Barbara Moore, December 17th, 2020
Throughout Russiagate liberals and progressives who in the past would have been suspicious of the intelligence community and even of Mueller himself, instead actively supported those interests and became cheerleaders for the whole affair. As a younger man Robert Mueller had been tasked with prosecuting the BCCI Saudi banking scandal, fraud on a level that until that time, the world had never seen. Yet, rather than drawing any reference to that debacle, (the investigation concluded with barely a hand-slap passed down), main-stream media tripped over one another to characterize Mueller as one of the most qualified and principled men in Washington.
For near the entirety of the Trump administration, the hopeful predicted that all exhibits presented by the Mueller team would point to the Russian bear—grisly and born of the cold dark woods—that counterpoint to the west and to America with its eagle that soared across open blue skies. Yet, as time passed, the proceedings increasingly resembled a matryoshka doll, one of those dumpling shaped nesting figurines. New details, promoted as revelations—at last the smoking gun—proved to be no more than the previous claims, in continuous diminishing form until alas, there was nothing else to open and nothing else revealed, beyond what one had begun with; a doll inside a doll inside a doll—hand-painted, symbolic, artifact. It was the souvenir of the democratic party.
Now that Joe Biden has been elected and given his record of leading the charge when it comes to foreign interventions, establishment democrats will again be reviving that American pastime called Russophobia and a certain level of McCarthyism will be sure to follow. On the left it is widely recognized that a Biden administration will be just as bad for most parts of the world as that of the Trump administration with a little reprieve for Iran. The fate of Julian Assange and what in the United States still passes for journalism hang in the balance.
Back in December of 2016 The New York Times published, The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S, It was one of many, possibly thousands of articles published by legacy media over the course of Russiagate. The article shows the extent to which the fiction of Russian interference was employed from the early days of the mission, a matter of concerted speculation, exaggeration and embellishment.
The story began with a photo op which compared the breach of the DNC servers to Watergate, a false equivalence that conveniently side-lined the wrongdoing of the democratic establishment and that of Hillary Clinton herself, while shifting the focus to Russa. No mention that candidate Clinton had used her influence to urge major television news outlets to promote candidate Trump (Clinton apparently believed he would be the easiest to vanquish). No mention that the questions to be asked in the Nevada debate with candidate Bernie Sanders were shared with her in advance.
With the scandal reconfigured, the plot set forth attempted to create a scenario of foreign espionage while other details, like the names assigned to the alleged agents, Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear seemed to have rolled out of the pages of a children’s storybook. The article advanced a sort of keystone cops scenario between the FBI, the tech personnel at the DNC who were themselves contracted employees and the firm called by the DNC once it had been established that the server had indeed been compromised. That firm was CrowdStrike.
The New York Times article falsely compared the forensic capabilities of CrowdStrike to the collection of finger-prints and DNA samples: “They (the cyber equivalents of material forensics) can be just as incriminating . . . And just as police detectives learn to identify the telltale methods of a veteran burglar, so CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.” The embellished, definitive nature of the firm’s capabilities asserted by the article was later tempered with the following: “Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker, is more art than science.”
Other claims made by the article, mainly, that Roger Stone had a back channel to WikiLeaks, an assertion that tied WikiLeaks to the Trump campaign, were eventually proven to be false. Through a court trial it was documented that Stone had no such connection. Meanwhile, other narratives were omitted. For example, in an interview with Bloomberg, Kim Dotcom had said WikiLeaks would become Clinton’s biggest nightmare. Unlike Stone, Dotcom made that assertion before information regarding WikiLeaks’ possession of the e-mails existed in the public domain.
To date Dotcom maintains that he was contacted by Seth Rich, a DNC staffer who some believe to have been the WikiLeaks source. That narrative has been widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory, yet has been taken seriously by independent media sites like Consortium News founded by the late Robert Perry. Additionally, a freedom of information request proved that that claims by Dotcom remain a possibility as the NSA (National Security Agency) had recorded over thirty pages of communications involving Dotcom, Seth Rich, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and a few other actors. But because the information remains classified the particulars are unknown.
From the start, claims of Russian interference were clearly overblown, (intelligence admitted not a single vote had been changed through hacking) and although ‘influence’ could not be measured, wrongdoing by the Republican party itself is undeniable as documented in the film The Great Hack. For a time the Trump campaign spent one million dollars a day on Facebook using the firm Cambridge Analytica. The information warfare was called Project Alamo and targeted swing-state voters who had been deemed to be persuadable. The wrongdoing involved the acquisition of data from millions of Americans, (thirty million to be precise) without their knowledge or consent, by Cambridge Analytica, a firm founded and funded by Trump backers Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon. All things considered, one had to wonder why there was so much focus put on Russia.
Stephen Cohen, who sadly passed away recently, was an erudite historian and professor emeritus at Princeton and New York Universities. Cohen had lived in Russia for twenty years, spoke the language fluently and published important scholarly work regarding Russia both before and after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. As a Russiagate skeptic, he went so far as to rename the affair ‘Intelgate’ and cited as evidence the Steele dossier which he claimed had John Brennan’s fingerprints all over it. Brennan formerly headed the Central Intelligence Agency.
I became familiar with the views of Professor Cohen during the political upheaval in Ukraine. Indeed, I became somewhat of a fan of the late professor as his views reflected my own; namely, that in the historic rivalry between the U.S. and Russia, the U.S. had consistently been the aggressor. The invasion of Iraq, bombing of Libya and what I viewed as a regime change goals for Syria were targets in the long-game of U.S. expansionism and all were considered to be Russian client states. Professor Cohen knew well the terms through which the end of the cold war was negotiated; Gorbachev had consented to a united, NATO member Germany in exchange for assurances that NATO would not push further east. Professor Cohen: “That promise has been challenged over the years. But it is now indisputably documented because the declassified documents have been published by the National Security Archive.”
While the annexation of Crimea was largely reported as Russian aggression, few onlookers understood that what had taken place in Ukraine had been a U.S. backed coup d’état. Details offered by Cohen were crucial to understanding those events; Yanukovych had consented to early elections, elections were imminent. Additionally, the gas deal with the EU which Yanukovych had rejected (Russia was the existing partner) had contained a clause ‘to adhere to the rules and norms of NATO,’ (what essentially would have amounted to a soft coup). Professor Cohen had also emphasized the antisemitic and far-right nationalist elements of the frequently violent Maidan protesters.
After the former leader of Ukraine had rejected the EU gas deal, the pressure of the Maidan protestors increased and eventually state security forces were accused of opening fire on the crowd—the parallel to the 2018 ‘uprising’ in Nicaragua was striking—an event which cemented Yanukovych’s ouster. I later came across a little-known story published by an Italian journalist that claimed the snipers who had shot and killed a number of Maidan protesters, had since confessed and stated they had been paid in U.S. dollars. But even at the time, journalist Jonathan Steele told Democracy Now, “There’s a lot of evidence that the snipers came from the protest side rather than from the government side, people who killed police and civilians.” The takeaway of the Ukraine story is that the annexation of Crimea by Russia would not have happened if not for U.S. meddling. It also led to a civil war which has been ongoing.
“In the past there was opposition, main-stream opposition to the cold war and today there is none of that. I think relations with Russia today are more dangerous than they have ever been.” So, said the late Professor Cohen. He viewed the threat of war as very real—in Syria and in Ukraine—where both superpowers were involved and his concerns proved credible in 2017 when President Trump authorized the launch of fifty Tomahawk missiles that targeted a Syrian airbase. According to Stephen Cohen, “The attack was of no military value whatsoever and may have been carried out to prove he (Trump) felt no allegiance to Russia.”
At the end of the day, my thinking on Russiagate went like this. Trump had instincts, informed by libertarian outlets and his instincts led to questions: Why did Russian need to be our enemy? What purpose did NATO actually serve? But in voicing those instincts he set off alarm bells throughout the intelligence community and really throughout the beltway. It was true he had pursued business in Moscow, but it came to nothing, so that wasn’t driving the narrative. Meanwhile, the outstanding contradiction that MSM chose to dispense with throughout the affair was that Trump eventually brought on board two of the most hardline anti-Russian, pro-interventionists available; Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
In pursuit of Russiagate mainstream media ignored the following; Trump began sending military support to the Ukrainian nationalists, (something Obama had not done) and by forcing European nations to boost their contributions, he ultimately strengthened NATO. He expanded sanctions on Russia and allowed the Open Skies treaty to expire and opted out of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile or IMF treaty of the Reagan/Gorbachev era and the New START treaty would sunset with no initiatives underway toward its renewal.
Consider also, actions taken by the Trump administration against Russian allies and trading partners. The recognition of Juan Guido as the legitimate President of Venezuela by decree, an unprecedented move. Further sanctions subjected the Venezuelan people to collective punishment, in clear violation of international law, that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. Less dramatic, yet equally consequential was the soft coup in Brazil which meant that BRICS, (a trade group that would have included Russia and not the U.S) was scuttled. How much more evidence did anyone need in order to recognize that U.S. policy towards Russia was as hostile as ever.
The idea that Trump was any less of an interventionist than the neoconservatives or the neoliberals was a hoax to the same extent that most libertarians could claim disinterest where the military-industrial complex was concerned. The Koch brothers, Elon Musk, indeed all of Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon and the Mercers were just as, if not more, dependent on the status-quo of American militarism as other elites. Elon Musk on Twitter following the coup in Bolivia: We will coup any country we want. The tweet was later deleted.
The libertarian brand was useful to Trump as it had been to the Koch brothers, in terms of cutting regulations and further weakening organized labor, both gifts to the corporate class. The anti-government theme was exploited and converted into talking points that were used to divide Americans; workers versus environmentalists, rural/suburban voters versus urban multi-cultural voters. But when it came down to it, they were not libertarians at all, but moved steadily and consistently towards fascism which was and would always be aligned with militarism and control, authoritarian use of force, dominance and violence.
Of course by the time Russiagate was in full swing, the real problem Trump faced was the scope of the investigation; in the search for collusion ANY wrongdoing could be prosecuted. That took down Flynn, it took down Manafort and it took down Cohen. The question of whether the Russians were involved in the DNC breach was significant for Julian Assange where the bending of the truth had suited news outlets who preferred to believe the Russians hacked the DNC and gave the information to WikiLeaks, painting WikiLeaks as an organization that had ties to Russia. At the same time a concerted effort was made to suggest WikiLeaks or Assange himself had developed a relationship with the Trump campaign. It’s easy to see how both of these scenarios would decrease support for WikiLeaks among the public, especially among liberals.
Eventually Aron Mate, one of the leading Russiagate skeptics who received the Izzy Award for journalism for his writings on the topic which appeared in The Nation, unearthed the transcript of a closed-door meeting between the Senate Intelligence Committee and CrowdStrike president, Shawn Henry. Henry was also the former head of the FBI’s department of cybercommand and reflected the ‘revolving door’ where civil servants left the public sector and formed their own companies which then received lucrative government contracts at tax-payer’s expense.
Mate quoted from the transcripts as Senator Schiff questioned Henry about the findings related to the DNC e-mails. Schiff stated, GRU officers ‘appear’ to have stolen the documents, is that right? Henry replied; We did not have concrete evidence that the data was exfiltrated, but we have indicators that it was exfiltrated. (Exfiltrated apparently means removed). Asked by a Senator from Utah; Did I get this right, no direct evidence related to the hack. Henry replied; It appears to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that it actually left. Mate’s article made its rounds under the heading, Another nail in the coffin of Russiagate.
As Julian Assange noted, 80% of the national security state has been privatized. The new concerns that come with a Biden administration are very much the same concerns to the extent that fear mongering and militarism will be propelled along for the sake of corporate profits and will be as anti-Russian and prone to interventions as Biden’s record indicates. Neera Tanden recently tapped for a cabinet position claimed that the Russians actually hacked into voting machines and switched Clinton votes for Trump votes. No doubt that assertion promoted on Twitter was one of one thousand tweets Tanden recently deleted. Tony Blinken tapped to be the next Secretary of State was a top aide to the President-Elect in 2002 and 2003 as then Senator Biden pushed for the Iraq invasion. After serving in the Obama administration Blinken co-founded West Exec Advisors, a consulting firm that assisted Silicon Valley interests in obtaining profitable government contracts.
The privatization of the national security state has not only come at tax payer expense—the U.S. now spends more on military expenditures than the next ten countries combined—outsourcing also shields the national security state from scrutiny as private contractors are not required to be transparent and therefore are also more difficult for journalists to investigate. In the case of Russiagate the government itself could not be blamed directly for misinformation even though the FBI and CrowdStrike were separated by mere degrees.
Biden has already indicated his belief that Julian Assange deserves criminal prosecution. Meanwhile, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald, the rubric ‘national security’ has completely silenced reporting on the Assange case including the CIA spying on Assange which was carried out at the Ecuadorian Embassy and which Greenwald compares to the FBI infiltration of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The criminal case against Ellsberg, who also faced espionage charges, related to his role in the leaked Pentagon Papers, was dropped because of that misconduct.
The blind acceptance of national security concerns by mainstream media will surely allow for a continuation of the status-quo and self-enrichment by all of those connected to the military-industrial complex; a gravy train that grows by the hour while the publisher of WikiLeaks is tortured and likely to be extradited by a rubber-stamp, shamefully unethical U.K. court process. While the prophesy made by Assange regarding the convergence of corporate interests and the state has become a reality, the excuse of ‘national security’ overshows the real and present dangers of climate change, grotesque inequality and a withering democracy.