Taking on water from revealed FBI conflicts of interest, the foundering Russia-gate probe – and its mainstream media promoters – are resorting to insults against people who note the listing ship, Robert Parry wrote two years ago today.
The very issues being debated in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week regarding FBI misconduct in starting an investigation into a presidential campaign was dissected two years ago to the day, on Dec. 13, 2017 by Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry, who was way ahead of this story.
By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News
Dec. 13, 2017
The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling “scandal” into its own scandal, by providing evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.
Peter Strzok was a deputy assistant director of the FBI, the second in command of counterintelligence.
As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American “deep state” exists and that it has maneuvered to remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government’s intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump.
In one Aug. 6, 2016 text exchange, Page told Strzok: “Maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace.” At the end of that text, she sent Strzok a link to a David Brooks column in The New York Times, which concludes with the clarion call: “There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.”
Apparently after reading that stirring advice, Strzok replied, “And of course I’ll try and approach it that way. I just know it will be tough at times. I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps.”
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, criticized Strzok’s boast that “I can protect our country at many levels.” Jordan said: “This guy thought he was super-agent James Bond at the FBI [deciding] there’s no way we can let the American people make Donald Trump the next president.”
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In the text messages, Strzok also expressed visceral contempt for working-class Trump voters, for instance, writing on Aug. 26, 2016, “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support. … it’s scary real down here.”
Another text message suggested that other senior government officials – alarmed at the possibility of a Trump presidency – joined the discussion. In an apparent reference to an August 2016 meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok wrote to Page on Aug. 15, 2016, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”
Strzok added, “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event that you die before you’re 40.”
It’s unclear what strategy these FBI officials were contemplating to ensure Trump’s defeat, but the comments mesh with what an intelligence source told me after the 2016 election, that there was a plan among senior Obama administration officials to use the allegations about Russian meddling to block Trump’s momentum with the voters and — if elected — to persuade members of the Electoral College to deny Trump a majority of votes and thus throw the selection of a new president into the House of Representatives under the rules of the Twelfth Amendment.
The scheme involved having some Democratic electors vote for former Secretary of State Colin Powell (which did happen), making him the third-place vote-getter in the Electoral College and thus eligible for selection by the House. But the plan fizzled when enough of Trump’s electors stayed loyal to their candidate to officially make him President.
After that, Trump’s opponents turned to the Russia-gate investigation as the vehicle to create the conditions for somehow nullifying the election, impeaching Trump, or at least weakening him sufficiently so he could not take steps to improve relations with Russia.
In one of her text messages to Strzok, Page made reference to a possible Watergate-style ouster of Trump, writing: “Bought all the president’s men. Figure I needed to brush up on watergate.”
As a key feature in this oust-Trump effort, Democrats have continued to lie by claiming that “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred” in the assessment that Russia hacked the Democratic emails last year on orders from President Vladimir Putin and then slipped them to WikiLeaks to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
That canard was used in the early months of the Russia-gate imbroglio to silence any skepticism about the “hacking” accusation, and the falsehood was repeated again by a Democratic congressman during Wednesday’s hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.
But the “consensus” claim was never true. In May 2017 testimony, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” was put together by “hand-picked” analysts from only three agencies: the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
Biased at the Creation
And, the new revelations of high-level FBI bias puts Clapper’s statement about “hand-picked” analysts in sharper perspective, since any intelligence veteran will tell you that if you hand-pick the analysts you are effectively hand-picking the analysis.
James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence.
Although it has not yet been spelled out exactly what role Strzok and Page may have had in the Jan. 6 report, I was told by one source that Strzok had a direct hand in writing it. Whether that is indeed the case, Strzok, as a senior FBI counterintelligence official, would almost surely have had input into the selection of the FBI analysts and thus into the substance of the report itself. [For challenges from intelligence experts to the Jan. 6 report, see Consortiumnews.com’s “More Holes in the Russia-gate Narrative.“]
If the FBI contributors to the Jan. 6 report shared Strzok’s contempt for Trump, it could explain why claims from an unverified dossier of Democratic-financed “dirt” on Trump, including salacious charges that Russian intelligence operatives videotaped Trump being urinated on by prostitutes in a five-star Moscow hotel, was added as a classified appendix to the report and presented personally to President-elect Trump.
Though Democrats and the Clinton campaign long denied financing the dossier – prepared by ex-British spy Christopher Steele who claimed to rely on second- and third-hand information from anonymous Russian contacts – it was revealed in October 2017 that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign shared in the costs, with the payments going to the “oppo” research firm, Fusion GPS, through the Democrats’ law firm, Perkins Coie.
That discovery helped ensnare another senior Justice Department official, Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who talked with Steele during the campaign and had a post-election meeting with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Recently, Simpson has acknowledged that Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS last year to investigate Trump.
Bruce Ohr has since been demoted and Strzok was quietly removed from the Russia-gate investigation last July although the reasons for these moves were not publicly explained at the time.
Still, the drive for “another Watergate” to oust an unpopular – and to many insiders, unfit – President remains at the center of the thinking among the top mainstream news organizations as they have scrambled for Russia-gate “scoops” over the past year even at the cost of making serious reporting errors.
For instance, last Friday, CNN — and then CBS News and MSNBC — trumpeted an email supposedly sent from someone named Michael J. Erickson on Sept. 4, 2016, to Donald Trump Jr. that involved WikiLeaks offering the Trump campaign pre-publication access to purloined Democratic National Committee emails that WikiLeaks published on Sept. 13, nine days later.
Grasping for Confirmation
Since the Jan. 6 report alleged that WikiLeaks received the “hacked” emails from Russia — a claim that WikiLeaks and Russia deny — the story seemed to finally tie together the notion that the Trump campaign had at least indirectly colluded with Russia.
Hillary Clinton with supporters at Carl Hayden High School in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21, 2016. (Gage Skidmore)
This new “evidence” spread like wildfire across social media. As The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald wrote in an article critical of the media’s performance, some Russia-gate enthusiasts heralded the revelation with graphics of cannons booming and nukes exploding.
But the story soon collapsed when it turned out that the date on the email was actually Sept. 14, 2016, i.e., the day after WikiLeaks released the batch of DNC emails, not Sept. 4. It appeared that “Erickson” – whoever he was – had simply alerted the Trump campaign to the public existence of the WikiLeaks disclosure.
Greenwald noted, “So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all.”
Yet, despite the cascade of errors and grudging corrections, including some belated admissions that there was no “17-intelligence-agency consensus” on Russian “hacking” – The New York Times made a preemptive strike against the new documentary evidence that the Russia-gate investigation was riddled with conflicts of interest.
The Times’ lead editorial on Wednesday mocked reporters at Fox News for living in an “alternate universe” where the Russia-gate “investigation is ‘illegitimate and corrupt,’ or so says Gregg Jarrett, a legal analyst who appears regularly on [Sean] Hannity’s nightly exercise in presidential ego-stroking.”
Though briefly mentioning the situation with Strzok’s text messages, the Times offered no details or context for the concerns, instead just heaping ridicule on anyone who questions the Russia-gate narrative.
“To put it mildly, this is insane,” the Times declared. “The primary purpose of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not to take down Mr. Trump. It’s to protect America’s national security and the integrity of its elections by determining whether a presidential campaign conspired with a foreign adversary to influence the 2016 election – a proposition that grows more plausible every day.”
The Times fumed that “roughly three-quarters of Republicans still refuse to accept that Russia interfered in the 2016 election – a fact that is glaringly obvious to everyone else, including the nation’s intelligence community.” (There we go again with the false suggestion of a consensus within the intelligence community.)
The Times also took to task Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, for seeking “a Special Counsel to investigate ALL THINGS 2016 – not just Trump and Russia.” The Times insisted that “None of these attacks or insinuations are grounded in good faith.”
But what are the Times editors so afraid of? As much as they try to insult and intimidate anyone who demands serious evidence about the Russia-gate allegations, why shouldn’t the American people be informed about how Washington insiders manipulate elite opinion in pursuit of reversing “mistaken” judgments by the unwashed masses?
Do the Times editors really believe in democracy – a process that historically has had its share of warts and mistakes – or are they just elitists who think they know best and turn away their noses from the smell of working-class people at Walmart?
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. After AP and Newsweek spiked his stories critical of U.S. foreign policy, Parry started a consortium for other journalists whose reporting was suppressed and named it Consortium News in 1995.
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It is not ‘mainstream media’, it is establishment media and as such denies the very existence of itself as an arm of the deep state / shadow government.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”
— CIA Director Willian Casey to President Ronald Reagan
Thanks for re-publishing another honest and insightful piece from Robert Parry, honesty and insight being pretty rare qualities in American journalism. It inspires some thoughts.
To my mind, Russia-gate arose from at least two impulses. Both of them are of a political nature no one in the establishment wants to reveal.
The major one was a top-level, yet undisclosed effort to either stop or destroy Trump. There is no other way for senior officials of CIA and FBI to have worked and spoken in public about such matters without the support of President Obama, a fact which again demonstrates – again, as in Neocon Wars, the coup in Ukraine, and rolling tanks up to Russia’s borders – what a destructive leader Obama actually was, destructive even to his own country’s election principles.
And a very secretive leader, a president with an almost unparalleled drive for secrecy and a fierce enemy of all whistle-blowers and the truth. After all, he sent people to prison – Chelsea Manning, just one of several – and consigned others to a life of hell on earth – as we see in the case of Julian Assange.
By the way, Trump’s and Republican Party’s attitudes and actions towards Julian Assange, a man who could clarify instantly so many controversial matters, screams at us about the true nature of America’s establishment. At a certain level in both political parties, all desire for truth and openness simply evaporates.
But just as most people in America and perhaps abroad never had those dark thoughts about Obama, and perhaps still do not, we will never get to the bottom of his plot. He and his associates made sure he was well insulated, and the operation involved so many very high-level people, including of course Hillary Clinton – a politician with a different style, but a match for Obama’s secrecy and destructiveness in every way – that there is no way America’s establishment today will ever seriously dig into it….
Just look at all the (appropriately) bad publicity in Britain around Prince Andrew’s association with the ate Jeffrey Epstein. Even Buckingham Palace has not been able to protect him completely. Compare its extent and impact to that around Bill and Hillary Clinton. We know Bill Clinton was at least as important an associate of Epstein as the Prince. He made 26 flights on “the Lolita Express” according to the plane’s co-pilot and logs, and Epstein contributed to the Clinton Foundation and to other Clinton “causes.” Epstein even claimed a role in creating the Foundation that has served the Clintons’ personal interests so well.
Please don’t get me wrong, I am not a defender of Trump…. Yes, Trump is appalling, but what I am really saying is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are equally so….
God, I miss this man, Robert Parry. And this 2-year-old piece proves his visionary take on current events. He had a way of cutting through the corporate media’s manufactured BS, of writing stories based on the (evolving) truth as he saw it, that rang true and demanded of his readers an open mind, as the best writers do. He was more interested in truth than being “right.” Digging for the truth was his being right, it seemed and the journey with him to uncover it was one I looked forward to daily.
It says a lot about our society that a person with his professional integrity and courage was pushed to the fringes of debate and set upon for destruction. I was greatly saddened when he passed, and still mourn our collective loss. Rest in peace, sir.
Beautifully said, Daniel. Agree wholeheartedly.
AMEN
This reveals the collective “government intelligence” that the United States relies upon regularly to keep the people safe.
Instead, the Deep State as a whole has been a disaster for the United States. President Trump has it correct when he vilifies the actions of this group of corrupt morons.
The oddity of James “Claptrap” Clapper and John Brennan having any association with anything related to “intelligence” is a laughable fiasco. Put those two into a room with some of these Congressional investigators like Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, and no one would be able to determine the stupidest person in the room. The collective intelligence of those four would be represented by a BB bouncing around the inside of the Capitol rotunda.
Russiagate isn’t “foundering.” It’s just proving a TON of Democrat/Clintonista collusion instead of Republican/Trump collusion!
Defiant reminds me of Paul Mahoney, ( journeyman ventriloquist).
Of course Trump was elected by virtue of a constitutionally mandated mechanism intended to blunt the will of the “bewildered herd”in order to protect the”oppulent few”from the egaliterian instincts of the propertyless multitude. For the second time in four election cycles democracy was deferred to the tally of surrogate voters in the electoral college.
That being said the debasement of reason being practiced by the proponents of Russia gate is symptomatic of systemic ills beyond politics.
Someone should change the label “intelligence ” agency to nonsense agency!
This is circling back to Hillary Clinton email investigation … which was irregular in so many ways. She is the ultimate target and I don’t think she can be insulated anymore from having to testify to the numerous Congressional committees investigating all these things. The bottom line is whether she was selling her influence as Secretary of State in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. Or maybe even selling classified information. And we need to go back and look at why Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin weren’t prosecuted.
I am NOT a great Trump fan but these slime bags who look down their haughty noses at the American electorate need to be brought down…..ruined. Every single one of them should be removed from Government positions…FIRED…..and if enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing is presented they should be prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison. Members of the FBI have no business interfering in an election and that should be sufficient to prosecute them.
You must see the pattern:
https://www.thenation.com/article/gutting-net-neutrality-is-the-trump-administrations-most-brutal-blow-to-democracy-yet/
(pythagoreans and the pentagon)
Additional info. …
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-prosecution-of-inauguration-day-protesters-is-a-threat-to-dissent/
They’re slamming the door of free speech with the
(right-wing nationalists inspired) police state coup d’etat
– where Trump gave a speech yesterday that signaled
a GREEN LIGHT for the return of an FBI Czar
in-the-style-of, record keeping J. Edgar Hoover.
Jeff Sessions fits-the-profile-of-a-Czar with puzzle-piece-precision.
With or without Trump,
the “Conservative Agenda” marches forward, straight and Strong
“Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not, shall lose,
so the Bible says and it still is news”
(God bless the child that’s got his own)
.
Trump’s stacked deck of Authoritarians gives him Boldness
[For Example] —- Final arguments are underway today in Washington, D.C., in a case that could shape the future of free speech and the right to protest in the United States: the first trial of the nearly 200 people arrested during President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
As demonstrators, journalists and observers gathered in Northwest D.C. after the inauguration on January 20, some separated from the group and vandalized nearby businesses and vehicles. Police officers then swept hundreds of people in the vicinity into a blockaded corner in a process known as “KETTLING,where they carried out mass arrests of everyone in the area.
The first so-called J20 trial could go to a jury as early as today, and involves six people, including one journalist, Alexei Wood, a freelance photojournalist.
The defendants face multiple felony and misdemeanor charges, including multiple counts of destruction of property. Evidence against the defendants has been scant.
We get an update from Jude Ortiz, a member of the organizing crew of Defend J20 and the Mass Defense Committee chair for the National Lawyers Guild. He’s been in court throughout the first J20 trial.
http://defendj20resistance.org/blog/
Cleaned up my typos as best as I could.
Apologies :
All concerns to a point are valid here and and worthy of sharing and discussing.
But Russia gate or not- Mr Parry’s earnest reporting or not- this administration is hiding something- the CEO or president is mired in something that is unsavory. Felix Slater tracked down by the Zembla journalists in Long Island (Mr Trump said in a separate deposition on camera they he could not pick him out and did not remember him) is now going to be given a unique perch by the intel committee and be selectively questioned as is Rona – Trump’s life long personal assistant.
Slater is a convicted felon turned state’s witness whose father is a Russian mobster and Rona is Trumps fly on the wall loyal personal assistant -two very important witnesses will not face the full force of these committees – Trump denied even knowing Slater despite him having a Trump employee business card with his name on it and and office in the Tower a floor below Trump’s
Why ? Even Don jr and Jared had to face up to the comittees stringent interrogation .
Cleaned up my typos as best I could :
Apologies: corrected post :
All concerns to a point are valid here and and worthy of sharing and discussing.
But Russia gate or not- Mr Parry’s earnest reporting or not- this administration is hiding something- the CEO or president is mired in something that is unsavory. Felix Slator tracked down by the Zembla journalists in Long Island (Mr Trump said in a separate deposition on camera they he could not pick him out and did not remember him him) is now going to given a unique perch by the intel committed and be selectively questioned as is Rona – Trumps life long personal assistant.
Slater is a convicted felon turned state’s witness whose father is a Tudsian monster and Rona is Trumps fly on the wall – two very important witnesses will not face the full force of these committees – Trump denied even knowing Slater despite him having a Trump employee business card with his name on it and and office in the Towet a floor below Trump’s
Why ? Even Don jr and Jared had to face up to the committees stringent interrogation .
All concerns to a point are valid here and and worthy of sharing and discussing.
But Russia gate or not- Mr Parry’s earnest reporting or not- this administration is hiding something- the CEO or president is mired in something that is unsavory. Felix Slator tracked down by the Zembla journalists in Long Island (Mr Trump said in a separate deposition on camera they he could not pick him out and did not remember him him) is now going to given a unique perch by the intel committed and be selectively questioned as is Rona – Trumps life long personal assistant.
Slater is a convicted felon turned state’s witness whose father is a Tudsian monster and Rona is Trumps fly on the wall – two very important witnesses will not face the full force of these committees – Trump denied even knowing Slater despite him having a Trump employee business card with his name on it and and office in the Towet a floor below Trump’s
Why ? Even Don jr and Jared had to face up to the comittees stringent interrogation .
Something is not right here – russiahate or not as Mr Parry describes it
Something is not right at all – texting FBI agents, Assange, Guccifer, etc etc etc or not – the entire chokehold stinks to high heaven metaphorically
FYI:
Final arguments are underway today in Washington, D.C., in a case that could shape the future of free speech and the right to protest in the United States: the first trial of the nearly 200 people arrested during President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
As demonstrators, journalists and observers gathered in Northwest D.C. after the inauguration on January 20, some separated from the group and vandalized nearby businesses and vehicles. Police officers then swept hundreds of people in the vicinity into a blockaded corner in a process known as “kettling,” where they carried out mass arrests of everyone in the area.
The first so-called J20 trial could go to a jury as early as today, and involves six people, including one journalist, Alexei Wood, a freelance photojournalist.
The defendants face multiple felony and misdemeanor charges, including multiple counts of destruction of property. Evidence against the defendants has been scant.
We get an update from Jude Ortiz, a member of the organizing crew of Defend J20 and the Mass Defense Committee chair for the National Lawyers Guild. He’s been in court throughout the first J20 trial.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
The list of evil deeds the Russians have done continues to grow. A new story tells of how they engineered Brexit!
“Russian Influence” – $0.97 That Changed The Fate Of Britain
This is even more impressive than their arranging Donald Trump’s election with pictures of cute puppies.
These agents may wish to be considered patriotic in same vein as our most courageous whistleblowers. They are not. They intentionally broke laws and obstructed the process to highjack it for their own political agenda. Every one of those FBI agents and DOJ lawyers who are found to have colluded need to be identified, bounced from government, and held accountable under the law.
The agents I was referring to were those in the FBI and DOJ investigating Trump for ‘Russian collusion’, not the Russian FSB agents referred to in the article cited by Perry Logan. That is a separate question that needs to be fully vetted, but as of now it sounds like a dodgy story and an elaborate set-up.
Actually, things are going quite well for Russiagate. A Russian hacker has confessed to hacking the DNC servers–in court, no less:
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/russian-hacker-admits-to-breaking-into-dnc-servers-under-direction-of-kremlin-intelligence-report/#.Wi_UbzZWt0w.twitter
Rule of thumb: if it’s found on the internet, it must be true. From the link:
Mr Parry used the word foundering meaning failed probe rather than floundering which would mean struggling. We do not have the special counsel’s report yet so we cannot assume if it has failed to prove any thing or succeeded to prove anything.As far as the FBI agents ( it doesn’t matter that they were lovers or not) texted their opinion of distaste and revulsion of a most innappropriate and unqualififed candidate for President, which has borne out to be true and whose adminstration is nothing but a wrecking ball, is only what millions of Americans also thought of that then candidate. FBI agents are entitled to their opionion. Mueller removed Strzok pretty quickly. We would all be duly disqualified from doing any job we hold because we have opinions.Of course we are not.
A doctor will hold opinions of people but will still do his/her job even for people as distasteful as the failed Times Square would be bomber who ended up injuring himself. The Hypocratic oath means even an alleged terrorist will receive excellent medical care.
Something smells about this administration. The Trump organisation was on its knees with domestic financing denied. Turning to other sources like the giant German washing machine Deutsche Bank and dubious Russian oligarchs the intricate web spreads internationally. That the American political system is broken is in no doubt, but Trump at the helm is hastening the demise.
I would have given the direct youtube links to the two part series by Dutch investigative journalists,Zembla, first highlighted back In May at Rawstory.
Rawstory link:
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/watch-explosive-dutch-documentary-says-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russias-mafia-underworld/
Dutch link:
https://zembla.bnnvara.nl/nieuws/the-dubious-friends-of-donald-trump-the-russians
No one from the Trump camp has commented on this documentary (fake news) or the Mcclatchy team up piece with Zembla below :
McClatchy news investigation along side Dutch investigators at Zembla to do this follow up piece on the above :
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article185328068.html
Rawstory link to Zembla sequel:
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/09/watch-trumps-mob-ties-and-multibillion-dollar-fraud-revealed-in-dutch-documentary-sequel/
I was surprised that no one, to my knowledge in MSM every mentioned these pieces.
I am not a journalist or a specialist in any of these fields but something is not right with this administration on many levels despite the media hysteria and its ratings garnering blab fests about the Russian probe..
My understanding is that this is the real story behind Trump and should be a very serious criminal investigation. However, nobody wants to talk about the mob connections, because many top level people are involved in the Russian Jewish mob. Putin on the other hand, is an enemy of that mob because of his takedown of Khodorkovsky during the Perestroika looting of Russia and attacking Putin boosts the profiteering of the Cold War narrative. Russiagate serves the US establishment by protecting not only Clinton but also their mobster allies.
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-russia-facts-are-hiding-in-plain-sight/2017/12/14/81de3c56-e106-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
lock her up
What greater bias can there be than using, “we didnt find evidence of intent”, as justification for not indicting – when the relevant laws do NOT require intent ?
They might just as well have said, “Yes there was evidence that she broke the law, but we couldnt find evidence for life on Mars, so decided not to prosecute”. In effect, that (legally) was their argument.
“…destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.” that’s a joke. the president works at that 24/7…and it hasn’t caught on. now he’s like duterte saying ‘come on are you really just going to put up with me?’ we are. we love him. that’s frustrating so he acts erratically. that’s why they gave him the button to push if he feels lonely. i’d say us democracy is a historic failure. not historic enough, says the prez. let’s face it, we deserve him and he deserves us. nature abhors a vacuum and we’re all pumped out…
Hillary sends her love. To Lynn , also.
Do they believe in Democracy. Prop or NOT!
… while actual dictators like Netanyahu
get to be Honored Speakers
at UN functions or the US Capitol
and, while common people constantly died, murdered or killed
as it was under British East India Company authority and the root
of White Racism with it’s harsh/
stern, human spirit destroying
cruelty, and Total Acceptance of
Conceptual Racial Superiority.
The new Reunion of Ismael and Issac
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/13/trump-netanyahu-mohammad-bin-salman-destroyers-neoliberal-world-order.html
To whom it may concern: Forgive me, this isn’t meant to be Hasbara… .
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/11/30/us-foreign-policy-another-trump-organization-inc-property.html
I’m much happier with Putin photo as opposed to a depressing photo of the 20 year Dictator, Netanyahu.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/15/russia-victory-and-western-denial-habit.html
Liars always become very touchy when confronted with their falsehoods. They will inevitably attack there accusers with more lies to make them look bad. This is a fundamental reflex all liars respond to critics with. “I’m not lying, you are!” Those who want to believe the real liar love this response, because it gives them an excuse not to investigate if the accuser may be right. Then they can just turn on the accuser and blame them for false accusation – without the slightest proof, of course.
Liars are the amateurs, Dog damned liars are government professionals and the politicians of either party
“Israel’s collusion with the Trump presidential transition team points to more than just Trump, Kushner, and Flynn violating the Logan Act of 1799, an arcane law prohibiting American citizens from engaging in their own foreign policies. By convincing Trump, Kushner, and Flynn that Obama was behind Resolution 2443, Israel co-opted the Trump transition team to do its bidding. The Logan Act is immaterial when Trump, Kushner, Flynn, and others committed virtual treason against their own country to further the political aims of Israel.
“There has never been a successful prosecution under the Logan Act and likely there will never be one. However, those who possessed access to classified information – Trump, Kushner, Flynn, Haley, and others – who were simultaneously taking orders from Israel on matters of US national security, could be found guilty of violating the US Espionage Act. Israel’s ‘Greek Chorus’ of supporters in the US news media and Congress brought up the Logan Act to minimize the damage caused by collusion between Israel’s skink-like ambassador to the UN Danny Danon, Netanyahu, Kushner, Flynn, Trump, and Haley to kill the resolution. If the Logan Act had any enforcement teeth, it would have been used a long time ago to indict George Soros, Sheldon Adelson, Haim Saban, Paul Singer, and other pro-Israeli billionaire influence-peddlers, who represent the interests of other nations and engage in their own foreign policies.
“The phoniest aspect of so-called ‘Russiagate’ is that the political scandal involving Trump, Kushner, Flynn, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and others hardly involves the Russian government. Instead, Eastern European-Israeli oligarchs, along with their thousands of offshore shell corporations located in places as far-ranging as the British Virgin Islands and the Isle of Jersey to the Marshall Islands and Seychelles, along with well-placed American agents-of-influence for Israel, are front-and-center in the scandal that now threatens to bring down the Trump administration.”
Mueller Names Trump’s Foreign ‘Colluding’ Power: Israel
By Wayne Madsen
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/04/mueller-names-trump-foreign-colluding-power-israel.html
Thank You, Abe.
Luckily for Humanity, the betch Clinton did not get elected.
All the layers of deceit, denial and distraction bode ill for the Democratic Party and MSM.
Thank you Robert Parry for standing up to all this disinformation & propaganda.
The “Red Herring” is a major distraction to what is fundamentally a very corrupted election process from within and non-action by both parties to pursue fair, transparent “un-rigged” elections, taking the money out of the elections, getting rid of the electoral college, ranked voting and more.
Reforming our election process is the most important issue because what we have now and what came before is because of the money which owns the politicians and who no longer represent the American People!
Nothing will change until we fix this!
SUGGESTION / question,
Can We Fix This!?!
(compare & contrast)
Antebellum South[edit]
Eastman Johnson’s 1859 painting “Negro Life at the South” subtly portrays relationships of white male masters and their female slaves.
After the Revolution, Southern plantation owners imported a massive number of new slaves from Africa and the Caribbean until the banning of the trade in 1808. More importantly, more than one million slaves were transported in a forced migration in the domestic slave trade, from the Upper South to the Deep South, most by slave traders—either overland where they were held for days in chained coffles, or by the coastwise trade and ships. The majority of slaves in the Deep South, men and women, worked on cotton plantations. Cotton was the leading cash crop during this time, but slaves also worked on rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco plantations, clearing new land, digging ditches, cutting and hauling wood, slaughtering livestock, and making repairs to buildings and tools. Black women also cared for their children and managed the bulk of the housework and domestic chores. Living with the dual burdens of racism and sexism, enslaved women in the South held roles within the family and community that contrasted sharply with more traditional or upper class American women’s roles.[29]
Young girls generally started working well before boys, with many working before age seven.[30] Although field work was traditionally considered to be “men’s work,” different estimates conclude that between 63-80 percent of women worked in the fields.[31] Adult female work depended greatly upon plantation size. On small farms, women and men performed similar tasks, while on larger plantations, males were given more physically demanding work. Few of the chores performed by enslaved women took them off the plantation. Therefore they were less mobile than enslaved men, who often assisted their masters in the transportation of crops, supplies, and other materials, and were often hired out as artisans and craftsmen.[32] Women also worked in the domestic sphere as servants, cooks, seamstresses, and nurses. Although a female slave’s labor in the field superseded childrearing in importance, the responsibilities of childbearing and childcare greatly circumscribed the life of an enslaved woman. This also explains why female slaves were less likely to run away than men.[33]
Many female slaves were the object of severe sexual exploitation; often bearing the children of their white masters, master’s sons, or overseers. Black women were prohibited from defending themselves against any type of abuse, including sexual, at the hands of white men. If a slave attempted to defend herself, she was often subjected to further beatings from the master or even the mistress.[34] The black female, Woman or child, was forced into sexual relationships for the white slave master’s pleasure and profit; attempting to keep the slave population growing by his own doing, and not by importing more slaves from Africa. Even Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States, is believed to have fathered six mixed-race children (four survived to adulthood) with one of his female slaves, Sally Hemings, a woman of three-quarters European ancestry and half-sister to his late wife, who served as the widower’s concubine for more than two decades. In the case of Harriet Ann Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, her master, Dr. James Norcom, had sexually harassed her for years. Even after she had two children of her own, he threatened to sell them if she denied his sexual advances.[citation needed]
(get real!)
This irrelevant filler seeks to bury the essential subject of corruption of our election process.
Exactly, Colleen, until the mass media and election tools of democracy are freed from economic power, we have no democracy and no tools to restore democracy. The only hope short of the bloodbath of revolution is the creation of a coalition of third parties that truly represent their members, and can agree on winning candidates.
I think we still have a tool , but it only works if enough of us ignore party designations. Simply vote anti-incumbent in every race , in every election , until our reps start answering to us instead of to the big $$$.
In 2018 we can have a whole new House. I think those new reps would very quickly grasp that there’s also a new sheriff in town – the American people.
Washington Post today, in another story relying solely on anonymous sources, breathlessly states:
“Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.
The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat.”
Objective reality?
It just reads as the person who wrote that was a humorist, a comedian. No wonder so many Russians cannot stop laughing at the endless madness of the Russiagate objective reality. Some ask – where can we find such hallucinogenic drugs that US people talking and writing about Russiagate are taking?
I’m beginning to think Strzok was part of a Clinton/Podesta crisis management/deep state plan to bulletproof Clinton from both the Uranium One scandal (see Clinton Cash and the NYTimes validation of many of its facts in April 2015) and the festering email scandal: open a limited and controlled “matter” to give the appearance of a thorough investigation of her time as SOS, then have DOJ absolve her before the convention. And use the same DOJ investigators who quietly blessed the Uranium One sale, despite detailed evidence presented by confidential informant Walter Campbell.
Campbell, like the Podesta Group, was a lobbyist for Russia in the effort to get the sale approved. Unlike Podesta, he registered under FARA. He was reportedly so appalled by what he heard from his Russian clients – that massive donations to the Clinton Foundation were sealing the deal – that he reported his concerns to the FBI, and became a CI, wore a wire, collected all manner of evidence. When the deal was approved anyway, he reportedly asked his handler, how was that possible? “Politics” was the reported reply. He was then placed under an order not to reveal any of his evidence, not even to Congress, under penalty of imprisonment. It has not yet been reported who supervised the DOJ Uranium One investigation, or Campbell’s handler, but it is fair speculation that the same core conspirators pursuing an “insurance policy” to protect against a Trump victory should be suspected, until more is known. Particularly Strzok, who was everywhere, who may have been the only top person at FBI to have seen Huma Abedin’s laptop, and who we now see bore a powerful bias to avoid a Trump victory, shared with a small team within the DOJ.
As top counterintelligence agent at FBI, did he also supervise the review of the DWS laptop and Becerra server retrieved in the Imran Awan investigation? The Seth Rich laptop whose contents, according to Sy Hersh’s phone rant published in August, proved, per an FBI report Hersh claimed to have had read to hiim, that Rich was the source of the Wikileaks DNC emails.
The Uranium One deal reportedly netted the Clinton organization $135M, mostly from foreigners on both sides of the controversial transaction – the Russians seeking approval for strategic purposes, the sellers for monetary ones. It is likely the CIA also had to secretly sign off on that deal. It is hard to fathom why the US would approve it, unless there were corrupt purposes to be served: the Clintons and their many retainers to amass the funds needed to run their organization, the deep staters to amass the leverage they could use to exercise control over the levers of power from a known political machine with whom they’d already learned to profitably coexist, with the “cover” of the Clinton Global Initiative liberal goals to assuage the guilt, justify the actions as serving a “larger good.”
You raise some good questions , and posit a plausible scenario. I wonder if we’ll ever know the true story.
When I see the name ” Strzok ” , it makes me think of the famed Superman nemesis of yesteryear , Mr. Mxyzptlk. The only way Superman could defeat him was to get him to say his name backwards. I think we should give that trick a shot with Mr. Strzok.
Russia-gate serves the Democrat party because it side-steps their collusion with Israel. It serves the Republicans less because of collusion with corporations in the effort to destroy democracy and the social programs of the New Deal, and Russia is in on it. What is the purpose of all this collusion? It’s to bring Iran, North Korea, and Cuba into the New World Order. China and Russia are only nominal adversaries in the world economy. They also want to impoverish the majority of the world’s population even at the cost of enriching some individuals to the point of becoming gods. In a sense, this is what liberals have wanted, to level the field that the poor people of the world exist on.
Lately, I have been reading Luke Harding’s “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” Harding is a journalist who works as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. His book draws heavily upon the “Steele Dossier.” (q.v. Wikipedia: Donald Trump-Russian Dossier) Harding’s Wikipedia page is also very interesting, as is some of the information that he generously supplies in “Collusion.” For example, on pp.37-38, Harding describes a three-day event in November of 2016 that was sponsored by the Halifax International Security Forum in Halifax, N.S. Harding describes the objective of the gathered international group as making sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. Interestingly, Senator John McCain was one of the delegates; however, the participation of Sir Andrew Wood, a former Ambassador to Russia from 1995-2000 is perhaps even more interesting. Wood and McCain were participants in the Ukraine panel.
Sir Andrew Wood is a close friend of Christopher Steele (of the Steele Dossier) and an associate of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., which is Steele’s private spy agency. [Does Steele still work for the British SIS, MI6?] “Before the election Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier.” (p.38). Wood is wired into the arch-NWO Chatham House, which is home to The Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), the companion organization of which is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). (q.v. “Tragedy and Hope” by Carrol Quigley; “The Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States foreign Policy” by Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter; “Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2104” by Laurence H. Shoup).
At this conference in Halifax, Harding reports that Wood briefed McCain about the contents of the Steele Dossier [rattle-tat-tattle-tale…MI6’s “ScuttleTrump” operation seems to proceeding swimmingly at this point]. The senile senator from Arizona evidently decided that ” the implications [of the dossier] were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a former senior U.S. official to meet with Steele and find out more.” The emissary, David Kramer, is currently a senior director at the McCain institute for International Leadership: Kramer was formerly the President of the highly questionable Freedom House, a nest of NWO neocons and neoliberals. (q.v. Wikipedia article, Freedom House, especially the section on Criticism/Relationship with the U.S. Government.) Please, recall McCain’s role in the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.
I am starting to wonder if Luke Harding might be MI6 with journalism for a cover. Then there is the bizarre case of Carter Page, the former U.S. Marine intelligence officer and purported lover of all things Russian and of Putin. This obsessive enthusiast is beginning to remind me of another obsessive Russian enthusiast, U.S. Marine, and defector to the soviet Union; Patsy Oswald. I am starting to look at this Trump-Russia fraud as more than a takedown of the crooked Don. It seems to be an ingenious way of further demonizing Putin and the Russians, and, if so, it is working like a charm. The MSM echo chamber cannot get enough of it. and neither can the NWO.
Anyone see the latest PBS Frontline report on this. What a joke.
Et tu , Frontline ?
I don’t think Edward R. Murrow could survive in today’s MSM environment. ( He’d be a great addition to the CN crew , though. )
Amazing how the left is carrying water for the right! Reminds me of the many communists in interwar Germany who joined the Nazis.
Unlike the other commenters , I recognize and appreciate good sarcasm when I see it.
Nice one , Stronger Together.
Rereading Stronger Together I think you are right. It’s sarcasm. When I used to post on Salon, there were a couple of times when I myself had the experience of being taken seriously when I was being sarcastic – so my apologies to Stronger Together.
I’ve just recently adopted a new strategy for dealing with internet posts that I would normally categorize as being infuriatingly stupid , hyper-partisan , illogical , etc. Now I just credit them as being convincing and clever sarcasm.
I think this new strategy will be much better for my mental health. I’ll be delusional , yes , but still , happier.
Not delusional at all; Stronger’s post certainly fooled me the first go around (I had just read a nearly identical tweet from some DNC operative cited in an Intercept article on the AL election. The tweet lambasted among things the “fringe left” and their “faux purity”).
My own stability has taken some hits recently, so I will also adopt your very sound strategy. Many thanks.
Oops. It does appear to be very good sarcasm. Many times the best tool in the box against the lunacy we are confronted with.
What a year! Down the rabbit hole of 2-party politics. And this Alabama election of Jones isn’t the smashing success the Dims are touting. The Russian people must think Americans are loony. A dose of reality is on the way for the new year, America.
All the Democrats were trying to do was make the United States a “guided” intelligent Democracy.
First letting people vote for Bernie Sanders was good idea. It allows people to get their angst out
about their different political philosophies but was engineered so it would not wreck our nation.
Hillary even included some of Bernie’s ideas in her platform (just not the nutty ones).
Then letting people vote for Trump was also to be the same sort of exercise. Unfortunately the
Democrats don’t have access to the RNC and FEC to be able to control the election the way they
could through the DNC.
So, the only option was to bring in the FBI, CIA and NSA in to get control of the federal election
results, which unfortunately they were not well equipped enough to do. Congress has put up a lot
of inconvenient roadblocks that impede our intelligence communities from taking firm action in
this regard and the election got out of control and we accidentally got Trump and are now on the
brink of nuclear annihilation.
And people should not see Hillary as some Hitler like threat to our Democracy, like Trump really is, she
was actually listening to the people and adopted some of Bernie Sanders’ ideas and probably
would have adopted a few of Trump’s, like opposing the TPP.
It should be obvious to all, after the election of Trump, that Democracy is broken in the United States
and the sooner we hand it back to people like Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton, who understand how to
operate and control it, the faster we can get this dire situation sorted out, to avoid nuclear annihilation, the climate
catastrophe, and a potential race war, the better!
foundering logic:
“the sooner we hand it back to people like Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton, who understand how to
operate and control it, the faster we can get this dire situation sorted out”
The “poster’s” handle (and the post’s content) indicates that it may be a DNC sockpuppet account.
No question. Talk about being obvious. LOL.
Hillary Clinton “actually listening to the people”??? Nonsense. Democrats lost because she didn’t bother to listen to the concerns of the working class. Instead, she demonized and ridiculed them. If Democrats don’t return to their one-time base in the working class, we will be doomed to more Donald Trumps and more massive transfers of wealth from those to work for a living to the very rich.
As a lifetime progressive, I categorically reject the neoliberal political philosophy of both Clinton and Obama. In addition to being morally wrong, it is foolish, because in kicking out both the working class and progressives like me, they don’t have enough votes to win elections. I also reject lying in order to undo the will of the American people. Russia-gate is, from the “evidence” given, total BS.
The will of those stinking (not a word I would use) undesirables at Walmart was to raise their collective middle fingers at the elites who have abandoned them and thrown them under the bus. They were voting against phony promises of hope and change. They were voting against NAFTA and the TPP. And guess what: Plenty of them would have voted for Bernie Sanders.
Wow, you really have drunk the kool-aid! Didn’t you read any of the leaked emails? How about Hillary telling her banker friends in her highly paid speeches that she needed to have “public views” different from her “private views”? You really think her “platform” had any credibility at all after a disclosure like that? And Obama allowed Citigroup to pick his cabinet for him in 2008, and confessed to being “really good” at killing people. The only thing you are right about is our Democracy is broken (in fact, it never existed in the USA). Willful blindness will not make us “Stronger Together”, only dismantling the “Deep State” will do that. We must learn to wage peace in a multi-polar world. We can survive Trump just like we survived W, but we will not survive continued control of our foreign policy by the PNAC inspired “Deep State”.
Excellent work, Mr. Poe.
Guided by who? Saudis Arabia, Qatar, The Muslim Brotherhood, Goldman Sachs, George Soros, The CIA, Israel, General Petraues, Citigroup, The Clinton “Foundation”
No thanks.
This must be satire!
The Russia-gate ‘scandal’ sideshow provided a very useful diversion while military preparations were advanced:
“While still on the books, the War Powers Act has long ago been turned into a dead letter by the quarter century of US wars of aggression that have followed the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, all waged without a declaration of war by Congress.
“Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have willingly acquiesced in the de facto concentration of dictatorial power in the hands of the ‘commander in chief’ in the all-important matter of the waging of foreign wars.
“The latest letter from the Trump administration, however, represents another qualitative step in this protracted degeneration of American democracy and the elimination of the last pretenses of civilian control over the military. […]
“The Trump White House has removed caps imposed on troop levels under the Obama administration, leaving it up to the military commanders to escalate US deployments at will. Obama’s caps themselves were routinely circumvented through so-called temporary deployments that saw far more troops sent into US wars than were officially on the books.
“The secrecy surrounding troop deployments has been highlighted in recent months […] the so-called slip of the tongue by the commander of US special operations forces in Iraq and Syria who told a Pentagon press conference that 4,000 US troops were on the ground in Syria. He quickly caught himself and repeated the official figure of 500. Subsequently, the Pentagon allowed that the real number was over 2,000.
“Meanwhile, figures posted by the Pentagon last month—with little media attention—revealed that the number of US troops deployed in the Middle East as a whole had soared by 33 percent over the previous four months, with the sharpest increases taking place in a number of Persian Gulf countries, indicating advanced preparations for a new US war against Iran.
“These deployments are kept secret or effectively concealed not out of any concern about ‘tipping off the enemy,’ which in virtually every case is well aware of the level of US military aggression against their countries. Rather, it is aimed at keeping the information from the American people, which has no interest in continuing the ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, much less launching new and potentially world catastrophic wars against Iran, North Korea and even China and Russia.
“In terms of the waging of semi-secret wars abroad, as with attacks on democratic rights and the social conditions of the working class at home, Trump represents not an aberration, but rather the culmination of protracted processes that have unfolded under both Democratic and Republican administrations, which have ceded ever greater power over US foreign policy to US military commanders. This trend has only deepened under Trump, with an active duty general serving as national security advisor, and two recently retired Marine generals filling the posts of defense secretary and White House chief of staff.
“With US forces on the borders of North Korea, China, and Russia on a hair-trigger, the continuous assertion of ever greater war-making powers to the military brass massively increases the danger that a miscalculation, misunderstanding, or accident could quickly lead to full-scale nuclear war.
“Trump’s further assault on the War Powers Act has elicited no protest from the Democrats in Congress. They are not opposed to the government’s domination by the military or the drive to war. Their differences are merely of a tactical character, expressed in a campaign of anti-Russia hysteria waged in collaboration with sections of the US military and intelligence apparatus in preparation for a new and far more terrible conflagration.”
Washington’s secret wars
By Bill Van Auken
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/13/pers-d13.html
“Thanks to Flynn’s indictment, we now know that the Israeli prime minister was able to transform the Trump administration into his own personal vehicle for undermining Obama’s lone effort to hold Israel accountable at the UN. A clearer example of a foreign power colluding with an American political operation against a sitting president has seldom, if ever, been exposed in such glaring fashion.
“Kushner’s deep ties to the Israeli right-wing and ethical breaches
“The day after Kushner was revealed as Flynn’s taskmaster, a team of researchers from the Democratic Super PAC American Bridge found that the presidential son-in-law had failed to disclose his role as a co-director of his family’s Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation during the years when his family’s charity funded the Israeli enterprise of illegal settlements. The embarrassing omission barely scratched the surface of Kushner’s decades long relationship with Israel’s Likud-led government. […]
“A Clinton mega-donor defends Kushner’s collusion
“So why isn’t this angle of the Flynn indictment getting more attention? An easy explanation could be deduced from the stunning spectacle that unfolded this December 2 at the Brookings Institution, where the fresh-faced Kushner engaged in a ‘keynote conversation’ with Israeli-American oligarch Haim Saban. […]
“”The spectacle of a top Democratic Party money man defending one of the Trump administration’s most influential figures was clearly intended to establish a patina of bipartisan normalcy around Kushner’s collusion with the Netanyahu government. Saban’s effort to protect the presidential son-in-law was supplemented by an op-ed in the Jewish Daily Forward headlined, ‘Jared Kushner Was Right To ‘Collude’ With Russia — Because He Did It For Israel.’
“While the Israel lobby ran interference for Kushner, the favorite pundits of the liberal anti-Trump “Resistance” minimized the role of Israel in the Flynn saga. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who has devoted more content this year to Russia than to any other topic, appeared to entirely avoid the issue of Kushner’s collusion with Israel.
“There is simply too much at stake for too many to allow any disruption in the preset narrative. From the journalist pack that followed the trail of Russiagate down a conspiracy infested rabbit hole to the Clintonites seeking excuses for their mind-boggling campaign failures to the Cold Warriors exploiting the panic over Russian meddling to drive an unprecedented arms build-up, the narrative must go on, regardless of the facts.”
Michael Flynn’s Indictment Exposes Trump Team’s Collusion With Israel, Not Russia
By Max Blumenthal
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/flynn-indictment-exposes-collusion-israel
Where is William Binney’s “Thin String” signals intelligence (SIGINT) software when it’s needed? Wouldn’t it be lovely to focus it on the communications of our own government? Binney says applying it after 9/11 to the pre-9/11 communications streams did successfully predict the 9/11 attacks. If only we had stored all communications of government officials dating back to …. hey, let’s say 1774 or so, what truths might we now know, and what proofs might we now have? What would FDR’s communications prior to Pearl Harbor reveal? What about the JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X assassinations?
While I can’t endorse our government’s illegal and immoral collection and storing of virtually all communications among people, if the store is there and is used against petty criminals, why couldn’t or shouldn’t it be used to detect and prove the illegal acts of our government power brokers?
What’s good for the goose …
Yes, all communications and finances of candidates and officials and their relatives and associates should be monitored during their lives for corrupt influence.
Thank you for your spot-on analysis! The motives of the deep state – including FBI operatives, NY Times and WAPO – is crystal clear. They do not want Trump to be president, and are determined to either remove him or handcuff him indefinitely. But why? Why has the establishment gone crazy? Is it simply political, or something deeper and darker?
The real “deep” reason is the PNAC plot to make sure that the USA remains the sole super power that can impose its will anywhere in the world. Trump’s campaign position of seeking detente with Russia would have led us into a multi-polar world giving Russia a sphere of influence. That is unacceptable to the empire. RussiaGate is an attempt to remove Trump from power, or at a minimum make it impossible for him to seek detente. I am no Trump apologist, but I do think our only hope for a future in this nuclear age is to seek peace and cooperation in a multi-polar world that respects national sovereignty and the rule of law. I suspect Trump will continue to be brought to heel, with or without the success of RussiaGate. And there is always the JFK solution as a last resort.
“The primary purpose of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not to take down Mr. Trump. It’s to protect America’s national security and the integrity of its elections by determining whether a presidential campaign conspired with a foreign adversary to influence the 2016 election – a proposition that grows more plausible every day.”
1. How is Russia an “adversary”? And even if Russia is, that’s weasel-words and subjective. Is Turkey a foreign adversary? Is Israel? China? Mexico?
2. Why wasn’t there decades ago a special Election Panel looking into foreign influence? I guess it just started to happen in this last election though….Only with Putin!
3. “more plausible”….this fucking idiot. After a year of headlines of “this is what will finally take down Trump” and such, all with zero reasons, zero facts….Is naught more plausible than naught?
4. I detest Trump. I more detest hypocrites and idiots.
But sure, “blah blah more possible take trump down” says some idiot or collective NYT idiocy. Bore me more your next op-ed, you partisan morons.
Yes, the NYT is mere propaganda. We already know that “a presidential campaign conspired with a foreign adversary to influence the 2016 election” because Clinton’s top ten donors were all zionists, and she supported all wars for Israel.
I think that the new evidence discussed provides Trump the cover to pull the plug on the whole Mueller operation despite the Alabama debacle. Sure the media talkers would compare it to the Saturday Night Massacre, but the proven falsity of the whole absurd circus renders risible such comparisons. While I don’t expect much out of Trump, the championing of this absurd theory by the mainstream democrats renders them an existential threat to civilization itself based on the fact that enmity with Russia seems to be their be-all and end-all. It is all not only criminal but profoundly stupid.
It’s been a year and a half since Hillary Clinton first accused Donald Trump of being a Putin puppet and in collusion with the Kremlin. Any fool should be able to understand that if there existed any real evidence to support this accusation the world would have seen it under banner headlines long ago. Instead, we get nothing but one set of sensational fake headlines unsupported by any actual facts time and again, all in an attempt to fool the mentally-challenged public. Yet the NYT and the rest of the yellow press continue to insist that the evidence continues to mount against Trump. What a laugh. Moreover, these deceivers are the people that want what they define as “fake news” to be systematically rooted out and stricken from the public record so no thinking person can ever see it. And, they tell us this is a free and democratic country. Got any more jokes?
Totally agree. And it reminds me of some reality “quest” shows about finding Bigfoot or the Oak Island treasure, etc.
If those were actually found, it would be reported a day or two later, unless every single one of the producers, actors, workers, etc. were under an NDA enough to wait until some season finale a year or two later. Ridiculous. If Bigfoot exists that will come to us on news, and big news, international. It won’t come on a 4th season of some Bigfoot-finding show.
So yeah, season two of the Trump-Russia whatever.
Maddow/MSNBC and the likes have gone utterly insane. Bigfoot behind every door. Scant or zero facts, who cares. This isn’t like Benghazi or White Water or Bush’s air service…this is 24/7 inane terrible journalism from nearly every journalist publisher in the US.
I’m curious as to why this is still an issue. Here’s a link to an article from last August:
http://www.businessinsider.com/top-fbi-investigator-peter-strzok-steps-away-from-russia-probe-2017-8
At that time, it wasn’t known why Mr. Strzok was transferred/whatever from counter-intelligence, but since then it has been revealed that Mr. Mueller did so for his ( Strzok) political opinions. That would seem a fair thing to do. What’s the problem? Might be right-wing fear.
” What’s the problem? ”
C’mon , man. Given Strzok’s position and his influence on Russiagate AND the earlier Hillarygate investigations , the fact that he was transferred in July is of little comfort. Any damage he could do he’d already done by then.
Jim Jordan will explain it to you , in six minutes :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=69&v=cShxjlUfmhk
What’s the problem? You don’t know?
DEEP STATE!!!! DEEP STATE!!!
Get with the program.
The problem is that when that story first appeared, nothing else was disclosed. The damning material took months to emerge, as did Strzok’s links to the Clinton coverups and the links to the fake dossier and the FBI’s “anti-Trump” insurance policy. Those who want to believe the regime’s falsehoods can always come up with rationales such as “I guess the government people know best” which was typical of the answers to sceptics against the Viet Nam war in the mid ’60s.
The last great hope for the Dems :
“A Russian hacker accused of stealing from Russian banks reportedly confessed in court that he hacked the U.S. Democratic National Committee (DNC) and stole Hillary Clinton’s emails under the direction of agents from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB)”
PUTIN ORDERED THEFT OF CLINTON’S EMAILS FROM DNC, RUSSIAN HACKER CONFESSES
BY CRISTINA MAZA ON 12/12/17
http://www.newsweek.com/russian-hacker-stealing-clintons-emailshacking-dnc-putinsfsb-745555
And on PBS tonite the author of this Atlantic article got to put in her two cents about Putin:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/
in which she stated that not only did Putin ‘annex Crimea’ but also invaded Ukraine,
among other things. None of her statements were backed up by any facts, which
apparently are irrelevant anymore. Wikipedia has an interesting bio on her.
Thank you irina for that “catch”. I’m a long time reader of “The Atlantic Magazine” well aware of its long, liberal history and was surprised to find David Frum reporting there. David was a speech writer for W. Bush and apparently came up with the infamous “Axis of Evil” tag for President Bush’s State Of The Union speech. I’ll link the Wikipedia page below for those interested. I’m concerned that propaganda has spread far and wide…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil
Despite its extremely conclusive title and substance, the Newsweek article later admits the extremely suspect nature of the accusation, and the lack of any evidence whatsoever:
“Andrei Soldatov… an expert on Russian cybersecurity, said he believes Kozlovsky invented the story about his direction from the FSB for personal gain. ‘I’ve been communicating with [Kozlovsky] for four months, and he has failed to give me any proof or answer my questions,” Soldatov told Newsweek….’He was put in jail by these guys so it could be out of revenge, or he wanted to make a deal with the FSB,’”
Such a reversal of evidence and conclusion bespeaks deliberate deception. The motive is unclear, as the failed Newsweek is said to have been revived in 2013 by a Korean-American Christian fundamentalist David Jang formerly of Moon’s Unification Church, whose followers consider him the Second Coming of JC, according to the linked source. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/03/newsweek-ibt-olivet-david-jang/
Perhaps another quasi-religious CIA front like Fethullah Gulen’s madrassas in Turkey and across central Asia.
They keep publishing the same horseshit just like Pravda did in the Soviet era and just like the Voelkischer Beobachter and Stuermer did during the Nazi era. I guess the uninformed hoi polloi get so used to it in these situations that they accept the situation, like ducks and frogs accept watery ponds as their environments.
I think I heard a similar story from newsweek months ago, looks like someone took the deal(?).
FBI Probe Into Clinton Emails Prompted Offer of Cash, Citizenship for Confession, Russian Hacker Claims
“On October 5, 2016, days before U.S. intelligence publicly accused Russia of endorsing an infiltration of Democratic Party officials’ emails, Nikulin was arrested in Prague at the request of the U.S. on separate hacking charges. Now, Nikulin claims U.S. authorities tried to pin the email scandal on him.”
“ikulin’s lawyer, Martin Sadilek, [claims] that the FBI visited him at least a couple of times, offering to drop the charges and grant him U.S. citizenship as well as cash and an apartment in the U.S. if the Russian national confessed to participating in the 2016 hacks of Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails in July.”
“[They told me:] you will have to confess to breaking into Clinton’s inbox for [U.S. President Donald Trump] on behalf of [Russian President Vladimir Putin],” Nikulin wrote”
http://www.newsweek.com/fbi-investigation-clinton-emails-russia-hack-607538
Those of us who live within the Outlaw US Empire have been seduced by lies Big and small since we could understand language. RussiaGate is an example of a Big Lie, just as the Outlaw US Empire being a democracy is a Big Lie–both are indoctrinational. Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Great Pumpkin, Sand Man, Cupid, et al are other excellent examples of indoctrinational Big Lies. One of the most severe is the maxim delivered from parents: You must share and play nice, when the real world acts in the exact opposite fashion. What’s more, RussiaGate serves as a cover-up for several major crimes–some by Clinton, some by DNC, some by FBI, some by Justice Department, and some by CIA: None of them are being actively investigated despite there being lots of evidence existing in the public domain, which is why we know those crimes occurred.
I very highly suggest reading this article, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/13/the-u-s-is-not-a-democracy-it-never-was/
Thanks Karl. That is a really good article.
I used to believe that Satan was one of those indoctrinational Big Lies. Now , I’m not so sure.
Well, you have Satan as discussed within the Abrahamic religious trilogy, then there’s other manifestations of Evil reported in the mythos of other nations since the advent of language and writing. Evil is seemingly a rather obvious aspect of Human Nature; it’s rather easy to see its existence just about everywhere one looks, like Haley’s presentation of “evidence” to be used to justify the murder of millions of people; or there’s the threatened Genocide of Korean peoples made by numerous actors holding prominent positions within the Outlaw US Empire. Just look at the proposed, so-called, Tax Bill, and you’ll find numerous instances of evil within it, like the proposed total destruction of subsidized housing and disability insurance support–both of which will kill people, which is the purpose including those clauses within the bill–and there are many more.
IMO, I see both the Democrat and Republican Parties as EVIL, despite a few good apples mixed with all the evil/rotten ones. Is Trump Evil for supporting such legislation–Yes! Is Obama Evil for his Drone murders, aggressive war on Syria, and 100% support for the most evil of terrorist organizations–Yes!
You see, we don’t need a mythical Devil or Satan; we have plenty of extremely Evil people in positions of power that have no scruples about killing a great many innocent people, both within the Outlaw US Empire and without. And the RussiaGate Big Lie was designed to enable even more death, destruction and chaos globally; thus, it is EVIL.
Thought this story would be appropriate here:
An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life…
“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.
“One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.
“The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
“This same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
“Which wolf will win?”
The old chief simply replied,
“The one you feed.”
Great reporting. Keep it up.
Great related reporting on BAR.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/entire-russian-hacking-narrative-invalidated-single-assange-tweet
https://www.blackagendareport.com/russsiagate-and-collapse-obamas-war-against-syria
Excellent links, robjira. Thanks.
This is another great review by Robert Parry. However, he again uses the formulation that “WikiLeaks published” and “WikiLeaks released” purloined DNC emails on September 13, 2016. Greenwald and the Washington Post have stated, more carefully, that WikiLeaks “promoted” the data source of these emails by means of a Tweet on that date.
Adam Carter noted in a comment under Parry’s previous article that the DNC emails in question are the NGP/VAN files associated with Guccifer 2.0’s pre-announced “hack” on July 5, 2016 and reportedly released by him on Sept 13, 2016.
In fact, they are certainly not part of WikiLeak’s official archive. One can see from their website that they published nothing between the times of the DNC emails release of July 22, 2016 and the Podesta emails release of October 7. So “published” is clearly the wrong word.
Whether or in what sense it may fairly be stated that WikiLeaks “released”, “promoted” or “uploaded” (as according to the Erickson email, which probably represents nothing more than an outsider’s impression) the September 13 files needs to be cautiously assessed. Their Tweet did include an access key, as did the Erickson email, and the address for the file given in the latter was a “mega.nz” address. I assume that this address is associated with Kim Dot Com, who also claims to have been involved with WikiLeaks.
Did Guccifer 2.0 himself upload the files to mega.nz? Did he play Kim Dot Com to use the latter’s association with Wikileaks to get Wikileaks itself to put out the Sept 13 Tweet advertising the data release? I’m not sure how this all worked, but it seems that it is misleading to simply refer to this set of emails as having been “published” by Wikileaks.
Didn’t you read the VIPS analyses of the DNC leaks?
Yes, I did, but not while writing my comment above. Do they say anything relevant to the question of whether it is accurate to correct the false media report that the Trump campaign was given access to the NGP/VAN DNC emails before WikiLeaks published them with a “corrected” statement that the Trump campaign was notified (but may never have noticed) of a link to those files by a random member of the public _after WikiLeaks had already published them_? As I recall, the original VIPS memo was itself somewhat confused about the distinction between the NGP/VAN material and the five DNC documents made public by “Guccifer 2.0” on June 15, 2016, so I’m not sure one will find anything relevant to my question there.
While it is true that the “correction” here is _much_ closer to the truth than the original misinformation, the underlined part at the end of my question still seems misleading in that the “publication” is attributed to WikiLeaks without qualification. And it seems Parry is not the only one to make this mistake. As Adam Carter pointed out two days ago, he was very surprised that almost no one has been noticing that the files in question came from “Guccifer 2.0” and not from WikiLeaks. While Parry’s attribution misleading, I am still not clear in my own mind about precisely what did happen, i.e. how WikiLeaks came to “promote” the release of the files and whether in some loose or indirect sense WikiLeaks did “release” them.
Is there really any other purpose in your involved questioning but seeking to cloud and confuse the obvious issues in the “Russia hacked” affair?
How is it clouding the issue to suggest, as Adam Carter did, that one element in Parry’s (and others’) description of the facts in an otherwise excellent article seems to be misleading?
@ “the address for the file given in the latter was a “mega.nz” address. I assume that this address is associated with Kim Dot Com, who also claims to have been involved with WikiLeaks.”
Kim Dot Com’s relationship with Mega was already extremely strained by the time of the Guccifer leaks and to the extent he ever had control of the company it had apparently ended. See e.g., https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-warns-mega-users-to-backup-their-files-160421/
These are the sort of details I haven’t been familiar with and about which I was hoping to learn more – so thanks! I was relying on a vague impression from memory when I made the link between the “mega.nz” address seen in the email from Erickson and Kim Dot Com.
Since the whole Guccifer 2.0 operation appears to be an attempt to falsely smear WikiLeaks as a Russian agent (by publicly claiming to be a hacker associated with WikiLeaks and then being “caught” releasing documents (the ones of June 15, 2016) with “Russian fingerprints”), perhaps his uploading files (Sept 13, 2016) to a server with (past) ties to someone associated with WikiLeaks (Kim Dot Com) would have been part of the same effort.
A contemporary article says this about the release: “‘Guccifer 2.0’ released over 670 megabytes of documents at a cybersecurity conference in London Tuesday…. The documents were released on a file storage system and not on WikiLeaks or on Guccifer 2.0’s website.” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hacker-guccifer-2-0-releases-more-dnc-docs-including-tim-n647921
Thus the statement that “WikiLeaks published” the files in question (repeated by Parry, Justin Raimondo and others) appears to be false. I share the surprise expressed by Adam Carter (under Parry’s previous piece) that few appear to have noticed or bothered to correct this error – even though they were on target in exposing the main part of the latest MSM lie.
All of you Trump apologists, Alabama . You all keep hating on Democracy. I was shocked.
“You all keep hating on Democracy.”
— Amazing how energetically the “democrats” are uniting with the CIA! Exhibit No 1 is Mr. Michael Morell (the former director of the CIA)) who has just confessed his treason in support of H. Clinton: http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_76241.shtml
Your “democracy” was nowhere when Mr. Clinton had been molesting underage girls on Lolita express. Your “democracy on the march,” Clinton-Kagan style, has destroyed Libya and Ukraine. Millions of innocent civilians of all ages (including an enormous number of children) died thanks to your Israel-first & oil-first Clinton & Obama policies. Very democratic (“We came, we saw, he died…ha, ha, ha” – and the gem of Northern Africa has become a hell for Libyan citizens). One does not need to be Trump apologist to sense the stench of your rotten Clinton-Obama-CIA-FBI “democracy.”
Good response Anna. Most democrats are very much like their republican counterparts, they take sides, and truth be damned. They don’t understand that ousting a president in a soft coup, based on lies, is undemocratic, and would have long term consequences for this country. They don’t understand that a press corps who foregoes truth because they are in complicity with pushing the same agenda, ousting Trump, is also unacceptable no matter what one thinks of him.
Exactly. Trump is not so much a ‘threat to our democracy’ as a test of it.
Ladies, your fantastic comments are a credit to this fine political zine. Even Tina regularly generates good prompts for the exposure of the Democrats’ (and Republicans’) privatization of democracy and all other empty phrases.
Obama’s expulsion of the Russian diplomats after Trump’s election, with no reason based on fact/danger to the USA gave a good start to the Russophobia encouraged by the Clinton losers and leading on to the ludicrous extreme situation still going on.
Are you shocked about Seth Rich murder? Wikileaks has offered a reward to speed up a search for the murderers, whereas DNC did nothing. Nothing! But the DNC was very active when certain Mr. Awan needed legal protection.
How is your Debbie Wasserman doing — did not she threatened the DC police investigator for doing his job of investigating the Awan affair? Debbie has been a major protector of the Awan family that accomplished the greatest breach of the US cybersecurity. And how is your Nobel Peace Laureate doing — collecting nice fees from banksters for his betrayal of democracy in the US?
Thank you Anna and Annie. People like tina drive me nuts. They see everything as either/or. Since we won’t defend RussiaGate, we must be Trump apologists. My hope is that this whole thing blows wide open enough that there can be a real house-cleaning and reining in of the Intelligence Agencies. No president has had control of his foreign policy since Kennedy was assassinated when I was 7 years old. There is no hope of ending the forever war and gaining control of the MIC until the intelligence agencies are “broken into 1000 pieces”, as JFK wanted. If it takes a buffoon like Trump to be our “Toto” and reveal “the man behind the curtain” so be it. Let us pray for peace.
This is an excellent thread but I’m most pleased Anna by your regular mention of the Seth Rich Affair.
It is kind of “the bottom line” in all of this DNC discussion and it should not disappear from mention. So again Anna, thank you…
Amen
Agreed. That is the central issue about the affair. A populist website refers to “Arkanicides” involving mysterious deaths of people inconvenient to the Clinton power structure.
Spot on Bob, the unfortunate and idealistic Mr Seth Rich became the DNC’s bottom line, the shining example of its “anything goes as long as we have friends in the right places” (FBI, DOJ, CIA, etc etc).
Agreed. Let’s not forget Process Server for the DNC Fraud Lawsuit Shawn Lucas who died mysteriously 2 weeks after serving the DNC either.
I never would have believed the rot in the Democratic Party establishment would rival the Republicans, but here we are.
Thank you Lois Gagnon as well, for that reminder and I’ll include a link that shows Shawn Lucas delivering a subpoena to the DNC. One can see the joy in the images of both Seth Rich and Shawn Lewis as they attempt to do both the right thing and the legal thing as Citizens. That they are both dead is the tragedy of our time; and those Crimes must be solved…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D3FMgZruOXE
“Tina” is a troll assigned to CN to claim extremism, and never presents evidence or argument.
I’ve been seeing all sorts of places where this fellow Strzok’s name pops up. Things like a FISA judge recusing himself. Things like him possibly arranging things so Hillary was able to continue her run for President. At a super-right-wing site I found these “questions”.
Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post paid any price for their promotion of the invasion and destruction of Iraq. They might not get off as easy this time.
One can hope.
I can add one more. It’s been suggested that Strzok’s job as counterintelligence deputy would have made him the principal FBI liaison to CIA Director Brennan. At least this point was made explicitly in a recent LarouchePAC Live broadcast on Youtube (perhaps Will Wertz’s presentation at last Saturday’s Manhattan Project event) though I don’t know what their evidence is. So we can ask:
Was Peter Strzok the principal FBI liaison to CIA Director John Brennan?
That is a big one. This RussiaGate plan was most likely Brennan’s baby. It would be great to see Strzok subpoenaed and roll over on his old boss. If he didn’t get the “Michael Hastings” treatment first.
Yes, John Brennan and Robert Mueller are at the very top of my list of deep state creatures who I think public exposure and jailing for their crimes are most essential for restoring the constitution. Incidentally, the phrase “Brennan’s baby” was used by a US special forces source to refer to the policy of ousting Assad through alliance with al-Qaeda. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/theerant/sofrep-us-special-forces-sabotage-white-house-poli-t86508.html
What they’re protecting with RussiaHate no doubt extends way beyond Hillary Clinton’s losing presidential campaign but includes the entire scope of regime-change efforts from Ukraine to the use of Islamists on Russia’s soft underbelly – in effort to block dreaded Eurasian integration and not the global BRI in the interests of Wall Street/London.
I’m still unsure about which specific LaRouche broadcast mentioned the question I have raised here. If I find it again, I’ll try to post a link here.
Post should have read “and now the global BRI…”
It turns out it was Harley Schlanger, referring to an unnamed colleague’s research, who stated that as the number 2 counterintelligence guy at the FBI, Peter Strzok was the liaison to John Brennan. See “Hanging with Harley (12/07/2017)” on Youtube (@~6:15). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HWx_QafkpI&t=560s
Philip Giraldi writes about a shift occurring over at the CIA in Trump’s favor, Politico’s interview with a somewhat repentant Trump hater Mike Morell now saying ‘maybe our plan wasn’t that well thought out’ , and now these MSM Russia Gate screwups coupled with a discovery of FBI Trump haters, is a result of Trump’s recognizing Jerusalem as it being Israel’s capital? Just say’n.
This whole Russia ate my lunch has entered the realm of alternate truth. The MSM are now actually stating that the Russian hacking the 2016 election as fact. Just like all the other false and fabricated statements of world events in the last 20 years . Fro Yugoslavia, Milosovic exonerated for the falsely laid charges of genocide . How convenient after his death . Qadaffi murdering and slaughtering his own people hence RPL interventionist and voila the highest standard of living in the African continent is now reduced to takfiri heaven for the NATO proxy army recruiting centre. MH17 disaster is still being paroled as Russian deliberate murder. No facts no evidence that would stand even in a Stalinist show trial. Assad gassing his own people. More than debunked by multiple sources and US academics to boot no still being paroled as fact by western MSM.
The whole charade post 9/11 has gone into this Orwellian nitemare that just keep on growing and news and information has become pure Hollwoodian fantasy that the sheeple are sleep walking into this futuristic hell hole that these vile masters of the universe will not be able to back track without losing face and without causing the populace to stand up and be counted and kick tjhese vile players out for good.
Take heart Falcemartello, its not all bad. Over here in the Britain RT has its own free to view TV channel which sits next to the BBC news and the parliament programme. It is now widely watched by the public and has millions of viewers with many using RT as their main news source. The fact that the American deep state criminals have made things difficult for RT America in the US, is a clear indication that the fake news masters otherwise known as the MSN, and their handlers in the deep state are rattled by the ever growing alternative voice. Its up to you, me and the rest of the posters on CN to tell our friends colleagues and others about CN, RT etc. If only one percent take a look then alternative opinion will start to filter through and more importantly, show the public what liars and criminals are in charge of their country.
Thanks for the info John. I am really glad that at least Britain has a reasonable degree of freedom of the press. If it spreads across Europe, the USA may eventually find itself so isolated by its own propaganda that the whole evil empire scheme will implode, and we will have to learn to wage peace in a multi-polar world. That is my Christmas wish.
It’s not difficult to get RT in the US- I watch it regularly on Dish Network. Youtube is another option- I’m guessing it’s big and rich enough to survive any changes in net neutrality that will result from the Trump/Pai FCC (of course, Obama and Clinton were just as bad, DEEP STATE!!!!, etc.).
If you’re going to tout conspiracies, get your facts straight.
“BobS” is a troll name often used here. The usual false claim that alt-news reports “tout conspiracies.”
John Pilger has an article in counterpunch explaining the importance of documentaries (not just his!). It is notable that his first one, on Cambodia, in 1970, was shown free to air on TV in the UK and thirity other countries, with huge audience impact, but refused by PBS as too disturbing!!
The free press in the USA is in tune with the ptb.
I see the Pilger article is here on consortiumnews. It is worth a read, like the rest here!
What you wrote john wilson is simply not the complete truth, although I wish it was. It is true that RT UK has its own terrestrial digital TV channel. It appears that Margarita Simonyan bid for such channel at an auction when Britain was converting from analogue to digital TV and got it. Thus, the British TV viewers can now see RT without any subscription or special equipment, “next to BBC” as you optimistically say.
What you did not mention john wilson is that the British Government regulator Ofcom is putting severe pressure on RT because their news offered an alternative view to the British propaganda. They rinse and repeat the same biased-news allegations almost every year, keeping RT UK under constant threat of the loss of its broadcasting licence due to “breach of truth standards” = “fake news”. They even banned the lightbox, radio and other media advertising campaign of RT in Britain, the so called “RT is the second opinion”, only because the campaign claimed that if RT existed before UK attack on Iraq in 2003, Tony Blair may have not been successful in passing the war resolutions through the parliament.
What most people do not appreciate is that the methods of suppression are not the same in all Western countries, and why should they be? Simonyan got a terrestrial TV channel and the broadcasting licence because of the British propaganda hubris – the British still believed that their post-imperial propaganda is the best in the World, just because it was the best in the world during the empire. They simply never expected the Russians to be so successful, just the same as US.
In summary:
US => force RT to register as a foreign agent to force reporting of every little detail of its operations; refuse journalistic credentials to Congress etc to disadvantage its reporting
UK => keep constant threat of the loss of broadcasting licence to skew the reporting towards the British Government version of the news
I post the links relevant to what I wrote here separately to avoid being put on hold.
https://secondopinion.rt.com/
https://www.rt.com/about-us/press-releases/rt-uk-second-opinion/
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/10/russia-today-ofcom-sanctions-impartiality-ukraine-coverage
https://theintercept.com/2015/03/02/uk-media-regulator-threatens-rt-bias-airing-anti-western-views/
Yes, we are lucky in the UK and get to watch Chris Hedges on RT and we used to get Thom Hartmann. We also get Al Jazeera which tanked in the US. And believe it or not Larry King is still wearing his suspenders on RT!
I thought we were waiting to hear what the evidence is found. The lack of discussion about what they have uncovered seems to me to speak of a professional operation. Once they are done and present what they have found, then everyone can get on their soap boxes and let loose. As for Bias, that exists in everyone to some extent or another, where was the moral outrage from the Republicans charging this today when the Benghazi investigation was being conducted by folks with known axes to grind themselves? It is the Washington hypocrisy machine at its most obvious. As for the media, print or otherwise, they are just preaching to their choirs in order to sell whatever their particular consumers are buying. Frankly I have come to expect more from you than this article Mr. Parry, here’s hoping…
I’ve been skeptical out the Russian conspiracy so far, but I agree with what Walter Devine wrote.
I am still waiting . Mr. Parry can ride on his story back in the 1980’s. We are in 2017, The internet is good. What did those people in Washington do today? get rid of net neutrality? Love you all people on CN, Happy Hanukah Merry Christmas, and Kwanzaa, And the winter solstice. Peace to all. Love, tina everyone is going to believe that they want to believe.
Are you kidding about Benghazi? Obviously you have still not informed yourself about the egregious security breakdown of the Administration or how the Benghazi facility factored into the CIA’s proxy war in Syria. (And, btw, where was Hillary “Rod up her Hiney” Clinton when that ‘3AM call’ came in at 4pm?
Hillary Rodham Clinton AND William Hamrod Clinton
Thank you for bringing attention to the Benghazi scandal: “FBI Chief Instructed Agents To Lie About Benghazi To Protect Hillary” http://yournewswire.com/fbi-lie-benghazi-hillary/
“By placing the interests of the Obama administration over the public’s interests, the order is yet another data point highlighting the politicization of the FBI: After the September 11, 2012 attack against U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration peddled a lie, telling the public that the attack was related to Muslims who had become enraged at an anti-Islam YouTube video, and not a planned act of terrorism – despite Hillary Clinton emailing Chelsea Clinton from her unsecure @clintonemail.com server the night of the attack to say exactly that.”
—On a topic of evidence: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-13/anti-trump-texts-between-fired-fbi-agents-having-extramarital-affair-leak-and-theyre ” In 2016, [the FBI] received the infamous anti-Trump “dossier”… The “dossier” was a compendium of allegations about then-candidate Trump and others around him that was compiled by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm’s bank records, obtained by House investigators, revealed that the project was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Weeks before the 2016 election, Peter Strzok’s FBI team agreed to pay former MI6 agent and Fusion GPS operative Christopher Steele $50,000 if he could verify the claims contained within the dossier – which relied on the cooperation of two senior Kremlin officials. (One more time for you, Walter Devine — “if he [Steele] could verify the claims”). When Steele was unable to verify the claims in the dossier, the FBI wouldn’t pay him according to the New York Times.
Despite the fact that Steele was not paid by the FBI for the dossier, Peter Strzok used it to launch a counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s team. Steele was ultimately paid $168,000 by Fusion GPS to assemble the dossier.
— More evidence” “FBI Texts Reveal “Insurance Policy” To Prevent Trump Presidency” http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-13/we-cant-take-risk-fbi-texts-reveal-insurance-policy-prevent-trump-presidency
— Have you noticed the numbers for payments? The bank records? The names? — these are the evidence. Or you beleive that there a Bias against the misearble Steele?
Of interest to me is why the Republicans did not hammer Hillary for placing an ambassador in what was essentially a CIA compound in the first place. My guess and I can only guess is that they no objection to its being a ratline to ship Libya’s stolen armaments to head-chopping jihadists (with USA blessing) fighting Assad. So to raise the issue of why putting an ambassador there would have opened the door to sensitive questions—if the press would ask them, of course.
That’s the real Benghazi story the MSM won’t talk about. Although I suspect the armaments were given to the head choppers by the CIA, and then they rebelled at having them transferred to the head choppers in Syria after they had succeeded in killing Ghaddafi.
“Madame Secretary, WHY was it necessary to destroy Libya?” No republican asked THAT question.
Hello Skip, nice to read your good comments again and to exchange info. Here is an article which talks about the weapons ratline in Syria. Within four days, the powerful anti-tank missiles that CIA bought in Bulgaria and (supposedly) delivered to “moderate” rebels, ended up in ISIS hands. The only problem with the article’s narrative is that it is still drawing the official line that the lack of oversight is to blame for such, whilst it was clearly a deliberate action to supply weapons to ISIS wrapped up in plausible deniability of passing them through the hands of some poor inept souls serving as intermediaries.
Thus, the CIA kept being surprised that its powerful weapons kept ending up in ISIS hands but kept doing the same over and over: oops an oversight mistake, oops and another one, oops one more, and another one, …. the two hundredth one …
https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/blowback-isis-got-a-powerful-missile-the-cia-secretly?utm_term=.joevpx9dG#.lxegj54A7
Just an FYI, your newswire has been proven to be just about the fakest fake news out there. I won’t go into the owner but you should look into it.
I agree with your comment and the info in it, just suggesting that using YNW as a reference or link isn’t a good idea.
Obviously there’s been an active plot to change our country into something it’s not and the truth about Benghazi needs to come out.
Starting a grand-scale investigation on the basis of allegations of conspiracy with another government and treason is rather dubious when these allegations from dirty campaign tactics are not based on any tangible facts. It is true that the Muller team does not leak as much to the press as the intelligence services did previously. This investigation still plays an important role for the media propaganda that still pushes the Russiagate conspiracy theory even though there had never been any factual basis for it and no evidence has been found in over a year. Since there is still this investigation is going on, they can use it for justifying their daily minutes of hate against Russia, their calls for censorship and denounciation of any political position that diverges from the neoconservative and neoliberal ideology.
I wonder how long this can go on. So far, the indictments of the Muller team have had nothing to do with the Russiagate conspiracy theory. Paul Manafort was indicted for tax evasion related to lobbying business with Ukraine, mostly years ago. Michael Flynn was indicted because when he reported a call from his holidays to the Russian ambassador to the FBI more than three weeks later, he left out two elements (the FBI had the recordings from the NSA, anyway, so they wouldn’t have had to ask him about the telephone call). There was nothing illegal about the contents of the telephone call (the most dubious thing was, of course, the lobbying related to a UN security council resolution vote, but that might at best hint at colluding with Israel, it certainly does not fit the Russiagate conspiracy theory). It seems quite plausible that Flynn just forgot these two elements of a telephone call in which quite a large number of points was raised and that he pleaded guilty because of a plea deal (otherwise he might have been indicted in connection with his lobbying work for Turkey). Superficially, the closest to the idea of Russiagate is the indictment of Papadopoulos, someone who played a minor role in the Trump campaign and was looking for contacts with Russians, but, as it seems did not get very far (for some reasons he seemed to think a Russian woman he was talking with was a relative of Putin). His actions may have been naïve or misguided, but nothing about them was illegal, like in the case of Michael Flynn, he is only accused of lying to the FBI about normal, legal actions.
So, if we judge the Muller investigation by its results, it is not going anywhere. Obviously, that is what should be expected when a commission is set up for investigating a conspiracy theory for which there had never been any evidence to begin with. I suppose the result would be similar if the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, or reptiloids were officially investigated.
The question is how they will wind down. If they just say that apart from things like Manafort’s possible tax evation and Flynn’s lobbying for Israel, they have not found anything – certainly nothing that confirms the Russiagate conspiracy theory -, that will be quite difficult, people will demand that it is investigated how it came about that such a conspiracy was spread and played such an influential role in political discourse for some time. It seems that the Muller team wants to delay that moment when they have to confess that the conspiracy theory has broken down, but that won’t necessarily make it easier, either.
“If the FBI wants to retain any sembelance of impartiality some people need to be arrested for treason.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-14/wsj-exposes-real-election-meddling-fbi
“The Real Election Meddling… At The FBI”
“Public confidence isn’t helped by the continuing Justice and FBI refusal to cooperate with Congress. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who supervises Mr. Mueller, toed the Mueller-FBI line on Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee. He repeated FBI Director Christopher Wray’s preposterous excuse that he can’t answer questions because of an Inspector General probe. And he wouldn’t elaborate on the news that Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior Justice official Bruce Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Mr. Steele to gin up his dossier.”
The treasonous activities must be punished.
How long should we wait until we hear of ONE, that’s right, ONE piece of evidence backing these claims up? Please answer: 2 years? 10 years? The only evidence so far amounts to “trust us”.
And that’s ignoring the monumental number of pieces of false evidence that have been put forward. That in itself makes the whole “investigation” suspicious. On top of the long, documented history of the CIA planting false stories in the press.
I don’t know. How long did it take the Dutch to cook the evidence to condemn Russian partisans for the downing of the Malaysian airliner—with Ukraine holding a gun to their heads.
Dear Mr. 7, I have come to the grudging conclusion that Russia-gate is and has always been more about Russia and Putin than about the crooked Don. If we stop to think about it, Trump has succumbed to the deep control of the Deep-State colossus. Russia evil; Israel good! Got it? When the pathetic wiener & crotch-grabber isn’t bitchin’ for Bibi and doing little pooch tricks for Israel, he is being programmed by the pentagon and the Deep State, and making sure that the super-rich get super richer. His own SOS Tillerson called him an effin’ moron. Enough said!
Therefore, 7, Russia-gate is all about keeping the pot boiling for the presidential election in Russia next year. Demonizing Putin and Russia is the new great game of our era. The NWO Nebula lusts after Russia’s geostrategic location and its abundant resources. It’s 1905-1925 all over again. Read the book, “Wall Street and the Russian Revolution 1905-1925” by Richard B. Spence and also take a gander at Trine Day books’ website of suppressed books. The deep-state Plutocrats and their secret societies hatch their evil little plots, while trying to keep the rest of us in the dark. Right now, Trump is a convenient platform for anti-Russian propaganda.
Think you nailed it. The bankster regime changers already tried once to structurally adjust Russia into being a US puppet state in the 90s under Clinton. Russia was robbed blind while Yeltzin drank himself into a stupor. Putin is the one who put a stop to the looting. That is his crime against the western oligarchs and why he is enemy #1.
Once more the standard troll line about being a prior supporter, which plainly “Devine” is not.
We are well over a year into this matter with nothing but speculation and manufactured claims.
It is clear that Russia-gate = Israel-gate, a diversion from zionist control of the DNC.
Where is the concern of “Devine” for the lack of investigation of control of elections and mass media by Israel?
Why does he seek to cover up the complete destruction of democracy by the foreign power Israel?
Oliver Stone had this to say on the matter on Face Book. If you’re on FB, here is the link.
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=oliver%20stone
facts don’t show bias walt. yeah, media sells to the public, but they’re also selling (or trading narratives for access) to the gov’t. Wikileaks exposed the MSM – DNC collusion and we’ve witnessed the leaks and anonymous sources from the IC. Trust the CIA?
There’s no ‘lack of discussion about what they have uncovered’ which has basically amounted to a pile of dirt. Have not read from the VIPS and William Binney? Uncovering shady business with oligarchs doesn’t show collusion, but the dossier oppo does, but it’s business as usual. Denying the FBI-DNC server subpoena was odd don’t you think?
I personally believe that progressive hope dies at the DNC and exposing the party’s lies (their private and public views) and undemocratic practices (preliminary process, fundraising) is the best thing for the country. It brings us one step closer to potentially building a third party that represents the proletariat and petty bourgeois classes.
I agree with your sentiment, but I’m finding it disturbing how many so called progressives are convinced beyond any doubt, despite the evidence I produce to instill doubt, that Russia interfered in “our democracy.”
They have come unglued to the point of idiocy over Trump. They are firmly in the clutches of the CIA Deep State apparatus.
Hey, Walter Devine, here is more for your whining about evidence: There are plenty of evidence when the disgusting clintonistas are concerned: http://theduran.com/fusion-gps-admits-that-it-hired-wife-of-doj-official-to-investigate-then-candidate-trump/
“Fusion GPS appears to be in the center of a web of corruption. Who hired Fusion GPS to ramp up its opposition research against Trump? Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
… the wife of Justice Department official Bruce G. Ohr worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 presidential election. … Nellie Ohr is listed as working for the CIA’s Open Source Works department in a 2010 DOJ report.”
Look how the CIA, FBI, and DNC have found each other and made a friendship forever.
Also, do you personally have any concern about the murder of Seth Rich? — Donna Brazil has become afraid of being Seth-Riched. How come? What kind of scum the Democratic apparatus has become? — Guess Tony Podesta and Bill Clinton and madame “we came, we saw, he died…ha, ha, ha…” are the composite face of the Democratic Party today.
@ Walter Devine: “Once they are done and present what they have found, then everyone can get on their soap boxes and let loose.”
But overlook that the Democrats and mainstream media are doing the opposite? It seems to me that this is precisely the point that Mr. Parry’s reporting has been aimed at, that the Democrats and mainstream media are jumping enormously to RussiaGate conclusions without disclosing any evidence to back up their incredibly dangerous claims and that there *is* very strong evidence of ulterior motives.
Have at it Walter. What exactly have they uncovered? The “process” lost credibility long ago. The “intelligence” report of January 6th was garbage and it’s been all downhill since.
I had great respect Parry’s earlier writing which had a healthy dose of MSM skepticism (albeit largely for personal reasons). This whole business of jumping to conclusions on the Russia meddling has put me off him totally. All the reporting seems to be in service of defending a forgone conclusion. I wonder if this has anything to do with fundraising.
A troll lying that criticism of the evidence-free Russia-gate propaganda is somehow evidence-free.
Uses the standard troll line of being a former supporter, which is obviously false.
The NYT is just another tool of the multi-billionaire oligarchs who rule this USA from the shadows. They fear nothing more than the light. When that investigative light gets strong enough, more and more ordinary folks will begin to awake to the massive fraud that has been perpetrated at their expense. And when that happens, we will finally see the Oligarchy begin to crumble under the pressure of the 99%. The truth will out, then heads will roll……..
Keep up the pressure – get your friends interested, tell them about CN, Counterpunch, Strategic-Culture, Chris Hedges, etc. Pursuing the truth can be a fascinating hobby, that leads to a person awakening. Make it interesting, awaken your friend’s curiosity.
How about also including RT in your list? It’s a news and commentary site with strong journalistic values and credibility, notwithstanding what the Administration or the MSM may say or imply.
If RT didn’t have the qualities you describe, attempts by the Administration and the MSM to discredit it would have been successful. However they will attempt to silence it by other means.
Very true TJ. I found counterpunch when wapo / propornot blacklisted them. Gave ’em creds imo. I also like mint press, occupy, naked capitalism, **world socialist website**, disobedient media, truthout, some of Glenns work on the Intercept … and my youtube subs include: wearechange, **anonymous Scandinavia**, **the jimmy dore show**, RT America, TeleSUR English*, Zoon Politikon, **democracy at work**, HA Goodman, theRealNews*, mintpressnews, watching the hawks, secular talk, laura kinhtlinger, judicial watch, empire files, redacted tonight, TBTV, …a little from Julian Assange’s twitter.
what about Al-Jazeera?
Good suggestion; in such persuasion, one must respectfully suggest better sources and avoid any conflict.
Mr. Parry has well summarized for beginners these essential counterpoints to the mass media propaganda.
Those who would like to petition the NYT to make Robert Parry their senior editor may do so here:
https://www.change.org/p/new-york-times-bring-a-new-editor-to-the-new-york-times?recruiter=72650402&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink
While Mr. Parry may prefer independence, and we all know the NYT ownership makes it unlikely, and the NYT may try to ignore it, it is instructive to them that intelligent readers know better journalism when they see it. A petition demonstrates the concerns of a far larger number of potential or lost subscribers.
I like this use of “awakened,” in contrast to the establishment culture’s fascination with “woke.” People don’t need to get woke. They need to become awakened. Thanks to Robert Parry.
1986, ” word up”. 1997, “Straight up”. 2002. “Down”, 2017, “woke”. It all means the same thing. Ya dig?
Add to the list, and be enlightened
The Saker https://thesaker.is
Corbet Report https://www.corbettreport.com
Moon of Alabamahttp://www.moonofalabama.org
The Real News Network http://therealnews.com/t2/