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Source: Counterpunch
MAY 26, 2023
The Russiagate Fraud Revisited
Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 2.0
According to the recently published Harvard / Harris poll of the political views of Americans, 70% believe that the US intelligence agencies are 1) rigging American elections and 2) should be prevented from doing so in the future. This view finds support in the recently released report from Special Counsel John Durham that concluded that the FBI colluded with the 2016 (Hillary) Clinton campaign to concoct and promote the Russiagate fraud. The apparent plan was for the FBI to help Clinton win the election, or to disempower Mr. Trump if he was elected.
Having been repeatedly advised to read key parts of the Mueller Report by people committed to the Russiagate hoax, I did. As circumstance had it, I had already explained why Mueller’s indictments of foreign individuals and corporations were political in nature because they were unlikely to be contested. What foreign national would voluntarily come to the US to face the charges? In fact, one of the companies charged, Concord Management, did precisely that. The Mueller team instantly dropped the charges. Russiagate is a fraud. Read the Durham Report.
Prior to recent revelations, suggestions that the Feds were behind Russiagate were arrogantly dismissed as Russian propaganda. A large and intrusive Federal effort to counter ‘disinformation’ was created to prevent revelations that now appear to be true from ever reaching the public. In other words, the task of the Federal (and private) disinformation industry is to insure that only Federally-sponsored disinformation and malinformation gets distributed. Who says that liberals and the American left are completely useless?
For younger readers, American elections have long featured subterranean politics where bored and not terrifically bright campaign contribution receptacles (politicians) play one-dimensional checkers knowing that the duopoly power that the political parties have accrued will prevent any real threat to their status from arising. The Clintons (Bill and Hill) no doubt felt that all was fair following the impeachment of Mr. Clinton in 1998 for a series of errant blowjobs that he received from a young woman that his soul would have benefited by mentoring instead.
That the American people would be enlisted in this minor court intrigue on the side of one politician or another is testament to who it is that the American electoral system has been constructed to benefit. Even though registered ‘Independents’ now constitute the largest voter affiliation group in the US by a large margin, the US has no ‘Independent’ party for them to vote for. In this way, the duopoly parties are the political equivalent of dogshit that can’t be wiped from one’s shoe. The only solution is to throw the shoe out and find less dysfunctional footwear.
My Republican friends who voted for Donald Trump (twice) descended from people who have voted Republican since Abraham Lincoln was President. They weren’t particularly enthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s divisive blather, but they saw the Russiagate fraud for what it now appears to have been— a Clintonite scam to convince fragile and deeply cloistered city and suburb dwellers that they are God’s chosen people. And it worked. A political economy of Trump-derision emerged, with sad, gray, opportunists finding their callings repeating CIA talking points.
None of this is a defense of Donald Trump, who is apparently quite capable of defending himself. The FBI and CIA weren’t scamming ‘the right’ with the Russiagate fraud. My Republican friends knew it was nonsense from day one. The FBI and CIA were scamming liberals and ‘the left.’ The ex-post posture that ‘the left’ promoted the scam because it served its political interests begs the question: what did they get for it? Barring Biden blowing up the world searching for a clean diaper; Donald Trump is going to be re-elected.
What Democrats need to be held to account for, in addition to Biden, is the fact that they are still centering their political fortunes on Trump. In doing so, they give away their game. Question: how do politicians in an alleged democracy represent the interests of the rich and connected while needing votes from the not-rich and not-connected? Answer: they demonize the other party, even as it faces the same challenge. Helping in this respect is a left geezerati whose remembrance of things past includes the Democratic party of the 1940s and 1950s. That party hasn’t existed for over half a century.
Through this alliance between the CIA / FBI, the urban and suburban bourgeois, and the self-styled ‘radical left,’ what was once a promising and much needed political program has been substantively destroyed. That program included the creation of Federal jobs that pay to elevate working people, an end to US militarism and forever wars, deep, robust, and internationally negotiated environmental programs to save the planet, and a reorientation of capitalism away from serving the few to serving the many. While my views on ‘saving capitalism’ have been previously stated (replace it with something that works), this was the compromise.
What ‘we’ got was tax breaks to fund the executive bonus pools of ‘green’ corporations, and war with Russia. Joe Biden’s campaign staff, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has now been credibly accused of colluding with the CIA to rig the 2020 election in Biden’s favor. And recent revelations now place dozens of Federal agents in key positions during the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. This might be a political mess if the urban bourgeois knew anything about it. As with the Pentecostal Sects of my youth, liberals now quantify their virtue by what they don’t know.
Were the Russiagate fraud the only aspect of the ‘left’ narrative from the Trump era that is coming unwound, the press framing of it as a press / DNC story would be more plausible. However, to the point made by political journalist Aaron Mate here, plausible reports from credible sources now have the FBI / CIA rigging two elections for the national Democrats. According to the (Durham) report, the FBI colluded with the (Hillary) Clinton campaign to falsely accuse the Trump campaign of collusion with Russia prior to the 2016 election.
In separate reporting over recent weeks, former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morrell, publicly stated that the CIA letter claiming that the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop ‘has the earmarks of Russian disinformation’ was solicited by current Biden Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who in 2020 worked on Biden’s campaign staff. Morrell organized the signing and distribution of the letter, which was apparently approved by the (active) CIA. This ‘Russian disinformation’ disinformation was released mere weeks before the 2020 election.
Further, the ‘plot’ to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was conceived, organized, financed, and partially carried out by the FBI and its informants (see here, here, here, here, here). These informants outnumbered the alleged conspirators by 3:1. Of course, the FBI had already been accused of entrapping young Muslim and Black men in fake ‘terrorism’ plots over the fifteen years that preceded the riot. Anyone doing left political organizing over the last half-century would have been aware of the presence of the FBI in organizing circles.
With respect to the Capitol riot (January 6th), what may seem clear in isolation quickly becomes muddied when context is brought in. CIA propaganda vendor the New York Times now admits that eight Federal informants had infiltrated the Proud Boys at the time of the riot. The FBI even appears to be willing to sacrifice some of its own to save face. Leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, recently convicted on seditious conspiracy charges, has long been known to be an FBI informant. Taken together, this renders the FBI’s claim of no foreknowledge of the Capitol riot implausible.
A recent article by political journalist Branko Marcetic articulates the ‘left’ theory that the FBI informants involved in the Capitol riot were actually on the side of the far right. While no evidence was provided to support this assertion, assume for a moment that it is partially or wholly true. What Special Counsel John Durham found was that the FBI, as an institution, unambiguously sided with the national Democrats, going so far as ignoring potentially serious crimes by Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff to focus solely on discrediting the Trump administration.
Graph: excess deaths measure differences in death rates between nations using a single method of estimation. The graph measures the US death rate per 100,000 people versus a benchmark consisting of the average death rates of Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and Australia. Illustrated is a human catastrophe unfolding in the US. Every year since 2000 the US has had hundreds of thousands more death than nations with functioning healthcare systems. The spike at the right of the graph is relative, meaning that while all of these nations experienced the Covid pandemic, the US did horrifyingly worse. This data corroborates the life expectancy data in my last piece. Source: OECD.
So, while the ideological predisposition of ‘law enforcement,’ broadly considered, may tend toward the retired-military-right, the leaderships of the FBI and / or CIA have been committed to rigging elections for Democrats since 2016. Additionally, given the stated goal of these agencies of disrupting ‘domestic terrorists’ on the political right, why would it staff the effort with people that couldn’t be trusted to carry out the leadership’s mission? The FBI more likely than not understood the electoral benefit to Democrats of allowing the Capitol riot to proceed.
The indignation that the political class expressed in response to the riot stands in stark contrast to its readiness to launch wars that kill millions of people based on conspicuously fraudulent grounds. In fact, they love political violence, they adore it, they live for it. It provides them with good incomes and, paradoxically, a sense of moral worth. In other words, they don’t oppose political violence; they oppose it being directed at them. Meanwhile, in America, things aren’t going so well (see graph above). Many more people are dying now due to a lack of healthcare and an effective pandemic response than from ‘political extremism.’
That it apparently never occurred to Marcetic (above) that Federal agents were made fully aware of the plans of the Proud Boys on January 6th, and yet let the riot proceed, would seem strange if an absence of comprehension hadn’t motivated the entire bourgeois response to the Russiagate fraud. Additionally, his assertion that the FBI has long hounded ‘the left,’ therefore it is allied with the right, begs the question: what left? The only program that the current American left has is to vote for Democrats. I guess some people like to be kicked in the groin repeatedly.
There is no hostility toward Marcetic here. There is, however, more than a bit of frustration. In the Gretchen Whitmer case, who cares if the FBI informants agreed with anything the alleged kidnappers said? They did what they were told to do by the FBI. That much is uncontested. As per the links near the top of this piece, the FBI conceived, organized, and financed the plot. The FBI informants enlisted the alleged plotters, organized them as per instructions from FBI agents, and testified against them in court. But they were in league with the plotters? How gullible are you?
The only interesting question to emerge from this mess is why any of this new-old information is coming out now? The US goes through these public disclosures whenever there is a crisis, with the apparent goal of superficially exposing bad behavior so that it is neutralized as ‘old news’ in future affairs. The admission by Michael Morrell that he colluded with the Biden campaign to rig the 2020 election is ‘against interest.’ The CIA is either trying to get out ahead of serious accusations of wrongdoing, or, sensing weakness, it is leaving the national Democrats to dangle in the wind.
I tend toward the latter explanation. Biden was brought to power to bury ‘Socialism.’ He has done so. Donald Trump couldn’t have done so nearly as effectively. The CIA has its war in Ukraine, and establishment Republicans have shown their willingness to get on board with it. Democrats and ‘liberalism’ are going to be damaged goods for the foreseeable future (see 1975 – 2015), so why not toss Biden and the idiot left overboard and forge new-old alliances with the right? The CIA cut its eye-teeth on oil geopolitics, which are in vogue again thanks to its efforts in Ukraine.
Most Americans have likely forgotten the state of panic that was achieved when retired grandparents living in tiny towns across the US were convinced by the George W. Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was going to rape them in their sleep (poison them with biological weapons made by the US military). The bourgeois panic over Trump had pundits whose skillsets were limited to tying their shoelaces demanding that Trump nuke Russia in retaliation for events that the Durham report makes clear never took place. Again, Russiagate was a fraud.
