The method of those who built Russiagate’s tower of lies and disinformation grows clearer and the list of their names longer.
Street art on U Street in Washington, D.C., February 2017. (Mike Maguire, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Not that we needed more evidence to dismantle the extravagant tower of lies and disinformation known as Russiagate: This was accomplished years ago.
But with the release last week of a previously classified Appendix to a flawed but minorly useful investigation concluded two years ago, the method of those who built this edifice grows clearer and the list of their names longer.
Altogether good. The more hard evidence the better. Publication of the 29–page annex to the May 2023 report John Durham, a special counsel named in the final months of the first Trump administration, will give the historians yet more to work with. And it falls to the historians, I reluctantly conclude, to get this long, destructive episode properly into the record.
The Russiagate hoax — Donald Trump’s term is good enough — lies like rubble all around us, but as I contended in this space seven years ago this month, “We live within an institutionalized proscription of proven reality.” The headline atop that piece was “Too Big to Fail,” and so it remains.
Durham’s Appendix, until now withheld from the public record, lands us back in the familiar dynamic of disclosure followed by denial — the disclosures damning and the denials hopelessly flimsy but advanced via our corporate media with a power it is no use denying.
Disclosure and denial has been inevitable since what we came to call Russiagate began to take shape in mid–2016.
That was when Donald Trump, then launching his presidential campaign, started proposing a new détente with Russia, ending America’s wars of adventure and the decommissioning of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — you know, crazy things, things that threatened the very pillars of our beloved imperium.
John Durham in 2018. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
Those opposed to these madman ideas elaborated a regime of falsehoods and subterfuge to sink Trump as he ran for office and, as it turned out, after he assumed it.
The running theme rested on the malfeasance of Russians — yes, the Rrrrrussians, who hacked the Democratic Party’s email systems, who gave said mail to WikiLeaks, who colluded secretly with Trump, who corrupted the elections in behalf of Trump, who “had something” on Trump, who, who, who: This did not go on endlessly but it often seemed to.
The authors of this most conjured of tales were comprised primarily of the Democratic Party leadership, notably but not only Hillary Clinton’s campaign machine, the intelligence apparatus, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and — but how can we forget our dearest friends — the clerks in mainstream media serving these constituencies.
I have to say, as a covert political operation there was a good chance at the outset Russiagate would work. It was built to last but a few months: Clinton would take it in November 2016, as the whole world assumed, and the entire apparatus could be discarded and forgotten.
But on the morning of Nov. 9 it was obvious those who had constructed the Russiagate case had radically over invested. A machine made to endure a matter of months would have to last four years.
So began the sometimes grotesque, sometimes silly, always destructive chicanery of the Russiagate years. I date its first appearance to Friday, July 22, 2016, when WikiLeaks released roughly 20,000 emails pilfered from the Democratic National Committee’s servers.
Among much else, these showed that the DNC had systematically subverted the campaign, for a time a threat to the party’s neoliberal elites, of Bernie Sanders.
So did the fictions, coverups and deflections begin.
On the Sunday talk shows but two days later, Robby Mook, manager of Clinton’s campaign, went back-to-back on ABC’s This Week and CNN’s State of the Union to explain that what concerned the Clinton people and the DNC was not what was in the mail but — you can finish the sentence — the Russians’ intrusion into the party’s computer servers.
Mook on the CNN program:
“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”
Anonymous Experts
Experts, experts, experts: There would be no end of experts, none ever named, for the next four years. From them we learned, or were supposed to learn, all of the above-stated: The Russians stole the mail, the Russians co-opted Trump, the Russians meddled in the electoral process, the Russians attacked electricity grids and so on.
Mook in 2016. (Ravensfan2000/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
A year and a few months after Mook opened the gates of Russiagate, I reported on the work of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS, and a gathering of forensic scientists associated with them, showing, by way of the metadata all digital messages bear, that what was supposed to be a Russian hack of the Democrats’ emails almost certainly was a leak from the inside.
In brief, the speed of the download was too fast for an external “exfiltration,” as these things are called.
The piece I wrote on this, based on extensive reporting over many weeks, appeared in The Nation on Aug. 9, 2017. Among much else, it showed that a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, which appeared to have extensive connections with U.S. intelligence, had to be lying when it asserted it had all the metadata necessary to prove a Russian hack.
Parenthetically and no more, The Nation fired me for reporting and writing that piece, such was the frenzied pitch Russophobia had reached by this time.
The leak-not-hack revelations were but a step on the way to exposing the whole of the Russiagate fabrications. The entire structure eventually collapsed of its own weight. An important moment came in the course of that fateful year, 2017.
Many prominent Democrats had by then professed in front of microphones and cameras to have or have seen evidence of Russia’s malevolent deeds. But in May of that year they all admitted in congressional testimonies they had none and had seen none.
CrowdStrike, so key to the whole story, acknowledged on Page 32 of the closed-door House Intelligence Committee testimony that it had no forensic data or metadata establishing a Russian hack of the DNC’s mail servers.
What a difference a legally binding oath makes, I recall chortling at the time.
Those hearings, it is important to add, were never covered in the mainstream press and, at the insistence of Capitol Hill Democrats, were not made public for three years afterward. You would have thought the mainstream press and broadcasters would have covered it when these testimonies were final made public in April 2020. But no, silence again.
I pencil-sketch the years in question to give an idea of how all the corruptions of the Russiagate years — a paradox here — were exposed but suppressed at the same time. There is much I have not mentioned.
Consortium News’ archives, notably but not only the work of Ray McGovern, the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, contain as fulsome and uncorrupted a record of events as any now available. [See: Consortium News Busted Russiagate 9 Years Ago]
In January 2023, Jeff Gerth, the noted investigative journalist, published a four-part series on the corruptions of the press and broadcasters in reporting — or not, as so often — the Russiagate falsifications. This appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Gerth’s four pieces ran to more than 24,000 words. The one major feature he omitted to mention, I must add, was the fraudulent claim that Russians had hacked the Democrats’ email. The leak-not-hack dimension of the long tale remains untouchable, it seems, but, like the rest of the Russiagate case, this has long been an open-and-shut matter of record.
President Joe Biden looks on as Garland delivers remarks at the White House on May 16, 2022.
Merrick Garland, the Biden regime’s attorney general, sent the Durham Report to Congress in May 2023. You could argue that paying-attention people already knew much or most of what was in it. But an official government source at last appeared to go on the record with the truth of the Russiagate scandal. Durham also provided a useful chronology of events such that one could follow the bouncing ball with more confidence than conjecture.
Clinton Operation to Frame Trump
As the Report had it, Hillary Clinton authorized an operation to frame Trump within days of the leak of emails from Democratic Party servers in July 2016.
The F.B.I.’s leadership acted quickly to set this operation in motion. It first considered using the offhand remarks of George Papadopoulos, a minor Trump campaign volunteer, to obtain surveillance warrants against various of Trump’s advisers. When that proved too flimsy, the agency turned to the now-infamous Steele Dossier, which was nothing more than Clinton campaign paid-for opposition research on Trump.
Hillary Clinton formally accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for President on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016. (A. Shaker/VOA/Wikimedia Commons)
The F.B.I. knew the dossier was junk, but it punched it up sufficiently to get the warrants needed to proceed against Trump and his people. This was Crossfire Hurricane, the F.B.I.’s anti–Trump op at the heart of the Russiagate hoax.
Such was the gist of Durham’s findings, but his Report immediately struck many of us as peculiar. It described crimes but recommended no criminal investigations. People had broken the law, but Durham named no lawbreakers.
As I wrote at the time, it looked as if the Biden regime thought it was time to move Americans decisively beyond the mess the Democrats had made for themselves when they persisted with the Russiagate rubbish after Clinton’s defeat in 2016. A snippet from that piece:
“It looks as if Garland found this an opportune moment to send the Durham Report to Capitol Hill, effectively to remove the entire Russiagate affair from the common American consciousness. With a presidential election 18 months away, Biden’s attorney-general must dispose of Russiagate and Durham’s probe as hastily and as best he can.”
In simpler terms, I would say now the Democrats were scuttling a ship that had been taking water almost as soon as it slid off the dry dock. Or, an alternative way at the point, this was what is known in spook-speak as a limited hangout: When an operation has been exposed, acknowledge the minimum so has to obscure all else.
The Durham Report’s substance and fate supports this interpretation. The text runs 316 pages — ample length to reveal and bury a great deal of information all at once. It was much anticipated and was made public on May 15, 2023. Within 10 days it had disappeared from the media and public discourse altogether.
It is the Appendix to the Durham Report that has now been made public. It gives us some of the “all else” the Report itself left out. Now we have some names, now the bouncing ball bounces further.
Its 29 pages derive from email traffic and memoranda that passed among various figures in the Democratic elite prior to the 2016 election, when the sink–Trump project was full-throttle.
Straight of the top, there is provenance to note. From the first page of the Appendix:
“Beginning in or about 2014, and continuing through at least in or about 2016, individuals affiliated with Russian intelligence services hacked and gained unlawful access to emails of numerous U.S. public and private U.S. entities — including government agencies, non-profit organizations, and think tanks based in the United States. Among the non-profit organizations hacked by Russian government actors in 2016 was the Open Society Foundations, formerly known as the Soros Foundation.”
This raises an obvious question of veracity. Durham’s people, the “we” in this document, answer it this way. I leave in the redactions:
“From… through… received from a… source, referred to herein as ‘TI,’ and shared with FBI intelligence consisting of… We identify the information provided by TI as ‘Sensitive Intelligence.’ ”
The conclusion to draw here seems to me evident. If the material in the Appendix were short of credible, or simply junk, Durham’s people would not have dedicated an annex to it. They would simply have omitted it as not pertinent to the case. They certainly would not have described it as “Sensitive Intelligence,” in caps no less.
Equally, this question: Were this material not substantive, would Durham and the Justice Department have kept the Appendix classified when A–G Garland made his tell-all journey up Capitol Hill with the Durham Report in his attaché case? I simply don’t see it.
Among those figuring in the traffic Durham considered were Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was key in the subversion of the Sanders campaign; Julianne Smith, the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy adviser; and Leonard Benardo, a senior v–p at the Soros operation, the Open Society Foundations.
Here is at least some of what remains to be disclosed in the Russiagate story. We have more detail now, in any case. It is now a matter of public record that Hillary Clinton signed off on plans to destroy Trump with a disinformation op tying him to Russia, the stated purpose being to distract the public — recall my quotation from Robby Mook above — from the email scandal then threatening Clinton’s campaign.
The author of this operation, the email traffic establishes, was Smith, who urged “raising the theme of ‘Putin’s support for Trump’ [and] subsequently steering public opinion” such that voters would believe the Kremlin was hacking mail and voting technology and all the rest in Trump’s behalf.
Demonstrators in Washington, 2017. (Ted Eytan, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Here is Benardo on July 25, 2016 (coincidentally the day Salon published my commentary):
“Julie [Smith] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
And elsewhere this, a favorite line of mine given my leak-not-hack reportage in The Nation. Again from Benardo:
“The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. In absence of direct evidence, CrowdStrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media, and GRU [Moscow’s foreign intelligence service] will hopefully carry on to give more facts.”
Corporate Media Goes Back to Work
Were I employed as a Washington correspondent for a mainstream newspaper or broadcaster, I would dread having to cover the Durham Appendix. Imagine selling your integrity in broad daylight in exchange for a paycheck.
Imagine, I mean to say, reporting this material while continuing to advance the long-exhausted line that the Democrats were innocent of wrongdoing during the Russiagate years, the Russians meddled at every turn and altogether that the Russiagate story was all along just as it was reported at the time.
But so the coverage of the Durham Appendix has been. Corporate media are so far back in the mists they still pretend it is a given that the Russians hacked the Democrats’ email in 2016 and that any thought the Clinton campaign ran an operation to discredit Donald Trump is sheer “conspiracy theory.”
As to the mail traffic cited in the Appendix, nah, Russian intelligence “likely” — a longtime weasel word and very key in this case —fabricated this stuff.
You have Leonard Benardo denying that he sent the email bearing his name, that he has no idea who “Julie” is — a stretch too far in my view — and that he would never use a phrase such as “put more oil into the fire.”
As to Julianne Smith, she doesn’t remember ever suggesting to the Clinton campaign that a disinformation op to subvert Trump was the thing to do.
This settles it, then. It is all a put-up job. As we saw throughout the hot years of Russiagate, if a source says something that fits the orthodox narrative, this is evidence that it is just as these sources say.
The mainstream coverage, not to be missed, stays well clear of details that simply cannot be explained away or blurred, notably but not only the above-quoted reference to CrowdStrike as an ever-available tool of the Democrats. No mention of this in the reporting I’ve seen.
The reality, we have long known as a matter of record, is that CrowdStrike, which played a central role in the case constructed to prove Russia’s various intrusions into the 2016 election, was outright lying from the first.
The New York Times ran two articles on the Durham Appendix, one datelined July 31, the day the annex was made public; the other is what is called in the trade an explainer and was published a day later. Read them, or try to read them. Tell me, just a few paragraphs in, if you can find your way through the cotton-wool English to understand what is being said.
The headline atop the piece I wrote when the special counsel’s report came out two years ago read, “John Durham and the burying of American history.” This reflected my most fundamental concern and the time. And it is my fundamental concern once again.
The Durham Report was advanced as a dramatic reveal-all after years of official obfuscation and confusion. “But it shapes up after a few days’ consideration,” I wrote then, “as part of the effort to bury the Russiagate hoax the way the Warren Commission buried the facts of the Kennedy assassination for many years.”
We have just got a variant of the same with the publication of the classified Appendix. History is once again being interred. As important as the Annex is, the concerted attempt to obscure its contents is equally so.
Russiagate has done untold damage if we measure it by the global instability it has precipitated, the dangers of a third world war and other such matters. Let us not miss the extent to which it succeeded in befuddling the majority of Americans, so leaving them incapable of understanding and judging events and altogether the world in which they live.
I wondered all along how those who so foolishly invested in the Russiagate hoax would escape their predicament when it all came undone. This is how. The conjurors of all the lies propose again to plunge us ever deeper into what I came to call the Republic of Pretend.
Vigilance, readers. It is the resort of those who have not been stupefied these past nine years. Vigilance and the bearing of witness. The historians with the integrity to write of our time honestly will appreciate this when they sit with the records and begin their work.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Wheres the future in this timeline ?
Too Lategate ?….Russiagate…..Epsteingate…..Today At Our Gate
Investigate With No Rebate ?
I don’t believe any of these accusations of “Russian hacking”, whether in support of a Democrat narrative or a Republican narrative, without a considerable amount of hard evidence behind it. Not when the modern internet has so many effective techniques for obfuscating online activity, and certainly not when the CIA has the Marble Framework, the largest most expensive piece of government software ever written and the sole function of which is to allow them to conduct false-flag operations framing other states for cyberwarfare operations.
The whole idea that this report has to cite something a foreign intelligence agency possibly knows about domestic affairs instead of citing their own damn domestic detective work is completely ridiculous and make me immediately suspicious. To fall for this routine of government officials making unverifiable assertions based on anonymous insiders which cannot be named is to fall for the same scam that was the driving force behind Russiagate all over again.
Utililizing software similar to Paralell Investigation methods in a sense even if opposite in nature ?
Interesting read:
hxxps://www.nature.com/articles/s43586-021-00055-w
Let’s not forget the murder of Seth Rich !
Ah, Russia Gate, still being presented to we, the wee people, through a glass made darkly by the failing kidneys of a corrupt political system and ink of a complicit press. May you keep on keepin’ on Mr. Lawrence.
Sr. Gibbonk
Debunking the Russiagate operation of intelligence interference in U.S. domestic politics in no way defends Trump and many of his extremist policies, such as openly promoting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Excellent point.
I and many other folks here at CN who routinely post comments knew all along (often in the face of hostility from friends, family and work colleagues) that all the Russophobic nonsense and mainstream Russiagate stories were b.s. from the start.
We were 100% correct and a deep dive into CN comments’ archives vindicates us all in spades!
“”The author of this operation, the email traffic establishes, was Smith, who urged “raising the theme of ‘Putin’s support for Trump’ [and] subsequently steering public opinion” such that voters would believe the Kremlin was hacking mail and voting technology and all the rest in Trump’s behalf.
Here is Benardo on July 25, 2016 (coincidentally the day Salon published my commentary as linked above):
“Julie [Smith] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.””
See, the Russians actually hacked into Benardo and Julianne Smith’s email accounts to deliberately incriminate them. That’s all it was, it was the Russians. See?
Thank you, Patrick.
From one crooked “administration” (regime) to another. The irony is that BOTH slick Willy and the Idiot Emperor are almost certainly perverted pedophiles and rapists. Another irony: despite acts of war against Russia during the DT regime, the so-called opposition created a great distraction by ramping up the lies and demonizing Russia, which had already been in place. Double-think on steroids.
Now the Idiot Emperor and the Kakistocrat Krew need another distraction from the Epstein scandals, so the Idiot Emperor has threatened Russia with nuclear war! Nothing to worry about, he promised to bring peace, right? It just gets more insane, irrational and Orwellian…
And we have gone from one cognitively challenged geriatric, to another: the Orange Idiot is becoming more incoherent and irrational by the day, nothing to worry about eh. Having and insane emperor withe the “nuclear football” and could destroy life on the planet, nothing to worry about.
In the context of the Bipartisan Consensus on war with Russia, China, Iran and full support for GENOCIDE, this Russia-gate BS appears trivial and a distraction. Our s0-called leaders and institutions are so corrupt, that they need emotional distractions for the plebs. Are we not entertained?!
No doubt, “a building of sand falls even as it is being built:” ‘The leak-not-hack revelations were but a step on the way to exposing the whole of the Russiagate fabrications. The entire structure eventually collapsed of its own weight. An important moment came in the course of that fateful year, 2017.“ PATRICK LAWRENCE
Everybody, knows, William Binney built the System! Binney knew how it worked!!! Concluding, RussiaGate is home-grown. Harvested in BHObama’s Oval. BHObama the Commander-N-$peech, the Assassin-N-Chief, the Community Organizer, the Constitutional Lawyer, POTUS, #44, a “Conjuror,” authored, “in the course of that fateful year,” 2016, the“Countering Foreign Propaganda & Disinformation Act.” BHObama’s “ACT” delivers death, disaster, “H.O.P.E.,” Hell On POTUS’ Earth; AND, “$0ld,” hook, line & sinker, to the Hors d’War, the US Congress. The currency is hate & wars. The US Congress, “both $ides,” wholeheartedly, embrace the fakery & the phuckery in A Bill, “H. R. 5181:”
….. “It is the sense of Congress that—(1) [FOREIGN] governments, including the Governments of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, use disinformation and other propaganda tools to undermine the national security objectives of the United States and key allies and partners; (2) the [RUSSIAN FEDERATION] in particular, has conducted sophisticated and large-scale disinformation campaigns that have sought to have a destabilizing effect on United States allies and interests; (3) [IN the LAST DECADE] disinformation has increasingly become a key feature of the Government of the Russian Federation’s pursuit of political, economic, and military objectives in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Balkans, and throughout Central and Eastern Europe; (4) [The CHALLENGE] of countering disinformation extends beyond effective strategic communications and public diplomacy, requiring a whole-of-government approach leveraging all elements of national power; (5) the [US GOVERNMENT] should develop a comprehensive strategy to counter foreign disinformation and propaganda and assert leadership in developing a fact-based strategic narrative; and, (6) [An IMPORTANT ELEMENT] of this strategy should be to protect and promote a free, healthy, and independent press in countries vulnerable to foreign disinformation.” The fakery & phuckery @ hxxps://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5181/text/ih
“WE’RE A WAR MACHINE AS A NATION:’ We’re spending our national treasure on war. We prefer war over healthcare. We prefer war over housing. We prefer war over education. We prefer war over the economic welfare of our own citizens. This is something that more and more people are catching onto. Unfortunately, the last ones to catch on appear to be members of the US Congress.” DENNIS KUCINICH 11.3.23 @ hxxps://therealnews.com/were-a-war-machine-as-a-nation-the-truth-about-american-politics
“FOOTPRINTS In the SANDS of TIME are not made by sitting down.” ‘Vigilance, readers. It is the resort of those who have not been stupefied these past nine years. Vigilance and the bearing of witness. The historians with the integrity to write of our time honestly will appreciate this when they sit with the records and begin their work.” PATRICK LAWRENCE
“This is no longer a conspiracy. This is an unresolved murder.” RAY McGOVERN — ‘Russiagate Decomposed’ hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2025/07/24/watch-cn-live-russiagate-decomposed/
TY, Patrick Lawrence, CN, et al., “Keep It Lit!”
“Parenthetically and no more, The Nation fired me for reporting and writing that piece, such was the frenzied pitch Russophobia had reached by this time.” I wonder, instead, if they suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and were willing to push the lie in order to “get Trump”. That was what drew me to Consortium News, as Robert Parry was unwilling to do the same (said he lost a number of friends because of it). (Sadly, after he passed, the comment section became much less lively, and I often saw articles about the “fascist” Trump, but I digress.)
Bob Parry never supported Donald Trump. Debunking the Russiagate operation of intelligence interference in U.S. domestic politics in no way defends Trump and many of his extremist policies, such as openly promoting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Yes, thank you. And the lawlessness and abuses of power are bipartisan and nothing new. Saddam Hussein has WMD was a pack of transparent lies and was repeated ad nauseam on the mass media monopoly outlets. The accusations against Libya, Syria, Iran etc. all turn out to be baseless and likely willful lies to “justify” the destruction of those countries.
Bob Parry exposed the October Surprise crimes and abuses, exposed the lies about Russia and Ukraine, and many others. He exposed abuses during both D and R regimes. I will never forget that.
Thank you, JonnyJames. Itsa “tearjerker,” full of love & reverence, “honoring” Robert Parry (R.I.P.); SFO!!!
AND, YES, “If, I die too young. Let all that I’ve done be remembered. Oh, carry onward, like some songbird, beautiful stranger.” Kevin Moruby
….. “L O N G Live Consortium News dot com!!!” Graduates, one & all, of the “School of Hard Knocks.”
‘If, you woke up this morning w/the “Statesboro Blues,” listen to,Gregg Allman’s, Taj Mahal ‘s & Chris Stapleton’s “Statesboro Blues;” &, the “blues” will disappear, into the ether. TY, JonnyJames. “Keep It Lit!”
“Statesboro Blues,” @ hxxps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qehfPs70FZU&pp=ygUQc3RhdGVzYm9ybyBibHVlcw%3D%3D
Here is a simple test to measure the effectiveness of the 2016 Trump campaign and that of Hillary Clinton: Can you recall their respective campaign slogans? The Trump one is easy to remember but I cannot recall the Clinton one.
The same is true of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008. People can probably recall the (winning) Obama one but not the (losing) McCain one.
Obama and Trump had memorable slogans and won whereas Clinton and McCain did not have memorable slogans and lost.
It is also worth bearing in mind that many Democrats had serious concerns about Hillary Clinton being the nominee in 2008 which is why they encouraged Obama, still only in his first Senate term, to seek the nomination. It is not as if Hillary Clinton was really any better in 2016 than in 2008.
I remember Hillary’s slogan. It was ‘stronger together’. It was often on a banner in the background when she was lumping half of America into a ‘basket of deplorables’ or telling coal miners they had better ‘learn to code’ because she was going to kill their industry and put them out of work or claiming that anyone who didn’t vote for her was a misogynist or a racist or a Nazi (or all of the above). I just can’t figure out why it didn’t resonate with the voters.
Personally, I just voted for the person of color over whitey. No matter how much hot sauce Hillary carried in her purse, she was still an old white lady, while her opponent was at least tangerine-hued.
I am confused (actually not an uncomfortable condition since it is so common for me), why is this particular malfeasance being raised here to such a position of dramatic importance when it seems to be surrounded by multiple acts of destruction of political, social and economic systems upon with common expectations of stability depend? Is it only that this particular dishonesty may have been ignored more than others? It is that the observers writing here have some obsessive interest in these events? Is it that this ‘one’ action is somehow seminal to other dangerous political behaviors?
Russiagate was an operation of U.S. intelligence interference in U.S. domestic politics. Anyone can see what a serious violation that is in a society that says the electorate decides on its leaders, not spies.
Russiagate gave strength to the insane “unprovoked” Ukraine-Russia war, with idiot Trump “obviously a Russian asset” (along with Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein and Michael Flynn and anyone who dared criticize Hillary– who received more money from Putin than any American politician.) “The Russians hacked the DNC computers and gave the information to the Evil Wikileaks” (although Seth Rich seems the only reasonable suspect for the leak/ not hack. “The Russians attacked our democracy so idiot Trump would win” (though now it seems that the Russians actually held much more disturbing information about Hillary, supposedly to deploy after she won as both State Media and the Kremlin expected. Idiot Trump would have averted Russia’s (Biden’s) war with our corrupt proxy Ukraine; what would have happened to the American economy so dependent on weapons sales (and Financials)?
The US cannot survive Peace.
Obama removed the law (Smith Mundt) in 2013 and put now legal domestic propaganda in the hands of the State Department (CIA); they had perfected the messaging abroad in the 70 years since WWII. The 2016 Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act just gave more teeth to Russiagate and the demonizing of Russians.
While the 15 months of Biden’s support for Zionist ethnic cleansing and idiot Trump’s 6 months of the same is reprehensible, that is what America (at least DC) has become. A Global Slaughterhouse. Biden set the world up for WWIII. Putin cannot afford to trust anything from America’s liars, he’s been burned repeatedly (we all saw what Trump’s word was worth in his negotiations with Iran). Idiot Trump may well pull the trigger and end human life. Perhaps it’s inevitable; a dying Empire circling the drain and pulling the world down with it.
The effect Russiagate had on US-Russian tensions is a topic Consortium News has covered extensively and repeatedly since 2016.
In addition to that, a thoroughly corrupted corporate media defended, and still defends that intel interference in domestic politics. That needs to be called out and opposed, along with the operation itself, which Consortium News has been doing since this scandal began nine years ago.
“still defends”
You betcha! Sickening.
First item is that Patrick Lawrence has proven himself to be the best English speaking reporter in the world right now.
Not only for having been fired by ‘The Nation’ for having the guts to report the facts about the Russia hoax.
Even though honest reporting is not a crowded field right now.
Because, as with our Congress, reporters are faced with a choice of taking the money to parrot the lies or being fired and smeared for reporting the truth.
Most will take the bribe and tell the lies they are told to tell.
Mr. Lawrence is also superior in nearly every other respect as a reporter.
Doing the hard work of actual research and avoiding the cheap device of quoting ‘anonymous sources’ to push a narrative.
It is always a tell that you are being fed propaganda, if not CIA Psy-Ops, when any ‘sources’ are referenced.
True that Durham was a tremendous disappointment.
But recall that the one prosecution he brought and won, against FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.
Clinesmith was then given a slap on the wrist by a DNC operative in judicial robes.
By no less then the notorious anti-Trump vigilante, Judge James Boasberg.
That same Judge Boasberg of the nationwide injunction to prevent legitimate immigration enforcement fame.
This, despite the fact that Clinesmith had lied to the FISA court with criminal intent to obtain the FISA court’s permission to spy on an innocent U.S. citizen.
Did Durham realize at that point that it would have been impossible to obtain any justice from any court in our nation’s Capitol?
That massive problem is still with us today.
The U.S. Constitution relies on honesty and fairness from judges and juries.
Without the sincere good will of our citizen judges and jurors, our Constitution isn’t worth the paper it is written on.
The Russia hoax was the dirtiest political hit job in our 200 year history.
The Democrats have made a mockery of our entire system of justice.
All because they have no solutions and no leadership.
They have proven that they are out to win at all costs and will destroy anyone and anything to seize power.
They will destroy the whole country if they feel the need to.
One way or another, they must be stopped.
Until people start going to jail, Democrats will persist in cheating the people and stealing power.
None of this matters. Every Democrat I know believes fervently in Russiagate.
Interesting. I did not know that Mister Lawrence had been writing for ‘The Nation’. I’d stopped reading them long before that.
I was once a reader and ‘fan’ of ‘The Nation’ back when I was in college. I remember a day, when suddenly the Mainstream News was reporting the shocking news that a CIA transport plane had been shot down supplying the Contras in Nicaragua thus disproving the denials from the Ray-Gun Administration. It was not shocking, or even a surprise to me, because back then ‘The Nation’ was a radical paper that had been reporting on the Ray-Gun people supplying the Contras for many issues. I thus saw great value in the fact that I read ‘The Nation.’ Much like I do with ‘CN’ today.
Then, there was an obvious change. Suddenly the mag wasn’t so broke anymore. They seemed to have more money. The pleas to send a couple of bucks to keep the mag afloat went away. Meanwhile, their coverage shifted, until it became much more the ‘left-cover’ for Democrats. The final straw for me was when they said to vote for Al Gore ….barf. Meanwhile, the people at the top of the mag suddenly started showing up on CNN as ‘experts’. Nobody cited them as ‘experts’ back when they were doing good reporting on CIA arms and drugs smuggling in central America.
Therefore, I had stopped reading ‘The Nation’ apparently long before Mister Lawrence wrote for them, and then got fired for them for exceeding their established ‘left-cover’ line.
Ditto The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker. All once fine magazines.
Thanks for your story. It is similar to my own. The Nation is now a thoroughly bourgeois rag. Same as Amy Goodman, about whose change Patrick writes in his book.
Keep a copy of that list.
Remember those names.
If you have a strong memory, great, otherwise, write it down. Store a copy in the cloud. But, make certain that you keep a copy of that list, and remember those names. Because, this will empower you in your refusal to listen to these liars ever again. Or, if your willpower is weak and you do slip and listen to them, then at the least to never believe them again and to distrust everything they say to trust and everyone they say to trust.
Keep a list of who has lied to you. Or, perhaps the much shorter list of who has always told you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You won’t need cloud storage to hold that list in this modern world. It might be as short as two letters, like ‘CN’, but I’m so jaded I wouldn’t swear to that.
There is no reason to listen to known liars. You already know that you can not trust what they say. Keep a copy of this list.
Turn them off!
PS… if you already had been keeping such a list, then you would have known that these lies came from many of the same outlets and some of the same faces that had lied to you about Saddam’s WMD’s and so many other lies. There is an old saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” With the “news” outlets mentioned in this piece, its more like “Fool me 1,000,000 times, shame on …”
The country has been slow walking to this point since 1980. The media went corporate in the 80’s with hostile takeovers and actual journalists were weeded out. Asking tough questions and follow ups were insulting to the Honorable Men in high office, because they never lie, and they are always right. I was in the ABC Radio Group (which doesn’t exist anymore) for 30 years and saw it first hand.