Authored by Thomas Farnan via OneLeggedParrot.com,
Last month, President Trump bypassed Europe, NATO, and the entire postwar order and opened a conversation directly with Russia. In doing so, he defied Washington’s established foreign policy paradigm that had been in place since the 1940s.
“They” always feared he would go there, and “they” tried to prevent it by a never-ending string of investigations, prosecutions, and impeachments.
The “they” Trump defied is called on X “the Deep State” which is a colorful nickname. It has a real name, too: “Atlanticism,” after the Atlantic Charter entered by Roosevelt and Churchill. It is the “A” in “North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
In high-toned treatises, Atlanticism described a form of empire built upon American hegemony. The moral justification was ostensibly based on American benevolence, a projection of virtue that relied on propaganda. It’s closest historical analog, though, was colonialism.
The lands occupied by Atlanticist ideology traded in American currency. NATO existed to deter the Soviet threat. But it was also an occupying army. There were not colonial governments. There was, instead, strict control of information, puppet governments, and election interference.
When Trump questioned the continuing need for NATO in 2016, institutions with a financial stake in Atlanticism performed a Cold War soft power operation against him. Western intelligence agencies mobilized to connect Trump to Russia, leading to a series of political dirty tricks.
Russiagate was not merely bureaucratic haplessness masquerading as foreign intrigue. It was, instead, the sclerotic postwar spy apparatus targeting an American presidential candidate and then president.
In 2024, Trump won the presidency again, in part out of the electorate’s disgust over the dirty tricks. Upon returning to the Oval Office, he deliberately refocused foreign policy on the American hemisphere.
He Truth Socialed aggressively about Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama, sending his new Secretary of State on his first diplomatic mission to negotiate better rates on passage through the Panama Canal after threatening to take it back by force.
President Trump was steering the ship of state back to the foreign policy of The Monroe Doctrine, in which America’s focus was on problems in its own hemisphere – and not on “democracy” movements abroad.
The new Trump administration made clear that Ukraine would not be invited into NATO, which would have obligated the United States to send troops half a world away to fight Russia. There is credible reporting that President Trump has also started to deny the NATO proxy warriors in Ukraine encryption codes needed to attack Russia with drones and missiles.
With no American cavalry coming to save the day and President Trump cultivating an independent diplomatic relationship with Russia, the most rational path in Ukraine is to negotiate a ceasefire.
Whatever its intentions – and they were arguably altruistic – Atlanticism became a Frankenstein monster that took its initial design to its rational conclusion that threatened existence.
We scratched the surface of what that means in USAID, Soft Power, And How Solzhenitsyn Predicted This Crisis. The following is based on a compilation of essays written between 2016-2020 connecting Russiagate to Atlanticism. It includes links to original sources and some updates.
To understand the malevolence of Atlanticism, it is essential to grasp the wild details of the putsch it attempted in President Trump’s first term. Following is the craziest story ever told in the history of American politics. Now that President Trump has closed the circle by embarking on a new foreign policy, it is relevant to revisit the story from beginning to end with the benefit of additional context.
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In the 1950s, the Cold War was waged on the premise of the domino theory. Russia was thought to be intent on spreading communist ideology by armed insurrection throughout the world. The Red Menace had to be stopped with blood and treasure in places like Vietnam and El Salvador.
The logic of the domino theory committed America to an unprecedented peacetime military build-up. In addition, the West created an intricate spy bureaucracy to discern Russia’s evil designs. The Five Eyes agreement was a postwar alliance among the United States, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to share intelligence. Under its terms, the Brits could spy on Americans suspected of helping Russia, and report their findings back to the CIA.
The CIA could not do anything with the information because it was not permitted, generally, to conduct investigations on American soil. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI closed the legal loophole by expanding its mission to gather intelligence against Americans who might be Russian agents, under the auspices of “law enforcement.” Now, the Brits could spy on Americans, share the information with the CIA, and the FBI could be brought in to finish the job.
There were spectacular abuses. Hoover kept secret files on Martin Luther King, Jr., Hollywood stars, and politicians who were rivals to his power. The FBI’s domestic intelligence gathering function caused understandable discomfort on the political left.
In response, liberal Idaho (before those words were an oxymoron) Senator Frank Church set up a commission to investigate domestic surveillance abuses. Technology, by then, permitted federal agencies to capture huge amounts of wire communications without disclosing the eavesdropping to Americans who were being surveilled.
Senator Church stated his concerns on an episode of Meet the Press:
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny [against those who] combine together in resistance to the government.
The result of Senator Church’s work was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). Under the new law, the FBI could not use its technological capacity to secretly gather intelligence against any American without first going to court with credible evidence that the citizen was a spy.
In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union disbanded, leaving an entire apparatus in the West built to fend off Soviet expansion. None of it was dismantled. Instead, intrusive devices meant to prevent World War III wound up in the hands of European bureaucrats and wannabee sophisticates of the American spy ranks. Together, they set out to find Russian intrigue of the sort that let them keep using their cool gadgets.
Prominent among them was a British spy by the name of Christopher Steele. He built a distinguished life for himself by blaming Russia for bad things. It was Steele, as a member of MI6, who determined that Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning was a Russian state hit. Nobody has seen the evidence that proves Russia poisoned Litvinenko because that would reveal sources and methods. We have to rely on Steele. But, not to worry, Steele would never just make stuff up, right?
By such shadowy machinations, “Putin is a thug” replaced the domino theory as the raison d’etre of the lucrative Western spy apparatus. How Putin poisoning political enemies justified complex intelligence gathering and expensive military bases originally designed to prevent Soviet incursions into Western Europe is not something you were supposed to ask. A priori, “Putin is a thug” meant he wants to annex France.
Think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution gave the “Putin-is-a-thug” mantra an official, silk-stocking, “former generals, major corporations, Senators, friendly foreign governments, and top academics agree” stature. It worked mostly because Democrats and Republicans were looking for a reason to hate Putin anyway, but for different reasons.
Putin’s anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, Christianity-sourced populism was anathema to Democrats. He roiled some of progressivism’s most strictly enforced pieties, speaking freely of his own baptism, his beliefs, and the positive role Christianity played in Russian history. He put a girl rock band, Pussy Riot, in prison for desecrating an altar, a crime that had not been prosecuted since the pope crowned heads of state.
In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on the advocacy of the homosexual lifestyle in the presence of children, strictly limited advertisements for abortions, and prohibited elective abortions later than 12 weeks after conception. The Sochi Olympics closing ceremonies in 2014 featured a tribute to Russian writers, including communism’s most eloquent critic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose books are required reading in Russian schools.
President Obama personally boycotted the Sochi Olympics and sent in his place a delegation of gay athletes, to protest Russia’s laws against gay advocacy. It was a diplomatic breach of the sort that was carefully avoided during the Beijing Olympics, even though China has a far worse record on human rights.
On the social issues alone, Putin would seem to be a natural ally for the American right, but it does not work that way. Instead, when discussing Putin, Republicans are quick to evoke images of Stalin and gulags. That is partly because the Cold War is ingrained in the Republican identity. They are the paunchy vets who always don their bad-fitting uniforms for the parade.
Mostly, though, it is because the funding pipeline that makes Washington, D.C. the wealthiest region in America feeds mostly on military spending. Politico reported in 2015, “the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad…. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined.” Republicans have been feeding at that trough for 75 years.
Smack dab in the middle of the foreign entanglements debated by this bipartisan mix of Putin-hatred is the country of Ukraine, which sits geographically between Europe and Russia.
The Cold War view was that Ukraine was the geographical key to the Soviet empire. Since the 1990s, Ukraine has bounced back and forth between alignment with Russia and the West. Like a child in a bitter divorce, it has become a proxy in the battle between two mismatched parents: the parochial, nationalistic, religious preferences of Putin’s Russia; and the globalism of the West.
In 2010, Russia-sympathetic candidate Viktor Yanukovych was elected as president of Ukraine, in part due to the services of an American political consultant, Paul Manafort. In 2014, Yanukovych would make the mistake of not signing an association agreement with the European Union. John McCain flew to Kiev to rally support for the EU.
McCain reported back to the Atlantic Council about his trip. There followed a successful coup d’état, that replaced the Russia-sympathetic government with a Western puppet.
President Obama later told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he had “brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.” The word “brokered” suggests that the Obama administration successfully replaced a government half a world away at the behest of Washington’s smart people. There was also a leaked phone call in which Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland participated in choosing the new government.
In 2015, the fledgling Donald Trump campaign gained unlikely traction among the Republican rank-and-file by questioning Washington’s Putin hatred. Several times in that summer – after his June announcement that he would run for president – Trump cited his experience with the Miss Universe Pageant in Russia as providing foreign policy bona fides and, in the same interviews, he spoke highly of Vladimir Putin.
Such bombast enraged the huffy foreign policy establishment, but regular people got a kick out of it, partly because of the rage it caused among the self-important. Candidate Trump did not know it, but he was thumbing his nose at the West’s most powerful syndicate – Atlanticism – and there would be hell to pay.
In September 2015, Putin made a speech at the UN in New York harshly critical of NATO expansion and Western meddling on Russia’s borders, citing “the bloc thinking of the times of the Cold War” that was having devastating effects in places like Ukraine. For Trump, it must have seemed a gift when a world leader like Putin provided such a harsh critique of President Obama’s foreign policy just a short cab ride away from his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.
Trump gave Putin’s speech a stellar review. He would appear on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX the next day and say, “I will tell you that I think in terms of leadership, [Putin] is getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well. They did not look good together.”
Trump spent the next few months distinguishing himself from all other Republican candidates by lavishing praise on Putin, even daring to question the Russian president’s role in the Litvinenko poisoning: “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that. I don’t know that he has. Have you been able to prove that?”
Christopher Steele could not have been pleased. Republicans, too, did not appreciate the Putin heresy. Around the time of Putin’s UN speech, the strategic intelligence firm Fusion GPS put out a feeler to Republican interests, offering to find dirt on Trump. The Washington Free Beacon, a neoconservative website funded by the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, hired Fusion GPS. At the time, Singer was backing Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination.
Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative, also began doing opposition research for the DNC about Trump and Russia in late 2015. The Ukrainian embassy representing the new Ukrainian government whose power President Obama had “brokered” worked closely with Chalupa. Suddenly, lots of powerful Washingtonians were trying to connect Trump to Russia.
On January 16, 2016, The Atlantic Council issued a dispatch under the banner headline: “US Intelligence Agencies to Investigate Russia’s Infiltration of European Political Parties.” The lede was concise: “American intelligence agencies are to conduct a major investigation into how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe, it can be revealed.”
There followed a series of pull quotes from an article that appeared in the The Telegraph, including one stating that, “James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence” was investigating whether right wing political movements in Europe were sourced in “Russian meddling.”
The dispatch spoke of “A dossier” that revealed “Russian influence operations” in Europe. This was the first time trippy words like “Russian meddling” and “dossier” would appear together in official sources.
Senator Frank Church would have been rolling over in his grave. A progressive Democratic president was spying on European political parties to uncover connections to Russia. This meant, almost necessarily under the Five Eyes Agreement, that foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump campaign and sharing their “intelligence” with John Brennan at the CIA, who was shucking it off to James Comey at the FBI.
One of the international men of mystery spying on European political parties was none other than the ubiquitous Christopher Steele. A March 5, 2018 piece in The New Yorker about Steele described the connection:
Even before Steele became involved in the U.S. Presidential campaign, he was convinced that the Kremlin was interfering in Western elections. In April of 2016, not long before he took on the Fusion assignment, he finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. The report…. suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., in order to end the punishing economic sanctions that the E.U. and the U.S. had imposed on Russia after its 2014 political and military interference in Ukraine.
At roughly the same time Steele worked on Project Charlemagne, he hired Fusion GPS to do research on Paul Manafort. Glenn Simpson detailed this in his book: “Weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort.” Manafort was then working as an advisor to Trump’s campaign, and he had not yet ascended to campaign manager. His one-time business partner, Rick Davis, had managed John McCain’s campaign, and Manafort was tapped as a level-headed insider who could possibly bring some ballast to Trump.
The perfect storm that became Russiagate looked like this in March 2016:
Steele was investigating Putin’s influence in European politics. Manafort had been helpful in electing a Russian-sympathetic candidate in Ukraine, and he started to work for Trump. Steele hired Fusion GPS to investigate Manafort. Then Fusion GPS hired Steele to help them. Cozy, huh? Oblivious to it all, Trump continued to poke the bear, wondering out loud about NATO’s continued relevance and questioning America’s foreign policy in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council was on high alert, defending NATO against Trump’s heresy.
There were whispers of “Putin’s candidate”, but they were only whispers. It probably would have remained innuendo parroted occasionally on the campaign trail. But then something extraordinary happened.
On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails to an unknown entity in a “spear phishing” scam. This has been called a “hack,” but it was not. Instead, it was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the internet. The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.
Blaming Russia would be a convenient way to deal with the Podesta emails. There was already an existing Russia operation around Trump that could easily be retrofitted for this purpose. The problem was that it was nearly impossible to identify the perpetrator of a phishing scheme using computer forensic tools. The only way to associate Putin with the emails was circumstantially.
The DNC retained a company called “CrowdStrike” to help. CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, was an anti-Putin Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. With the Atlantic Council in 2016, all roads led to Ukraine.
The Atlantic Council’s list of significant contributors included Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. The Ukrainian energy company that was paying millions to Hunter Biden as a member of its board of directors, Burisma, also appears prominently on the Atlantic Council’s donor list. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Western puppet installed in Ukraine, visited the Atlantic Council’s Washington offices to make a speech weeks after the coup.
Pinchuk was a big donor (between $10 million and $20 million) to the Clinton Foundation. Back in ’15, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative piece, “Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends.” The piece was about how Ukraine was attempting to influence Clinton by making huge donations through Pinchuk. Similarly, in 2014, the New York Times saw fit to print a story, “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks.” The article identified both the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution as think tanks being paid by foreign governments for lobbying efforts, noting that the arrangements, “opened a whole new window into an aspect of the influence-buying in Washington that has not previously been exposed.”
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails pending publication.” Two days later, CrowdStrike fed the Washington Post a story, headlined, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.” The improbable tale was that the Russians had hacked the DNC computer servers and got away with some opposition research on Trump. The article quoted Alperovitch.
The next day, a new blog – Guccifer 2.0 – appeared on the internet and made an improbable confession:
Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups.
I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.
Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.
Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.
Guccifer 2.0 posted hundreds of pages of Trump opposition research allegedly hacked from the DNC and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun. In raw form, the opposition research were documents obtained in the Podesta emails, with a notable difference: It was widely reported the documents now contained “Russian fingerprints.”
The document had been cut and pasted into a separate Russian Word template that yielded an abundance of Russian “error “messages. The document’s metadata included the name of the Russian secret police founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, written in the Russian language.
The three-parenthesis formulation from the original post “)))” is the Russian version of a smiley face used commonly on social media. In addition, the blog’s author deliberately used a Russian VPN service visible in its emails even though there would have been many options to hide national affiliation.
Under the circumstances, the FBI should have analyzed the DNC computers to confirm the Guccifer hack. Incredibly, though, the inspection was done by CrowdStrike, the same Atlantic Council-connected private contractor paid by the DNC that had already concluded in The Washington Post that there had been a hack and Putin was behind it.
CrowdStrike would declare the “hack” to be the work of sophisticated Russian spies. Alperovitch described it as, “skilled operational tradecraft.” There is nothing skilled, though, in ham-handedly disclosing a Russian identity on the internet when trying to hide it. The more reasonable inference is that this was a set-up. It certainly looks like Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared as a cover story for the Podesta email leak in coordination with the Washington Post’s article that appeared the previous day.
FBI Director James Comey confirmed in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017 that the FBI’s failure to inspect the computers was unusual. “We’d always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that’s possible,” he said. But the DNC rebuffed the FBI’s request to inspect the hardware. Comey added that the DNC’s hand-picked investigator, CrowdStrike, is “a highly respected private company.”
What Comey did not reveal was that CrowdStrike never corroborated a hack by forensic analysis. In testimony released in 2019, it was revealed that CrowdStrike admitted to Congressional investigators as early as 2017 that it had no direct evidence of Russian hacking.
CrowdStrike’s president Shawn Henry testified, “There’s not evidence that [documents and emails] were actually exfiltrated [from the DNC servers]. There’s circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.” The circumstantial evidence was Guccifer 2.0; i.e., the uncorroborated cover story.
This was a crucial revelation because the thousand ships of Russiagate launched upon the positive assertion that CrowdStrike had definitely found a Russian hack. The testimony that there was no direct evidence of a hack was kept from the American public for nearly three years.
The reasonable inference is that the DNC was trying to frame Russia, and the FBI and intelligence agencies were going along with the scheme because of political pressure. Lending weight to the frame-up theory: at the same time CrowdStrike was raising a false Russian flag over the hack, the DNC also hired Fusion GPS to create Russian dirt on Trump. The law firm, Perkins Coie, was used as a cut out to hire both CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, so that the DNC’s involvement would not be immediately visible.
There were massive conflicts of interest.
To give the hit job a veneer of credibility, Fusion GPS recruited its client, Steele, for whom it was investigating Paul Manafort. But Steele at the time had already investigated Putin’s supposed involvement in European politics, in Project Charlemagne. Finding that Russia colluded with Trump would at least be an act of confirmation bias.
Steele couldn’t tap anyone actually connected to Putin to provide Trump kompromat. Instead, he dipped into Washington’s ready pool of earnest role players and got the Putin dirt from low level policy researcher with connections to the Brookings Institution, Igor Danchenko.
Danchenko drafted what has famously come to be called “the Steele dossier,” a facially absurd document that claimed Putin possessed videotape of Trump paying two prostitutes to pee on a bed the Obamas had used while in Russia. The theory was that Putin was using that video (kompromat) to control Trump’s candidacy, injecting it with the sort of anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, Christianity-sourced populism that was working so well for him in Russia.
Therein lies the chewy tootsie roll center of Russiagate: Atlanticists have a condescending view of the hoi polloi who vote against their globalist projects, regarding the huddled masses as easily manipulated, Pygmalion-like, by smarter people. They project that Putin is playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who reject their ideas, because that is how they see the world. This simple prejudice makes Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence.
In his master’s thesis at the University of Louisville, Danchenko had thanked Fiona Hill, who would help him graduate to the position of senior researcher at Brookings, and co-author a paper with her about how Russian ambitions in Europe and Asia are bolstered by its energy exports. Hill is the British-American academic and self-confessed Russia-hawk who was Adam Schiff’s key impeachment witness against President Trump.
Danchenko would disclaim the substance of the dossier to the FBI in 2017 – a fact the FBI did not disclose until 2020. Disclaiming the substance of the dossier in his FBI interview was a stunning admission by the so-called primary sub-source that somehow did not stop Trump’s own Justice Department from using the dossier to ratchet up the inquiry and appoint a special council.
While CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS were creating false Russian flags over the Trump campaign, the CIA managed to get the FBI to open its own domestic spy investigation. John Brennan was asked in his February 4, 2018 appearance on Meet the Press about the role of the Five Eyes Agreement in investigating the Trump campaign, and he made a blunt admission:
Now I’m not going to get into details about how it was acquired. But the FBI has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the FBI had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals who may have had some affiliation with the Trump campaign. And so the intelligence that we collected was pulsed against that. And I thought it would have been derelict if the FBI did not pull the threads, investigative threads, on American persons who might have been involved with Russia and working on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.
There is no way to read his answer except to infer that Brennan prodded the FBI investigation into Trump with the help of “British counterparts”, and he’s proud of it.
At the time the CIA was pushing the FBI to investigate, Trump had made an unlikely and inexplicable run at the Republican nomination on a populist agenda. The Brits were dealing with their own unlikely and inexplicable political event. Tens of millions of working-class voters had done the unthinkable: reject rule by the EU.
It was the time of the Brexit vote and a wave of populism was sweeping the UK. On July 13, 2016, British academic Dr. Andrew Foxall penned an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Putin Loves Brexit.” Foxall blamed Russia for the previous month’s Brexit vote, adding in a little-noted aside that spies were looking into it:
The United States is so concerned over Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity that in January, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, began a review of Russia’s clandestine funding of European parties.
Whatever their motivation, British intelligence agencies were imagining Putin under mattresses, and they were in full spy-mode about it. Minor members of the Trump campaign, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, were invited to London to talk to Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, who burrowed in on Trump and Russia. Unless U.S. intelligence agencies were freestyling in Great Britain, MI6 was spying on the Trump campaign.
Halper is inferentially a British spy or at least a double agent. The alternative is that he was an American spy conducting rogue operations from England. At the time, Halper was an FBI confidential human source being paid by American tax dollars.
After Papadopoulos hooked on as a minor underling in the Trump campaign, he ran into a person by the name of Josef Mifsud while traveling in Europe. Mifsud either did or didn’t bring up something about Hillary Clinton emails, depending on who you believe: Papadopoulos or Andrew Downer, an Australian diplomat connected to the Clinton Foundation who gratuitously inserted himself into these events right as the FBI was looking for a pretext to start and official investigation. Downer himself would later retreat from the claim that Papadopoulos mentioned emails.
James Comey has called Mifsud a Russian agent. But Mifsud has documented connections to British spy agencies. He traveled to the United States in early February 2017 as a guest of the State Department, an accommodation not ordinarily made to Russian operatives who just stole an election. Joseph Mifsud walked, quacked, and acted like a Western asset. The alternative is that he somehow showed up in the middle of a honeypot operation against George Papadopoulos as a real Russian spy to play the part of a Russian spy.
The FBI would officially launch its investigation into the Trump campaign, Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016. A few days later, the agent who opened the investigation – Peter Strzok – would text his lover, “We’ll stop” Trump. By then, the DNC, its paid contractors CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the CIA, foreign intelligence services, and the FBI were engaging in a joint operation to stop Trump that was being run out of Washington’s silk-stocking think tanks.
Together, this powerful junta successfully dealt with the release of the Podesta emails. The contents were beyond embarrassing. The emails show Clinton and the Democratic Party fixing the primaries against Bernie Sanders. The chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign on the eve of the democratic convention in late July for her role in the dirty tricks.
The Podesta emails were the sort of political dirt Woodward and Bernstein got from Deep Throat in that parking garage. You would think the media would have celebrated the emails leak for speaking truth to power. This time, though, The Washington Post intervened firmly on the side of the cover-up. By August, the media was running with the Clinton campaign’s Russia smear operation: The damaging emails showed Putin was behind Trump was now the story.
It made no sense, but Trump was placed on the defensive for email leaks that showed his opponent fixing the primaries. Paul Manafort, who was by then Trump’s campaign manager, resigned because a fake ledger suddenly appeared out of Ukraine connecting him to Russia. In September, the CIA briefed President Obama that the Russians believed the Clinton campaign was conducting a false flag operation to connect Trump to Russia. This briefing was not declassified until 2020, and the necessary inference is that President Obama had full knowledge of the dirty tricks.
Trump protested by stating the obvious: the federal government has “no idea” who was behind the hacks. The FBI and CIA called him a liar, issuing a “Joint Statement” that cited Guccifer 2.0, suggesting 17 intelligence agencies agree that it was the Russians. Hillary Clinton took advantage of this “intelligence assessment” in the October debate to portray Trump as Putin’s stooge” She said:
“We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber-attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.”
The media’s fact checkers excoriated Trump for lying. It has since been learned that the “17 intelligence agencies” claptrap was always false. Somehow, Trump won anyway. Then, immediately after the election, elements of the scheme began to unravel.
On Dec. 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian separatists. Voice of America later determined the claim was false, and CrowdStrike retracted its finding.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense was forced to eat crow and admit that the hacking never happened. It was suddenly obvious to anyone paying attention that if you wanted a computer testing firm to fabricate a Russian hack for political reasons in 2016, CrowdStrike was who you went out and hired.
In a piece first published on January 11, 2017, headlined “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico reported that Ukraine tried to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election: “The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.” Ukraine later apologized and admitted its interference.
The conspirators probably should have exited the scheme there and played dumb but instead they doubled down. The Washington insiders who had together orchestrated the Russia hoax switched into a cover-up, hide-the-evidence, continue-to-harm-Trump operation.
Trump had promised that he would appoint General Michael Flynn as his National Security Advisor. Flynn publicly favored rapprochement with Russia and was somewhat of an Atlanticist iconoclast. Once behind the desk with access to the government’s top-secret files, Flynn possibly would have figured out that the FBI and CIA combined with the DNC and members of the Obama administration to play political dirty tricks against Trump. The plotters’ first order of business was to sideline Flynn.
In their meeting two days after the election, President Obama forcefully told Trump not to give Flynn a role in his administration. Trump was taken aback but he did not listen and made General Flynn his National Security Advisor. The Obama Administration needed a Plan B: Invent an international incident to entrap Flynn.
On December 27, 2016, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats—including gardeners and chauffeurs—for interfering in the election. Flynn had a conversation with the Russian ambassador the next day and the plotters listened in via wiretap. The Obama administration wanted to see if Flynn signaled to the Russians that the Trump administration would have a different approach to foreign policy.
Under American law, it is perfectly okay for an incoming administration to communicate its foreign policy preferences during a transition even if they differ from the lame duck administration. That is one of the purposes of a presidential transition. Flynn could have said, “President-elect Trump believes this Russian interference thing is a fantasy, and these sanctions will be lifted on his first day in office.”
Given the soupy mix of conspiracy theories at the time, it is unlikely the Trump administration would have survived such an act of diplomatic common sense. The conspirators were hoping to get Flynn on tape making that sort of accommodation to the Russians. The promise to lift the sanctions would then be cited to suggest a quid pro quo that proved the nonexistent collusion. But Flynn was noncommittal in his wiretapped conversation. Drat!
The plotters did have a transcript of what he said. This is where the outrageous behavior of the FBI is fully displayed. James Comey invited Flynn to be interviewed by the FBI, supposedly about Russian collusion to steal the election. Flynn was eager to tell the FBI that Russian collusion was ridiculous. What Flynn did not know was that the purpose of the interview had nothing to do with the election. It was a trick.
Comey did not need to ask Flynn what was said in the conversation with the ambassador—he had a transcript. The only reason to ask Flynn about it was to cross him up. It would be a test pitting Flynn’s memory against the transcript. The inescapable conclusion is that the FBI set a trap for the incoming national security advisor to disrupt the foreign policy of the newly elected president.
Flynn was not completely clear about what he had discussed with the ambassador, but most of it was none of the FBI’s business. In his defense, he did not believe he was sitting there to tell the FBI how the Trump administration was dealing with Russia going forward. The conversation was supposed to be about the election. He certainly did not think the FBI would unmask his comments and compare them to his answers. That would be illegal.
Flynn was forced to resign. The conspirators had successfully eliminated the one person with the experience and gumption to discover their dirty tricks and go after them for it. Once Flynn had been successfully sidelined, insiders combined with the media to invent a phony Russia narrative that called into question Trump’s legitimacy.
Republicans played leading roles ginning up Russia hysteria during the transition. Trump appointed Exxon chairman Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state. He had received the Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin in 2013, for his work on the Arctic Exploration Pact with Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft. Tillerson drew the ire of Marco Rubio, a prominent Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who tweeted, “Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState – MR.”
Sen. John McCain expressed opposition to Tillerson’s appointment. McCain went on TV to declare that “Vladimir Putin is a thug, and a murderer, and a killer….and a KGB agent.” Trump’s attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, ridiculously recused himself from the Russia probe because he had recently seen the Russian ambassador in a reviewing line at the Senate, which somehow placed him under investigation for collusion.
Both sides in Washington – Republicans and Democrats – were now playing the same Russia game. Everyone knew their role. Buzzfeed released the Steele Dossier to much fanfare on January 10, 2017, and it caused a feeding frenzy in the media. A new wave of reporting ensued, using smears and innuendo to question whether Trump was controlled by Russia. In 2021, Axios offered a muffled after-the-fact apology calling the reporting, “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history….”
FBI Director James Comey attended a meeting before Trump’s inauguration, during which President Obama posited that “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia” with the new president. Comey had an obligation to say, “Mr. President, with due respect, the FBI gathers intelligence for the president, and once you’re out the door and the new guy is in here, I have an obligation to share everything with him, even embarrassing facts that show we were using the FBI to improperly surveil his campaign.” Instead, Comey – who was up to his neck in the political operation at this point – saluted and said, “Yes sir.”
Moments after the inauguration, while she still had access to her computer – in a clumsy attempt to paper the record – Susan Rice sent a CYA email stating President Obama had said during the earlier meeting that they should do everything by-the-book. Ambassador Rice wrote:
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
Early in his administration, President Trump met with Comey on several occasions and asked him to make public what he had told the president privately: that the president was not a target of the Russia investigation. Comey refused, and Trump fired him.
Comey then leaked notes of his meetings with Trump, he claimed under oath, to get a special counsel appointed. He did not say what he knew behind the scenes about the inner workings of Washington that convinced him his notes would yield that result.
Because of the Sessions recusal, the special counsel decision devolved to the second in command at the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, a Washington insider who had been recommended to Trump by Republican leaders. Without any evidence that showed a possible crime, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate, “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
Mueller had been Obama’s director of the FBI until 2013. He had previously explored Paul Manafort’s advocacy on behalf of Yanukovych in Ukraine. Manafort may or may not have violated tax and banking laws in 2010. Given the twisted and arcane nature of those laws, who knows? What is known is that Manafort first was investigated for breaking those laws way back then. A discretionary decision was made not to prosecute.
Nevertheless, in 2017, the Office of Special Counsel in the Russia probe indicted Manafort for hiding income that he received in 2010 from Ukraine. Mueller essentially dusted off some old files from when he ran the FBI and indicted Trump’s one-time campaign manager on a stale tax charge.
Mueller also indicted underlings in the Trump campaign for process crimes, inanities like – in the case of George Papadopoulos – not correctly stating the date when he officially joined the campaign, which the media then portrayed as “an indictment for lying to the FBI in the Russia probe.” They also indicted Flynn for lying to the FBI in an interview that was itself a set-up.
The Roger Stone prosecution was emblematic of the through-the-looking-glass world of the Mueller probe. Stone had been a Trump-friend and confidante for years. He claimed in 2016 that he had a connection to Wikileaks and therefore could speculate with credibility about Clinton email contents and their drop date.
When questioned after the election as part of a Congressional investigation, he said his backchannel to WikiLeaks was comedian and radio talk show host Randy Credico. Credico admitted that at the time he was leading Stone to believe he had an in with Julian Assange, who had been on his radio show. He wrote an email to Stone on September 18, 2016: “that batch probably coming out in the next drop… I can’t ask them favors every other day. I asked one of his lawyers… they have major legal headaches riggt [sic] now… relax.”
Stone did not tell investigators that when he failed to get insider knowledge from Credico, he had a colleague, Jerome Corsi, try to contact Wikileaks. Corsi was unsuccessful in those attempts. In America, apparently, if your name is not James Comey or John Brennan, failure to disclose to Congress something you consider immaterial gets you indicted for perjury.
Any unbiased investigator would have looked at the Roger Stone facts and said, “Who cares?” Stone certainly had reason to believe Credico was a backchannel, and he had email evidence to prove it. Moreover, if Trump’s people really needed a backchannel to contact Wikileaks to inquire when the emails were being released, that means they did not have direct contact when the emails were obtained.
Once the Mueller team found out that Trump confidantes could not even get hold of Assange, it was time to end the inquiry over whether Trump conspired with Assange.
Stone emailed Credico after talking to investigators and said, basically, you better not lie to them like you lied to me or I’ll kill your therapy dog. That sort of bluster was not unusual in their relationship. Stone had once joked on social media that Credico had died of a drug overdose.
For his gag about killing the dog, Stone was also prosecuted for witness tampering, even though Credico himself admitted that he never felt threatened and considered it a joke. The prosecution of Roger Stone (before a tainted jury) was a misuse of the legal process for political ends. It was designed to generate a month’s worth of misleading headlines, each some variant of “Trump Advisor Found Guilty of Lying About Wikileaks.”
Stone was convicted and President Trump was forced, by the rules of fairness, to commute his sentence and incur unneeded controversy in an election year among voters who were purposely conned by the ridiculous prosecution.
The only actual Russians Mueller indicted were associated with an internet troll farm that, the indictment suggested, Putin had used to influence the 2016 election for Trump. The troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), had purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, more than half of them after the election, and only a small percentage having anything to do with the candidates themselves.
The Mueller Report concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” They did it by “a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned two reports, from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, that also concluded that the IRA had influenced the election by social media posts.
The posts uncovered by the Senate and the Special Counsel, though, were beyond strange. Most had nothing to do with the election. Hilariously, Mueller tried to prove his case against the troll farm in court. The IRA unexpectedly hired lawyers to mount a defense instead of suffering an empty, unenforceable conviction by default. Turns out, nobody could connect even the minor trolling to Putin.
US District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who presided over the trial, noted the indictment in the case “does not link the [IRA] to the Russian government” and alleged “only private conduct by private actors.” The judge prohibited prosecutors from publicly claiming that the troll farm was sponsored by the Russian government, because there was no evidence of that.
The Justice Department was forced to dismiss the indictment.
As a final, desperation play, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that defied the findings of the Mueller probe and suggested that Trump colluded with Putin during the 2016 election when Paul Manafort sent some polling data to Ukrainian Konstantin Kilimnik. There is no evidence that Kilimnik was a Russian agent or that the otherwise available polling data could possibly be used to influence an election.
Instead, by all accounts (even Mueller’s), Manafort was just trying to impress a possible consulting client who had previously worked closely with the Obama administration (far more closely than with the Trump campaign). That the U.S. Senate was willing to engineer the Russian interference virus into a strain that even Mueller rejected shows how much Washington wanted the phony political operation to continue.
At the end of it all, after tens of millions of dollars in investigations, and countless words spilled in the media alluding to a Russian conspiracy to steal the 2016 election, there was nothing there.
Attorney General William Barr eventually dispatched U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. Durham obtained one guilty plea. Turns out, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith fabricated evidence to get a FISA warrant on Carter page. Otherwise, the Russiagate conspirators escaped. Once the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee conceded that Vladimir Putin meddled in the election, it gave the bad guys an airtight alibi.
John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper et al. could say that whatever they did to stop the Red Menace from interfering in our democracy makes them American heroes. When he was interviewed, Brennan probably told U.S. Attorney John Durham that President Obama became concerned about Russian interference way back in 2015 and instructed the CIA to use all intelligence tools at its disposal to get to the bottom of it.
Guaranteed, that caused Durham to tug at his beard and ask, “How do you indict high ranking officials for protecting America?”
Durham never took the next logical step to call this operation what it was: a Washington power grab against an outsider using false Russian flags. He would have to cross lots of powerful Republicans and Democrats to take his investigation to its natural conclusion. That is unfortunate, because his failure has continued to vector American foreign policy in the direction of war.
“Putin is a thug” is a mantra that funds think tanks and embellishes the hero’s journey of many of Washington’s most notable Republicans. It is sourced less in fact than in constant repetition. How is Russia worse than Saudi Arabia, to whom the United States supplies F-15s and military training?
When President Trump finally met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, he expressed skepticism about the Putin-did-it racket. At a joint press conference with the Russian president, Trump was asked about allegations of Russian election meddling and he responded, “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
He added, “I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics,” signaling that he believed Russian interference was primarily an invention of his political enemies.
Trump even dared to bring up the FBI’s failure to test the DNC servers: “You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server — haven’t they taken the server…. Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?”
The Western media predictably went nuts. But the frenzy scuttled upon the rocks of public opinion, as usually happened with Trump. The Washington Post could not figure out the polling numbers Trump received after publicly rejecting the fake Russia meddled in the election narrative:
[P]ublic reaction nationally [to the Helsinki summit] appears more muted than in Washington, where Trump faced withering bipartisan criticism for appearing to side with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies at a July 16 news conference in Helsinki.
The lesson? Standing against swamp politics to reestablish friendly relations with an armed nuclear state is not something that upsets ordinary Americans.
It is possible to admire the pure audacity of the plotters and their friends in the media for pulling this one off. For the first two and a half years of Trump’s presidency, they constructed a diabolical trap: if he denied that Russia interfered in the election it meant he himself was colluding in the conspiracy.
Republicans stupidly insisted on conceding phony Russian intrigue, which allowed the plotters to say they were justified to investigate it. Russian collusion was a hoax. It is time to finally admit that there was no Russian interference either.
The Republican establishment’s slavish acceptance of Washington’s Putin-did-it lie perfectly illustrates why it regularly loses political battles. Gifted in 2016 with undeserved victory in a generational realignment that they were dragged to kicking and screaming, they proceeded to question its source and validity.
Because if Trump was a product of KGB-esque intrigue, then Hillary was a victim of meddling. Trump was at least a hapless beneficiary. The basket of deplorables were not only racist losers, they were also Putin’s unwitting stooges.
There was always a basic logical contradiction in Russiagate: If the Steele dossier tapped Russian sources to reveal a Putin plot to harm Hillary, why did it primarily include crazy stuff that hurt Trump? And if it was created to smear Trump, why did the intelligence community rely on it to conclude that Putin was out to get Hillary?
Read closely, the dossier tells you who fabricated it beginning on its first page:
Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. Source C, a senior Russian financial official said that the TRUMP operation should be seen in terms of PUTIN’s desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon countries’ interests rather than ideals-based international order established after World War Two. S/he had heard PUTIN talking in this way to close associates on several occasions.
The key is the use of the descriptor trans-“Atlantic” in describing Putin’s ambitions. That is a Washington insider word. It is the “A” in NATO. It is the “Atlantic” in Atlantic Council. Unless Vladimir Putin goes around the Kremlin talking like a NATO lobbyist, he never said any of those things.
An ideals-based Transatlantic alliance that defies the rabble who prefer governance based on national interest is, instead, the postwar foreign policy paradigm called Atlanticism.
In the end, the political class wanted Russian interference to be true because of Atlanticism’s continuing hold over the American soul. The evil geniuses behind this operation baited the hook with a Putin lure knowing that the Republican establishment (see, e.g. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, NeverTrump) would not be able to resist.
“Russia v. America the Rematch” would make America 1985 again, and Republican insiders threatened by Trump’s insurgency would reclaim their petty thrones and dominions.
If there were not places like the Brookings Institution and the Atlantic Council funded by foreign governments with pecuniary interests in keeping NATO bases in their countries, this operation never would have gotten off the ground.
The Russia hysteria proves, more than anything, that America is not a democracy. It is an insider-ocracy run by lobbyists and think tanks even against the choices of American voters. Eisenhower said to beware the military industrial complex, and that remains a fair description of the great amorphous beast.
Trump’s first term was crippled by Atlanticism. In his second term, he has turned spectacularly on the beast, driving a stake into its still beating heart. The true facts of Russiagate are especially important as the Trump administration proceeds to transform the foreign policy establishment. The above telling is the full story of the worst scandal in American political history.
