Clinton Journalist Has Meltdown After His Russian Conspiracy

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Leading Putin Critic Warns of Xenophobic Conspiracy Theories Drowning U.S. Discourse and Helping Trump
by Glenn Greenwald
March 7, 2017

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MASHA GESSEN IS a Russian-American journalist and author who has become one of the nation’s leading Russia experts and one of its most relentless and vocal critics of Vladimir Putin. She has lived her life on and off in the U.S. and Russia, but as a Jewish lesbian and mother of three children, she left Russia in 2013 and moved back to the U.S. in part because she felt threatened by the increasingly anti-LGBT climate there, one that began particularly targeting LGBT adopted families with discriminatory legislation.

Throughout the years Gessen (pictured, above) has become one of the go-to Kremlin critics for the U.S. media, publishing harshly anti-Putin reporting and commentary in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s and several articles about political repression in Russia for the Intercept. She has also become a virulent critic of Donald Trump, writing shortly after the election that “Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won,” while describing the critical lessons that can be learned on how to resist Trump’s autocratic impulses by studying Putin.

She now has a new article in the New York Review of Books – entitled “Russia: the Conspiracy Trap” – that I cannot recommend highly enough. Its primary purpose is to describe, and warn about, the insane and toxic conspiracy-mongering about Russia that has taken over not the fringe, dark corners of the internet that normally traffic in such delusional tripe, but rather mainstream U.S. media outlets and the Democratic Party.

The backbone of the rapidly yet endlessly developing Trump-Putin story is leaks from intelligence agencies, and this is its most troublesome aspect. Virtually none of the information can be independently corroborated. The context, sequence, and timing of the leaks is determined by people unknown to the public, which is expected to accept anonymous stories on faith; nor have we yet been given any hard evidence of active collusion by Trump officials. As a paragraph deep into a New York Times analysis noted on Friday,

vigorous reporting by multiple news media organizations is turning up multiple contacts between Trump associates and Russians who serve in or are close to Mr. Putin’s government. There have been courtesy calls, policy discussions and business contacts, though nothing has emerged publicly indicating anything more sinister….Former diplomats and Russia specialists say it would have been absurd and contrary to American interests for the Trump team to avoid meetings with Russians, either during or since the campaign.

Given that the story has been driven by the intelligence community and the media, it is perhaps unsurprising that each subsequent revelation creates the sense of pieces falling into place. It builds like an old-fashioned television series, dispensed in weekly episodes with no binge-watching allowed. What remains from the earliest installments is not so much information as mood. Take, for example, one of the earliest revelations: in July an opinion piece in The Washington Post claimed that the Trump campaign “worked behind the scenes” to block a platform amendment that would have called for providing lethal aid to Ukraine—including weapon systems, mortars, grenade launchers, ammunition, and other armaments. The article was slightly misleading: it made it seem like Trump’s people made the party abandon a plank that would have called for maintaining or increasing sanctions and lethal aid. In fact, the sanctions part of the plank stayed in the platform—it was the lethal-aid amendment, a step that had hitherto not been taken, even during the height of the Ukraine war in 2014, that was tabled. The issue is far from a clear-cut one: few people in Washington, whether Republicans or Democrats, are on record as favoring lethal aid.

Now, the Republican convention is back in the news because one of the conversations the Russian ambassador had with Sessions, who was at the time an adviser to the Trump campaign, occurred in Cleveland, at a diplomacy panel timed to run alongside the convention. On March 2, USA Today reported that two more members of the Trump campaign—J.D. Gordon and Carter Page—spoke to the Russian ambassador at the same panel. When CNN picked up the story, it reported that “Gordon said that he was a part of the effort that was part of the Trump campaign to put some language in the GOP platform that essentially said that the Republican Party did not advocate arming the Ukrainians in their battle against pro-Russian separatists.” Correspondent Jim Acosta continued,

Of course, that was a big issue that was flaring up at the time. That effort was ultimately successful. They were successful in having that language in the Republican Party platform. I asked J.D. Gordon, ‘Well, why is that? Why did you go ahead and advocate for that language?’ He said this is the language that Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March at the meeting at the unfinished Trump Hotel here in Washington, D.C. J.D. Gordon said then-candidate Trump said he did not want to, quote, ‘go to World War III over Ukraine.’ And so, as J.D. Gordon says, at the Republican convention in Cleveland he advocated for language in that Republican Party platform that reflected then-candidate Trump’s comments.

He then briefly noted that Gordon denied that any inappropriate conversation had occurred between him and the Russian ambassador.

The report sounded damning—unless one knew, of course, that the “language” to which Acosta managed to refer four times in the space of thirty seconds did not exist—no statement on Ukraine was inserted into the Republican platform by the Trump campaign—and that the sentiment ostensibly ascribed to candidate Trump falls squarely in the foreign-policy mainstream and was, in fact, the position held by the Obama administration. The “meetings” that sounded so sinister were in fact public encounters that occurred during a panel and, later, a cocktail party—schmoozing, which is both the ambassador’s and campaign advisers’ jobs. But all of Friday-evening punditry on CNN and MSNBC was from that point on occupied with connecting the imaginary dots of the Russian ambassador-Trump campaign cabal at the Republican convention. CNN also ran with an unsubstantiated report that the Russian ambassador is a “spy master,” an outrageous assertion that mirrored Russian propaganda about Obama’s Moscow ambassador, Michael McFaul.

-- Russia: The Conspiracy Trap, by Masha Gessen

Few articles have illustrated the serious, multi-faceted dangers of what has become this collective mania in the U.S. as well as Gessen’s does.

The New York Review of books
NYR Daily
Russia: The Conspiracy Trap
Masha Gessen

To begin, Gessen details several examples of classic, evidence-free, unhinged, and increasingly xenophobic conspiracy theorizing masquerading as serious news in mainstream outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, and the Washington Post. Routine diplomatic interactions are depicted as dark and sinister if they involve Russians. When the most flamboyant, alarmist, tabloid-style Russia stories from leading news outlets collapse (as so many have), or when Trump’s actions (such as hiring numerous anti-Russia hawks for key positions) explode the “Putin’s puppet” narrative, it makes no difference to our mainstream conspiracy obsessives because – as she puts it – “such is the nature of conspiracy thinking that facts can do nothing to change it.”

Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say

Wild, melodramatic claims about hidden Russian plotting and Trump collusion are routinely and constantly hyped by leading media outlets based on nothing but their imaginations or, at best, coordinated whispers from intelligence officials utterly insusceptible to verification, from operatives trained in disinformation. As she writes:

The backbone of the rapidly yet endlessly developing Trump-Putin story is leaks from intelligence agencies, and this is its most troublesome aspect. Virtually none of the information can be independently corroborated. The context, sequence, and timing of the leaks is determined by people unknown to the public, which is expected to accept anonymous stories on faith; nor have we yet been given any hard evidence of active collusion by Trump officials. . . .

The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome. . . . More likely, the Russia allegations will not bring down Trump.

The crux of her article is the point that has been driving everything I’ve been writing and saying about this topic for months: that this obsession with Russia conspiracy tales is poisoning all aspects of U.S. political discourse and weakening any chance for resisting Trump’s actual abuses and excesses. Those who wake up every day to hype the latest episode of this Russia/Trump spy drama tell themselves that they’re bravely undermining and subverting Trump, but they’re doing exactly the opposite.

This crazed conspiracy mongering is further discrediting U.S. media outlets, making Washington seem even more distant from and irrelevant to the lives of millions of Americans, degrading discourse to the lowliest Trumpian circus level on which he thrives, and is misdirecting huge portions of opposition energy and thought into an exciting but fictitious spy novel – all of which directly redounds to Trump’s benefit. As Gessen puts it in the key sentence that ought to be pinned everywhere in neon lights:

Russiagate is helping [Trump]—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.

I’ve been asked often why I’ve written so much against the prevailing sentiments on Russia and Trump. It’s not just because this obsessive narrative distracts from Trump’s genuinely consequential actions or from the need to find an effective vessel for activism against über-right-wing nationalism. It’s not just because it’s driven by ugly and historically familiar anti-Rusisan xenophobia, nor because it dangerously ratchets up tensions between two nuclear-armed, traditionally hostile countries. Those things are all true, but that’s not the main impetus.

Above all else, it’s because it’s an offensive assault on reason. This kind of deranged discourse is an attack on basic journalistic integrity, on any minimal obligation to ensure that one’s claims are based in evidence rather than desire, fantasy, and herd-enforced delusions. And it’s emanating from the most established and mainstream precincts of U.S. political and media elites, who have processed the severe disorientation and loss of position they feel from Trump’s shock election not by doing the work to patiently formulate cogent, effective strategies against him, but rather by desperately latching onto online “dot-connecting” charlatans and spewing the most unhinged Birther-level conspiracies that require a complete abandonment of basic principles of rationality and skepticism.

Donald Trump reiterated his point that Hillary Clinton started the birther theory Monday night, citing reports of her campaign surrogates or staff spreading the rumor when she was running for president in 2008.

A former Washington reporter maintains Clinton surrogate Sid Blumenthal personally pitched him the President Barack Obama “birther” story in 2008, prompting him to send a reporter to Kenya to investigate.

The Clinton campaign and the media have consistently refuted Trump’s claim Clinton started the birther movement, which Trump re-upped Friday when he said for the first publicly that he believes Obama was born in the United States. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said, drawing a slew of media fact checks almost immediately. “I finished it.”

But former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher has backed up Trump’s version of events, saying he was personally pitched the story by a Clinton surrogate in 2008.

Clinton had tweeted: “President Obama’s successor cannot and will not be the man who led the racist birther movement. Period.”

And Asher replied: “@HillaryClinton So why did your man #sidblumenthal spread the #obama birther rumor to me in 2008, asking us to investigate? Remember?”

James Asher ✔ @jimasher
@HillaryClinton So why did your man #sidblumenthal spread the #obama birther rumor to me in 2008, asking us to investigate? Remember?
9:06 PM - 15 Sep 2016 · Maryland, USA

Blumenthal is a former aide to Clinton’s husband former President Bill Clinton and their long-time friend.

“#CNN says #Hillary team in 2008 never raised the #birther issue,” he said in another tweet Thursday night. “#SidBlumenthal, long-time #HRC buddy, told me in person #Obama born in #kenya.”

James Asher ✔ @jimasher
#CNN says #Hillary team in 2008 never raised #birther issue. #SidBlumenthal, long-time #HRC buddy, told me in person #Obama born in #kenya
7:43 PM - 15 Sep 2016 · Maryland, USA

Nevertheless, as soon as Trump reiterated his criticism, Clinton started the birther movement, the media started churning out fact checks.

“I covered it at the time,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said Sept. 16, referring to the movement. “She and her campaign never, never started the birther issue.”

“Trump Drops False ‘Birther’ Theory, but Floats a New One: Clinton Started It,” blared a New York Times headline. And The Washington Post fact checker quickly spun up a piece declaring the claim “debunked.”

At one point the MSNBC chyron read: “Trump (falsely) claims Clinton started birther controversy.”

-- Clinton Surrogate Pitched Reporter Birther Story In 2008, by Rachel Stoltzfoos

TO SEE HOW extreme this derangement has become, let’s look at the latest conspiracy theory that took hold of fringe and mainstream figures alike this weekend. It was prompted by the death of Alex Oronov, a 68-year-old Ukrainian-American whose daughter married Bryan Cohen, who is the brother of Michael Cohen, who is Trump’s personal lawyer. Got all those connections, those “dots”?

Back in the 1990s, the fever swamp of the Far Right was driven mad by Bill Clinton’s election. They were convinced he and Hillary were mass murderers, constantly ordering the deaths of political opponents and others who could incriminate the Clintons – not just Vince Foster but an endless number of remotely related people.

Any person who died and had any kind of connection to the Clintons, no matter how remote, became part of the “Clinton Body Count.” These were people who died and whose death was ruled by the coroner to be due to “natural causes” yet were still classified by right-wing extremists as “mysterious deaths,” all for the purpose of implying that the Clintons were responsible for their deaths.

WND EXCLUSIVE
'CLINTON DEATH LIST': 33 SPINE-TINGLING CASES
Bill and Hillary's "friends" fall off buildings, crash planes, die in freak accidents
Published: 08/21/2016

One of the primary pushers of this innuendo was the nation’s most influential radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who spent the 1990s hyping every death with any proximity to the Clintons as “suspicious.” He gleefully resurrected this theme during the 2016 campaign by claiming that people close to the Clintons were once again mysteriously dying. This is what Limbaugh told his audience in August:

I can remember reading magazines back in 1992 that catalogued all the people who the Clintons knew who had died. . . . The inherent conspiracies that were associated with this. And lo and behold, here we go again.

Limbaugh cited a Townhall article describing the deaths of three DNC-related officials and told his audience: “Since the DNC emails were leaked a few weeks ago, three people associated with the DNC have all found dead, under what could be questionable circumstances.” Limbaugh added: “This is exactly the kind of stuff we saw back in 1992 and 1993.” He then mocked the media for viewing this speculation as insane conspiracy theories, emphasizing:

A lot of people [the Clintons] know who have died, been murdered . . . . it’s amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons . . . . How many other politicians do you know who have so many mysterious deaths associated with them?. . . . But there is a Clinton body count.

citizenwells @citizenwells
Rush Limbaugh Clinton body count, Julian Assange murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich WikiLeaks… http://citizenwells.com/2016/08/10/rush ... tances-lin …
6:09 PM - 10 Aug 2016

There’s now an identical – and quite profitable – Democratic cottage industry that specializes in pointing to every death of anyone with any proximity to Trump or Russia and strongly implying – with zero evidence – that they were murdered. But the difference is that it’s not confined to the fringes but is fully embraced by numerous mainstream Democratic figures. It’s not a coincidence that one of the key figures of this early 1990s anti-Clinton sickness, David Brock, is now always lurking at the center of similar yet highly lucrative insanity, but now on behalf of Democrats.

One of the most popular online conspiracists among Democrats is now the former Tory member of the UK Parliament and current Murdoch-rag-writer Louise Mensch, whose history of public humiliations and pure bigotry is far too long to chronicle.

But because she has now turned her deranged behavior to peddling any and all conspiracies about Trump and Russia, she has built a huge Twitter following among Democrats convinced that all of their critics are Kremlin spies and anyone who dies was murdered by the Putin/Trump axis to protect their conspiratorial cover-up. Here’s what this newfound liberal journalistic icon tweeted two weeks ago:

Louise Mensch ✔ @LouiseMensch
I absolutely believe that Andrew Breitbart was murdered by Putin, just as the founder of RT was murdered by Putin.
8:44 AM - 24 Feb 2017

That is as flagrantly insane as the most warped versions of birther and truther fever dreams that have tragically engulfed significant portions of the U.S. population. That tweet, by itself, should disqualify her from any form of serious consideration. But Mensch is now routinely cited as some sort of credible journalistic source on Russia conspiracies by unhinged, mainstream anti-Trump fanatics such as MSNBC and Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, who will launder any insanity as long as it promotes their Tom Clancy fever dreams of Trump as a Kremlin asset.

When news of Oronov’s death broke over the weekend, Democratic Party loyalists instantly began implying, if not outright stating, that his death was really a murder, intended to silence him from exposing the Trump/Russia conspiracy. One of the leading articles pushing this evidence-free tripe was this thing called “The Palmer Report,” whose insinuations went viral because they were quickly mainstreamed by all kinds of prominent Democrats with a platform.

Palmer Report
Alex Oronov, organizer of Russia-Ukraine blackmail plan sent to Donald Trump, dies suspiciously
By Bill Palmer
March 4, 2017
Yet another key figure in the Trump-Russia scandal has suddenly dropped dead. A meeting was organized

What is the Palmer Report? It’s a classic Fake News site created by Bill Palmer, a crazed fanatical follower of Hillary Clinton who got caught purposely disseminating fake news during the election. The site he ran during the campaign was called “The Daily News Bin,” and among other gems, that was the site that published the totally false but viral claim – based on the fraudulent assertions of MSNBC’s partisan warriors Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance – that the DNC and Podesta emails WikiLeaks was publishing were forgeries.

Daily News Bin
MSNBC intelligence expert: WikiLeaks is releasing falsified emails not really from Hillary Clinton
By Bill Palmer
October 7, 2016

The latest release from WikiLeaks, a collection of emails supposedly hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, is getting very little public attention due to the fact that it contains nothing particularly scandalous to begin with, and the fact that it was released just as Donald Trump's campaign was imploding in a sexual assault scandal. But those who have examined the Clinton email dump have found something fascinating: several of the emails aren't even good forgeries.

Malcolm Nance, a U.S. intelligence expert and MSNBC analyst, has issued what he's calling an "official warning". He's reporting that the emails in question "already proving to be riddled with obvious

The Palmer Report is the same Fake News site that published multiple stories claiming that the vote totals for the 2016 election were altered, causing Slate to compare it to The National Enquirer. In February, the Atlantic warned of “The Rise of Progressive Fake News,” and one of its leading examples was the “very harmful” Palmer Report.

This is where Democrats are now getting their “news” from. The Palmer Report seems to be a trusted news source for Professor Tribe. Yet it’s no better – no different – than what Macedonian teenagers or Clinton Body Count sites are churning out. But it’s being mainstreamed by prominent, establishment Democrats who have completely taken leave of their senses in the wake of Trump’s victory and show no signs of returning to anything resembling sober, grounded reasoning any time soon.

Palmer Report
You're not just imagining it: the Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump vote totals do look rigged
By Bill Palmer
November 17, 2016
As a political journalist, I hate empty conspiracy theories. I like to go where the bulk of the evidence is pointing. So

The Democrats’ favorite reporter during the 2016 campaign was Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who outright fabricated a claim that Trump “was institutionalized in a mental hospital for a nervous breakdown in 1990,” and then when caught, claimed that it was a “signal to a source.” Not even an outright fabrication and a pitiful explanation like that hurt his standing among Democrats; if anything, it bolstered it, because it was for the Right Cause.

Kurt Eichenwald
@kurteichenwald
I believe Trump was institutionalized in a mental hospital for a nervous breakdown in 1990, which is why he won't release medical records.

And now, every time a Russian dies, mainstream Democratic sites instantly imply with zero evidence that they were murdered by Putin and possibly Trump to cover up something or other. Even when the autopsy rules that they died of natural causes, the conspiracies persist, indeed are often bolstered – just as Louise Mensch “absolutely believes” Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart despite the coroner’s findings.

TPM’s Josh Marshall this weekend pronounced Oronov’s death a “startling new development” – just as Limbaugh and right-wing sites do for every Democrats’ death. The liberal journal The Washington Monthly – echoing the innuendo tactics of the right-wing fever swamps focused on the Clinton Body Count – added: “Was it a heart attack, as seems to be implied? Or something else? . . . . Someone might want to figure out the actual cause of death.”

Is it possible all these people were killed by Putin and Trump to ensure their conspiracy remains hidden? Anything is “possible” – in the same sense that it’s possible that Bill and Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster and multiple Arkansas state troopers murdered. But since there’s no evidence for it, responsible, rational people don’t go around spouting it and trying to lead others to believe it.

When DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered in 2016, his family was furious and sickened by the attempt to exploit his death by implying that he was murdered by the Clintons for political reasons. In an interview with Buzzfeed, Oronov’s family just did the same thing, denouncing the theories laundered by TPM, the Palmer Report and other Democrats as “total bullshit” and noting that Oronov “died of a prolonged illness,” only “after three months at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.”

But as Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith noted last night, the denunciation of this conspiracy theory by Oronov’s family received only a tiny fraction of the attention which the viral stories implying he was murdered received.

Ben Smith
@BuzzFeedBen
Less widely shared than the theorizing about his death ...

Jason Leopold
Scored intv w/Michael Cohen's brother, Bryan abt the death of his father in law & claims it was tied to Trump-Putin buzzfeed.com/jasonaleopold/

This happens over and over and over. Totally fraudulent stories about Russia are published on the internet. Those who do it – including the leading media outlets and their journalists – receive endless benefits: exploding follower counts on social media, gushing praise from their peers, media appearances, profitable traffic for their sites. But then when the stories fall apart and are debunked, as they so often are, the debunking is shared by virtually nobody, and there is zero accountability or cost to their reputations because their false stories were peddled for a Good Cause.

The most obscenely transparent charlatans and grifters have built a huge social media following over the last year by feeding Democrats an endless stream of increasingly unhinged, insane conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia. That Trump is a Manchurian Candidate recruited by old Soviet leaders and installed in the White House as a 30-year-plan – or that any critics of Democrats are on the payroll of Putin – are completely acceptable theories which many of the Democrats’ most beloved commentators endorse literally on a daily basis.

Part of it is exciting: they get to center themselves as intrepidly uncovering an international Moscow-led plot to infiltrate the U.S. Part of it is self-excusing: it explains why Democrats have failed without having to confront the party’s fundamental corruption. Part of it is personally enriching: just as was true of the Clinton years, these conspiracies have created a whole stable of new media stars, and the crazier they are, the bigger their following will be.

But whatever the motives, what’s most damaging is how mainstreamed it’s all become. These are the same circles which endlessly rail against misleading reports from Fox News and right-wing radio, and the dangers of Fake News. And yet – in the name of stopping Trump and winning the New Cold War – they are the most enthusiastic disseminators of exactly what they denounce.

The most ironic part of it all is that they are achieving exactly the opposite of what they convinced their followers they are doing: they are strengthening Trump, not weakening him, by poisoning and corroding all of the institutions that – if they had any credibility – could effectively check him.

ULTIMATELY, what makes Gessen’s article so important – aside from the fact that partisan smear artists cannot dismiss her on the ground that she loves Putin and works for the Kremlin – is that it focuses on the key point: namely, that this fixation on primitive conspiracy-mongering is just a slothful way of avoiding the real work of meaningfully opposing Trump. As she explains, this bottomless, ultimately pointless obsession with Russia has utterly crowded out effective strategies for opposing Trump, and has obscured many of the truly damaging policies he is implementing with little notice:

Meanwhile, while Russia continues to dominate the front pages, Trump will continue waging war on immigrants, cutting funding for everything that’s not the military, assembling his cabinet of deplorables—with six Democrats voting to confirm Ben Carson for Housing, for example, and ten to confirm Rick Perry for Energy. According to the Trump plan, each of these seems intent on destroying the agency he or she is chosen to run—to carry out what Steve Bannon calls the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” As for Sessions, in his first speech as attorney general he promised to cut back civil rights enforcement and he has already abandoned a Justice Department case against a discriminatory Texas voter ID law. But it was his Russia lie that grabbed the big headlines.

Indeed, even the most plausible plank of the story – that the Russians were behind the hacking of Podesta and the DNC – has been widely accepted as Truth despite no evidence from the U.S. Government. As Gessen notes: “A later building block in the story, which has become its virtual cornerstone, is the joint intelligence report on Russian interference in the campaign, which was released in December and is, plainly, laughable.”

Worst of all, our discourse is being drowned by irrational, highly corrosive delusions and feverish conspiracy theorizing – not just from Trump, who built his political career on a racist and deranged conspiracy theory about Obama’s true birthplace, but also from those who have anointed themselves leaders of the Resistance against him.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/7860

RE: McCain Survey- Take 3

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
CC: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Date: 2008-01-09 17:32
Subject: RE: McCain Survey- Take 3

Paul et al- We've reworked the Obama message into the survey, as requested. But on the list of negative facts we need to cut ONE since we separated out gay adoption and his use of cocaine. Please send your suggestions. Thanks!

* 1 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) was the only candidate at a recent event not to cover his heart during the national anthem and he has stopped wearing an American flag pin.

* 2 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) benefited from a land deal from a contributor who has been indicted for corruption.

* 3 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) would personally negotiate with the leaders of terrorist nations like Iran and North Korea without preconditions.

* 4 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) voted against allowing people to use handguns to defend themselves against intruders.

* 5 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) plans to raise taxes by 180 (one hundred and eighty) billion dollars a year to pay for his government-run health care plan

* 6 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) voted repeatedly against emergency funding bills for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

* 7 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh)'s father was a Muslim and Obama grew up among Muslims in the world's most populous Islamic country.

* 8 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) is ranked as one of the ten most liberal members of the Senate because of his support of issues like gay adoption.

* 9 (Other)

* 10 (All)

* 11 (None)

* 12 (Don't know/refused)

* 13 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive the procedure.

* 14 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) supports giving driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants

* 15 Obama (owe-BAHM-uh) described his former use of cocaine as using "a little blow."


________________________________

From: Begala, Paul [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 4:08 PM
To: Kristi Fuksa; Tom Matzzie; Tara McGuinness; Susan McCue; John
Podesta
Cc: Stan Greenberg; Anna Greenberg; Ana Iparraguirre; Andrew Baumann;
Jesse Contario
Subject: RE: McCain Survey- Take 3

Several issues:

1. I think gay adoption belongs with the "liberal" hit on Obama, but "a
little blow" does not. "A little blow" needs to be tested on its own.

2. This means we have to cut one Obama negative. Suggestions?

3. I think we need a more accurate tax attack on Obama. The $180
billion tax hike for health care is only the beginning. Obama also
supports raising the cap on Social Security taxes, which would be a tax
increase of $1.3 trillion over ten years. [See factcheck.org, citing
data from Cato Institute and Citizens for Tax Justice
http://www.factcheck.org/clinton_vs_obama.html
<http://www.factcheck.org/clinton_vs_obama.html> Obama will also be
attacked for Charlie Rangel's "mother of all tax reforms," which the GOP
says will be a $1 trillion tax increase. See Bloomberg story at
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... Cc&refer=h
ome
<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a2Ydcv4tYVCc&refer=
home>

Paul

________________________________

From: Kristi Fuksa [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 3:28 PM
To: Begala, Paul; Tom Matzzie; Tara McGuinness; Susan McCue; John
Podesta
Cc: Stan Greenberg; Anna Greenberg; Ana Iparraguirre; Andrew Baumann;
Jesse Contario
Subject: McCain Survey- Take 3

Hello-

Attached is another revision of the McCain survey. It is currently at
25 minutes exactly, so please take that into account when making further
edits. As for the timing of this poll, are there any more thoughts on
fielding tomorrow versus holding off? Or is the consensus to wait for
tonight's results?

Tom-- Do you think we can do a quick call today with you in order to
discuss the implications for the upcoming research and timeline for the
ads?

Thanks all! Kristi

Kristi Fuksa <http://www.gqrr.com/index.php?ID=1068>
Analyst
10 G Street NE, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20002
Phone: 202 478 8300 / Fax: 202 478 8301
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://www.greenbergresearch.com <http://www.greenbergresearch.com/>

-- Podesta emails, WikiLeaks

How can one credibly denounce Trump’s birtherism or his fact-free accusation that Obama ordered his wiretapping if one is simultaneously spreading the most blatantly evidence-free claims and conspiracies or venerating those who have built their new platforms based on feeding hungry partisans flagrantly fraudulent “reporting”?

The Russia narrative dominates national discourse, as it has for months, and becomes progressively more removed from evidence. As Gessen concludes: “What is indisputable is that the protracted national game of connecting the Trump-Putin dots is an exercise in conspiracy thinking. That does not mean there was no conspiracy. And yet, a possible conspiracy is a poor excuse for conspiracy thinking.”

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The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories: Excerpt
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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THE TREMOR HIT on June 11, 1997, when a Little Rock jury convicted Dan Harmon on five counts of racketeering, extortion, and drug dealing. It meant nothing to the political classes in Washington, but those who understood the nexus of relationships in Arkansas saw it very differently. Harmon was one of the commissars who had enforced a politicized criminal justice system during the tenure of Governor Clinton. Now a jury of Arkansans had found him guilty of running his Seventh Judicial District prosecuting attorney's office "as a criminal enterprise for six years" and "demanding money in return for dropping charges."

Among those attending the trial at the U.S. District Court was Jean Duffey, one of his many victims. Years before she had told me, in one of her acerbic asides, that "if you freed all the prison convicts in Arkansas, and locked up all the judges and prosecutors, you would do wonders to raise the moral condition of the state."

Here, at last, were the first glimmerings of vindication. She listened tensely, with bittersweet emotions, as Dan Harmon was painted by one witness after another in unflattering colors. He was a wife-beater; he took payoffs; he dealt drugs. A woman testified that she had delivered $10,000 in cash to Harmon's office as the bribe to drop a marijuana charge.

Fine as far as it went, thought Duffey, but the prosecution was holding back. She knew that Dan Harmon was much worse than that. His crimes were heinous. She suspected that the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas was engaged in damage control. Experience had taught her to expect the absolute minimum from the U.S. Justice Department. But at least Harmon had now been exposed as a criminal, and that was something. At least he could not inflict any more judicial atrocities on the people of central Arkansas. That was no small victory.

A gaunt, fearless woman with piercing eyes, now aged 50, and an animal-rights vegan to boot, Duffey is the sort of American who reassures you that the founding character of the republic lives yet. When I met her, she was an algebra teacher at the Sam Rayburn High School in Pasadena, Texas, but that was a second career she had adopted in political exile, as a refugee from Arkansas. By metier, she is really a prosecutor.

In March 1990 she was appointed head of the Seventh Judicial District drug task force, a joint federal and tri-county probe into the epidemic of narcotics trafficking in central Arkansas. It started badly. Her supervisor, Gary Arnold, walked in and said: "Jean, you are not to use the drug task force to investigate any public official." [1]

But it was not her character to confine herself to the street "mules" while the managerial class carried on with impunity. With a team of seven undercover police officers it did not take long to establish what she already suspected: The local judiciary was up to its neck in corruption, behaving much like the fiscalia of a backward Mexican province.

"We heard right away that if you got busted you could buy your way out," said Duffey. "It was an extortion racket. You'd pay off the prosecutor, who'd share the profits with the judge, and the case would be dropped." Soon they learned that it was even worse: The clique not only protected the drug flow, they essentially operated the business. Dan Harmon, then 45, the former Saline County prosecutor, and soon to be the Seventh Judicial District prosecutor, was the enforcer for the local smuggling enterprise.

It was not easy to conduct the investigation. Dan Harmon, a mustachioed dandy of great personal charm with a concealed penchant for violence, soon found out that the task force was poking around in his affairs. He launched a smear campaign with the help of friends at The Benton Courier and The Arkansas Democrat, accusing Duffey of every sin from embezzling funds to child abuse.

Instead of fighting back in public, she took the findings of the task force to the U.S. Attorney's office in Little Rock, hoping that the federal government would have the gumption to confront the local narco-brotherhood. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Govar encouraged her to fight on. Dan Harmon would soon be indicted by a federal grand jury, he promised. She would be absolved.

But both of them underrated Harmon's reach. In November 1990 Duffey was fired by the Seventh Judicial District committee that had appointed her. Half of the task force resigned in sympathy.

The federal probe into Saline County corruption was still running, so Duffey was able to continue her crusade vicariously by offering her witnesses to the U.S. Attorney's Office. On the afternoon of December 10, 1990, her best informant, Sharlene Wilson, walked into the U.S. District Court in Little Rock and blurted out in front of an astonished grand jury that she had provided cocaine to Bill Clinton at Le Bistro nightclub during his first term as governor.

It had no criminal implications for Clinton because the statute of limitations had passed long before. But matters were clearly getting out of hand. Within days the federal investigation was closed down. U.S. Attorney Charles Banks went into full cover-up mode. [2] He was a Republican appointee but that meant nothing in Arkansas. What mattered were the interlocking relationships of power. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Govar was pulled off the case. [3]

A month later Sharlene Wilson contacted Duffey in a desperate panic and arranged a surreptitious meeting at Lake Catherine on January 7, 1991. It was then that she revealed what she had blurted out in a moment of misguided candor at the grand jury.

"She was terrified. She said her house was being watched and she'd made a big mistake," said Duffey. "That was when she told me she'd testified about seeing Bill Clinton get so high on cocaine he fell into a garbage can .... I have no doubt she was telling the truth." Duffey has provided me with her contemporaneous diaries recording the conversation. [4]

For both Sharlene Wilson and Jean Duffey matters took a drastic turn for the worse when Dan Harmon became prosecuting attorney for the Seventh Judicial District in January 1991. He immediately summoned a county grand jury and issued a subpoena for all the records of the task force, which included the incriminating files on his own activities. If Duffey had complied it would have exposed 30 witnesses and her confidential informants to violent retribution. She refused.

Harmon issued a felony warrant for "avoiding service." Harmon's ally, Circuit Court Judge John Cole announced publicly that once arrested she would be held without bail. "That is when I got really worried," said Duffey. "I got a message from one of the dispatchers that I would never get out of jail alive, and I didn't doubt it. Some of the cops had already been warning my family there was a $50,000 price on my head."

She went into hiding on a ranch in northern Arkansas. During the early months of 1991 she was on the move, emerging from time to time for a clandestine meeting with her husband and three children, but always one step ahead of Dan Harmon's men. The Arkansas Democrat called her a "felony fugitive" in blaring headlines. Finally she fled to Texas. The family followed.

"I was dragged through the mud, totally discredited and professionally destroyed, but I have no regrets," said Duffey. "We tried to do what was right; we did everything that we possibly could; all that was left was to get on with our lives .... I became a school teacher, and you know what? I just love it."

It took longer to deal with Sharlene. In the mid-I980s she had been one of Harmon's lovers, on and off, and an accessory in his illicit operations. That, of course, is why she had been so invaluable to Jean Duffey, guiding her through the underworld of organized drug trafficking in Arkansas. Sharlene, in essence, had served as paramour to the cartel.

She had bedded with most of the criminal fraternity, including Roger Clinton, in a decade-long career of vertiginous debauchery. She had even done a stint for three or four months unloading bags of cocaine at the Mena Airport in the mountains of Eastern Arkansas. If there was anybody who knew the business inside out -- where the aircraft made their drops at night, who picked up the deliveries, who laundered the money, who ordered the hits -- it was Sharlene Wilson. She was a dangerous woman. What's more, she had gone spiritual. She was trying to rectify her life, hoping to regain custody of her lost son. She posed a threat to the whole organization.

But Harmon had to be careful, bide his time. Sharlene had become an undercover informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the DEA did not like it when their sources had fatal accidents. [5] So with a nice sense of irony he used the Seventh Judicial District task force, now completely under control, to set her up on drug charges.

His opportunity came when a close friend of Sharlene's, Joann Potts, was arrested and agreed to "roll over" to avoid prosecution. Potts was sent on repeated visits to Sharlene's house to arrange a drug deal. Sharlene succumbed. [6] She gave Potts a joint of marijuana, then made the fatal mistake of fetching her some methamphetamine. The woman was crying, saying her husband was cheating on her, that her car wouldn't start, that life was hell, and she "needed to get high really bad." [7]

"I'm not denying that I did it," Sharlene later told the court. "I'm saying that I've been pushed and pushed into this whole situation. The girl would not leave me alone, and I cared about her genuinely."

Sharlene was arrested by Dan Harmon in person. "He yelled, 'Bitch, I told you that if you ever breathed a word about me I'd take you down. You're going to prison, bitch,''' she said.

Harmon then prosecuted the case, neglecting to tell the jury that they had been lovers. He offered her a plea agreement of 116 years. A bit stiff, she felt, opting instead for a trial. She was convicted and sentenced to 31 years in prison for delivery of methamphetamine and marijuana. Still a bit stiff, for a first drug conviction.

"They couldn't silence her so they locked her up and threw away the key," said Duffey. "That's Arkansas for you."

But this time the powers that be in Arkansas did not have the last say. Represented by a talented, maverick lawyer, John Wesley Hall, Sharlene took her appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas on May 22, 1995, the Court found that Harmon's men had violated Sharlene's Fourth Amendment rights by failing to adhere to the "knock-and-announce principle" before entering her home. [8]

Citing English common law, Justice Thomas noted that a man's house is "his castle of defense and asylum" and that the King may not send his sheriff into a person's house, either to arrest or to do other execution of the King's process, without signifying the cause and requesting that the doors be opened. Harmon had forgotten to study his Blackstone Commentaries. So had the Arkansas courts.

"The judgment of the Arkansas Supreme Court is reversed and the case is remanded for further proceedings," concluded Thomas. It did not get her off the hook entirely. Other convictions still held. But it bolstered her claim that she had been a victim of legal foul play, and it occurred at a time when Harmon's vicious sway over the Seventh Judicial District was fast coming to an end.

* * *

"I don't know if I trust you. I don't know if I trust anybody any longer," said Margie Wilson, in the sing-song cadence of rural Arkansas, as she hobbled around her dusty, cluttered trailer.

I was trying to persuade her to take a message to her daughter, Sharlene, in the Arkansas penitentiary for women. I knew that Sharlene would refuse to talk to me without knowing what it was about, but I did not want to alert the wrong people by sending an explicit letter through the prison system. I had to get in by stealth and tape her story before the portcullis came crashing down. The weekend family visit was my best bet.

"Since you're a friend of Jean Duffey I'll do it," said Margie, wearily. "Though I don't see what good it'll do my daughter talking to you .... She knows too much stuff about the Clinton brothers, too much for her own good." [9]

The penitentiary protruded inelegantly from the flat, sweltering cotton fields near Pine Bluff. A team of male convicts was out in the midday sun, slowly pulling up grass with their hands. Uniformed guards watched on horseback, no doubt envious of the loose white clothes worn by their wards. It was deathly silent.

At the women's compound I was shown into the warden's boardroom and told to wait while Sharlene was escorted from her cell in Barracks 9-B. She had borrowed some makeup from one of the other inmates in an effort to recapture lost allure. But it could not mask the desecrating effects of a life on drugs. Though still comely at age 38, it was hard to imagine that she had once been the blonde bombshell who made the rounds with Roger Clinton in the governor's limo. She had grown frumpy on prison food. Her light brown hair was untended. All that remained where the laughing eyes.

I made it clear to her that my newspaper could not offer any money for her story. Nor could I guarantee her safety in any way, although I believed that she was probably at less risk going public.

"Mr. Pritchard, sir, I'll tell you anything you want to know," she said. "I'm not proud of what I've done, but if I'm doing time for dope, they should be, too. They've persecuted me. They took my house, my family. They've done everything but kill me, and when the time is ripe they may do that." [10]

She had been the bartender at Le Bistro, a Little Rock nightclub where Roger Clinton used to play with his rock band Dealer's Choice. Big Brother would come by from time to time with one or two of his State Troopers.

"Roger had all the pretty girls and drugs and the fast life, and Bill was pretty envious of this," she said. On one occasion "Roger the Dodger" came back to the bar and said he needed two grams of cocaine right away. They carried out the deal near the ladies room. The Dodger then borrowed her "tooter," her "one-hitter" as she called it, and handed it to the governor.

"I watched Bill Clinton lean up against a brick wall. He must have had an adenoid problem because he casually stuck my tooter up his nose," she said. "He was so messed up that night, he slid down the wall into a garbage can and just sat there like a complete idiot."

Afterward they went back to the Governor's Mansion and partied into the early hours of the morning. "I thought it was the coolest thing in the world that we had a governor who got high."

That was not the only time she snorted cocaine with Bill Clinton. She claimed to have been present with him at a series of "toga parties" at the Coachman's Inn outside Little Rock between 1979 and 1981. "I was, you know, the hostess with the mostess, the lady with the snow," she said. "I'd serve drinks and lines of cocaine on a glass mirror."

People shared sexual partners in what amounted to a Babylonian orgy. They were elite gatherings of ten to twenty people, mostly public officials, lawyers, and local notables, cavorting in a labyrinth of interconnected rooms with women that included teenage girls. Bill Clinton was there at least twice, she said, snorting cocaine "quite avidly" with Dan Harmon. She gave a graphic description of the sexual activities that Bill Clinton preferred.

She remembered seeing a distinctive mole at the base of his stomach. "It's darned me that he's managed to get elected through all this," she said.

"It's 'darned' a lot of people," I concurred.

Sharlene was surprisingly frank about her job at the Mena Airport in the mid-1980s. The cocaine was flown in on twin-engine Cessnas, sometimes as often as every day. "I'd pick up the pallets and make the run down to Texas. The drop-off was at the Cowboys Stadium. I was told that nobody would ever bother me, and I was never bothered .... If there was a problem I was to call Dan Harmon."

A lot of the cocaine that came into Mena was taken up to Springdale in northwest Arkansas, she said, where it was stuffed into chickens for reshipment to the rest of the country.

But she had another job, which she revealed to me two years later when we were allowed to meet and talk in relative privacy at the prison library. This time she was trembling with emotion, giving free rein to the terrible remorse that had been eating at her for nine years. She used to pick up cocaine deliveries on the railway tracks near the little town of Alexander, thirty miles south of Little Rock.

"Every two weeks, for years, I'd go to the tracks, I'd pick up the package, and I'd deliver it to Dan Harmon, either straight to his office, or at my house .... Sometimes it was flown in by air, sometimes it would be kicked out of the train. A big bundle, two feet by one and a half feet, like a bale of hay, so heavy I'd have trouble lifting it .... Roger the Dodger picked it up a few times."

But in the summer of 1987 one of the drops disappeared. Furious, Harmon brought out some of his men to watch the delivery on the night of August 22. They were expecting a delivery of 3 to 4 pounds of cocaine and 5 pounds of "weed." Sharlene was supposed to make the pickup that night but she had been "high-balling" a mixture of cocaine and crystal and was totally "strung-out." They told her to wait in the car, which was parked off Quarry Road. It was around midnight.

"It was scary. I was high, very high. I was told to sit there and they'd be back. It seemed forever. I heard two trains. Then I heard some screams, loud screams. It ... it ... ," she stammered, breaking into uncontrollable tears. She never did finish that sentence.

"When Harmon came back, he jumped in the car and said, 'Let's go.' He was scared. It looked like there was blood all down his legs."

She later learned that a group of boys had been intercepted at the drop sight. According to Sharlene some of them had managed to get away, but Kevin Ives, 17, and Don Henry, 16, were captured. Harmon's men interrogated them as they were lying on the ground, face down, hands tied behind their backs. They were kicked and beaten, and finally executed. One of the boys was stabbed to death with a "survival knife." The bodies were wrapped in a tarpaulin, carried to a different spot on the line, and placed across the railway tracks so that the bodies would be mangled by the next train.

The following day Harmon told Sharlene that she would have to ditch her car. He gave her $500 in cash and told her to deliver a packet of cocaine to an address in Rockford, Illinois. She went to an auto auction and bought an Olds Cutlass Supreme for $450 in cash and drove to Rockford. From there she fled to the obscurity of Nebraska.

Sharlene is too candid for her own good. After telling me her harrowing story she made a collect call to my office in Washington, and said in a tone that was by turns pleading and peremptory: "Everything I told you is off the record." She then sent a letter with a notarized stamp, or so it appeared, commanding me to adhere to her First Amendment rights.

I thought about this a great deal. Technically, under American journalistic convention, a comment cannot be put off-the-record retroactively. But Sharlene Wilson is not a public official. She is not a potentate who knows how to play the game of media spin. She is a convict in dire straights who is afraid to eat the food on her tray when it is brought to the prison boiler-room where she works. People in her predicament have an excuse to go "off-the-record" after the event.

On the other hand, I owe greater loyalty to the feelings of Linda Ives who lost her son Kevin to the death squad of the Saline County judicial authorities. Besides, I have Sharlene's signed confession, which she gave to the narcotics detail of the Little Rock Police Department on May 28, 1993. The FBI has it, so does the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. The whole damn government has it.

* * *

Kevin Ives was spending the night at the home of his friend Don Henry. At about 12:30 AM the two boys had apparently gone out "spotlight" hunting for deer in a wooded area near the railway tracks. [11]

At 4:25 AM the three drivers of a Union Pacific train coming up from Shreveport caught sight of an obstruction on the line. They jammed on the breaks but there was no chance of stopping the immense freight train in time. As they got closer they could see two bodies lying across the tracks, heads inside the rails, partly covered with a tarpaulin. [12] Not even the deafening whistle of the train could make them stir.

The Arkansas medical examiner, Fahmy Malak, ruled the deaths an accident. He said the boys had smoked twenty marijuana joints and fallen into a trance on the railway tracks, side by side. How he reached this astounding conclusion was a mystery because the state crime labs never tested the concentration of marijuana in their blood. [13]

Malak, an Egyptian with poor command of English, did not inspire confidence. In his most creative ruling he concluded that a James "Dewey" Milam had died of an ulcer and then been decapitated by the family dog. According to Malak, the animal had eaten the entire head and then vomited, leaving traces of half-digested brain matter. To Malak's chagrin, however, the man's skull was later recovered. No bites were taken out of it. The man had been decapitated with a sharp knife.

"That Malak survived in Arkansas is a testament to Clinton's power," wrote Meredith Oakley in her dispassionate Clinton biography On the Make. "He repeatedly lied about his credentials, misconstrued his findings, and misrepresented autopsy procedures. In the lab, he misplaced bodies and destroyed evidence. On the witness stand, he was a prosecutor's dream."

As has now been amply explored -- by The Los Angeles Times, NBC's Dateline, and others -- he obscured the negligent role of Bill Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, as the nurse anesthetist in the death of 17-year-old Susie Deer in 1981. Deer had been hit by a rock that broke her jaw and nose, but she was not in serious danger. Indeed, she was sitting up and chatting before surgery at the Ouachita Memorial Hospital.

During the operation, however, Virginia Kelley fumbled the breathing tube with disastrous results. Deer died from lack of oxygen. It was a clear case of medical malpractice, but Fahmy Malak concluded that the patient had died of "blunt trauma" to the head. With the extra touch that so captured the character of justice in Bill Clinton's Arkansas, the lad who threw the rock was prosecuted and convicted of negligent homicide.

Over the years, outraged families had tried to expose Fahmy Malak for what he was, a pseudo-scientific servant of power. But the doctor finally met his match in the immovable American spirit of Linda Ives. A buxom housewife with blue eyes and bushy blonde hair, aged 38 when her son was killed, she had never been involved in politics. Nor had her husband, Larry, an engineer on the Union Pacific. "Our lives were going to the ballpark, going out to the lake ... until the 'machine' reached into our lives." [14]

Linda declared war on Fahmy Malak and created such a stir that a county grand jury was called to investigate the case. The bodies were exhumed. In April 1988 a second autopsy was conducted by the Atlanta medical examiner Dr. Joseph Burton.

He found a "v" shaped "penetrating wound" into the "thoracic and left lower chest cavity" of Don Henry. He showed an enhanced photograph of the wound to six other forensic investigators. They all concurred that it was "a stab wound ... consistent with it having been inflicted by something such as a large cutting edge knife." [15]

He also found that Kevin Ives had been smashed in the head with a rifle butt, probably Don Henry's .22 caliber hunting rifle. There was "considerable reaction within the lungs of both boys" indicating that they had not died immediately. The level of marijuana in Kevin's blood was 97.9 nanograms per milliliter, consistent with having smoked two marijuana cigarettes over the previous few hours. Don Henry's level was slightly higher, but not nearly enough to induce collapse.

"The preponderance of evidence in this case indicates that Kevin Ives and Don Henry sustained injuries prior to impact with the train, that these injuries were inflicted on them by another individual or individuals, that their bodies were placed on the track."

It was at this stage that the Clinton administration in Little Rock began to exhibit the body language of alarm. In May 1988 Governor Clinton's chief of staff, Betsey Wright, deflected an attempt by the grand jury to subpoena two outside pathologists who had looked at the train deaths during a review of the Arkansas crime labs. Wright responded with an affidavit asserting that the doctors had not been contracted "to provide second opinions on specific cases."

It was gratuitous obstruction. The grand jury, highly irritated, then issued a subpoena for Betsey Wright herself. For weeks she defied the order.

Shortly afterward, a team of state police investigators assigned to help with the case -- at the insistence of the Henry and Ives families -- were reined in by the head of the Criminal Investigations Division. One of the investigators was Trooper L. D. Brown. "I was told it had something to do with Mena and I was to leave it alone." [16]

Meanwhile, with a panache that has to be admired, Dan Harmon had managed to take over the case, first as a concerned private attorney and then as a special deputy prosecutor appointed by his friend, Judge John Cole. He took command of the grand jury, promising to turn over every stone until the fiendish killers were caught and brought to justice. Linda Ives believed him.

"I thought he was our knight in shining armor. He was the only one helping us when nobody else would, it didn't make any sense that he'd do this if he'd been involved himself," she said. "I was so naive, back then."

"People had been telling me all along about his drug use, but he'd explain it all, and I was easy to pacify. Dan Harmon can make you believe anything, if you want to believe it," she said. "It makes me shudder to think that I was on the phone to him every day, pouring out my heart." [17]

In December 1988 the grand jury reached the end of its natural life and was disbanded. Sadly, explained Harmon, the investigation had failed to crack the case, but the capable officers of the Saline County Sheriffs Department would press on. It was only later that Linda Ives would be told by two frightened jurors that Harmon had prevented the grand jury from calling witnesses.

Already, people associated with the case were beginning to die in what amounted to a reign of terror among young people in Alexander, Arkansas.

Keith Coney, who told his mother he knew too much about the railway deaths and feared for his life, died in a motorcycle accident after a high-speed chase. Coney had been with the two boys a few hours before their deaths. Linda Ives now believes that they met up again at the tracks. "I'm sure now that there were three of them out there, at least, and he was one who got away," she said. [18]

Boonie Bearden, a friend of the boys, disappeared. His body was never found.

Jeff Rhodes, another friend, was killed with a gunshot to the head in April 1989.

And on it went. The killing fields.

There had always been rumors that the railway tracks were a drop-zone for drugs. It was assumed the deliveries were coming by train. But in June 1990 the undercover officers of Jean Duffey's Seventh Judicial District task force stumbled on evidence of a much bigger trafficking operation involving aerial drops. [19]

Aircraft with no lights were observed flying very low over the tracks at night. One informant staked out the area and observed a twin engine plane coming in at approximately 3:00 AM at least once a week. "It would fly in extremely low over the field, reduce speed, before throttling up again. By the field is a children's colony [20] that is lit up each night like a 'Christmas Tree.' That was the 'beacon.'" [21]

The deeper the undercover officers looked, the more certain they became that the operation was protected at the highest levels of law enforcement in Saline County, Pulaski County, and Little Rock.

Three years later, long after Duffey had been driven into exile, a Saline County detective named John Brown came to much the same conclusion. A brave, stubborn, emotional man, with rugged good looks, he ignored all warnings that it would be wiser to leave the case alone. It came to a head at a tense closed-door meeting with Robert Shepherd, the man appointed by Bill Clinton to be Arkansas's drug czar.

"Shepherd put on his overbearing cop manner and said 'Brown, those two kids are dead. There's nothing you do can bring them back. Your career will prosper a lot more if you'd concentrate your efforts somewhere else,'" recalled Brown. "I walked to the door, and just as I was leaving I turned and said, 'Guys, unless somebody wants to discuss the big secret with me, and tells me why everybody wants me to leave this alone, I've got two kids dead and I still consider that murder in Arkansas.' I walked out and thought, 'Oh shit, have I got problems.'''

Brown's career did not prosper. Forced out of the Saline County Sheriff's Department, he was reduced to digging ditches at $6 an hour to support his young wife Karen and two small children. But he never cracked. Once, when I visited him at his home in the country, there was a volunteer providing protection around-the-clock. The man was unarmed, but at least there would be a witness if anything happened. I have no doubt that it was this informal network of friends and supporters that kept him going, and perhaps kept him alive, through the worst months. [22]

It was John Brown who finally broke Sharlene Wilson and extracted her confession. He then discovered a fresh witness, a lad who had been out with two friends that night looking for a marijuana patch. The witness had been about sixty feet away, hidden below the bank, watching a group of men talking on the tracks. "One of them I definitely recognized as Dan Harmon. Then I noticed two more people, Kevin and Don, walking down the railroad tracks."

At first it looked as if Harmon was just talking to the boys, but then a shot rang out. The witness turned and ran. [23]

At this point the FBI took charge. Phyllis Cournan, an athletic, single-minded agent from Philadelphia, had recently arrived in Little Rock on a routine assignment. An idealist at heart, eager to see the best in people, she was discovering to her shock and disgust that the rampant drug trafficking in Arkansas was being protected by the highest levels of the political machine. The most offensive abuse was the murder of Don and Kevin. If she could break that case open, she believed she could shake things loose in Arkansas. [24]

Cournan immediately gave the boy a polygraph test, which he passed, and placed him in the witness protection program. It was the beginning of a lonely FBI probe into the blackest narco-corruption of Bill Clinton's Arkansas. Cournan contacted Jean Duffey in Texas, persuading her to open the files of the drug task force. She went to see Sharlene in the penitentiary.

"She asked me if Roger Clinton had been on the railway tracks that night," said Sharlene. "And she asked me about Bill Clinton and whether he was into cocaine." [25]

Cournan was now being accompanied by an FBI agent from the Hot Springs office, Floyd Hayes. As the investigation progressed -- that is to say, as she established with near certainty who had murdered the two boys -- Hayes was assigned to be her partner. She also began to feel the presence of "The Machine," day and night. Her telephones were no longer secure. She had bouts of insomnia. Being a federal agent, she discovered, was no protection. Not in Arkansas.

Then, after eighteen months, the probe suddenly collapsed. In November 1995 Linda and Larry Ives went to see Special Agent Bill Temple, the number two man in the FBI office in Little Rock, and were given a taste of the bullying insolence of the FBI.

"He was so arrogant and smug," said Linda. "He said, 'Maybe in light of the fact that there was no physical evidence, maybe it's time for you all to realize that no crime occurred.' I slammed down my notebook and said, 'I don't have to listen to this bullshit' and walked out." [26]

"I think he intended to make me mad. I was crying throughout the entire meeting, and I cried for days afterward."

She went public, accusing the FBI of working to cover-up the murder of her son. The chief of the FBI's Little Rock office, I.C. Smith, countered in the local newspaper, The Benton Courier, saying that the Bureau had a "very real problem" establishing federal jurisdiction in the case, and anyway it was not clear that the boys had been murdered. [27] He said that Linda Ives had "badly misquoted" Agent Temple's remarks.

"He never even asked me or Larry what had happened," said Linda. "He just came out and called me a liar."

For Linda Ives it was the last straw. She telephoned Phyllis Cournan, who had been present at the meeting. With the tape-recorder running, Linda Ives extracted from Cournan an acknowledgment that Temple had been quoted "verbatim."

Armed with evidence of FBI mendacity, Linda took her campaign to the airwaves. It was a harsh way to treat Phyllis Cournan, a dedicated agent Linda Ives admired in many ways. But Linda had learned that there was no use giving quarter to Louis Freeh's FBI. "I'm fighting a war, and I'll fight it any way I can," she said.

A few months later I had a final dinner with Agent Phyllis Cournan and her husband, a Secret Service Agent from Minnesota. Charming, educated, with a strong sense of duty, they were everything that one could hope for in the rising generation of federal agents. But priorities were changing. They had a baby now, the center of their lives.

We went to an Italian restaurant in Little Rock -- at their expense, they would not let me bill it to my newspaper -- and talked about the amazing mores of Arkansas. None of us wanted to poison the evening by mentioning the train deaths, but the issue had to be confronted.

The boys were murdered, said Phyllis, and the FBI knew who did it. But the forensic evidence was contaminated. "We couldn't get anything out of the DNA," she said. "All we had were witnesses with huge credibility problems; we couldn't go to trial with that .... What were we supposed to do?"

She was putting the best face on it, trying to convince herself. I could sense her slipping away into the embrace of the Bureau. She had poured her heart and soul into the case, but when it came to the crunch she was going to be a team player.

Linda Ives now shifted her campaign into high gear. Incensed by the conduct of I.C. Smith, she joined up with a California film producer named Pat Matrisciana to make a documentary on the deaths. It was called Obstruction of Justice. The video, tightly documented, was a heart-wrenching expose of "The Machine."

Journalist Micah Morrison then took up the cause on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. (The rest of the media stayed away, with the exception of Phil Weiss in The New York Observer.) In one article, Morrison put in a plug for the "Train Deaths" website that Linda Ives and Jean Duffy had constructed on the Internet. The site received 32,000 hits the next day. Angry letters poured into the offices of I.C. Smith in Little Rock.

The FBI was losing control. The nasty methods that the Bureau had been using for years, and getting away with, were suddenly being exposed for all to see on the Internet. Of course, the political Left had always understood that the Bureau could be abusive, with the mind set of a deformed cult. Now the Right was finding out, too.

Special Agent I.C. Smith was badly shaken. Once billed as a star agent picked by Louis Freeh to clean up the Bureau's operations in Arkansas, he suddenly found himself being recast as the new villain. Scrambling to recover, he shifted the investigation into Saline County corruption into higher gear. Nobody was going to be able to say that I.C. Smith was prostituting himself for Dan Harmon and his miserable accomplices.

Linda Ives, the housewife from Benton, had outmaneuvered the Bureau. But she still did not understand what it was about her son's death that had caused a federal grand jury probe to be shut down in early 1991, or why the FBI had backed away in November 1995, or indeed why the Justice Department's prosecution of Dan Harmon in June 1997 was confined to racketeering, when they knew perfectly well -- or so she had to assume -- that he had murdered her son.

Linda Ives, Jean Duffey, and John Brown all came to the same conclusion. They were pitted against Dan Lasater -- the Dixie Godfather, and the friend of and provider for the Clinton brothers.

--The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

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Key Democratic Officials Now Warning Base Not To Expect Evidence of Trump/Russia Collusion
By Glenn Greenwald
March 16, 2017

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FROM MSNBC POLITICS shows to town hall meetings across the country, the overarching issue for the Democratic Party’s base since Trump’s victory has been Russia, often suffocating attention for other issues. This fixation has persisted even though it has no chance to sink the Trump presidency unless it is proven that high levels of the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Kremlin to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. election — a claim for which absolutely no evidence has thus far been presented.

The principal problem for Democrats is that so many media figures and online charlatans are personally benefiting from feeding the base increasingly unhinged, fact-free conspiracies — just as right-wing media polemicists did after both Bill Clinton and Obama were elected — that there are now millions of partisan soldiers absolutely convinced of a Trump/Russia conspiracy for which, at least as of now, there is no evidence. And they are all waiting for the day, which they regard as inevitable and imminent, when this theory will be proven and Trump will be removed.



Key Democratic officials are clearly worried about the expectations that have been purposely stoked and are now trying to tamp them down. Many of them have tried to signal that the beliefs the base has been led to adopt have no basis in reason or evidence.

The latest official to throw cold water on the MSNBC-led circus is President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morell. What makes him particularly notable in this context is that Morell was one of Clinton’s most vocal CIA surrogates. In August, he not only endorsed Clinton in the pages of the New York Times but also became the first high official to explicitly accuse Trump of disloyalty, claiming, “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

But on Wednesday night, Morell appeared at an intelligence community forum to “cast doubt” on “allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.” “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire at all,” he said, adding, “There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”

Obama’s former CIA chief also cast serious doubt on the credibility of the infamous, explosive “dossier” originally published by BuzzFeed, saying that its author, Christopher Steele, paid intermediaries to talk to the sources for it. The dossier, he said, “doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think.”

Morell’s comments echo the categorical remarks by Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, who told Meet the Press last week that during the time he was Obama’s DNI, he saw no evidence to support claims of a Trump/Russia conspiracy. “We had no evidence of such collusion,” Clapper stated unequivocally. Unlike Morell, who left his official CIA position in 2013 but remains very integrated into the intelligence community, Clapper was Obama’s DNI until just seven weeks ago, leaving on January 20.

Perhaps most revealing of all are the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — charged with investigating these matters — who recently told BuzzFeed how petrified they are of what the Democratic base will do if they do not find evidence of collusion, as they now suspect will likely be the case. “There’s a tangible frustration over what one official called ‘wildly inflated’ expectations surrounding the panel’s fledgling investigation,” BuzzFeed’s Ali Watkins wrote.

Moreover, “several committee sources grudgingly say, it feels as though the investigation will be seen as a sham if the Senate doesn’t find a silver bullet connecting Trump and Russian intelligence operatives.” One member told Watkins: “I don’t think the conclusions are going to meet people’s expectations.”

What makes all of this most significant is that officials like Clapper and Morell are trained disinformation agents; Clapper in particular has proven he will lie to advance his interests. Yet even with all the incentive to do so, they are refusing to claim there is evidence of such collusion; in fact, they are expressly urging people to stop thinking it exists. As even the law recognizes, statements that otherwise lack credibility become more believable when they are ones made “against interest.”

Media figures have similarly begun trying to tamp down expectations. Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, which published the Steele dossier, published an article yesterday warning that the Democratic base’s expectation of a smoking gun “is so strong that Twitter and cable news are full of the theories of what my colleague Charlie Warzel calls the Blue Detectives — the left’s new version of Glenn Beck, digital blackboards full of lines and arrows.” Smith added: “It is also a simple fact that while news of Russian actions on Trump’s behalf is clear, hard details of coordination between his aides and Putin’s haven’t emerged.” And Smith’s core warning is this:

Trump’s critics last year were horrified at the rise of “fake news” and the specter of a politics shaped by alternative facts, predominantly on the right. They need to be careful now not to succumb to the same delusional temptations as their political adversaries, and not to sink into a filter bubble which, after all, draws its strength not from conservative or progressive politics but from human nature.

And those of us covering the story and the stew of real information, fantasy, and — now — forgery around it need to continue to report and think clearly about what we know and what we don’t, and to resist the sugar high that comes with telling people exactly what they want to hear.

For so long, Democrats demonized and smeared anyone trying to inject basic reason, rationality, and skepticism into this Trump/Russia discourse by labeling them all Kremlin agents and Putin lovers. Just this week, the Center for American Progress released a report using the language of treason to announce the existence of a “Fifth Column” in the U.S. that serves Russia (similar to Andrew Sullivan’s notorious 2001 decree that anyone opposing the war on terror composed an anti-American “Fifth Column”), while John McCain listened to Rand Paul express doubts about the wisdom of NATO further expanding to include Montenegro and then promptly announced: “Paul is working for Vladimir Putin.”

But with serious doubts — and fears — now emerging about what the Democratic base has been led to believe by self-interested carnival barkers and partisan hacks, there is a sudden, concerted effort to rein in the excesses of this story. With so many people now doing this, it will be increasingly difficult to smear them all as traitors and Russian loyalists, but it may be far too little, too late, given the pitched hysteria that has been deliberately cultivated around these issues for months. Many Democrats have reached the classic stage of deranged conspiracists where evidence that disproves the theory is viewed as further proof of its existence, and those pointing to it are instantly deemed suspect.



A formal, credible investigation into all these questions, where the evidence is publicly disclosed, is still urgently needed. That’s true primarily so that conspiracies no longer linger and these questions are resolved by facts rather than agenda-driven anonymous leaks from the CIA and cable news hosts required to feed a partisan mob.

It’s certainly possible to envision an indictment of a low-level operative like Carter Page, or the prosecution of someone like Paul Manafort on matters unrelated to hacking, but the silver bullet that Democrats have been led to expect will sink Trump appears further away than ever.

But given the way these Russia conspiracies have drowned out other critical issues being virtually ignored under the Trump presidency, it’s vital that everything be done now to make clear what is based in evidence and what is based in partisan delusions. And most of what the Democratic base has been fed for the last six months by their unhinged stable of media, online, and party leaders has decisively fallen into the latter category, as even their own officials are now desperately trying to warn.

[admin]

The Myths of ‘Democracy Assistance’: U.S. Political Intervention in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe (EXCERPT)
by Gerald Sussman

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‘Americans to the Rescue’—A Russian Assignment

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the U.S. electioneering industry began to operate in a more globalized environment, sustained by state funding and encouragement to establish in the name of “freedom” new bridgeheads for neoliberal economic conquests. As a former bête noire, Russia was an electioneering plum for U.S. foreign policy planners. Initially, with production of political television spots in 1993 and then in the 1996 Russian presidential election, the first American consultants were invited to Moscow to spin the blessings of capitalism and Boris Yeltsin over communism and Communist Party (KPRF) challenger Gannady Zyuganov. Just prior to the election campaign, the United States helped bankroll Yeltsin with $14 billion in loans. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl committed an additional $2.7 billion, most of which was fully unconditional (thereby permitting its use for massive vote-buying), and French Prime Minister Alain Juppé added $392 million to the kitty, “paid entirely into Russian state coffers.” International Monetary Fund managing director Michel Camdessus committed his organization, as a “moral obligation,” to supporting Yeltsin’s privatization plans. Most of the IMF funds went to the state treasury for discretionary spending—with the caveat that financial assistance would be suspended in the event of a Communist Party election victory. “In the end, though, the KPRF’s door-to-door campaign was obliterated by the heavily researched, well-financed, media saturating, modern campaign waged by the Yeltsin team.”9

Operating under cloak in the Yeltsin campaign were American consultants, George Gorton, Joe Shumate, and Richard Dresner, who previously had worked together on Pete Wilson’s California gubernatorial campaign.10 At a moment when Yeltsin fared poorly in the polls, the three were asked to use their American razzmatazz to help “rescue” Boris. They were joined in this task by Steven Moore, an American public relations specialist, and a Russian TV advertising production company, Video International. Dresner was a former business partner of Dick Morris and former gubernatorial campaign consultant to Bill Clinton. Morris, in turn, was Clinton’s main political advisor (previously having worked for conservative southern senators, Trent Lott and Jesse Helms) and acted as a liaison between the U.S. president and Morris’s friends on the Yeltsin team. Despite these close associations, the consultants denied any connections between the Russian campaign and the White House.11

Video International (VI) staff were trained for the election by the American advertising firm Ogilvy and Mather (part of the worldwide WPP advertising group). The campaign strategy, including use of archival footage of Stalin’s brutality, was to attack the KPRF and Zyuganov with an assortment of anti-communist tactics. Within just a few years of the fall of the Soviet Union, this was an extraordinary turnaround in Russian (formerly Soviet) politics. As one scholar found in her interviews with VI, the company’s producers mocked Zyuganov for failing to grasp the importance of political marketing, which suggested yet another remarkable adaptation in Russian political thinking.12

VI was run by former KGB member Mikhail Margolev, who had previously spent five years with American advertising agencies. Margolev next joined the Putin public relations team for the 2000 election campaign. Since then he has became a “senator” in the Federation Council, Russia’s legislative upper chamber. He and other close advisors to Putin have been receiving “first-hand insights into strategies and techniques of American campaign practice,” a tutelage they presumably assume will assist their leader’s grand political ambitions. Another VI company executive, Mikhail Lesin, became Putin’s press minister. Lesin is known in Russia for harassing media outlets that are critical of the Putin government, marking the growing authoritarian style of that leadership.13

The American campaign consultants worked closely with Yeltsin’s daughter and campaign operations manager, Tatyana Dyachenko, passing on to their Russian counterpart the American techniques of spin-doctoring. According to a published news report, “they advised the campaign on organization, strategic and tactical use of polls and focus groups” with a “central campaign message of anti-communism,” a role they shared with Burson-Marsteller and other American public relations firms. They also urged Yeltsin to assert authoritarian control and think in terms of how to make the state-run television stations “bend to your will.” Boasting that they had saved Yeltsin from certain defeat and Russia from a return to the Cold War, the consultants admitted to employing a host of manipulative tactics in their advertising strategy to sow fear among Russians, a style that has been well-rehearsed by many Republican political strategists. A Time magazine report on these events came with the brazen cover lead, “Yanks to the Rescue”—later inspiring a Showtime (cable TV and subsequent DVD) film undertaking, Spinning Boris, about how the heroics of American political consultants “saved Russia from communism.”14

The consultants’ political ads, mostly aired over state-run television and radio stations, which Yeltsin fully controlled, repeatedly pitched the theme that a Zyuganov victory would bring back a command economy and a climate of terror. For “personality” styling designed to capture the youth vote, the Americans asked Yeltsin to appear at rock concerts and had him “jitterbug” onstage at one of them. Some of Yeltsin’s Russian advisors did not approve of the stunt, possibly because it caused the candidate’s heart attack in the midst of the campaign. Ignored in the campaign slogans, and by the Clinton administration, were the out-of-control economy, Yeltsin’s poor health and alcohol addiction, and his broad use of repressive policies. Despite his autocratic tendencies, disregard for constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, frequent money-laundering scandals, and brutal war in Chechnya, Yeltsin received the unreserved endorsement of the leaders of the main market economies, as if open markets were the true measure of a democracy. A Time correspondent rationalized the American intervention in pure Machiavellian logic: “Democracy triumphed—and along with it came the tools of modern campaigns, including the trickery and slickery Americans know so well. If these tools are not always admirable, the result they helped achieve in Russia surely is.”15

Russians too have learned the dark arts of Machiavellian political chicanery. Moscow hosts a Center of Political Consulting, more popularly known as “Niccolo M”—referring to the famed theorist of political manipulation and spin. By 2002, Niccolo M, whose organizers were trained in NED-funded seminars by the NDI and IRI, was joined in Russia’s new electioneering business by several other new political consulting groups, such as the Center of Political Technologies, which helps design campaign strategies and arrange contacts between businesses and Kremlin officials. Niccolo M staff used all the methods learned from their mentors, including candidate marketing, polling, focus groups, direct mail, phone banks, heavy use of the mass media, attack ads, and spin doctoring. Following its 1996 election defeat, the KPRF began studying Western campaign manuals and adopting the same tactics. Russian business groups have learned to give their money directly to the consultants rather than to candidates for tighter control over policy making, a practice that corresponds to soft-money election financing in the United States.16

An NDI assessment congratulated itself on the role it played in transforming Russian society through the introduction of American electioneering techniques. Under U.S. influence, Russian political parties, the study confidently claimed, were now

targeting their communication to voters based on demographic and geographic information…conducting research on voter attitudes through focus groups and polling…small meetings, coalitions with civic groups, door knocking, phone banks, and public leafleting; organizing more sophisticated press operations that attempt to create news and respond to events….Much of this change can be attributed to NDI training. (emphasis added)17

If the U.S. influenced Russian politics as much as the NDI claimed, then the accession of Vladimir Putin suggests that American campaign practices have little to do with institutionalizing democracy.

In fact, American “democracy assistance” to Russia has been part of a larger project to transform that country into an open market economy and place it under the control of stable and reliable pro-capitalist, pro-U.S. elected officials, regardless of their anti-democratic history or inclinations. In the early 1990s, Harvard University’s Institute for International Development (HIID), which “served as the gatekeeper for hundreds of millions of dollars in USAID and G-7 taxpayer aid, subsidized loans, and other Western funds,” sent a team of economic “shock therapists,” led by Jeffrey Sachs. HIID’s influence extended to the coordination of $300 million in USAID grants that went to the global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and the “big six” international accounting firms operating in Russia to help sell the privatization program.18 Working closely with Anotoly Chubais, Yeltsin’s first deputy prime minister, minister of finance, and chief of staff, HIID support led to the conversion of major state enterprises to private ownership. The Harvard group actually “drafted many of the Kremlin decrees” to this effect.19 The policies the Sachs group advocated have been widely discredited as disastrous, as measured by subsequent Russian quality of life indicators.

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Democrats Now Demonize the Same Russia Policies that Obama Long Championed
by Glenn Greenwald
March 6, 2017

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ONE OF THE most bizarre aspects of the all-consuming Russia frenzy is the Democrats’ fixation on changes to the RNC platform concerning U.S. arming of Ukraine. The controversy began in July when the Washington Post reported that “the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.”

Ever since then, Democrats have used this language change as evidence that Trump and his key advisers have sinister connections to Russians and corruptly do their bidding at the expense of American interests. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke for many in his party when he lambasted the RNC change in a July letter to the New York Times, castigating it as “dangerous thinking” that shows Trump is controlled, or at least manipulated, by the Kremlin. Democrats resurrected this line of attack this weekend when Trump advisers acknowledged that campaign officials were behind the platform change.

This attempt to equate Trump’s opposition to arming Ukraine with some sort of treasonous allegiance to Putin masks a rather critical fact: namely, that the refusal to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons was one of Barack Obama’s most steadfastly held policies. The original Post article that reported the RNC platform change noted this explicitly:

Of course, Trump is not the only politician to oppose sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. President Obama decided not to authorize it, despite recommendations to do so from his top Europe officials in the State Department and the military.

Early media reports about this controversy from outlets such as NPR also noted the irony at the heart of this debate: namely, that arming Ukraine was the long-time desire of hawks in the GOP such as John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, but the Obama White House categorically resisted those pressures:

Republicans in Congress have approved providing arms to the Ukrainian government but the White House has resisted, saying that it would only encourage more bloodshed.

It’s a rare Obama administration policy that the Trump campaign seems to agree with.

Indeed, the GOP ultimately joined with the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party to demand that Obama provide Ukraine with lethal weapons to fight Russia, but Obama steadfastly refused. As the New York Times reported in March, 2015, “President Obama is coming under increasing pressure from both parties and more officials inside his own government to send arms to the country. But he remains unconvinced that they would help.” When Obama kept refusing, leaders of the two parties threatened to enact legislation forcing Obama to arm Ukraine.



The general Russia approach that Democrats now routinely depict as treasonous – avoiding confrontation with and even accommodating Russian interests, not just in Ukraine but also in Syria – was one of the defining traits of Obama’s foreign policy. This fact shouldn’t be overstated: Obama engaged in provocative acts such as moves to further expand NATO, non-lethal aid to Ukraine, and deploying “missile defense” weaponry in Romania. But he rejected most calls to confront Russia. That is one of the primary reasons the “foreign policy elite” – which, recall, Obama came into office denouncing and vowing to repudiate – was so dissatisfied with his presidency.

A new, long article by Politico foreign affairs correspondent Susan Glasser – on the war being waged against Trump by Washington’s “foreign policy elite” – makes this point very potently. Say what you will about Politico, but one thing they are very adept at doing is giving voice to cowardly Washington insiders by accommodating their cowardice and thus routinely granting them anonymity to express themselves. As journalistically dubious as it is to shield the world’s most powerful people with anonymity, this practice sometimes ends up revealing what careerist denizens of Washington power really think but are too scared to say. Glasser’s article, which largely consists of conveying the views of anonymous high-level Obama officials, contains this remarkable passage:

A few days in, I went to meet with an early Obama appointee who had since become disillusioned. He saw much in common between the skeptical dovishness of Obama and the grand but vague America Firstism promised by Trump. Both considered the 2003 invasion of Iraq a big mistake and the entanglements of the Middle East a waste of time and money. Both were weary of America footing the bill for the defense of the well-heeled countries of Europe and Asia; both came to office looking for better relations with Russia. “There is a lot of continuity between them,” he insisted. “Both are promoting a minimalist, anti-interventionist foreign policy. Trump says a lot of what Obama thinks—it’s just he says it in a much more crass way.”

But it was much too soon for this kind of second-guessing, and nobody wanted to make the comparison publicly. “You can’t really have an honest conversation about this,” the former Obama appointee said. After all, Trump was in the White House and he was scaring the shit out of everybody.

In other words, Democrats are now waging war on, and are depicting as treasonous, one of Barack Obama’s central and most steadfastly held foreign policy positions, one that he clung to despite attacks from leading members of both parties as well as the DC National Security Community. That’s not Noam Chomsky drawing that comparison; it’s an Obama appointee.

The destructive bipartisan Foreign Policy Community was furious with Obama for not confronting Russia more, and is now furious with Trump for the same reason (though they certainly loath and fear Trump for other reasons, including the threat they believe he poses to U.S. imperial management through a combination of ineptitude, instability, toxic PR, naked rather than prettified savagery, and ideology; Glasser writes: “‘Everything I’ve worked for for two decades is being destroyed,’ a senior Republican told me”).

ALL OF THIS demonstrates how fundamental a shift has taken place as a result of the Democrats’ election-related fixation on The Grave Russian Threat. To see how severe the shift is, just look at this new polling data from CNN this morning that shows Republicans and Democrats doing a complete reversal on Russia in the span of eight months:

In the new survey, 34% call Russia a "very serious" threat, up from 21% in May 2016. Last spring, Republicans were about twice as likely as Democrats to consider Russia a deep threat (30% among Republicans, 15% among Democrats). Now, that's reversed, with Democrats about twice as likely to consider Russia a very serious threat (51% among Democrats, 24% among Republicans).

The Democrats’ obsession with Russia has not just led them to want investigations into allegations of hacking and (thus far evidence-free) suspicions of Trump campaign collusion – investigations which everyone should want. It’s done far more than that: it’s turned them into increasingly maniacal and militaristic hawks – dangerous ones – when it comes to confronting the only nation with a larger nuclear stockpile than the U.S., an arsenal accompanied by a sense of fear, if not outright encirclement, from NATO expansion.

Put another way, establishment Democrats – with a largely political impetus but now as a matter of conviction – have completely abandoned Obama’s accommodationist approach to Russia and have fully embraced the belligerent, hawkish mentality of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, the CIA and Evan McMullin. It should thus come as no surprise that a bill proposed by supreme warmonger Lindsey Graham to bar Trump from removing sanctions against Russia has more Democratic co-sponsors than Republican ones.

This is why it’s so notable that Democrats, in the name of “resistance,” have aligned with neocons, CIA operatives and former Bush officials: not because coalitions should be avoided with the ideologically impure, but because it reveals much about the political and policy mindset they’ve adopted in the name of stopping Trump. They’re not “resisting” Trump from the left or with populist appeals – by, for instance, devoting themselves to protection of Wall Street and environmental regulations under attack, or supporting the revocation of jobs-killing free trade agreements, or demanding that Yemini civilians not be massacred.

Instead, they’re attacking him on the grounds of insufficient nationalism, militarism, and aggression: equating a desire to avoid confrontation with Moscow as a form of treason (just like they did when they were the leading Cold Warriors). This is why they’re finding such common cause with the nation’s most bloodthirsty militarists – not because it’s an alliance of convenience but rather one of shared convictions (indeed, long before Trump, neocons were planning a re-alignment with Democrats under a Clinton presidency). And the most ironic – and over-looked – aspect of this whole volatile spectacle is how much Democrats have to repudiate and demonize one of Obama’s core foreign policy legacies while pretending that they’re not doing that.

[admin]

A Bernie Sanders Campaign Adviser Was a Russian. Now He’s Speaking Out.
by Glenn Greenwald
April 19, 2017

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A HIGH-LEVEL ADVISER and operative for the 2016 Sanders campaign was Vitali Shkliarov, a Soviet-born citizen of Belarus. Shkliarov, who had previously worked on the 2012 Obama re-election campaign and for several other successful Democratic Party campaigns, has also become increasingly in demand as a political adviser and campaign manager in Russia, working for liberal candidates in opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

Possessing a unique background and vantage point, Shkliarov, now that the 2016 election is over, has many interesting observations to express on the state of American politics, the Democratic Party, U.S.-Russian relations, and the impact of rising anti-Russian sentiment in the United States.

To say that Shkliarov’s background is unusual for U.S. political advisers is an understatement. The 40-year-old, for whom English is a fourth language, has a Ph.D. in political and social sciences from Universität Vechta in Germany. Having spent the 1990s working with various German music industry startups, he was first infected with political passion as a volunteer youth organizer for Germany’s Left Party. Shkliarov’s wife is a U.S. State Department consular officer who, after serving years in Asia and Europe, is now based in Brazil, where they live with their 5-year-old son.

Shkliarov’s first significant position with U.S. political campaigns was his overseeing the get-out-the-vote operation in Wisconsin for Obama’s 2012 re-election bid, as well as consulting work that year for Tammy Baldwin’s successful Senate run in that state. In 2015, Shkliarov was recruited to work for the Sanders campaign by colleagues he knew from his prior work on behalf of Democratic candidates.

He began by working on the Sanders campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort for Nevada. After Nevada, he became Sanders’s deputy state director for Washington, and then moved to the national team, where he worked as a deputy to the political outreach director through the end of the campaign.

His 2012 work with the Obama campaign, and his activism within the community of Russian liberals working in opposition to the Kremlin, has made him a highly sought-after campaign manager in Russia on behalf of anti-Putin candidates. In 2014, he managed the mayoral campaign of one of the leaders of the anti-Putin opposition, Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of the Russian Parliament to vote against the Russian annexation of Crimea, who now lives in exile. Shkliarov also ran the re-election campaign of one of the Kremlin’s most outspoken opponents in the Russian Parliament, Dmitry Gudkov, a campaign whose ads and messaging just won multiple top awards from the American Association of Political Consultants.

Shkliarov’s anti-Putin bona fides, and his now-entrenched status in both the Russian and American community of liberal and leftist political consultants, makes him a unique voice on a wide range of issues of current prominence, particularly the state of U.S.-Russia relations and the impact of anti-Russian discourse in the U.S. Last week in Rio de Janeiro, I spoke with him about his experiences with the Sanders campaign, his views on Trump’s victory, the dangers posed by rising tensions between Moscow and Washington, and what it’s like now to be a Russian who works in U.S. politics.

Of particular interest is Shkliarov’s analysis of — and his warnings about — the dangers posed from escalating U.S.-Russia tensions (on Tuesday night, the U.S. scrambled jets in response to Russian warplanes flying 100 miles off the coast of Alaska for the first time since Trump became president).

Especially noteworthy are Shkliarov’s concerns about how intensifying anti-Russian sentiment in U.S. discourse is alienating Russian liberals from the U.S. and uniting them behind their own government — as happens in most countries when people, even those who loathe their own government, perceive that their nation is being demonized and targeted by a foreign power.

The transcript of our discussion, edited for length and clarity, is below, along with several video clips:



The 2016 primary battle

Glenn Greenwald: Let’s start by talking about the work that you did with the Sanders campaign, specifically, how — as a Russian who comes from Belarus — you ended up working pretty high up at this campaign and what you did as part of that.

Vitali Shkliarov: Well, I started with the first or second, second caucus state, Nevada. We started, there was a huge ground operation, and as a director for get out the vote, we needed to hire 5,000 people, precinct captains, as we called them. We ended up actually being four points down. Like we did a good job.

GG: How did you even end up in a position to work in the Sanders campaign? Did you know someone, and what was your entry into that?

VS: A couple of progressive consultants that worked for progressive campaigns that I used to work for, they knew me, they knew my skill set, and I got a call from a friend of mine who has been working for Bernie’s campaign already and who has been really high up.

I knew them from the 2012 Obama campaign — I was actually working for two campaigns back then — for Tammy Baldwin, running for Senate in Wisconsin. And together for a big get-out-the-vote campaign operation in Milwaukee for President Obama.

GG: The Sanders campaign surprised pretty much everybody in terms of the challenge imposed and the excitement that it created, especially among young voters, and its ability to sustain itself for so long, with almost no establishment support. What was it like to work in a campaign like that? What was your experience? The feeling that it gave?

VS: It’s amazing, because Bernie was, from beginning, an underdog, and he always had this startup state of mind fever, like, oh, working really hard, like 15, 17 hours, we were all excited, it was like no fatigue, whatever. And all of those progressively minded people were totally excited about his agenda.

People came as families, they camped, they had fun, they listened to messages, they listened to bands, to music, so we created as a huge gathering of people, and he had up to 35,000 people, 30,000 people events. Free events every day. So it was like just this excitement. First of all, the agenda was appealing to me, appealing to my background, to my view of the world, of life.

GG: What about the agenda was so appealing?

VS: Well, his views of education, reform of political campaign finances. His ideas about or a vision about foreign policy in America, I liked a lot. And it hit me personally, when I moved to the U.S. and when my wife got pregnant with my first baby — that American women don’t have paid maternity leave. That’s so normal for someone who is from Europe, you can as a dad have like up to a year, 70 percent paid maternity leave or paternity leave.

I wasn’t even aware of that: The richest nation on Earth doesn’t have this. And it was like, wow, I didn’t know that actually. And I believe Bernie vocalized it for the first time, like in this manner that everybody heard it. And I believe it was so authentic, so true, and I believe people were thirsty for this type of voice, this type of truth.

And I believe exactly that he gave them, and especially why so many people asks why he was so successful among young people, because my theory is that young people have less tolerance for bullshit, that’s exactly the age when the people, the whole social network, the whole life is based around social connections, and the key is if you’re true or not, if you’re legitimate or not, if you’re telling the truth, if you’re a credible or not person.


Photo: Erick Dau/The Intercept

Trump’s victory

GG: So you went from this really exciting, energizing political event, the Sanders campaign, to this shocking outcome for a lot of people — which is still very disorienting: the victory of Donald Trump.

There’s a lot of debate about why Trump won, how could somebody like this, just so retrograde and seemingly from another decade and political culture, win, especially after two terms of President Obama. And there’s a lot of debate about what the causes were, and why that happened.

What is your view on that question?

VS: Well, I believe there’s a lot of arrogance on the side of the Democratic Party, first of all. I believe disengagement, the fact that the Democratic Party, regardless of analytical data, regardless of all perception, regardless of all polls and excitement over Bernie, still chose to nominate Hillary, was one of the mistakes.

Moreover, actually even if they ran the Hillary campaign differently, better, she could have won, she actually won the popular vote. But I believe they were killing themselves by being a little bit arrogant and just dismissing what the American people were looking for.

The Trump campaign used the rhetorical tactics of Sanders, which galvanized him, energized a lot of people. Trump used it on a different spectrum of the political aisle, but he used pretty much the same rhetoric as Sanders. He used, he told —

GG: About inequality, about trade?

VS: Inequality, jobs, and so on, about rich, about foreign policy and wars. So I believe they took Sanders’s approach in a smart way.

The U.S. and Russia

GG: Let me ask you about what has happened after the election — particularly the constant focus in the United States on Russia and on Vladimir Putin and the relationship of both the U.S. and the Trump campaign to Russia.

First of all, can you just talk a little bit about the work, the political work you’ve done in Russia? Was it on behalf of Putin? Was it against Putin? And what’s your overall view of the political situation in Russia as it pertains to Putin’s future role in the political process?

VS: Sure. So I was helping Russian candidates, all liberals, to run campaigns in Russia. Even though we lost the campaign — have to mention that it’s fairly difficult to win a campaign against the regime, against Putin, against Kremlin candidates, and against money — but still I don’t think with winning one campaign you will change something. I see my approach and my mission in Russia and working in Russia as being more educational.

We said, “Look, where is the country right now.” Look at the economic situation. And we explained, with infographics, with easy language, people on the street every day can understand, we have 251 events with, with pretty much like we did with Bernie, like, we did five events a day, reaching a broad audience, explaining what is the status quo of the country, of the economy, of the rate of growth in the country, of the house budget. And so on.

And as a second step of the campaign, we tried to show that there are tools how to get out of this misery, like by reforming this and that, by setting foreign policy a different way, and so on, talking about politics in Russia, I’m not saying that the change is going to happen as soon as Putin’s gone.

But the problem is also in hands of people, the people who has been ruled for 70 years, in a particular manner. So I believe you have to start to talk about Russian politics with an educational approach towards all the Russian people. And I believe the future of activism in Russia lies in this approach, like teaching young people.

GG: As a Russian liberal or somebody in the circles of Russian liberalism, and somebody who has worked against the Kremlin and the Putin government, for their opposition, what is your view of what has happened in the United States as it concerns Russia? The way Russia has sort of taken center stage in American discourse, the focus on Putin and the Kremlin as kind of the cause or explanation behind many bad things, including the election of Trump?

As somebody who has been in the United States for a while, has focused on U.S. politics, what has this change been, and how do you view it?

VS: I believe it’s really bad right now. It’s the whole hysteria in the media. Partly it’s the media’s fault — just like in order to get a lot of views, a lot of attention and audience, like trying to ride this horse and trying to play this card.

Partly I believe the Democratic establishment is a little bit at fault, has fault in all this rhetoric. I mean, it’s true that probably — even though it’s not, there’s no like real facts on the table — but partly the media says that Russian intervention in the highest of American culture, in the American elections, and that this is a bad thing. Sure.

But, for instance, America does the same. Every country does the same. Like, we all know from the latest from Snowden that everybody does the espionage and it’s part of the job. So let’s not go crazy about it. To use Russia as a justification for bad and misery in election, from the Democratic side, I believe it’s really dangerous, because what’s happened if you’re starting to shake this board, like, you can shake it to a certain degree and and at some point it’s going to turn around, and you’re going to sink.

GG: What do you mean by that?

VS: I believe that — look, the situation with Russia is really dangerous, first of all. So we kind of are like in the Cold War 2.0 or 3.0 right now, because neither of the sides trust each other, so we don’t communicate. I mean like, Americans and Russians do not communicate anymore. So we cannot get rid of this 60, 70-years-old politics of, like, that mutual deterrence, you know? That started actually with Truman, and it was probably really important back then, in ’48 or like in ’50s, but I will be living in the 21st century right now, and then so much has changed.

And I believe, instead of having, continuing trying to establish the politics of distrust, and this mutual deterrence, Russia and America should calm down and start to talk, because those are two major nations in the world. Sure, America has 27 percent of world GDP, and Russia has just, fairly 2 percent. Sure, they’re economically unequal, but based on nuclear weapons, based on ego alone, politically, those are two major countries, and I believe if this hysteria doesn’t stop, it’s going to lead to some bad events.

Partly because Russia is in the corner. Partly because Russia is economically, because of sanctions, because of political instability, in a country, on the knees, and in the corner, and Russia doesn’t have much to lose, and that’s what the American politicians underestimate: I believe the Russian mentality, when you look throughout the history, is shaped by all these losses, all these wars. And they are like more capable of taking a lot of pain, and a lot of sacrifice, and once, even as a little, teeny tiny cute dog, if you push them in the corner, you gonna start to bark and you gonna start to bite back, you know?

And I believe, like, economically, in the media, and in the perception, Russia is pushed in the corner right now.

GG: But are there opportunities that you see for the U.S. and Russia to work more constructively, together — ?

VS: In 1948 with the Marshall Plan, the U.S. saw the opportunities, the tourists, to restore Europe, easily, even though the distress with Hitler and then Germany was huge. They saw the opportunity to put a lot of money in the economy [to rebuild German and Europe].

Sure, they tried to get their own products — they had all personal reasons for, like political reasons for it — but still, that helped, that made Germany, Germany. That helped England, that helped later Japan and so on.

Why doesn’t same strategy apply to Russia? Why not helping, why not creating like a partner?

So what happens with Russia right now, it doesn’t matter if you have five icebreakers in the pocket or just one. It’s still dangerous. They have a lot of missiles. They have nothing to lose. And they could easily, easily, I believe, they could start the war just to cover up the misery, what’s happening in the country. Just to cover up, just to shift the attention, like so many presidents do, also in America, throughout the history.

GG: I’m really interested in this dynamic in particular, which is that there is a fairly vibrant sector of the Russian intelligentsia that is opposed to Putin, Russian liberals. We’ve seen signs that it’s getting increasingly vibrant, protests, the opposition’s getting a little bit stronger. And yet, one of the things that happens in every country is when people in a country feel like they’re being attacked from the outside, or vilified by an outside power —

VS: They unify.

GG: They unify. Like Iran, right? There was this growing movement against the conservative mullahs, and yet the idea was if the U.S. gets too antagonistic to Iran, they’re going to unite behind the government that they hate.

VS: Absolutely.

GG: Do you think there’s a danger of that happening with Russian liberals or is that already happening, that this kind of hysteria, this very anti-Russian strain in U.S. discourse, is starting to alienate Russian liberals and drive them to move away from the U.S.?

VS: Absolutely, I mean, we see it, like all the time. We see it in the media, we see it in everyday life. We see it with the war in Ukraine, we see that Putin is hard, or like, he is trying hard, maybe now less than before, but he’s been trying hard to get to find the love, the appreciation, the recognition invest. He wanted, I believe, deep down, something good for Russia. It didn’t happen. I believe partly because of the misery of foreign policy of America. I believe it truly.

But partly because Russian corruption as well. And once you try and try and try, and you get always portrayed as a dumb idiot, and some conspiracy theories tell us that he is getting paranoid, that the West is trying, like, to putsch him, like they did in Ukraine with Orange Revolution, so of course you are going to try to do whatever it takes, whatever is possibly to protect yourself, and your country.



I believe the problem is partly of course in Putin, because the president determines the course of the country. But even if Putin’s gone tomorrow, nothing is going to change that quick, believe me, because the country is corrupt, the infrastructure is dead.

So that’s why I’m saying, when we talk about Marshall Plan, that’s how the Americans helped, first of all to establish, to recover the economy in Europe: that people became monied, the middle class grew, and that people started to live a normal life, and that’s how people change. And that’s how systems change.

People don’t change by getting beaten up. Getting to starve. People doesn’t change by putting some labels on them. People do not change when they are being pushed in a corner, so I believe — everybody knows that America is so strong economically. We know that America, if tomorrow is a war, nobody is going to survive. So why don’t we just stop for a second and be a little bit smarter with the first step?

Climate in the U.S. for Russians

GG: There was an article in the Washington Post, maybe two or three weeks ago, about how Russians who are either Americans, who became Americans, or who worked in America for a long time, are starting to become really worried about the climate, how they feel personally stigmatized and almost as though people are afraid to even interact with Russians, because of the perception that has been created.

Do you sense that? Have you had any kind of personal experiences with this changing climate, as a Russian?

VS: I totally sense that. I sense it every day by watching the news and feeling sorry for Russians and for Americans as well, because so many companies suffer. I feel it pretty much every day while talking to people.

I recently tried to open a bank account, for my company. I was denied because it’s a Russian entity. If you talk to people, and try to talk about politics, it’s so toxic. Russia became so toxic that nobody want to touch it.

So many colleagues of mine from D.C., like really smart people, are looking for jobs and having hard time to find a job because nobody all of a sudden needs any Russian experts, or like any Russian people.

GG: Or is almost afraid to interact with Russians?

VS: Afraid. Absolutely afraid. It’s just crazy. Recently when I was receiving those prizes in LA, for the campaign, from the American Association of Political Consultants, I was talking to a couple of people and tried to help my colleagues from the European Association of Political Consultants to get speakers, to the conference in Moscow, and people from the Trump administration said, like, “No, we can’t. We just, we going to be tomorrow on the news [if we do that]. Done!”

Like, instead of learning from mistakes and move on. Come, the election is over, move on guys. Learn. Like, Russia, sure, maybe they did it. Who cares right now? It’s done already. We have a different president, Trump is the president, the same because they push this president in a corner to be distanced from Russia.

So he cannot change. Everybody from both sides of the ocean, we are like hoping with a new administration, it’s going to be a new era of Russian-American relations. And it looked like it’s gonna happen. But now they push him so far in the media, so far to have distance to Russia and to any Russian topic, that it’s getting actually worse. And I believe the media is partly responsible for that.



GG: What about this idea of being cornered, and what are the dangers of continuing to ratchet up tensions between these two countries. What are the real dangers?

VS: Well the big danger is to get — like, there’s a couple of dangers. One is to get a new war that could happen because of isolating of this —

GG: Is that a cold war or a hot war?

VS: Hot war.

Second danger is: People make mistakes. We already have situations when they fly jets over navy ships or, like, some bombs firing in Syria — maybe the next attack could hit a couple of Russian planes, hurt a couple of Russian citizens. Maybe not, but they’re going to claim that, and bang you have a problem!

So I believe that’s a really, really hot iron right now, so you cannot drop a lot of water on it.

And I mean, just imagine: In 2002, there are interviews with Putin, who was like back then on the pinnacle of Russian development. He was giving speeches in the Bundestag, in Germany, and he was thinking, he was talking about maybe Russia becoming part of NATO.

So we were that far, and now we are where we are right now.

And I believe for Russia it’s getting existentially dangerous. Not just because of Syria. Partly because of economical sanctions, partly because of infrastructural problems, partly because of the perception of Russia as a son that nobody wants. I believe Russia struggles and Putin personally struggles with that perception, and instead of fighting this, I believe the West should really approach and be wise, you know, like, if two parties, if a couple fights at home, someone has to be wise and stop first and say, “I’m sorry.”

Even if it’s not his or her fault. But that’s the only way to solve the problem and to start the peace, otherwise you’re gonna get the wars. And that’s what we’re doing right now, and the media unfortunately does the same, just keeping putting oil in the fire, instead of saying, like, “Come on. It’s enough.”

Even if Russia did the election hacking, it’s not about that. Like, nobody is sane. Both parties are hiding some skeletons. But the problem is actually the point, my point is, Glenn: not the problem of mistakes that characterize a state or a smart person or a smart government, it is the reaction to the mistakes.

And what I see is the reaction to mistakes made on both sides of the aisle that are just terrible, and that’s how we should judge our politics.

[admin]

MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow Sees A "Russia Connection" Lurking Around Every Corner
by Aaron Maté
April 12, 2017

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ONE DAY AFTER her network joined the rest of corporate media in cheering for President Trump’s missile attack on Syria, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was back to regular business: seeing Russian collaboration with Trump at work.

It’s “impossible,” fellow anchor Lawrence O’Donnell told Maddow on April 7, to rule out that “Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week – so that his friend in the White House could have a big night with missiles and all of the praise he’s picked up over the past 24 hours.”

Maddow concurred, suggesting that only the FBI’s ongoing probe into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russian electoral interference will determine the truth. “Maybe eventually we’ll get an answer to that from [FBI Director] Jim Comey,” Maddow said.

The Washington Post noted that the “conspiracy theory” drew “derision from across the political spectrum.” But it was not out of place.

MSNBC, the country’s most prominent liberal media outlet, has played a key role in stoking the frenzy over Trump’s alleged involvement with Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential race — in lock step with the Democratic Party’s most avid partisans.

Jennifer Palmieri, a senior member of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, captured the prevailing mentality when she recently urged party members to talk about the Russian “attack on our republic” — and to do so “relentlessly and above all else.”

And no leading media figure has done so more than Maddow. In the period since Election Day, “The Rachel Maddow Show” has covered “The Russia Connection” — and Russia, generally — more than it has any other issue.

Here is a video sampling:

The Intercept conducted a quantitative study of all 28 TRMS episodes in the six-week period between February 20 and March 31. Russia-focused segments accounted for 53 percent of these broadcasts.

That figure is conservative, excluding segments where Russia was discussed, but was not the overarching topic.

Maddow’s Russia coverage has dwarfed the time devoted to other top issues, including Trump’s escalating crackdown on undocumented immigrants (1.3 percent of coverage); Obamacare repeal (3.8 percent); the legal battle over Trump’s Muslim ban (5.6 percent), a surge of anti-GOP activism and town halls since Trump took office (5.8 percent), and Trump administration scandals and stumbles (11 percent).


Russia issues vs. Non-Russia issues. Chart: The Intercept

Maddow’s focus on Russia has helped her ratings, which are at their highest level since 2008.

As MSNBC’s most popular host, Maddow over the years has become a critical voice for U.S. progressives, helping to shape the outlook of millions of viewers and the smaller left-leaning outlets that follow her lead. A supremely gifted journalist who Vanity Fair has dubbed “the smartest person on TV,” Maddow’s influence is well-earned. She frequently brings pivotal national attention to overlooked stories, such as the poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water supply.

While proof of collusion with Moscow could well emerge — and could well topple Trump’s presidency — the “above all else” focus on Russia lacks concrete supporting evidence, either of Russian hacking and cyber disinformation impacting the vote’s outcome or of the Trump campaign’s complicity with it. Journalist Matt Taibbi calls it “an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.”

This muddies the waters for a sober, credible investigation of Russia’s actions — but that is the least of its consequences. Democrats have avoided constructive introspection on their seismic election loss by blaming the Kremlin. Anti-Russia sentiment threatens to turn into rank xenophobia and escalate tensions with a nuclear-armed power. And most critically for a vital news source like Maddow’s show, every moment devoted to scrutinizing Trump’s alleged Russia ties deflects attention from his administration’s actual policies.

“The Rachel Maddow Show” on Russia, February 20-March 31, 2017

In the six-week period we reviewed, Maddow covered Russia not just more than any other issue, but more than every other issue combined. The contrast is particularly striking when comparing the amount of time that speculative Russia stories received versus critical non-Russia issues.

The Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare, which was in full swing during the six-week period, got less coverage (nearly 46 minutes) than six other individual Russia issues on the chart below, such as the plight of Russian dissidents under Putin’s rule (54 minutes) or alleged Russian hacking and cyber disinformation (70 minutes). Trump’s Muslim travel ban got less time (67 minutes) than any one of four other Russia-related issues, including former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s Russia ties (88 minutes). Trump’s escalation of immigration raids and deportations (16 minutes) got just over half the coverage of the Russian-related machinations of his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort (31 minutes).




*these issues included substantial Russia content but were included in this category because their overarching focus was non-Russia. Chart: The Intercept

In 16 of the 28 episodes analyzed, Russia comprised either all or a substantial part of the “A-block”, the show’s headlining and far lengthiest segment, which often amounts to nearly half the show, excluding commercials.

Maddow’s Insistence on “a Continuing Operation”

Maddow’s foremost concern has been alleged Trump-Moscow collusion, which she has repeatedly suggested has continued beyond the election. Here she is on March 9:

What’s getting to be, I think, particularly unsettling, is that simultaneously, we are … number one, nailing down more direct connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government at the time the Russian government was influencing our election. Number two, at the same time, we are also starting to see what may be signs of continuing influence in our country. Not just during the campaign but during the administration. Basically, signs of what could be a continuing operation.

Maddow has acknowledged that allegations of Trump-Russia collusion are unverified. But she has ignored claims that cast them in a more skeptical light. For instance, James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, told NBC News on March 5 that U.S. intelligence has “no evidence” of collusion between Trump and Russia. On March 15, former CIA Director and Hillary Clinton surrogate Michael Morrell said “there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all.” Those statements have gone unmentioned.


MSNBC-PutinTrump-Power-Play--1491941048 Putin/Trump Power Play. Screenshot: MSNBC

“A Dream for Putin”: Trump Chose Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and Weakened the State Department for Russia

Proposed budget cuts, canceled press briefings, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s muted role have led Maddow to wonder if Trump is weakening the State Department on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. “We have to ask,” Maddow said in a 12-minute segment on March 8, “whether [Russia] wanted actions by U.S. political figures to weaken the parts of America that most annoy and that most undermine Vladimir Putin.” In an extended follow-up the next night, Maddow said, “Silencing the U.S. State Department, putting a friend of Vladimir Putin’s in charge at the U.S. State Department, who stands by quietly while the State Department gets hollowed out, gets gutted… That’s a dream for Putin.”

“It’s the CIA, Right?”: Putin used WikiLeaks Against the CIA

On March 7, WikiLeaks published documents exposing cyber tools used by the CIA to penetrate cell phones and other devices. Two days later, Maddow blamed Putin. Reminding viewers that WikiLeaks had released the Podesta emails, Maddow asked:

Consider what the other U.S. agency is besides the State Department that Putin most hates? That Putin most feels competitive with? That Putin most wants to beat? It’s the CIA, right? Spy versus spy. Putin is ex-KGB. He’s an ex-FSB officer… Smart observers say this is the largest dump of classified CIA material maybe ever, and it really could be a devastating blow to the CIA’s cyber war and flat-out spying capabilities, and that dump was released by WikiLeaks.

Maddow omitted the widely circulated reports that U.S. intelligence officials believe that the CIA’s own contractors were behind the cyber tools leak.

“How’d You Know It Was Coming?”: RT Colluded With WikiLeaks on the Podesta Emails

A popular internet theory posits that RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin-funded television network, had advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks release of hacked Podesta emails. The claim is based on RT’s Twitter account reporting the release 19 minutes before WikiLeaks’ Twitter account did. Here’s Maddow on March 9:

Russian state television was magically able to tweet about the next release of John Podesta e-mails. The sixth release of John Podesta e-mails even before WikiLeaks released them… Russia Today, how did you know it was coming?

But RT answered the question months earlier: the Podesta emails appeared on the WikiLeaks website before WikiLeaks got around to tweeting about it.

“Quid Pro Quo”: Trump Weakened the GOP Platform on Ukraine

On March 8 – one day after congressional Republicans unveiled their Obamacare repeal bill – Maddow led her show with “dramatic news.” U.S. officials, she explained, “are looking into a Russian citizen in conjunction with one of the incidents on the Trump campaign last year which defied explanation at the time”: the rejection of a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for sending lethal aid to Ukraine. Politico reported of the Russian in question, Konstantin Kilimnik: “after a late summer trip to the U.S., Kilimnik suggested that he had played a role in gutting a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that would have staked out a more adversarial stance towards Russia, according to a Kiev operative.”

The Politico report, Maddow explained over the course of 16 minutes, confirms “essentially a quid pro quo between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign,” whereby the Trump campaign sought “to take Russian intervention in Ukraine basically out of the Republican Party platform as an issue.”

But Politico’s main revelation was that U.S. investigators are “looking into” a Russian guy who an unnamed Ukrainian “operative” says “suggested” that he helped the Trump campaign change the language in a document that has no practical effect on anything, and that in fact remained strongly pro-Ukrainian government, stating:

We support maintaining and, if warranted, increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored. We also support providing appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater coordination with NATO defense planning.

“Is the New President Going to Take Those Troops Out?” Putin May Blackmail Trump Into Withdrawing U.S. Forces from Europe

On January 17, Maddow opened her broadcast by noting the parallels between Vladimir Putin’s political ascent and former British spy Christopher Steele’s just-disclosed dossier asserting that Russia has compromising details on Donald Trump’s sex life. “How Vladimir Putin stopped being just a KGB guy and got political power in the first place was by producing, at just the right time and in just the right way, just the right sex tape to use for political purposes,” Maddow said.

Maddow then discussed the increase of U.S. troops near Russia’s border during President Obama’s last days in office:

“The Kremlin is furious about it,” Maddow said. “Russia hates it, but our allies—they say they want it.” And so, with Trump about to enter the White House, Maddow had this to say:

Here’s the question – is the new president going to take those troops out? After all the speculation, after all the worry, we are actually about to find out if Russia maybe has something on the new president? We’re about to find out if the new president of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military starting noon on Friday. What is he going to do with those deployments? Watch this space. Seriously.

As of this writing, Trump has not withdrawn the troops.

Missed Opportunities While Focusing on Russia

On March 7, Maddow led with the day’s top story: the unveiling of Republican plans to repeal Obamacare. “If you are worried about losing your health insurance, if you are worried about 20 million of your fellow Americans losing their health insurance, today was very scary,” Maddow said.

But after less than two minutes, Maddow promised to return to the story later and shifted gears to a higher editorial priority:

But we are going to start at this embassy. The embassy, this is a big one. It is fully staffed … there’s even an attaché specifically for fish. The fisheries attaché is named Mr. Oleg Vladimirovich Rykov.

Viewers were then treated to a 22-minute deep dive into the Steele dossier and the various ways “the bits and pieces of what’s reported in this dossier are turning out to be true and reported and checkable.” When Maddow finally returned to the day’s opening, “scary” story about millions standing to lose their health insurance, she gave it less than four more minutes.

Six days later, on March 13, Maddow opened with the day’s “absolutely astonishing” news that the Congressional Budget Office was now estimating that 24 million people would lose their health insurance if Republicans manage to repeal Obamacare. But after less than two minutes, Maddow again veered off: “We’re actually going to start the show tonight on the subject of money, lots and lots and lots and lots of money.” The ensuing 20-minute segment speculated on whether the recent firing of New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara could be tied to investigations into Russian money laundering through Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Cyprus. The CBO’s Obamacare repeal news ended up getting less than five minutes of Maddow’s time.

On March 16, Trump unveiled a budget that would boost military funding and slash vital government spending. But Maddow viewers heard no mention of the EPA, public broadcasting, meals on wheels, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, the Community Development Block Grant program, or other targets of Trump’s domestic cuts. Instead, Maddow began the show by recounting the shady Russian bid to win the 2014 Winter Olympics, and how a Russian air cargo company involved in the scandal would later become one of several Russian entities that made payments to former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The 22-minute segment explored the issue of whether Flynn committed a crime in taking money from Russians, and whether the Trump campaign knew about it. The next 12 minutes were devoted to alleged Russian hacking that targeted down-ballot congressional Democratic candidates in 2016, and the Clinton campaign’s response.


Russia Cargo Company. Screenshot: MSNBC

Given her political expertise, journalistic acumen, and influential platform, Maddow is ideally suited to explore the Democrats’ 2016 electoral collapse in an insightful way. But the time and investigative zeal that Maddow has devoted to Russia has come at the cost of any such analysis. Maddow has shunned critical issues such as the Democratic establishment’s embrace of neoliberal financial policies and rejection of economic populism. Her audience has heard next to no discussion of why a segment of Obama voters abandoned Democrats for Trump or didn’t vote at all. Instead, lengthy segments have suggested that Clinton and the Democrats were done in by such Russian “active measures” as anti-Clinton bot attacks (their key target, a Bernie Sanders Facebook fan page in San Diego); hackers interfering in Congressional races; and fake news stories and social media posts.


Bernie Sanders San Diego Facebook Page. Screenshot: MSNBC

Maddow has also avoided substantive post-mortems on Clinton team fumbles such as its absence of policy messaging or neglect of swing states. Clinton campaign guests have faced almost no challenge or criticism. Interviewing Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, on December 12, Maddow asked about how Russia, FBI Director James Comey, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein fueled Clinton’s loss. Her toughest question on the campaign’s mistakes: “You guys did outraise and outspend Trump two to one. How could you have taken better advantage of your cash advantage?”

The Danger of Hyperbole

On several occasions, Maddow has described Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 race as an “attack on our election.” On March 21, she went further:

This is not part of American politics. This is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country. And it did not end on Election Day. We are still in it.

But whatever Russia may have done, it was not “international warfare.” And it was most likely far less consequential than U.S. interference in other countries over many decades, including Russia itself.

“If the worst is true,” Maddow warned on March 17, “if the presidency is effectively a Russian op, if the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian intelligence services and an American campaign — I mean, that is so profoundly big, we not only need to stay focused on figuring it out. We need to start preparing for what the consequences are going to be if it proves to be true.”

But what if the allegations are ultimately disproved or go nowhere? Maddow and likeminded influential liberals will have led their audience on a fruitless quest, all the while helping foment anti-Russia sentiment, channeling Democratic Party energy away from productive self-critique, and diverting focus from the White House’s actual policies. Trump would be handed a further gift via the damaged credibility of his “enemy”: the media responsible for holding him to account.

And what if the media’s focus on the “Russia Connection” ends up goading Trump to become more bellicose with Russia? The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved its doomsday clock to its highest point since 1953. Among many contributing factors, the Bulletin warned: “The United States and Russia—which together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons—remained at odds in a variety of theaters.”

The need for caution was perhaps most starkly underscored last week with Trump’s Syria bombing, which prompted the Kremlin to warn that Russia and the U.S. are “on the verge” of military conflict. Rather than raising the ludicrous theory that the attack on Syria was orchestrated by Putin, as Maddow and O’Donnell speculated, it’s worth asking if Trump was motivated at least in part to show the media – a top presidential preoccupation – that Putin isn’t pulling the strings.

But Maddow shows no signs of slowing down. Her top story on Monday night was about the detention in Spain of a prominent Russian spammer, Pyotr Levashov, at the FBI’s request. Levashov’s wife has told reporters that his arrest may be linked to a computer virus “associated with” Trump’s election victory. The FBI has offered no details. “This is the news,” Maddow reported in her 13-minute segment. “The Russian guy just got arrested.”

[admin]

The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook
by Glenn Greenwald
February 23 2017

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FOR ASPIRING JOURNALISTS, historians, or politically engaged citizens, there are few more productive uses of one’s time than randomly reading through the newsletters of I.F. Stone, the intrepid and independent journalist of the Cold War era who became, in my view, the nation’s first “blogger” even though he died before the advent of the internet. Frustrated by big media’s oppressive corporatized environment and its pro-government propaganda model, and then ultimately blacklisted from mainstream media outlets for his objections to anti-Russia narratives, Stone created his own bi-monthly newsletter, sustained exclusively by subscriptions, and spent 18 years relentlessly debunking propaganda spewing from the U.S. government and its media partners.

What makes Stone’s body of work so valuable is not its illumination of history but rather its illumination of the present. What’s most striking about his newsletters is how little changes when it comes to U.S. government propaganda and militarism, and the role the U.S. media plays in sustaining it all. Indeed, reading through his reporting, one gets the impression that U.S. politics just endlessly replays the same debates, conflicts, and tactics.

Much of Stone’s writings, particularly throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, focused on the techniques for keeping Americans in a high state of fear over the Kremlin. One passage, from August 1954, particularly resonates; Stone explained why it’s impossible to stop McCarthyism at home when — for purposes of sustaining U.S. war and militarism — Kremlin leaders are constantly being depicted as gravely threatening and even omnipotent. Other than the change in Moscow’s ideology — a change many of today’s most toxic McCarthyites explicitly deny — Stone’s observations could be written with equal accuracy today.

If Communists are some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic master minds in that distant Kremlin, engaged in a Satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave all mankind — and this is the thesis endlessly propounded by American liberals and conservatives alike, echoed night and day by every radio station and in every newspaper — the thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect — then how to fight McCarthy?

If the public mind is to be conditioned for war, if it is being taught to take for granted the destruction of millions of human beings, few of them tainted with this dreadful ideological virus, all of them indeed presumably pleading for us to liberate them, how can we argue that it matters if a few possibly innocent men lose jobs or reputations because of McCarthy?

Two vital points stand out here: 1) the key to sustaining fears over foreign adversaries is depicting them as all-powerful and ubiquitous; and 2) once that image takes root, few will be willing to question the propaganda for fear of being accused of siding with the Foreign Evil: “the thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect.”

This tactic — depicting adversaries as omnipotent super-villains — was key to the war on terror. Radical Muslims were not just violent threats; they were uniquely menacing, like Bond-film bad guys.

When photos emerged showing how the U.S. government was transporting terror suspect Jose Padilla to his trial by placing blackened goggles and earphones over his face, one U.S. commentator justified it by explaining it was necessary to prevent him from “blinking in code” to his terrorist comrades to activate plots. When asked why terror suspects were bound and gagged for long intercontinental flights to Guantánamo, a U.S. military official said that these were “people who would chew through a hydraulic cable to bring a C-17 down.” They possessed powers of dark magic and were lurking everywhere, even when you couldn’t see them. That’s the reason to fear them so much that one submits to any claim and any policy in the name of crushing them.

FEW FOREIGN VILLAINS have been vested with omnipotence and ubiquity like Vladimir Putin has been — at least ever since Democrats discovered (what they mistakenly believed was) his political utility as a bogeyman. There are very few negative developments in the world that do not end up at some point being pinned to the Russian leader, and very few critics of the Democratic Party who are not, at some point, cast as Putin loyalists or Kremlin spies:

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald
Has there even been a more ubiquitous and omnipotent villain in history?
9:45 AM - 24 Jul 2016

Howard Dean @ GovHowardDean
Would be interesting to find out if the intercept gets money from Russia or Iran

Corinne Marasco #CorinneAM
PSA: Guilt by association is @lhfang's speciality because he fancies himself an "investigative journalist"

RAWSTORY
Rachel Maddow: Why hasn't Jill Stein said anything about the Trump-Russia scandal?
by Travis Gettys
22 Feb 2017

Maddow cast suspicion on Stein’s silence over alleged Russian attempts to interfere with the election to benefit Donald Trump, who she claimed during her own campaign would govern no differently than Hillary Clinton.

“So everybody’s like, ‘Wow, how come this like super, super aggressive opposition that we saw from these third-party candidates — how come they haven’t said anything since this scandal has broken?’” Maddow said.

“I don’t know, Jill — I can’t pronounce it in Russian,” Maddow said, with apparent sarcasm. “Hope you’re really psyched about your Wisconsin vote totals.”

Putin — like al Qaeda terrorists and Soviet Communists before him — is everywhere. Russia is lurking behind all evils, most importantly — of course — Hillary Clinton’s defeat. And whoever questions any of that is revealing themselves to be a traitor, likely on Putin’s payroll.

As The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel put it on Tuesday in the Washington Post: “In the targeting of Trump, too many liberals have joined in fanning a neo-McCarthyite furor, working to discredit those who seek to deescalate U.S.-Russian tensions, and dismissing anyone expressing doubts about the charges of hacking or collusion as a Putin apologist. … What we don’t need is a replay of Cold War hysteria that cuts off debate, slanders skeptics and undermines any effort to explore areas of agreement with Russia in our own national interest.” That precisely echoes what Stone observed 62 years ago: Claims of Russian infiltration and ubiquity are “the thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect” (Stone was not just cast as a Kremlin loyalist during his life but smeared as a Stalinist agent after he died).

I’ve written extensively about all this throughout the last year, as Russia Fever reached (what I hope is) its apex — or, more accurately, its nadir. I won’t repeat that all here.

BUT I DO want to draw attention to an outstanding article in today’s Guardian by the Russian-born American journalist Keith Gessen, in which he clinically examines — and demolishes — all of the hysterical, ignorant, fearmongering, manipulative claims now predominant in U.S. discourse about Russia, Putin, and the Kremlin.

The article begins: “Vladimir Putin, you may have noticed, is everywhere.” As a result, he points out, “Putinology” — which he defines as “the production of commentary and analysis about Putin and his motivations, based on necessarily partial, incomplete and sometimes entirely false information” — is now in great prominence even though it “has existed as a distinct intellectual industry for over a decade.” In sum, he writes: “At no time in history have more people with less knowledge, and greater outrage, opined on the subject of Russia’s president.”

It’s hardly unique for American media and political commentators to speak of foreign adversaries with a mix of ignorance and paranoia. But the role Putin serves above all else, he says, is to cast America’s problems not as its own doing but rather the fault of foreigners, and more importantly, to relieve the Democratic Party of the need to examine its own fundamental flaws and errors:

According to a recent report, Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians — and, by extension, Barack Obama, who did not make a big issue of the hacks before November — for her electoral debacle. In this instance, thinking about Putin helps not to think about everything else that went wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it.

But while petty self-exoneration may be the prime motive, the far greater danger is how much this obsession distracts from, and distorts, the pervasive corruption of America’s ruling class. As Gessen writes:

If Donald Trump is impeached and imprisoned for conspiring with a foreign power to undermine American democracy, I will celebrate as much as the next American. And yet in the long run, the Russia card is not just bad politics, it is intellectual and moral bankruptcy. It is an attempt to blame the deep and abiding problems of our country on a foreign power. As some commentators have pointed out, it is a page from the playbook of none other than Putin himself.

As Adam Johnson detailed in the Los Angeles Times last week, the constant effort to attribute Trump to foreign dynamics is devoted to avoiding the reality that U.S. policy and culture is what gave rise to him. Nothing achieves that goal better than continually attributing Trump — and every other negative outcome — to the secret work of Kremlin leaders.

The game that establishment Democrats and their allies are playing is not just tawdry but dangerous. The U.S. political, media, military, and intelligence classes are still full of people seeking confrontation with Russia; included among them are military officials whom Trump has appointed to key positions.

As Stone observed in the 1950s, aggression toward and fearmongering over the Kremlin on the one hand, and smearing domestic critics of that approach as disloyal on the other, are inextricably linked. When one takes root, it’s very difficult to stop the other. And you can only propagate demonization rhetoric about a foreign adversary for so long before triggering, wittingly or otherwise, very dangerous confrontations between the two.

Top photo: Portrait of journalist I.F. Stone in his office in Washington in 1966.

[admin]

Full Clapper: "No Evidence" of Collusion Between Trump and Russia
Interview with James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence
by Chuck Todd, Meet The Press
March 5, 2017

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CHUCK TODD:

We're going to pause the conversation and pick it up, I have a feeling, on the other side of the half hour. But coming up is a man who may know more than anyone about Russia's efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. It's the former Director of National Intelligence, Jim Clapper. He joins me next.

***COMMERCIAL BREAK***

CHUCK TODD:

Welcome back. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that, in the dying days of the Obama presidency, White House officials took steps to spread information about Russia's attempt to undermine the presidential election. Why? Well, one reason given was to make it easier for government investigators, and in particular, Congress, to uncover that truth.

Well, James Clapper, a career intelligence officer, was the Director of National Intelligence for more than six years under President Obama, he spearheaded the report that was released in January that concluded that Russians hacked the Democrat National Committee e-mails and interfered with the 2016 election. And Mr. Clapper joins me now. Welcome, sir, to Meet the Press.

JAMES CLAPPER:

Thanks, Chuck, for everything.

CHUCK TODD:

Let me start with the President's tweets yesterday, this idea that maybe President Obama ordered an illegal wiretap of his offices. If something like that happened, would this be something you would be aware of?

JAMES CLAPPER:

I would certainly hope so. I can't say-- obviously, I'm not, I can't speak officially anymore. But I will say that, for the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI, there was no such wiretap activity mounted against-- the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign. I can't speak for other Title Three authorized entities in the government or a state or local entity.

CHUCK TODD:

Yeah, I was just going to say, if the F.B.I., for instance, had a FISA court order of some sort for a surveillance, would that be information you would know or not know?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Yes.

CHUCK TODD:

You would be told this?

JAMES CLAPPER:

I would know that.

CHUCK TODD:

If there was a FISA court order--

JAMES CLAPPER:

Yes.

CHUCK TODD:

--on something like this.

JAMES CLAPPER:

Something like this, absolutely.

CHUCK TODD:

And at this point, you can't confirm or deny whether that exists?

JAMES CLAPPER:

I can deny it.

CHUCK TODD:

There is no FISA court order?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Not-- not to know my knowledge.

CHUCK TODD:

Of anything at Trump Tower?

JAMES CLAPPER:

No.

CHUCK TODD:

Well, that's an important revelation at this point. Let me ask you this. Does intelligence exist that can definitively answer the following question, whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials?

JAMES CLAPPER:

We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, "our," that's N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.

CHUCK TODD:

I understand that. But does it exist?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Not to my knowledge.

CHUCK TODD:

If it existed, it would have been in this report?

JAMES CLAPPER:

This could have unfolded or become available in the time since I left the government.

CHUCK TODD:

At some--

JAMES CLAPPER:

But at the time, we had no evidence of such collusion.

CHUCK TODD:

There's a lot of smoke, but there hasn't been that smoking gun yet. At what point should the public start to wonder if this is all just smoke?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, that's a good question. I don't know. I do think, though, it is in everyone's interest, in the current President's interests, in the Democrats' interests, in the Republican interest, in the country's interest, to get to the bottom of all this. Because it's such a distraction. And certainly the Russians have to be chortling about the success of their efforts to sow dissention in this country.

CHUCK TODD:

So you feel like your report does not get to the bottom-- you admit your report that you released in January doesn't get to the bottom of this?

JAMES CLAPPER:

It did-- well, it got to the bottom of the evidence to the extent of the evidence we had at the time. Whether there is more evidence that's become available since then, whether ongoing investigations will be revelatory, I don't know.

CHUCK TODD:

There was a conclusion that said, "It's clear that the Russians interfered and did so in an attempt to help Donald Trump." Do you still believe that conclusion?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Yes, I do.

CHUCK TODD:

But at this point, what's not proven is the idea of collusion.

JAMES CLAPPER:

That's correct.

CHUCK TODD:

When you see these parade of officials that were associated with the Trump campaign, first they deny any conversations, now we're hearing more, does that add to suspicion? Or do you think some of this is circumstantial?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, I can't say what the nature of those conversations and dialogues were, for the most part. Again, I'd think it would be very healthy to completely clear the air on this subject. And I think it would be in everyone's interest to have that done.

CHUCK TODD:

Can the Senate Intelligence Committee-- what are we going to learn from their investigation, do you think, that will move beyond what you were able to do?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Well, I think they can look at this from a broader context than we could. And at this point, I do have confidence in the Senate intelligence Committee and their effort. It is underway, in contrast to the House Intelligence Committee, which just last week agreed on their charter.

And importantly, in the case of the Senate Intelligence Committee, this appears to me to be a truly bipartisan effort. And so I think that needs to play out. If, for some reason, that proves not to be satisfactory in the minds of those who make those decisions, then perhaps then move on to a special prosecutor.

CHUCK TODD:

The New York Times, earlier this week, and as I was introducing you, this idea that they sort of left a trail, maybe lowered classif-- can you walk us through how that would work? Did they lower classification levels on certain information? Was that a fair read of what was done in the last few weeks of the administration?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Actually not. Because of the sensitivity of much of the information in this report, our actual effort was to protect it and not to spread it around, and certainly not to dumb it down, if I can use that phrase, in order to disseminate it more widely. We were under a preservation order from both our oversight committees to preserve and protect all the information related to that report, in any event.

CHUCK TODD:

Let me ask you one other final question on the infamous dossier that was put together by this former British operative named Christopher Steele. Why did you feel the need to brief the president on that at the time?

JAMES CLAPPER:

We felt that it was important that he know about it, that it was out there. And that, without respect to the veracity of the contents of the dossier, that's why it was not included as a part of our report. Because much of it could not be corroborated. And importantly, some of the sources that Mr. Steele drew on, second and third order assets, we could not validate or corroborate.

So for that reason, at least in my view, the important thing was to warn the president that this thing was out there. The Russians have a term, an acronym, called Kompromat, which they will either generate, if it's truthful or if it's contrived. And it's important, we felt, that he knew of the existence of this dossier.

CHUCK TODD:

Have you done this with other presidents? Have you had to brief them about unverified intelligence?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Yes, I’ve had occasion in the six and a half years I was DNI to tell President Obama certain things that we could not corroborate or validate, but that we just thought he ought to know it was out there.

CHUCK TODD:

All right. James Clapper, I have a feeling-- do you expect to have to testify on Capitol Hill among these things?

JAMES CLAPPER:

Oh, I don't think there's any doubt.

CHUCK TODD:

All right. Mr. Clapper, then I have a feeling we will see you on T.V. some time soon. And hopefully you'll come back here on Meet the Press. Thanks for coming on and sharing your views, sir.

JAMES CLAPPER:

Thanks very much, Chuck.

[admin]

Clinton Ally Says Smoke, But No Fire: No Russia-Trump Collusion
by Ken Dilanian
NBC News
March 16, 2017

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Former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who endorsed Hillary Clinton and called Donald Trump a dupe of Russia, cast doubt Wednesday night on allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.

Morell, who was in line to become CIA director if Clinton won, said he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with Russians. He also raised questions about the dossier written by a former British intelligence officer, which alleged a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

His comments were in sharp contrast to those of many Clinton partisans — such as former communications director Jennifer Palmieri — who have stated publicly they believe the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia’s efforts to interfere in the election against Clinton.

Morell said he had learned that the former officer, Christopher Steele, paid his key Russian sources, and interviewed them through intermediaries.

"On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all," Morell said at an event sponsored by the Cipher Brief, an intelligence web site.

"There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it."

Morell pointed out that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Meet the Press on March 5 that he had seen no evidence of a conspiracy when he left office January 20.

"That’s a pretty strong statement by General Clapper," Morell said.

About the dossier, Morell said, "Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just can’t."

The dossier "doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think," he said.

He continued: "I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries.

"And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, ‘hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,’ because they want to get paid some more.

"I think you’ve got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier."

Another former CIA officer in the room pointed out that the CIA also pays its sources.

"But we know who the source is and we know how they got the information," Morell responded.

In August, Morell accused Trump of being an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."

Morell said Wednesday that he continues to believe that the Russian campaign of hacking, leaking and fake news, which the CIA says was designed to hurt Clinton and help Trump, was a hugely consequential action to which the U.S. has not sufficiently responded.

Putin, he said, has suffered no consequence for his unprecedented interference in the U.S. election.

"This has never happened before in American history on this scale, never not even close. And Putin did not pay any price for this — nothing, zero."