Russiagate Isn’t About Trump, And It Isn’t Even Ultimately About Russia written by caitlin johnstone MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently asked a question of his Twitter following that was so heavily loaded it wouldn’t be permitted on most interstate highways: “Aside from genuine cranks, is there anyone left denying it was the Russians that committed criminal sabotage in the American election?” Hayes asked this fake question because he works for MSNBC and it is therefore his job, and he asked it in response to a report first made viral by deranged espionage LARPer Eric Garland that a Dutch intelligence agency had been observing Russian hackers attacking US political parties in advance of the 2016 election. Like all “bombshell” Russiagate reports, this one roared through social media like wildfire carried on the wings of liberal hysteria about the current administration, only to be exposed as being riddled with gaping plot holes as documented here by independent journalist Suzie Dawson. The report revolves around an allegedly Russian cyber threat now known in the west as “Cozy Bear,” which as Real News‘ Max Blumenthal notes is not a network of hackers but “a Russian-sounding name the for-profit firm Crowdstrike assigned to an APT to market its findings to gullible reporters desperate for Russiagate scoops.” This “bombshell” overlapped with another as it was reported by the New York Times that at one point many months ago Trump had wanted to fire Robert Mueller, but then didn’t. *Cough.* Why does this keep happening? Why does the public keep getting sold a mountain of suspicion with zero substance? Over and over and over again these “bombshell” stories come out about Trump and Russia, Russia and Trump, only to be debunked, retracted, or erased from the spotlight after people start actually reading the allegations and thinking critically about them and see they’re not the shocking bombshells they purport to be? These allegations are all premised upon claims made the US intelligence community, which has an extensive and well-documented history of lying to advance its agendas, as well as porous claims made by an extremely shady and insanely profitable private cyber security company, and yet all we’re ever shown is smoke and mirrors with no actual fire. Why is that? You can begin finding your way toward the answer to that question by envisioning the following hypothetical scenario. Imagine what would happen if, instead of promoting the Russiagate narrative, the faces of the consent-manufacturing machine known as the mass media began telling mainstream America that in order to ensure that the US will remain capable of dominating the other countries on this planet, there’s going to have to be an aggressive campaign to re-inflame the Cold War with the goal of disrupting and undermining China and its allies. That would be a very different narrative with a very different effect, wouldn’t it? But that’s exactly what’s going on here, and if the US power establishment and its propaganda machine were in the business of telling people the truth, that’s precisely what they’d say. It’s not a secret that China has been working to surpass the United States as the world’s leading superpower as quickly as possible. Hell, Xi Jinping flat-out said so during a three and a half hour address last October, and many experts think it might happen a lot sooner than Xi’s 30-year deadline. An editorial from China’s state press agency about the Davos World Economic Forum asserts that the time has come for the world to choose between the “Xi-style collaborative approach” and Trump’s “self-centred America First policy (which) has led his country away from multiple multilateral pacts and infused anxiety into both allies and the broader world.” China has been collaborating with Russia to end the hegemony of the US dollar, to shore up control of the Arctic as new resources become available, and just generally build up its own power and influence instead of working to remain in Washington’s good graces as most western nations have chosen to do. Preventing this is the single most important goal of the US power establishment, not just its elected government but the unelected plutocrats, defense and intelligence agencies which control the nation’s affairs behind the scenes. This agenda is so important that in a letter to his successor the outgoing President Barack Obama made the “indispensable” nature of American planetary leadership his sole concrete piece of advice, and pro-establishment influence firms like Project for a New American Century have made preventing the rise of a rival superpower their stated primary goal. This is what Russiagate is ultimately about. Democrats think it’s about impeaching Trump and protecting the world from a nigh-omnipotent supervillain in Vladimir Putin, Trump’s supporters think it’s a “deep state coup” to try and oust their president, but in reality this has nothing to do with Trump, and ultimately not a whole lot to do with Russia either. When all is said and done, Russiagate is about China. In an essay titled “Russia-China Tandem Changes the World”, US-Russia relations analyst Gilbert Doctorow explains how the surging economic power China depends upon Russia’s willingness to go head-to-head with America and its extensive experience with US attempts to undermine the USSR during the Cold War. Alone both nations are very vulnerable, but together their strengths are complimentary in a way that poses a direct threat to America’s self-appointed role as world leader. “Russia is essential to China because of Moscow’s long experience managing global relations going back to the period of the Cold War and because of its willingness and ability today to stand up directly to the American hegemon,” writes Doctorow, “whereas China, with its heavy dependence on its vast exports to the U.S., cannot do so without endangering vital interests. Moreover, since the Western establishment sees China as the long-term challenge to its supremacy, it is best for Beijing to exercise its influence through another power, which today is Russia.” So the strategic value of taking Russia out of the equation is clear, and that’s exactly what the US power establishment is attempting to do. California Representative Eric Swalwell, one of the lead congressional promoters of both anti-Russia sentiment and the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative, admitted last year that he’d like to see tougher sanctions stacked up until they “isolate Russia from the rest of the world” after much badgering from Fox’s Tucker Carlson about his incendiary claims that the alleged cyberattacks constituted an “act of war.” It is worth noting here that despite Swalwell’s repeated hysterical claims about Trump and Russia, he recently voted to renew the treasonous Kremlin-colluding president’s godlike surveillance powers anyway. Establishment muppets like Swalwell and the unelected elites who own them don’t care about Trump, they care about crippling China’s right arm Russia so that they can set about sabotaging the agendas of a potential rival superpower unimpeded by the skilful opposition of a nuclear superpower. But, getting back to the hypothetical situation I asked you to envision earlier, they can’t just come right out and say that. They can’t. The US oligarchs, the oligarch-owned media outlets, and the oligarch-aligned intelligence/defense agencies can’t just come right out and say “Hey America, we need to ensure our power structures remain unrivalled for the foreseeable future, so we’re going to have to try and shut down Russia’s influence using ever-tightening economic sanctions, NATO expansionism, proxy wars and troops along Russia’s border to squeeze them until they lose the capacity to interfere with our ability to crush China. We’ll also need a vastly inflated military budget to help facilitate our geopolitical agendas and prepare for a possible world war, please.” A few Americans might consent to it, but by and large the US public would rather see those resources spent on making their lives better. Just as importantly, the rest of the world would recoil in revulsion. So they lie. They use America’s deliberately constructed partisan enmity and culture wars to fan the flames of mass hysteria about a new president so that enough Americans will permit continuous escalations with Russia under the mistaken impression that they are helping to resist Trump. They think they’re lying to you for your own good, because you can’t understand how important it is that they do what they’re trying to do. That’s why there are so many gaping plot holes and none of this ever quite adds up; they’re lying to you like a parent telling a child he needs to eat his broccoli if he doesn’t want a lump of coal for Christmas. Except instead of eating broccoli it’s consenting to dangerous escalations and military expansionism, and instead of a parent it’s a class of elitist sociopaths, and you’re always going to get coal. And sure, an argument can be made that the world is better off under the watchful domination of the US power establishment than it would be with multipolar power arrangements, and I encounter many establishment loyalists who make precisely that argument. Personally I would argue that the death, destruction and mayhem caused by the intrinsically evil things the US establishment must do in order to maintain dominance completely invalidate that argument, but it’s a debate that people deserve to have, and they can’t have it when they’re being lied to about what’s really going on. Insist on the truth. Keep pushing back against this pernicious psyop. Spread the word.
For all intents and purposes. It's an honorary title. Caitlin Johnstone? *Cough.* Here's an assessment of your Caitlin Johnstone in relation to another piece she had previously written on the subject: This is fairly classic Caitlin Johnstone selection-biased “reporting”. How on earth can she call herself a journalist with a straight face? She’s a pundit and what’s more dangerous is that so many people will read her stuff and believe it represents fact. I have been an attorney and constitutional scholar for over 25 years and, believe me, “Russiagate”, or whatever other bullshit title you care to use, is a constitutional crisis of historic proportion. Johnston, once again (see: 911 deniers), cherry-picks the facts she likes and disregards the rest. I’m not in any way comparing her work to the evils of naziism, but so much of her “reporting” reminds me of the holocaust deniers: because we do not have Hitler or Hess or Goebbels on tape ordering the holocaust, because we cannot point to one specific document that says “now go forth and kill you some Jews”, the reasonable conclusion is that they didn’t do it, right? (The gibbet at Nuremberg begs to differ). I have prosecuted well over 100 obstruction of justice cases and, regardless of whether Trump or his minions colluded with Russia to steal an election (I think he did, but I need more evidence), there is certainly enough evidence to establish a prima facie case for obstruction against Flynn, his son, Manafort, Gates, Trump Jr., Sam Clovis, Kushner, Page, Papadopolous and Sessions. They went forth as emissaries of the Trump campaign, not private citizens. Obviously, whatever charges are filed, each of these people has an absolute right to rebut and refute a prima facie case in a court of law, which is precisely where they should be, right now. At the very least, each of the men on that list are also, prima facie, chargeable for failure to disclose foreign political and business ties. But wait, you say, almost no one is prosecuted under FARA. Until now, that would have been true, but the fact is that a crime is being committed when, say, Kushner or Sessions “forgets” to come clean on the form, when they only “remember” after the NYT or WaPo reports it. Mega-corporations dump tons of hazardous waste into the ocean every day and almost none are ever prosecuted. How does that make it right? More importantly, FARA should be rigorously prosecuted and the failure to do so has, in part, led to the lobbying crisis we find ourselves in now. No one in the Obama or Bush administrations was watching that store, which gave us a foreign agent as the head of Trump’s campaign and one as the Director of National Security. Which brings up a very interesting question: why is it that virtually every Trump surrogate and senior staff member failed to disclose? Forget active collusion. It matters and will matter more when hard evidence is presented, but we are in a position where lower-level crimes have almost certainly been committed by the Trump cadre. Motive is important in a common sense context, and it is not essential to prove motive in criminal prosecutions, but they probably did it and the question remains: why? Johnstone consistently and vociferously proclaims that “Russiagate” is a nothing story, designed to distract us from “real” issues. But we are being asked by Caitlin to ignore every common sense instinct that we have. Why did all these men fail to disclose? Why did they continue their illicit relationships with foreign governments during the campaign and after the election? And we have to get past the idea that wikileaks is anything more than a political actor. They are not neutral. They selectively release material and, as we have seen, at least one senior operative in the wikileaks machine was overjoyed to let Trump Jr. know that they had DNC emails that could harm Clinton. They take sides and someone in their hierarchy determined that it was a good thing to support Trump by trashing Clinton. Caitlin never met a conspiracy she didn’t like and yet she consistently fails to mention any of the slimy inner workings of the Trump campaign and presidency. 911? Inside job. Eco-genocide? A vast corporate conspiracy to profit from the destruction of the natural world. “Russiagate”? Nonsense and hype that will lead nowhere and is a complete waste of our time. When almost every one of Trump’s senior staff has a political, not just economic, but political relationship with Russia, we are absolutely right to investigate it thoroughly. Bob Mueller has been universally praised by literally every constituency that has seen him in action: Presidents, congress, the judiciary, his co-workers. A significant proportion of Americans wants to know what happened. None of this is a waste of time or resources. We have an absolute right to know who is pulling the levers of power, and Mueller will either find something (more than he already has) or he will not. Either way, every indication is that he will honestly and fairly reveal his conclusions. Stop preaching to me about what we “should” be focused on. You keep your eye on the 911 commission, but I want to know if my President and his people were bought and paid for by the Russians. _________ Stated differently, Caitlin Johnstone is a hack.
Apologies if I missed it, but who is the author of that "article" slamming Johnstone? At the end of the day, we have someone (not sure who) stating they have experience in obstruction of justice cases, claiming Wikileaks is a political actor on the side of Trump (lol) and then going back to the Russia-gate lunacy where - as you and I argued months ago - still has no evidence linking back to Trump. Zippo. Nada. Zilch. What's more, is that your efforts (and this unknown person's) to discredit the individual writing the article rather than debate any of the points in the article So you'll pardon me if I tend to lean towards what Johnstone is saying rather than, well, anything in that article whatsoever. I know, I'm a nazi, or a communist or a Putin lover, or what else you want to call me. Make sure to use your limited Russian when referring to me, da comrade?
"...regardless of whether Trump or his minions colluded with Russia to steal an election (I think he did, but I need more evidence)" LOL I can't believe this "constitutional scholar" typed this with a straight face. Pot, meet kettle.
This is a fair point. However, what Johnstone is doing is building an argument through the presentation of facts that are, by themselves, only partially related to the theory's conclusion. When taken together, however, they begin to paint a good picture of the theory but, as you say, there is no evidence. The reader has to decide whether or not the collective argument makes sense or should be discounted. You don't have to like or agree with her points, and I suspect you won't because of your hyper partisanship.