The biggest thing the Bureau is still hiding: The “articulable factual basis” on which its 2017 probe of Trump’s alleged role as a Russian intelligence asset was legitimated. 

Yes, it’s been obvious for years that there was no factual basis for the probe. 

But to see why that’s precisely the issue, and why the Bureau needs to fully come clean, take a look at the whole sordid history.

In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign (then desperate to distract from her illegal use of a private email server to illegally share classified documents) pays ex-spy Christopher Steele to gin up false allegations that her rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, was working with Russia.  

He in turn pays an “assistant” to imagine some dirt; those lies — collated into the now infamous Steele Dossier — are used to justify a probe into Trump’s campaign. 

Clinton escapes any legal pain for her email violations after FBI Director James Comey recommends against prosecution; Trump wins the 2016 race under a cloud of baseless suspicion, which a left-leaning media establishment adds to and amplifies. 

In November 2016, the FBI gives Steele the boot as a source; in January 2017, Steele’s lead fabricator Igor Danchenko tells the FBI that there was “zero” corroboration for the dossier’s claims and that the Russia-Trump rumors he’d passed along to Steele came from “word of mouth and hearsay.” 

In May 2017, Trump fires Comey; mere days later, the FBI reopens contact with Steele — whom it now knows to be 100% discredited — and launches a new probe, the one the RCI team targeted with its FOIA demand. 

That probe was launched by then-Acting Director Andrew McCabe and signed off on by FBI General Counsel Jim Baker and McCabe’s No. 2, Bill Priestap. 

Enter special counsel Robert Mueller — and cue two years of endless sound and fury from national Democrats and their lapdogs in the media, wall-to-wall TV coverage and frothy-lipped insanity from Resistance schizoids across the country. 

Mueller, of course, would go on to turn up . . . absolutely no evidence of any kind Trump was a Russian asset, ever, in any way. 

Period. 

So you don’t have to be Picasso (or Vassily Kandinsky) to connect the dots about what the FBI is still hiding and why. 

No one can know for sure until the Bureau tells the truth, but it’s beyond likely that the redacted “articulable factual basis” of the 2017 probe is both non-factual and non-actionable. 

I.e., nothing more than a toxic combo of Steele Dossier hogwash and an FBI vendetta over Comey. 

Recall that probe initiator McCabe hinted publicly that the latter was the case in a 2019 interview with CBS news.

And that probe co-signer Baker played a major role in laundering the Dossier’s claims (he was also serving as deputy GC at Twitter when the app killed our 100% accurate Hunter Biden reporting in a blatant case of election interference). 

The FBI’s failed coup — let’s call it what it was — against a sitting American president remains one of the most shameful chapters in the Bureau’s already-shameful history. 

It owes the American people a full accounting. 

That its leadership still, even now, feels it has the right to lie and conceal and delay and deny proves beyond any doubt that President-elect Donald Trump is more than justified in his plan to shake the Bureau to its foundations. 

The country first learned the FBI was investigating “any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government” when Comey testified in Congress in March, 2017. Comey then was referring to the FBI’s much-ballyhooed Crossfire Hurricane probe, which was opened in July, 2016 and targeted the likes of George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

This second FBI probe disclosed by the Times in 2019 carried far more explosive implications, making its delayed disclosure unusual. It’s one thing for the FBI to investigate possible “links” between foreigners and a presidential campaign. It’s another for Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe to open an investigation into whether a sitting president, i.e. his boss, is “working on behalf of Russia.”

“Imagine even opening this investigation up on just your average Joe,” says Aaron Maté of RealClear Investigations. “That would be crazy, unless you have some real predication. But this is the fucking president. Andrew McCabe decides that he can do this. On what basis?”

Either the FBI had evidence to start such an investigation, which would be damning to Trump, or it didn’t, which would be damning to the FBI. Which was it?

The 2019 Times story suggested the FBI probe was begun in part to determine if Trump’s “firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.” Beyond that, details were scant, and once the new investigation was folded into Robert Mueller’s inquiry, the reasons for its opening disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history. Even when Special Counsel John Durham issued his report on the FBI and Crossfire Hurricane, he made just one mention of this second investigation, saying it was beyond his purview:

We also have not interpreted the Order as directing us to consider the handling ofthe investigation into President Trump opened by the FBI on May 16, 2017.

Nobody seemed to care what this second investigation was about, or what evidence was submitted to justify its opening, until Aaron and RealClear in December, 2022 sent a Freedom of Information request. They sought a copy of the original document explaining why the FBI opened a new “Sensitive Investigative Matter” on May 16, 2017. It took over two full years for the Bureau to respond. The answer was a middle finger: six pages, almost entirely redacted, with the exception of a few paragraphs.

The released documents weren’t entirely bereft of information. In fact, they should contain enough to pique the curiosity of any incoming officials looking for places to start unraveling the Russiagate mystery. Whatever’s underneath these redactions is embarrassing to someone. Aaron yesterday published a story on the subject at RealClear Investigations which I recommend everyone read. This document is one of a series of Russiagate-related revelations about to hit the public.

The memo is included below. Apart from the fact that it names former FBI Counsel James Baker and Counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap at the top, the most interesting section is probably this passage:

The FBI is opening [redacted] based on an articulabe factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Russian government which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States.

If your first thought is, “How can a person ‘unwittingly’ be involved in activities on behalf of Russia that ‘may constitute violations of criminal law’?” you’re not alone. I reached out to multiple lawyers with experience working on the Hill to ask how one betrays the country criminally without intent. One sent back a “shrug” emoji, while another said this was the problem with the new generation of broad national security probes. The FBI often does investigations that are “not tethered to or bound by criminal law.”

“Unwittingly, without his knowledge, he’s being manipulated by the Kremlin,” laughs Maté. “It’s unbelievable.”

McCabe, now an author and sometimes contributor to CNN, said in 2019 that Trump’s “own words” prompted the investigation. Aaron attempted to reach him for his RealClear story, but he did not respond.

This is not a small issue. The FBI opening an investigation into a presidential candidate on the thinnest of pretexts, then continuing it despite repeated dead ends, then leaking word of an active investigation despite a total lack of results, and finally opening a second probe into a sitting president after their Director was fired, all speak to a law enforcement agency that was coloring way outside its lines, involving itself in unprecedented political interference. Whoever takes over the Bureau needs to unredact these and many other pages.

“It’s nuts,” says Maté. “Trump is in office, and they decide after he fires Comey to open a second investigation just of him, not his campaign but him, suspecting him of being a Russian agent. Why?” He pauses. “We know the pretext for the first investigation was George Papadopoulos. What’s the reason for this one? Probably the firing of Comey is in there in the redaction, but there’s got to be something else too.”

But what? Let’s hope we find out soon.

Fbi Opening (PDF, 113 KB)

In response to a Freedom of Information request that I filed in August 2022, the FBI on December 31, more than two years later, released a heavily redacted copy of the document that opened an explosive and unprecedented counterintelligence probe of the sitting president as an agent of the Russian government.

The Electronic Communication, dated May 16, 2017, claimed to have an “articulable factual basis” to suspect that Trump “wittingly or unwittingly” was illegally acting on behalf of Russia, and accordingly posing “threats to the national security of the United States.” The FBI’s “goal,” it added, was “to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation.” It additionally sought to uncover whether Trump and unnamed “others” obstructed “any associated FBI investigation” – a reference to Crossfire Hurricane, the initial FBI inquiry into the Trump campaign’s suspected cooperation with an alleged Russian interference plot in the 2016 election.

While Crossfire Hurricane, which was formally opened on July 31, 2016, had by that point focused on members of Trump’s orbit, the May 2017 probe was specifically targeted at the president himself during his fourth month in office. The investigation of Trump was undertaken at the behest of then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, one week after Trump had fired his former boss and mentor, James B. Comey.

According to the declassified document, McCabe’s decision was approved by FBI Assistant Director Bill Priestap, who had also signed off on the opening of Crossfire Hurricane; and Jim Baker, the FBI general counsel. Baker was a longtime friend of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, and a key figure in the dissemination of Clinton-funded disinformation to the FBI that falsely tied Trump to Russia. In his FBI role, Baker personally circulated the conspiracy theory, manufactured by “researchers” working with the Clinton campaign, that the Trump campaign and Russia were communicating via a secret server. After leaving the FBI, Baker served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, where he backed the company’s censorship of reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, based on yet another conspiracy theory that the laptop files were Russian disinformation.

As with Crossfire Hurricane, the May 2017 case was opened as a Foreign Agents Registration Act investigation, and also deemed a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” to reflect Trump’s status as the nation’s top public official. The FBI document indicates that it was launched as a full investigation, which would have granted investigators targeting Trump with sweeping surveillance powers.

While the declassified document records the FBI’s theory that then-President Trump might be involved in illegal – and potentially treasonous – behavior, the “articulable factual basis” for this suspicion is redacted. Only a few paragraphs of the six-page document have not been withheld.

Along with Crossfire Hurricane, the May 2017 counterintelligence probe was folded into the Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller, who was appointed just one day after the FBI began portraying Trump internally as a possible Russian agent or conspirator. Mueller’s final report “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Asked about his reasoning for opening the probe and related matters, McCabe, who now works as an on-air commentator at CNN, did not respond to RCI’s emailed questions by the time of publication.

Details about the FBI’s motivation can be gleaned, however, from other public disclosures.

According to a January 2019 account in the New York Times, which first revealed the FBI’s decision to investigate Trump, the Steele dossier – a collection of conspiracy theories funded by Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton – was among the “factors” that “fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns.”

Just two days before McCabe opened the May 2017 probe, the FBI, via Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, renewed contact with dossier author Christopher Steele despite having terminated him as a source back in November 2016. As RealClearInvestigation’s Paul Sperry has previously reported, this sudden outreach to Steele right before the opening of a new Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation indicated that the FBI was seeking to re-engage the Clinton-funded British operative to help it build a case against the president for espionage and obstruction of justice. At the time, the FBI was still relying on Steele’s fabrications for its surveillance warrants against Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. The following month, the FBI filed the last of its four FISA court warrants based on Steele’s material. The Justice Department has since invalidated two of those warrants on the grounds that they were based on “material misstatements.”

The FBI re-enlisted Steele despite possessing information that thoroughly discredited him. Five months before it newly sought Steele’s help to investigate the sitting president, the FBI interviewed Igor Danchenko, whom Steele had used as his dossier’s key “sub-source.” In that January 2017 meeting, Danchenko told FBI agents that corroboration for the dossier’s claims was “zero”; that he had “no idea” where claims sourced to him came from; and that the Russia-Trump rumors he passed along to Steele came from alcohol-fueled “word of mouth and hearsay.” The FBI had also been unable to corroborate any of Steele’s incendiary claims.

A previously disclosed document also shows that former CIA Director John Brennan – who insistently advanced the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory – informed then-president Barack Obama in July 2016 that the Clinton campaign was planning to tie Trump to Russia in order to distract attention from the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. By that point, the Clinton campaign was already paying for the fabricated reports produced by Steele, who made contact with the FBI as early as July 5.

Although the newly declassified document attempts to suggest that the FBI had actionable intelligence to suspect Trump of being a Russian agent, McCabe’s subsequent comments indicate that there was no such evidence on offer. Instead, McCabe has said his counterintelligence probe of Trump was primarily motivated by the president’s firing of Comey. In a February 2019 interview with CBS News, McCabe explained his thinking as follows: “[T]he idea is, if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia’s malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counter intelligence investigator you have to ask yourself, ‘Why would a president of the United States do that?’ So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia.”

McCabe therefore had no evidence that Trump had a “connection” to Russia, and in fact could only “wonder” if there was one. Yet because Trump had fired Comey, whose FBI was already investigating Trump’s campaign for Russia ties and relying on the Clinton-funded Steele dossier in the process, McCabe decided that he had grounds to order an espionage investigation of the commander in chief.

With the official predicate for that May 2017 investigation still redacted by the FBI, McCabe’s public statements offer the only insider window into why it was opened. In all of the investigations related to alleged Russian interference to date, the Justice Department has pointedly avoided the question.

Despite inheriting McCabe’s probe – and debunking claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy related to the 2016 election – Special Counsel Mueller made no mention of the Trump as Russian agent theory in his final report of March 2019. Without informing the public, the FBI closed down the Trump counterintelligence investigation the following month. The case’s closing Electronic Communication, which has previously been declassified in redacted form, states that the McCabe probe “was transferred to FBI personnel assisting” the Mueller team, and entailed the use of “a variety of investigative techniques.”

An inquiry led by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the FBI’s conduct during Crossfire Hurricane also ignored McCabe’s decision to investigate Trump as an agent of Russia. And in a footnote in his final report of May 2023, John Durham – the Special Counsel appointed to launch a sweeping review of the Russia investigation – claimed that McCabe’s May 2017 probe was outside of his purview.

By contrast, when it comes to Crossfire Hurricane, Durham’s report concluded that the FBI did not have a legitimate basis to launch that investigation, repeatedly ignored exculpatory evidence, and buried warnings that Clinton’s campaign was trying to frame Trump as a Russian conspirator.

While the original Trump-Russia investigation has been discredited, the public remains in the dark about why the FBI launched a follow-up counterintelligence probe that targeted Trump while he was newly in the White House – and what ends it took to pursue it.

With Trump set to be inaugurated this month after vowing to clean up the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, the FBI will have a fresh opportunity to break its longstanding secrecy on the decision to investigate the sitting, and newly returning, president as an agent of Russia.

So the scandal du jour involves a complex plot to “influence” some Right-wing media types (Tim Pool’s the only one I know by name; I don’t follow that echo chamber, but I’m aware that they exist) who allegedly were given millions of dollars (or rubles) by some Tennessee Tax Haven-based content-generating Company known as “Tenet Media.” Merrick Garland, America’s Attorney General at the moment who should be fired as immediately as possible (I think there’s a Fast Food joint down the street where he can be gainfully employed sweeping up stale fried food items that fell to the floor, if only because the cash register might be too complicated for Mr Garland), issued a statement, a kind of pre-indictment, alleging that two Russian individuals from the RT Network had impersonated an investor in this Tenet Media business contraption; and, furthermore, that several “right-wing influencer” podcaster-types received payments from—you guessed it—the Kremlin! Ta-da!

Just to paraphrase William Shakespeare: “Something’s fuckin’ rotten inside the DC Beltway—and that includes Brussels and London”—and Argentina, too, based on what I’m hearing. Merrick Garland, the US Attorney General, is a front-man for this crock of shit; CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the Corporate Media assholes are running cover for this “weirdness,” which is coming straight out of MI6 and CIA headquarters, or the basements of those headquarters. There is absolutely no Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, nor Venezuelan plot to foil our Majestic Election in November. This fact of the matter is pretty easy to comprehend. The “Tenet Media” story has been floated out there to deceive the gullible about what’s going on, and Corporate Media, the Total Propaganda News Network, is trying to push this nonsense to the hilt. Nothing but a Used Car Lot sales job. Ka-mala’s the Kremlin’s pick, and Putin said it with a Cheshire Cat’s grin. The only “foreign entities” attempting to influence the current U$ Election are Israelis and Ukrainians (not to mention the always perfidious Brits), and you can take that thought to the bank. If Russia wanted Alaska back—They would have said so.

 “This Russiagate story will not die,” investigative journalist Matt Taibbi said on “The Story,” Thursday. 

“This story just won’t go away. It reminds me of the ‘Friday the 13th’ movies. No matter how many times they killed Jason, he keeps leaping out of Crystal Lake in each sequel. And this is the same thing.”

The Biden administration on Wednesday accused Russia of trying to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election by targeting American voters through state-run media and other online platforms as part of a campaign referred to as “doppelganger.”

“There is a criminal case here. It remains to be seen exactly how much meat there is on the bone in the actual case,” Taibbi said. 

“What Merrick Garland said in the press conference is not the same as what all those commentators you showed said. He said that what this content was supporting was consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions. That’s not the same as saying that they were trying to promote Donald Trump. And when you get down into the nitty-gritty of this story, it’s very confusing, actually, as to what really happened and who was supporting whom.”

The DOJ on Wednesday announced it is seizing 32 websites it says were linked to the Russian government and used to spread disinformation. The Justice, State and Treasury departments also indicted a pair of employees at Russian state-controlled outlet RT. 

The indictment claimed that RT, in a $10 million scheme, had duped US-based influencers into sharing content “deemed favorable to the Russian government” through a Tennessee-based company believed to be Tenet Media. 

The DOJ accused RT of “conspiring to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

“We’ve seen so many iterations of this same theme, and every time it turns out to be less than meets the eye or a hoax like I discovered with the Hamilton 68 site in the Twitter files or the Steele dossier,” Taibbi said, referring back to allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

RT was asked about the allegations and previously told Fox News Digital, “We certainly have a reaction. Actually, we had several, but we couldn’t decide on one (we even thought of running an office poll), so here they are.” 

“2016 called and it wants its clichés back,” was among them, as were: “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the U.S. elections,” “We gotta earn our Kremlin paycheck somehow,” and “Somewhere Secretary Clinton is sad that it’s not because of her.” 

Asked by Fox News’ David Spunt how Garland would assure the American people of the seriousness of the situation, the attorney general said: “I’m sure [RT’s response] was much funnier in the original Russia, but for us it’s not funny.” 

“This is deadly serious, and we are going to treat it accordingly,” Garland said. 

Spunt asked Wray what he would say to other U.S. adversaries who try to interfere in U.S. elections.

“Knock it off,” Wray said. “As long as adversaries keep trying to influence and interfere in our society, and our democratic processes, they’re going to keep running into the FBI.” 

Given the parallels to the 2016 election, many Republicans are skeptical of the DOJ’s move to block Russian interference. 

“The utility of this story as a propaganda vehicle is entirely…aimed at Donald Trump squarely,” Talibbi said, echoing concerns of top lawmakers and experts. 

“This story would not be in the news. You wouldn’t have every network covering it. You wouldn’t have Joe Scarborough doing rants about it if it didn’t have a Donald Trump angle to it. And this has been true since the very first time they unveiled the story way back in 2016.”

Fox News’ Morgan Phillips, Greg Norman, Bradford Betz and David Spunt contributed to this report.

Madeline Coggins is a Digital Production Assistant on the Fox News flash team with Fox News Digital.

The latest effort at rehabilitating it is an interview by Adam Rawnsley in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine of one Michael van Landingham, an intelligence analyst who is proud of having written the first draft of the cornerstone “analysis” of Russiagate, the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment.

The ICA blamed the Russians for helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.  It was released two weeks before Trump assumed office. The thoroughly politicized assessment was an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence.

Worse, it was consequential in emasculating Trump to prevent him from working for a more decent relationship with Russia.

In July 2018, Ambassador Jack Matlock (the last U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union), was moved to write his own stinging assessment of the “Assessment” under the title: “Former US Envoy to Moscow Calls Intelligence Report on Alleged Russian Interference ‘Politically Motivated.’” 

In January 2019, I wrote the following about the ICA: 

“A glance at the title of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which was not endorsed by the whole community) — ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’ — would suffice to show that the widely respected and independently-minded State Department intelligence bureau should have been included. State intelligence had demurred on several points made in the Oct. 2002 Estimate on Iraq, and even insisted on including a footnote of dissent.

James Clapper, then director of national intelligence who put together the ICA, knew that all too well. So he evidently thought it would be better not to involve troublesome dissenters, or even inform them what was afoot.

Similarly, the Defense Intelligence Agency should have been included, particularly since it has considerable expertise on the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been blamed for Russian hacking of the DNC emails.

But DIA, too, has an independent streak and, in fact, is capable of reaching judgments Clapper would reject as anathema. …

With help from the Times and other mainstream media, Clapper, mostly by his silence, was able to foster the charade that the ICA was actually a bonafide product of the entire intelligence community for as long as he could get away with it. After four months it came time to fess up that the ICA had not been prepared, as Secretary Clinton and the media kept claiming, by ‘all 17 intelligence agencies.’

In fact, Clapper went one better, proudly asserting — with striking naiveté — that the ICA writers were ‘handpicked analysts’ from only the F.B.I., C.I.A., and NSA. He may have thought that this would enhance the ICA’s credibility. It is a no-brainer, however, that when you want handpicked answers, you better handpick the analysts. And so he did.”

[See: The January 2017 ‘Assessment’ on Russiagate] 

Buried in Annex B of the ICA is this curious disclaimer:

“Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents. … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.”

Small wonder, then, that a New York Times report on the day the ICA was released noted:

“What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission…”

Burying Obama’s Role

Mainstream journalism has successfully buried parts of the Russiagate story, including the role played by former President Barack Obama.

Was Obama aware of the “Russian hack” chicanery? There’s ample evidence he was “all in.” More than a month before the 2016 election, while the F.B.I. was still waiting for the findings of cyber-firm CrowdStrike, which the Democratic Party had hired in place of the F.B.I. to find out who had breached their servers, Obama told Clapper and Dept. of Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson not to wait.

So with the election looming, the two dutifully published a Joint Statement on Oct. 7, 2016:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. … “

Obama’s role was revealed in 2022 when the F.B.I. was forced to make public F.B.I. emails in connection with the trial of fellow Russiagate plotter, Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann

Clapper and the C.I.A., F.B.I., and NSA directors briefed Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017. That was the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump, telling him it showed the Russians helped him win, and that it had just been made public.

On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama used lawyerly language in an awkward attempt to cover his derriere:

“The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”

So we ended up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point … and, for good measure, use of both words — “hacking” and “leaked.” 

The tale that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was then disproved on Dec. 5, 2017 by the head of CrowdStrike’s sworn testimony to Congress. Shawn Henry told the House Intelligence committee behind closed doors that CrowdStrike found no evidence that anyone had successfully hacked the DNC servers. 

But it is still widely believed because The New York Times and other Democrat-allied corporate media never reported on that testimony when it was finally made public on May 7, 2020.

Enter Michael van Landingham

Rolling Stone’s article on July 28 about van Landingham says he is still proud of his role as one of the “hand-picked analysts” in drafting the discredited ICA.

The piece is entitled: “He Confirmed Russia Meddled in 2016 to Help Trump. Now, He’s Speaking Out.”It says: “Trump viewed the 2017 intel report as his ‘Achilles heel.’ The analyst who wrote it opens up about Trump, Russia and what really happened in 2016.” 

Without ever mentioning that the conclusions of the ICA were proven false, by Henry’s testimony and the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that found no evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion,” Rolling Stone says:

“The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), dubbed ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,’ was one of the most consequential documents in modern American history. It helped trigger investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees and a special counsel investigation, and it fueled an eight-year-long grudge that Trump has nursed against the intelligence community.” 

Rawnsley writes in Rolling Stone the following as gospel truth, without providing any evidence to back it up. 

“When WikiLeaks published a tranche of [John] Podesta’s emails in late October, the link between the Russian hackers and the releases became undeniable. The dump contained the original spear phishing message that Russian hackers had used to trick Podesta into coughing up his password. News outlets quickly seized on the email, crediting it for what it was: proof that the Russians were behind the campaign.”

Because Rawnsley didn’t tell us, it’s not clear how this “spear phishing message” provides “undeniable” proof that Russia was behind it. Consortium News has contacted Rawnsley to provide more detail to back up his assertion. 

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and close friend of Julian Assange,  suggested to Scott Horton on Horton’s radio show in 2016 that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them the Russian government.

“The Podesta emails and the DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn’t conclude that they both have the same source,” Murray said. “In both cases we’re talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that information out had legal access to that information.”

Reading between the lines of the interview, one could interpret Murray’s comments as suggesting that the DNC leak came from a Democratic source and that the Podesta leak came from someone inside the U.S. intelligence community, which may have been monitoring John Podesta’s emails because the Podesta Group, which he founded with his brother Tony, served as a registered “foreign agent” for Saudi Arabia.

“John Podesta was a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government,” Murray noted. “If the American security services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government’s paid lobbyist in Washington, then the American security services would not be doing their job. … His communications are going to be of interest to a great number of other security services as well.”

Leak by Americans

Horton then asked, “Is it fair to say that you’re saying that the Podesta leak came from inside the intelligence services, NSA [the electronic spying National Security Agency] or another agency?”

“I think what I said was certainly compatible with that kind of interpretation, yeah,” Murray responded. “In both cases they are leaks by Americans.”

William Binney, a former U.S. National Security Agency technical director, told Consortium News this regarding Rolling Stone‘s assertion about the Podesta emails:

“Saying something does not make it so. There is no evidence the phishers or hackers were Russian. In today’s networks, you really have to have the underlying internet protocol (IP nr) or device medium access control (MAC nr) to show the routing to/from [sending and receiving] devices to show exfiltration plus trace route evidence to show if that data went any further.

[In other words, you would need the unique computer addresses of the hacked and the hacker and anyone they may have relayed it to, if it were a hack.]

[Rawnsley] gives none of this type of data.  So, until he provides this type of data, I view his statements as an opinion and not worth much at all. 

The whole world-wide network has to have these numbers to get data from point A to point B in the world. No one (NSA included) has shown this data going to Wikileaks for publication. The 5EYES have Wikileaks under cast iron cover/analysis and would know this and report it.”

“There is one more aspect that’s important to take into account,” Binney added. “It’s the network log. This contains a record of every instruction sent on the network along with addresses for the sender and receiver. It’s held for a period of time according to storage allocated to it.”

Binney said:

“So, if there’s a hack, then the instruction to achieve the hack is in the log. Remember, Crowd Strike did the analysis of the DNC server all through this time and never talked about the network log. Now, Podesta’s computer does not have a network log, but the DNC and worldwide network providers do.”

Binney told CN that he proposed automated analysis of the worldwide log for the NSA in 1992, “but they refused it as it would expose all the money and program corruption in NSA contracts.”

Binney said he was putting that function into the ThinThread program in 1999/2000 that he was developing for the NSA, but the agency “removed it in 2001 after 9/11.”

A report by the private cybersecurity firm SecureWorks in June 2016 assessed with “moderate confidence” that a group identified as APT28, nicknamed “Fancy Bear” among other names “operating from the Russian Federation … gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government” was behind the Podesta phishing, though as Binney points out, the NSA found no such evidence, when it would have had to, had Russia done it.   

The name “Fancy Bear” of the alleged hackers from GRU, the Russian defense intelligence agency, incidentally, was coined by Dmitri Alperovich, the anti-Putin Russian co-founder of CrowdStrike. 

“This whole Russiagate affair was a concoction of the DNC, the Clintons, the F.B.I. etc. and none of them have produced any specific basic evidence to support their assertions,” Binney said. “The idea that the word ‘Bear’ implies Russia is about the level of technical intellect we are dealing with here.”  

Binney said these are the key technical questions that still need to be answered: 

1. What are the IP and/or MAC numbers involved? And, what are the allocations of these numbers by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (network number allocation authority)?

2. What are the trace routes of the hacked packets going across the worldwide network?

3. What instructions are in the network log indicating data exfiltration of data?

4. Are there any other specific technical aspects that are relevant to a potential hack? No opinions or guesses, that’s not factual evidence of anything beyond the writers biases.”

Binney said in email:

“Even if you assume the Russians did the hack and have the DNC/Podesta emails, you still have to show the transfer of these emails to Wikileaks to know who really did the deed. So far, no one has evidence the emails were sent to Wikileaks.

Most importantly, Julian Assange publicly said it was not the Russians. Kimdotcom said he helped others (not the Russians) to get data to Wikileaks. Craig Murray talked about physical transfer of data. These statements by people involved in WikiLeaks is clearly consistent with the technical evidence I and others have assembled.”

Binny said that “until such time as those others produce specific technical evidence for peer review and validation (like we have), they are just pushing sludge up an inclined plane with a narrow squeegee hoping they can get it over the top and accepted by all.”

Binney noted that the ancient Greek school of sophism called this the fallacy of repetition. “That’s where they keep repeating a falsehood over and over again till it is believed (it helps when they say the same thing from many different directions especially by people in positions of authority),” Binney said.

So the head of CrowdStrike testifies that there’s no evidence anyone hacked the DNC and according to Binney and Murray, there is no definitive proof that Russia was behind the Podesta phishing expedition either.  WikiLeaks maintains that a state actor was not the source of either. 

And yet the Russiagate myth persists. It is useful in so many ways for those in the U.S. who still want to ratchet up even more tension with Russia (as though Ukraine isn’t enough) and for a political party to perhaps again explain away an election loss if it happens in November. 

Thanks to Bill Binney and two other VIPS very senior NSA “alumni”, and the detailed charts and other data revealed by Edward Snowden, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) was able to publish a memorandum on Dec. 12, 2016 that, based on technical evidence, labeled the Russian hacking allegations “baseless.” The following July we issued a similar VIPS  memo, with the title asking the neuralgic question, “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?” The question lingers.

I have now posted an item on X to call attention to this latest Russiagate indignity.

I cannot escape the conclusion that journalism is not like war: In war the victors get to write the history; in today’s journalism, the losers — who get it wrong — get to write it.

O Tempora, O Mores!

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year C.I.A. career he supervised intelligence analysis as chief of Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, as editor/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief, as a member of the Production Review Staff and as chair of National Intelligence Estimates. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Referring to the memo whose preparation was overseen by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes and whose release was authorized by President Trump, and to similar reports likely to come, Cohen, having for years researched Soviet-era archive materials (once highly classified), understands the difficulties involved in summarizing such secret documents, especially when they have been generated by intelligence agencies. They must be put in the larger political context of the time, which can be fully understood only by using other sources as well, including open ones; and they may be contradicted by other classified materials not yet available.

Nonetheless, the “Republican memo,” as it has become known while we await its Democratic counterpart, indicates that some kind of operation against presidential candidate and then President Trump, an “investigation,” has been under way among top officials of US intelligence agencies for a long time. The memo focuses on questionable methods used by Obama’s FBI and Justice Department to obtain a warrant permitting them to surveil Carter Page, a peripheral and short-tenured Trump foreign-policy adviser, and the role played in this by the anti-Trump “dossier” complied by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer whose career specialization was Russia. But the memo’s implications are even larger.

Steele’s dossier, which alleged that Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin in various ways for several years even preceding his presidential candidacy, was the foundational document of the Russiagate narrative, at least from the time its installments began to be leaked to the American media in the summer of 2016, to the US “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 2017 (when BuzzFeed also published the dossier), the same month that FBI Director James Comey “briefed” President-elect Trump on the dossier—apparently in an effort to intimidate him—and on to today’s Mueller investigation.

Even though both have been substantially challenged for their lack of verifiable evidence, the dossier and subsequent ICA report remain the underlying sources for proponents of the Russiagate narrative of “Trump-Putin collision.” The memo and dossier are now being subjected to close (if partisan) scrutiny, much of it focused on the Clinton campaign’s having financed Steele’s work through his employer, Fusion GPS. But two crucial and ramifying question are not, Cohen argues, being explored: Exactly when, and by whom, was this Intel operation against Trump started? And exactly where did Steele get the “information” that he was filing in periodic installments and that grew into the dossier? In order to defend itself against the memo’s charge that it used Steele’s unverified dossier to open its investigation into Trump’s associates, the FBI claims it was prompted instead by a May 2016 report of remarks made earlier by another lowly Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, to an Australian ambassador in a London bar. Even leaving aside the ludicrous nature of this episode, the public record shows it is not true. In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, John Brennan, formerly Obama’s head of the CIA, strongly suggested that he and his agency were the first, as The Washington Post put it at the time, “in triggering an FBI probe.” Certainly both the Post and The New York Times interpreted his remarks in this way. Equally certain, Brennan played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter, briefing members of Congress privately and giving President Obama himself a top-secret envelope in early August 2016 that almost certainly contained Steele’s dossier. Early on, Brennan presumably would have shared his “suspicions” and initiatives with James Clapper, director of national intelligence. FBI Director Comey, distracted by his mangling of the Clinton private-server affair during the presidential campaign, may have joined them actively somewhat later. But when he did so publicly, in his March 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, it was as J. Edgar Hoover reincarnate—as the nation’s number-one expert on Russia and its profound threat to America (though, when asked, he said he had never heard of Gazprom, the giant Russian-state energy company often said to be a major pillar of President Putin’s power).

The question therefore becomes: When did Brennan begin his “investigation” of Trump? His House testimony leaves this somewhat unclear, but, according to a subsequent Guardian article, by late 2015 or early 2016 he was receiving, or soliciting, reports from foreign intelligence agencies regarding “suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.”

In short, if these reports and Brennan’s own testimony are to be believed, he, not the FBI, was the instigator and godfather of Russiagate. Certainly, his subsequent frequent and vociferous public retelling of the Russiagate allegations against Trump suggest that he played a (and probably the) instigating role. And, it seems, a role in the Steele dossier as well.

Where, then, Cohen asks, did Steele get his information? According to Steele and his many stenographers—which include his American employers, Democratic Party Russiagaters, the mainstream media, and even progressive publications—it came from his “deep connections in Russia,” specifically from retired and current Russian intelligence officials in or near the Kremlin. From the moment the dossier began to be leaked to the American media, this seemed highly implausible (as reporters who took his bait should have known) for several reasons:

§ Steele has not returned to Russia after leaving his post there in the early 1990s. Since then, the main Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, has undergone many personnel and other changes, especially after 2000, and especially in or near Putin’s Kremlin. Did Steele really have such “connections” so many years later?

§ Even if he did, would these purported Russian insiders really have collaborated with this “former” British intelligence agent under what is so widely said to be the ever-vigilant eye of the ruthless “former KGB agent” Vladimir Putin, thereby risking their positions, income, perhaps freedom, as well as the well-being of their families?

§ Originally it was said that his Russian sources were highly paid by Steele. Arguably, this might have warranted the risk. But subsequently Steele’s employer and head of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, wrote in The New York Times that “Steele’s sources in Russia…were not paid.” If the Putin Kremlin’s purpose was to put Trump in the White House, why then would these “Kremlin-connected” sources have contributed to Steele’s anti-Trump project without financial or political gain—only with considerable risk?

§ There is the also the telling matter of factual mistakes in the dossier that Kremlin “insiders” were unlikely to have made, but this is the subject for a separate analysis.

And indeed we now know that Steele had at least three other “sources” for the dossier, ones not previously mentioned by him or his employer. There was the information from foreign intelligence agencies provided by Brennan to Steele or to the FBI, which we also now know was collaborating with Steele. There was the contents of a “second Trump-Russia dossier” prepared by people personally close to Hillary Clinton and who shared their “findings” with Steele. And most intriguingly, there was the “research” provided by Nellie Ohr, wife of a top Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, who, according to the Republican memo, “was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research.” Most likely, it found its way into Steele’s dossier. (Mrs. Ohr was a trained Russian Studies scholar with a PhD from Stanford and a onetime assistant professor at Vassar, and thus, it must have seemed, an ideal collaborator for Steele.)

We are left, then, with a vital, ramifying question: How much of the “intelligence information” in Steele’s dossier actually came from Russian insiders, if any? (This uncertainty alone should stop Fox News’s Sean Hannity and others from declaring that the Kremlin used Steele—and Hillary Clinton—to pump its “propaganda and disinformation” into America. Such pro-Trump allegations, like those of Russiagate itself, only fuel the new Cold War, which risks becoming actual war any day, from Syria to Ukraine.)

And so, Cohen concludes, we are left with even more ramifying questions:

§ Was Russiagate produced by the primary leaders of the US intelligence community, not just the FBI? If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history, and the most detrimental to American democracy. And if so, it does indeed, as zealous promoters of Russiagate assert, make Watergate pale in significance. (To understand more, we will need to learn more, including whether Trump associates other than Carter Page and Paul Manafort were officially surveilled by any of the agencies involved. And whether they were surveilled in order to monitor Trump himself, on the assumption they were or would be in close proximity to him, as the president once suggested in a tweet.)

§ If Russiagate involved collusion among US intelligence agencies, as now seems likely, why was it undertaken? There are various possibilities. Out of loathing for Trump? Out of institutional opposition to his promise of better relations—“cooperation”—with Russia? Or out of personal ambition? Did Brennan, for example, aspire to remaining head of the CIA, or to a higher position, in a Hillary Clinton administration?

§ What was President Obama’s role in any of this? Or to resort to the Watergate question: What did he know and when did he know it? And what did he do? The same questions would need to be asked about his White House aides and other appointees. Whatever the full answers, there is no doubt that Obama acted on the Russiagate allegations. He cited them for the sanctions he imposed on Russia in December 2016, which led directly to the case of General Michael Flynn (not for doing anything wrong with Russia but for “lying to the FBI”); to the worsening of the new US-Russian Cold War; and thus to the perilous relationship inherited by President Trump, who has in turn been thwarted by Russiagate in his attempts to improve relations through “cooperation” with Putin.

§ With all of this in mind, and assuming Trump knew most of it, did he really have any choice in firing FBI Director Comey, for which he is now unfairly being investigated by Mueller? We might also ask, given Comey’s role during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign (for which she and her team loudly condemned him), whether as president she would have had to fire him.

Listening almost daily to the legion of former US intel officers condemn Russiagate skeptics ever more loudly and persistently in the media, we may wonder if they are increasingly fearful it will become known that Russiagate was mostly Intelgate. For that we will need a new bipartisan Senate Church Committee of the 1970s, which investigated and exposed misdeeds by US intelligence agencies and which led to important reforms that are no longer the preventive measures against abuses of power they were intended to be. (Ideally, everyone involved would be granted amnesty for recent misdeeds, ending all talk of “jail time,” on the condition they now testify truthfully.) But such an inclusive investigation of Intelgate would require the support of Democratic members of Congress, which no longer seems possible.

Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.)

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

Others who got this story right but were singled out for dismissal or ridicule include:

• former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who was called “fringe” and “conspiracy-mongering” by Max Boot, a member of the illustrious club of pundits who botched both the Steele dossier and Iraqi WMD stories;
• former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, who has been on this subject for years and was called a “misinformation superspreader” by the New York Times after the 2020 election;
• Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, denounced as a pathological bigot for dissenting on Trump-Russia themes, and ultimately forced out of his own publication for writing critically of Hunter Biden and Burisma without adequately addressing the question of “Russia’s hand”;
• former CIA operative Larry Johnson, who said years ago that the surveillance campaign began with the GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, in 2015 and was among the first to say publicly what our source just told us, that there is intelligence suggesting Maltese professor and supposed Russian asset Joseph Mifsud was British intelligence. He’s naturally been denounced as a “conspiracy theorist”;
• Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, declared “bonkers” by the Daily Beast, perhaps the most aggressive promoter of the “collusion” theory and one of the most dependable producers of factually dubious stories on this subject in the mainstream press landscape;
• author Lee Smith, the major chronicler of the HPSCI work (more to come on this), who naturally was ripped for “conspiracy theory” for publishing a book on the subject;
• Pulitzer-winner Jeff Gerth, who wrote a 24,000-word deconstruction of Trump-Russia coverage in the Columbia Journalism Review that included a quote from Bob Woodward saying the media needed to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” He was called a “Trump-Russia denialist” who “can’t handle the truth,” by David Corn of Mother Jones, one of the first people to publish the phony Steele-blackmail story;
• another RealClear writer, Paul Sperry, who wrote about CIA chief John Brennan overruling dissent to create the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. Sperry popped up in the Twitter Files when the office of California congressman Adam Schiff, who infamously said he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, asked to have Sperry banned;
• Professor Margot Cleveland of The Federalist and Chuck Ross of the Daily Signal, who both got this right and were both marked “unreliable” by Pentagon-funded NewsGuard;
• former The Hill and current JustTheNews writer John Solomon, who published a significant amount of the key documents in this matter, and was the subject of a poisonous media campaign that crested particularly during the period of the first Trump impeachment;
• citizen investigators like the Racket-profiled “Sleuth’s Corner” of @Walkafyre, @TECHNO_FOG, @RyanM58699717, @climateaudit, @FOOL_NELSON, and @Hmmm57474203. This group who uncovered the name of the “primary sub-source” of famed British ex-spy Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, not only went roundly uncredited, but was immediately accused in the New York Times of putting Danchenko “in Russia’s sights” by Virginia Senator Mark Warner.

There are countless others. Even I took more than one whack at this material in the past, among other things listing episodes involving illegal classified leaks as a way of focusing attention on intelligence abuses surrounding the Trump-Russia scandal. I heard the gist of this week’s story six years ago, but didn’t have the details and the multiple people willing to be sources I needed to put something in print. That changed when Michael, Alexandra, and Public got their scoop a few weeks ago.

Anyone can go back and read the reports of the figures listed above and piece together pretty much the whole story we ran this week, minus a few conspicuous details. We learned there were 26 surveillance targets among Trump’s aides and associates in the 2016 campaign year, and we were able to use a number of key quotes, including the internal intelligence community analysis that Russia wasn’t desperate to avoid a Hillary Clinton presidency at all, but saw her as “manageable and reflecting continuity” and a “relationship they were comfortable with.”

These details, along with things like the assertion that the surveillance had “nothing to do with our relationship with Russia” and was “just leveraging capabilities to undermine a rookie unprepared Trump campaign,” are important and move the story forward. The quotes about Russia’s attitude toward Hillary in particular could be impactful in helping undo one of the last surviving Russiagate myths.

Still, it’s important to make clear that the substance of these pieces was already out thanks to the people listed above, along with others (Joseph Wulfsohn? Rich Lowry? Caitlin Johnstone?) I may have neglected to mention. The novelty with our series is that headline-ready specifics from still-classified reports do not often get out in a way that’s reportable. And far from searching for credit, the goal in jumping on TV shows and podcasts and trying to make noise with these stories is to inspire or shame (either will do) other reporters to build on these articles, as we built on eight years of past reports.

A last note on the media angle. Amid the initial rush of Trump-Russia mania, a series of reports came out that featured tantalizing details. One was Jane Mayer’s March 2018 “Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Dossier,” which told us about a “stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted” by the GCHQ. The New Yorker piece asserted GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief John Brennan about these details. Brennan already co-signed that story in May of 2017, when he testified in Congress, saying he had been “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns” that those people “were cooperating with the Russians,” and that this “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion… occurred.” The Guardian’s “British Spies Were First to Spot Trump Team’s Links With Russia” also told this same basic story.

There’s considerable overlap between those accounts, the ones we just published, and the reports of the people listed above. In each place you find the elements of very early intercepts of Trump team conversations captured abroad. I think I speak for everyone on the above list when I say I’d be thrilled if Brennan or Hannigan or whoever would come forward and show us what those “illicit communications” were, or what that “intelligence… that raised concerns” was. If there’s proof all of this was legitimate, we all need to see it.

But The Post and The Times have changed, and one can only argue about when the process of their degradation began. Historically, both papers have represented the Democrats and the Left, causing much Republican criticism. As examples, Republicans during Reagan’s day called them “Pravda on the Hudson” and “Pravda on the Potomac” respectively, but this name-calling was mostly a humorous jab.

Things changed dramatically after Donald Trump announced his first White House bid in the 2016 election. Journalistic integrity and responsible reporting were thrown into the toilet and replaced by overwhelmingly fake news and stories. Trump must be defeated, and all means were justified in achieving that goal, including Hillary Clinton’s grotesque “Russiagate” campaign to depict Trump as Putin’s stooge.

When Trump won despite this onslaught, the whole Democratic machinery, including NYT and WP, was mobilized to destroy his presidency together with its intention to turn US-Russia relations from confrontation to cooperation.

The American and Russian presidents’ joint statement:

“The ‘Spirit of the Elbe’ is an example of how our countries can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in pursuit of a greater cause. As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all those who fought together to defeat fascism. Their heroic feat will never be forgotten.”

Had Trump succeeded, there would be no war in Ukraine and no threat of nuclear WW3, but both papers even supported Blinken’s operation to blame the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” story on Russia, helping Biden to win the 2020 elections, and taking us one step closer to war with Biden’s rejection of Russia’s December 2021 proposals for mutual security guarantees. The key point in these proposals was a neutral status for Ukraine with no membership in any military blocks including NATO. Biden had until February 23, 2022, to agree on this deal but he rejected Russia’s proposals. And, here again, both NYT and WP applauded this approach. 

Below are relevant quotes from their top columnists, Thomas Friedman and David Ignatius, whom I often quoted and applauded in my Washington Times and other publications’ columns back in the late 90s, when many of us still hoped for new, brighter, and mutually beneficial relations between the United States and post-communist Russia.

When the first round of NATO expansion began in 1998, Friedman interviewed one of the most distinguished American diplomats, George Kennan, who called NATO expansion a fatal foreign policy mistake:

”It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.”

And this is what Friedman is saying now:

“Back in the early 1990s, I opposed NATO expansion after the fall of the Berlin Wall because I thought our priority should be trying to nurture a democratic Russia…. Now, 30 years later, though, when the prospects for a democratic Russia feel utterly remote, I would gladly use NATO and the E.U. to nurture and secure a democratic Ukraine.”    

As for the WP’s David Ignatius, here is what he said in his WP article Who Robbed Russia? back in 1999, where he highlighted some of the most damning revelations of the multi-billion-dollar robbery of Russia with the help of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and with the acquiescence of the Clinton administration:

“By allowing the oligarchs — in the name of the free market — to grab Russia’s resources and siphon anything of value into their own offshore bank accounts, the United States poisoned Russia’s transition from communism… What makes the Russian case so sad is that the Clinton administration may have squandered one of the most precious assets imaginable — which is the idealism and goodwill of the Russian people as they emerged from 70 years of Communist rule. The Russia debacle may haunt us for generations.”

And here he is in July 2023:

“These 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”

Of course, both NYT and WP just follow the voices of Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Polish President Duda – and many others, including President of Ukraine Zelensky – who openly declare their desire to use Ukrainians as cheap cannon fodder for their geostrategic goals of defeating Russia, a country whose people and leaders from Gorbachev to Putin offered friendship, cooperation, and even alliance to America, only to be rebuffed in the name of a unipolar world order under U.S. hegemony.

I think it would be appropriate to conclude with a quote from Luke 23:34-35:

“And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’

“And parting his garments among them, they cast lots. “And the people stood beholding.”

Addressing Harvard’s graduating class in 1978, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned: “I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed,” quickly adding “But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man.” America’s excessive legalism, the ingrate continued, would eventually be our undoing. “Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”

In mid-July 2016, I spent the wee hours of one sleepless morning in St. Petersburg on my laptop in an otherwise silent hotel lobby watching retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn’s speech to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland get drowned out by chants of “Lock her up!” There I was, in the former capital of what Russian president Vladimir Putin once proudly called a “dictatorship of law,” yet now it was my compatriots who were demanding a politician be imprisoned.

After Trump won, the shoe was on the other foot and the chant — from that moment to the present — became “Lock him up!”

During the febrile peak of Russiagate, now two special counsels ago, I was the one facing a chance of getting locked up. My crime was a fairly arcane one: I failed to register as a foreign agent when my work for a Ukrainian politician triggered that requirement. According to the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA, passed to root out Nazi propagandists operating covertly in the US), when you represent the interests of a foreign government or political figure, you must declare it.

Imagine, for instance, your father were vice president of the United States just put in charge of Ukraine policy when an exiled Ukrainian oligarch hires you to advise his gas company. Would you have to register? What if he were a secretive Chinese billionaire who was later disappeared when news of your arrangement surfaced, or the wife of a notoriously corrupt ex-Moscow mayor? As the recent unraveling of Hunter Biden’s plea deal suggests, how one interprets or applies FARA is, well, fungible.

My own Ukrainian client had a longstanding relationship with Paul Manafort, until, that is, the storied Republican operative landed a big piece of domestic work, which created an opening for me in Kyiv. I’d been working as an international political consultant since helping midwife Iraq’s first free election in half a century in 2005. Mana- fort’s Russian-Ukrainian sidekick, Konstantin Kilimnik, had been my deputy in Moscow when I was promoting democracy abroad and ran the International Republican Institute (IRI) office in Russia during the early Putin years.

If the Russians really engineered the election of Donald Trump — as many were suggesting in all seriousness from the summer of 2016 until Robert Mueller testified before Congress in summer 2019 — someone must have helped them, right? If you were casting “likely suspects” for a B-movie, then, I suppose, Paul, Konstantin and I just about fit the bill — but you’d still have to be squinting.

This is where my exposure to the American criminal justice system began. From the time the FBI arrived on my doorstep, it took about six months to plead guilty, and a little over a year to be sentenced (many, arguably most, wait much longer). That plea cost me a quarter of a million dollars. Had I gone to trial, I would have sunk millions of dollars into debt for the privilege of facing a DC jury while prosecutors reminded them that I was a Republican.

As I explain in my forthcoming memoir, Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a “Foreign Agent,” surrender and cooperation were the logical choice, especially as I didn’t have much to hide.

“First of all, this has nothing to do with the president,” then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the Washington Post when they for some odd reason contacted him about my arraignment, “and secondly, the next thing you know, Bob Mueller is going to be handing out parking tickets in Russia.”

Giuliani’s off-hand remark cut to the core: was Russiagate the investigation of an actual crime, or was it an investigation in search of a crime?

Regardless, because the political outcome of Trump’s victory was so riven with discord, a legal approach had become necessary. Sixteen years earlier, it took the US Supreme Court to validate George W. Bush’s victory, and forty years before that, a case originating in the US District Court for the District of Columbia (where I was convicted) led to the downfall of the Nixon administration. The legal review of political issues is nothing new in America.

But we’ve recently seen much evidence of the legal system being abused to paper over political disputes and weaponize the administration of justice.

Politically speaking, the problem with the New York case against Donald Trump, involving hush money to a porn star violating FEC rules, as well as the Mar-a-Lago classified documents-handling case, filed in state and federal jurisdictions respectively, is that, in both instances, the other side is far from innocent. Hillary for America did not disclose the money it spent generating and ginning up the Russiagate probe with the “Steele dossier”; the FEC fined her campaign and the DNC about $100,000, case closed. The current president had plenty of classified documents scattered willy-nilly around his various properties — even if he was more cooperative when asked to return them. So why do we have a nuclear-level prosecution of one side and a kid-glove treatment of the other?

The only way to accept glaring contradictions like these is by practicing the same defense as those who lived under the Soviet regime: cognitive dissonance. When I was pleading guilty, a Russian friend counseled me: “just pretend it isn’t happening to you.” That is what Soviet citizens had to do every day in order to psychologically survive under a government they knew lied to them morning, noon and night.

As Americans we’ve adopted our own cognitive dissonance that allows Democrats to look past the troubling symbol Hunter Biden represents, and Republicans to dismiss Trump’s vulgarity.

Yet this separation, this bifurcation, this split is inherently unstable. In warning us about it, Solzhenitsyn evoked the line from Lincoln — “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — in titling his Harvard speech “A world split apart.” He had escaped a very different world — the gulag and repressive state — and having found sanctuary in the woods of Vermont, discovered he could not be silent about the trends he observed in this new land.

He explained that in the old land, to which he returned after the fall of the Soviet regime in 1991, “there is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.”

“The more corrupt the society, the more numerous the laws,” the Roman historian Tacitus lamented of his own time. Americans today must lawyer up to protect ourselves from the state — or I did anyway. When we elect prosecutors such as Adam Schiff, Democrat of Hollywood, to Congress, we should expect we’re going to get courtroom-style theater in lieu of governance. Though she did end up with the Number Two job anyway, Kamala Harris’s pledge to be America’s “prosecutor president” gained her little traction in 2020.

Had he lived until 2014, Solzhenitsyn would have loved Andrey Zvyagintsev’s powerful film Leviathan, in which an ordinary Russian citizen is crushed first by the corrupt state and then, even more devastatingly, by an amoral legal establishment. Let it be a cautionary tale for us too. Relying solely on legalism to mete out justice and effect political outcomes will in all likelihood leave us even more disappointed.