sides, having “modernized” their nuclear weapons, are embarking on a new, more dangerous, and largely unreported arms race.

Rational (if politically innocent) observers may have thought that when the Mueller report found no “collusion” or other conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, only possible “obstruction” by Trump—nothing Mueller said in his May 29 press statement altered that conclusion—Russiagate would fade away. If so, they were badly mistaken. Evidently infuriated that Mueller did not liberate the White House from Trump, Russiagate promoters—liberal Democrats and progressives foremost among them—have only redoubled their unverified collusion allegations, even in once-respectable media outlets. Whether out of political ambition or impassioned faith, the damage wrought by these Russiagaters continues to mount, with no end in sight.

One way to end Russiagate might be to discover how it actually began. Considering what we have learned, or been told, since the allegations became public nearly three years ago, in mid-2016, there seem to be at least three hypothetical possibilities:

1. One is the orthodox Russiagate explanation: Early on, sharp-eyed top officials of President Obama’s intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI, detected truly suspicious “contacts” between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians “linked to the Kremlin” (whatever that may mean, considering that the presidential administration employs hundreds of people), and this discovery legitimately led to the full-scale “counterintelligence investigation” initiated in July 2016. Indeed, Mueller documented various foreigners who contacted, or who sought to contact, the Trump campaign. The problem here is that Mueller does not tell us, and we do not know, if the number of them was unusual.

Many foreigners seek “contacts” with US presidential campaigns and have done so for decades. In this case, we do not know, for the sake of comparison, how many such foreigners had or sought contacts with the rival Clinton campaign, directly or through the Clinton Foundation, in 2016. (Certainly, there were quite a few contacts with anti-Trump Ukrainians, for example.) If the number was roughly comparable, why didn’t US intelligence initiate a counterintelligence investigation of the Clinton campaign?

If readers think the answer is because the foreigners around the Trump campaign included Russians, consider this: In 1988, when Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he went to Russia—still Communist Soviet Russia—to make contacts in preparation for his anticipated presidency, including meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. US media coverage of Hart’s visit was generally favorable. (I accompanied Senator Hart and do not recall much, if any, adverse US media reaction.)

2. The second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what became known as the Steele Dossier. As I pointed out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russiagate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that “researchers” in the United States (some, like Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign) were supplying him with the fruits of their research.

3. The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.

US Attorney General William Barr now proposes to investigate the origins of Russiagate. He has appointed yet another special prosecutor, John Durham, to do so, but the power to decide the range and focus of the investigation will remain with Barr. The important news is Barr’s expressed intention to investigate the role of other US intelligence agencies, not just the FBI, which obviously means the CIA when it was headed by John Brennan and Brennan’s partner at the time, James Clapper, then director of national intelligence. As I argued in The Nation, Brennan, not Obama’s hapless FBI Director James Comey, was the godfather of Russiagate, a thesis for which more evidence has since appeared. We should hope that Barr intends to exclude nothing, including the two foundational texts of the deceitful Russiagate narrative: the Steele Dossier and, directly related, the contrived but equally ramifying Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017. (Not coincidentally, they were made public at virtually the same time, inflating Russiagate into an obsessive national scandal.)

Thus far, Barr has been cautious in his public statements. He has acknowledged there was “spying,” or surveillance, on the Trump campaign, which can be legal, but he surely knows that in the case of Papadopoulos (and possibly of General Michael Flynn), what happened was more akin to entrapment, which is never legal. Barr no doubt also recalls, and will likely keep in mind, the astonishing warning Senator Charles Schumer issued to President-elect Trump in January 2017: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” (Indeed, Barr might ask Schumer what he meant and why he felt the need to be the menacing messenger of intel agencies, wittingly or not.)

But Barr’s thorniest problem may be understanding the woeful role of mainstream media in Russiagate. As Lee Smith, who contributed important investigative reporting, has written: “The press is part of the operation, the indispensable part. None of it would have been possible…had the media not linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by Clinton operatives.” How does Barr explore this “indispensable” complicity of the media in originating and perpetuating the Russiagate fraud without impermissibly infringing on the freedom of the press?

Ideally, mainstream media—print and broadcast—would now themselves report on how and why they permitted intelligence officials, through leaks and anonymous sources, and as “opinion” commentators, to use their pages and programming to promote Russiagate for so long, and why they so excluded well-informed, nonpartisan alternative opinions. Instead, they have almost unanimously reported and broadcast negatively, even antagonistically, about Barr’s investigation, and indeed about Barr personally. (The Washington Post even found a way to print this: “William Barr looks like a toad…”) Such is the seeming panic of the Russiagate media over Barr’s investigation, which promises to declassify related documents, that The New York Times again trotted out its easily debunked fiction that public disclosures will endanger a purported US informant, a Kremlin mole, at Putin’s side.

Finally, but most crucially, what was the real reason US intelligence agencies launched a discrediting operation against Trump? Was it because, as seems likely, they intensely disliked his campaign talk of “cooperation with Russia,” which seemed to mean the prospect of a new US-Russian détente? Even fervent political and media opponents of Trump should want to know who is making foreign policy in Washington. The next intel target might be their preferred candidate or president, or a foreign policy they favor.

Nor, it seems clear, did the CIA stop. In March 2018, the current director, Gina Haspel, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did. Several non–mainstream media outlets have reported the true story. Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.

We are left, then, with this paradox, formulated in a tweet on May 24 by the British journalist John O’Sullivan: “Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.”


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: dnctalkingpoint; dnctalkingpoints; mediawingofthednc; partisanmediashills; presstitutes; russiagate; smearmachine; spygate; stephencohen; thenation
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1 posted on 06/01/2019 8:39:21 AM PDT by billorites
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To: billorites

Nothing cheapens an otherwise serious crisis better than throwing a cliched and obligatory fricking “-gate” on to it.


2 posted on 06/01/2019 9:12:41 AM PDT by LittleBillyInfidel (This tagline has been formatted to fit the screen. Some content has been edited.)
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To: billorites

Steve Cohen is one of the few honest libs out there. It’s difficult to beleive The Nation, a left-wing magazine, would publish this.


3 posted on 06/01/2019 9:13:30 AM PDT by Signalman
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To: Signalman
His wife[Katrina vanden Heuvel] is the editor and part owner of The Nation. The have always been suspicious of the Russia stuff, as have other writers like Aaron Maté who works for her.
4 posted on 06/01/2019 9:33:07 AM PDT by Theoria (I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive)
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To: Signalman

No kidding!!


5 posted on 06/01/2019 9:34:38 AM PDT by milagro (There is no peace in appeasement!)
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To: Signalman
-- It's difficult to beleive The Nation, a left-wing magazine, would publish this. --

That was my thought too. Saw the source, and jumped to the conclusion that the content was misleading - which it likely is, but not the same way I prejudged.

6 posted on 06/01/2019 9:36:02 AM PDT by Cboldt
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To: billorites; All
2. The second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what became known as the Steele Dossier. As I pointed out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russiagate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”?

There is a TON of evidence that the Russians attempted to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton win the election!

The Nation magazine is a communist rag, not to be trusted.

You can find a lot of that evidence on my FR Home page:

http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/

7 posted on 06/01/2019 10:21:19 AM PDT by ETL (REAL Russia collusion! New Updates on Dem-Russia collusion via Ukraine ! Click ETL)
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To: billorites
>> Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.” <<

That is the money line.

The one thing I would add to the article is that the DNC needed a scapegoat for the DNC server hack and blaming Russia would be a good issue to use against Trump. That is when the MSM first exposed their collusion with the DNC and their anti Trump propaganda.
8 posted on 06/01/2019 10:33:30 AM PDT by Kid Shelleen (Beat your plowshares into swords. Let the weak say I am strong)
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To: Kid Shelleen
The one thing I would add to the article is that the DNC needed a scapegoat for the DNC server hack and blaming Russia would be a good issue to use against Trump.

You really ought to read up on things before you try to act like you know what you're talking about. The Dems worked closely with the Russians in this elaborate, highly sophisticated, but typical KGB/FSB-style hoax.

9 posted on 06/01/2019 10:38:02 AM PDT by ETL (REAL Russia collusion! New Updates on Dem-Russia collusion via Ukraine ! Click ETL)
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To: billorites; Pelham; LS

First I read of it was grumbling prior to the elections

Then the morning after the election when Hillary wouldn’t come out it was reported that Podesta Hillary and Mook and maybe Cheryl Mills and Plieffer were already leaking that they thought the Russians had meddled handing the election to Trump

Why?

Because they knew it was already in the works via Brennan and Clapper and Fusion GPS and British subterfuge and Somforth

And it went from there

That’s how I remember it

Anyone else?


10 posted on 06/01/2019 10:45:15 AM PDT by wardaddy (I applaud Jim Robinson for his comments on the Southern Monuments decision ...thank you)
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To: Signalman
Steve Cohen is one of the few honest libs out there. It’s difficult to believe The Nation, a left-wing magazine, would publish this.

The former KGB and FSB working in and around Putin must laugh their butts off at how easily people here can be tricked and manipulated. They are masters at the complex game of chess, while most us, unfortunately, suck at simple checkers.

11 posted on 06/01/2019 10:52:39 AM PDT by ETL (REAL Russia collusion! New Updates on Dem-Russia collusion via Ukraine ! Click ETL)
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To: ETL
2. The second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what became known as the Steele Dossier. As I pointed out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russiagate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”?
There is a TON of evidence that the Russians attempted to hurt Trump and help Hillary Clinton win the election!
The point is that point 2, above, and
3. The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump.
are mutually exclusive only to someone who accepts the fraudulent conceit that Russians must have illicitly helped Trump or he wouldn’t have won.

Now it is true that hacking Podesta’s email was illegal. But that doesn’t mean it was done by the Russians; it might have been Seth Rich.


12 posted on 06/01/2019 11:00:19 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (Socialism is cynicism directed towards society and - correspondingly - naivete towards government.)
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To: billorites

It all began in Chicago Illinois, October 26, 1947 when the she-devil, little Hillary Rodham was born.


13 posted on 06/01/2019 11:13:14 AM PDT by AFreeBird
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To: billorites

The Russian investigation began because it is the Democrats’ mode of operation to accuse the other side of what they are guilty of. This happens over and over. It does not matter if there is any evidence. They will manufacture some. This is the reason.


14 posted on 06/01/2019 11:15:48 AM PDT by rsobin
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
No need to get into all that, whatever it is, as it SHOULD BE an absolute no-brainer that the Russians would have much preferred a pathetically weak, "accommodating", Hillary Clinton in control. She no doubt would have continued the devastation of the Obama-Biden admin.

This, as opposed to a very strong on defense Trump-Pence team.

Obama-Biden-Hillary gave Putin everything he wanted and more in such critical areas as missile defense, the New Start nuke treaty, the Iran nuke deal, Uranium-One, etc, etc. So OF COURSE they (the Russians) would have wanted Hillary to win the election. Meanwhile, Obama-Biden damn near (purposely) dismantled our military!

Everyone knows, or should know, that the Russians are notorious for interfering in other countries' elections. Just ask the Ukrainians. The guy who ran against Putin's puppet in 2014 is still disfigured from an assassination by poison attempt.

15 posted on 06/01/2019 11:15:53 AM PDT by ETL (REAL Russia collusion! New Updates on Dem-Russia collusion via Ukraine ! Click ETL)
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To: ETL
>> The Dems worked closely with the Russians in this elaborate, highly sophisticated, but typical KGB/FSB-style hoax <<

I am not saying the Russian were NOT behind the hack but it is a matter of fact that Robbie Mook blamed the Russians for the hack and implied Trump was working with the Russian.

That same day, July 22, Wikileaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee. Two days later, on the 24th, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on television to claim that not only was Russia behind the hack — that was later proven true — but also that the Trump campaign was in league with Russia

Citation:

Retrospective: Mueller and the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia affair
16 posted on 06/01/2019 11:30:37 AM PDT by Kid Shelleen (Beat your plowshares into swords. Let the weak say I am strong)
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To: Kid Shelleen

OK, thanks for the response. Will check it out a while later. :)


17 posted on 06/01/2019 11:32:16 AM PDT by ETL (REAL Russia collusion! New Updates on Dem-Russia collusion via Ukraine ! Click ETL)
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To: Kid Shelleen; All
BTW, Here's a very small sample of what I've put together on my FR Home page...

May 31, 2019

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) on Robert Mueller’s May 29, 2019 (final?) press conference:

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Nunes: "He [Mueller] was so blatantly dishonest yesterday that he says, well, the Office of Legal Counsel says that you can’t indict a sitting president.

Well, he should have been gone after day two.

He has no Russians, except for the Fusion and Clinton Russians, and possibly the dirty cop, the FBI’s Russians, those are the only Russians that he has, to show connections to the Trump campaign.

Clearly, the Clinton operation is heavily working with Russians or Russian disinformation.

He didn’t take time to look into any of that[!]”

Partial transcript above begins at about the 1:34 mark in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yutgFcr5T9A&list=PLlTLHnxSVuIyw5jPrLmewrpBJAPYKhgml&index=3

18 posted on 06/01/2019 11:35:12 AM PDT by ETL (REAL Russia collusion! New Updates on Dem-Russia collusion via Ukraine ! Click ETL)
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To: wardaddy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWPmEKe1UGA


19 posted on 06/01/2019 11:35:44 AM PDT by Pelham (Secure Voter ID. Mexico has it, because unlike us they take voting seriously)
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To: ETL
I saw that the links you had on homepage. You did a lot of good work. You may want to add the article I cited. It has a timeline of how the Clinton campaign also colluded with the MSM to push the Russia hoax.

Do you buy into any of the theories that the DNC server hack was an inside job (Seth Rich) ?
20 posted on 06/01/2019 11:45:14 AM PDT by Kid Shelleen (Beat your plowshares into swords. Let the weak say I am strong)
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