Not Mueller Time – At Last!
At his wrap-up press conference in May, Robert Mueller sternly underscored
what he called "the central allegation" of the two-year Russia probe.
Namely, that the Russian government engaged in
"multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election, and that
allegation deserves the attention of every American."
Today’s gong show on Capitol Hill presented him with innumerable opportunities
to defend that heavy duty proposition.
Indeed, he had a massive TV audience before which to fortify the entire foundation
on which the Russia meddling/collusion story is based and on which a concerted
effort have been made by a goodly part of the Washington establishment to invalidate
the 2016 election on the grounds that the Kremlin threw it to Trump.
But nothing doing. Instead, Mueller ducked, dodged and demurred – hiding behind
the words of his 448-page report. Yet the latter doesn’t even attempt to "prove"
this "central allegation" at all; it just asserts it based on purportedly
classified information that the unwashed voters and most of their elected representatives
are not allowed to see.
More crucially, both before and since the Report’s release, even its squishy
nods and heavily qualified inferences implicating Russian state agents have
been essentially refuted by evidence now on the public record.
The two tent poles of the whole RussiaGate affair are the social media campaigns
of the St. Petersburg troll farm and the alleged hack of the DNC computers by
Russian state operatives. That’s not our view but the claim of the Mueller report
itself which said the alleged Russian interference occurred “principally
through two operations.”
Yet both poles are so flimsy that they can’t be taken seriously by anybody
who examines the facts with even a half-open, adult mind.
In a word, the troll farm’s efforts at using US social media were an amateurish
joke which were well and truly lost in the sea of noise and trivia which
washes through Facebook, Twitter et. al, and which had no relationship to the
Kremlin in any event (see below). Likewise, the overwhelming evidence on the
public record says the DNC emails were leaked by a disgruntled
insider not hacked by Russian agents operating over the internet
thousands of miles away.
We have buttressed both of these conclusions at length previously, and the
essence is summarized below. But the implications go way beyond knocking the
RussiaGate hoax into a cocked-hat.
What the two flimsy tent poles really show is the extreme danger of statism
and the inherent infirmities of Big Government itself.
That’s because in today’s world of relentless 24/7 communications and messaging,
haphazard information, random facts and mere factoids can be drafted into the
service of a narrative that serves partisan ends, and then can be repeated with
such monumental frequency and plenary breadth as to give the aura of truth to
what amounts to self-serving nonsense.
That is to say, scratch a Washington pol, Deep State apparatchik or MSM journalist
who embraces the "central allegation" of RussiaGate and you essentially
have a Never Trumper who finds the Donald and that for which he stands so loathsome
that they, perforce, must believe he was elected only by virtue of Kremlin intervention.
To RussiaGate believers, the alternative is not even thinkable. To wit, that
62 million voters knowingly preferred the Donald over Hillary – notwithstanding
all his warts of character and his querulous denunciations of establishment
policy and its officialdom.
Accordingly, the evidence needed to validate the Russian interference narrative
was never examined deeply or subjected to skeptical assessment and challenge;
it was just lined-up and recited endlessly as if the mere repetition of factoids,
irrelevancies and sheer foolishness proved the truth of the narrative.
Still, if a proposition as grave as "multiple, systematic efforts to interfere
in our election" can be embraced by a major section of the governing apparatus
on such threadbare evidence as the two poles of the RussiaGate story how is
it possible for Imperial Washington to rule the entire world or to micro-manage
the very warp and woof of domestic economic and social life?
Indeed, if there was ever a case for free markets, small government, maximum
individual liberty and minimal politicization of society at home and strict
non-interventionism abroad, the RussiaGate Hoax is exactly that.
What today’s gong show really proved is that the governing classes and their
media megaphones in America today cannot even chew bubble gum and walk a straight
line at the same time. So why in the world do we want them to rule where no
rulers are needed?
In any event, the St. Petersburg troll farm narrative is now deader than a
doornail. Mueller and his posse have actually been prohibited from even asserting
in public that it was a Kremlin operation by a U.S. District judge.
That’s right. Because they didn’t have a shred of evidence to support their
insinuation!
That was proven in open court when much to Mueller’s surprise, the operation
involved – the Internet Research Agency (IRS) – chose to defend itself and the
13 clueless ham sandwiches Mueller indicted and in so doing elicited a stern
admonition from the presiding judge.
Thus, the first pole of the RussiaGate tent – the allegation that IRA was a
part of the Russian government’s “sweeping and systematic” interference
campaign – has already tumbled to the ground. Mueller’s team has been forced
to admit in court that this was a false insinuation.
Aaron Mate, an intrepid and honest leftwing journalist for the Nation
magazine, recently summarized the matter as well as anyone:
US District Judge Dabney Friedrich noted that Mueller’s February 2018
indictment of the IRA “ does not link the {IRA} to the Russian government"
and alleges “only private conduct by private actors.”
Jonathan Kravis, a senior prosecutor on the Mueller team, acknowledged
that this is the case. “[T]he report itself does not state anywhere that
the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency activity,”
Kravis told the court.
Mueller also goes to great lengths to paint it as a sophisticated operation
that “had the ability to reach millions of US persons.” Yet, as
we already know,
most of the Russian social media content was juvenile clickbait that had nothing
to do with the election (only 7 percent of IRA’s Facebook posts mentioned
either Trump or Clinton). There is also no evidence that the political content
reached a mass audience, and to the extent it reached anyone, most of it occurred
after the election.
Indeed, the IRA was such a belly-splitting joke that they only thing it proved
is that prosecutor Mueller did actually indict 13 Russian-speaking ham sandwiches.
Actually, the IRA was the relatively harmless Hobby Farm of a fanatical Russian
oligarch and ultra-nationalist, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has a great big beef
against Imperial Washington’s demonization of Russia and Vlad Putin. Apparently,
the farm was (it’s apparently been disbanded) the vehicle through
which he gave Washington the middle finger and buttered up his patron.
Prigozhin is otherwise known as "Putin’s Cook" because he made his
fortune in St. Petersburg restaurants that Putin favored and via state funded
food service operations at Russian schools and military installations.
Like most Russian oligarchs not in jail, he apparently tithes in gratitude
to the Kremlin: In this case, by bankrolling the rinky-dink operation at 55
Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg that was the object of Mueller’s pretentious
foray into the flotsam and jetsam of social media low life.
Prigozhin’s trolling farm was grandly called the Internet Research Agency (IRA),
but what it actually did was hire (apparently) unemployed 20-somethings at $4-8
per hour to pound out ham-handed political messaging on social media sites like
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc. They banged away twelve hours at
a shift on a quota-driven paint-by-the-Internet-numbers basis where their output
was rated for engagements, likes, retweets etc.
Whatever these keyboard drones might have been, they were not professional
Russian intel operators. And the collection of broken English postings strewn
throughout Mueller’s indictment were not one bit scary.
The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling
of the nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on
Facebook for about $100,000 – more than half of which were posted after the
election.
Yet here’s a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America’s sacred
election space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less
than 10,000 "impressions" and the mighty sum of 160 "shares".
For crying out loud, it didn’t take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent
to post this kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American
xenophobes more than happy to do it with their own dime, time and bile.
Still, the fact that these Facebook ads and the St. Petersburg troll farm were
taken seriously shows how insidious the Deep State’s RussiaGate campaign had
become. In order to prove that their writ and rule will not be denied by the
American electorate, they cynically fostered a mindless public hysteria that
makes the work of Joe McCarthy appear benign by comparison.
And during a period, by the way, when the 80,000 Facebook posts
attributable to IRA were up against the 33 trillion messages posted
on that fetid network by its billions of users.
Indeed, talk about shooting fish in a barrel. Even Keeping Up With The Kardashians
voters would get a pretty good yuck from the example displayed below.
A post called "Power to the people!" was typed out by some troll
farm operative in St. Petersburg, whose $4 per hour pay probably was not worth
the effort: It was shared by the grand some of 20 people, who
might well have been algos, anyway!
The fact is, the "evidence" for Russian meddling via the IRA social
media operation was always complete nonsense.
Needless to say, of course, if there was no "meddling", how could
there have been Trump campaign "collusion" to accomplish something
which didn’t happen?
As to the DNC emails, the notion that the Russian GRU (intelligence service)
hacked the DNC emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks has now been equally
discredited.
William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA Internet spying technologies,
says that the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn’t
have been hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent
analysts have shown that Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction
based on the oldest trick in the police precinct station house – planting
evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and the name of a notorious
head of the Soviet secret police.
Indeed, if the Russians did it via a nefarious hacking operation, the digital
fingerprints would be all over the computers and servers involved. Moreover,
the National Security Agency (NSA) would have a record of the breach stored
at one of its server farms because it does capture and store everything that
comes into the US over the Internet
Said record, of course, would amount to the Smoking Intercept. So the only
thing Mueller really needed to do at the get-go was to call the head of NSA
and request the NSA intercept – something he obviously didn’t do or it would
have leaked long ago.
In the alternative, if NSA has no such record, he could have confiscated the
DNC computers and servers – which had never even been inspected by the FBI,
let alone taken into custody – to determine whether William Binney is right.
That didn’t happen, either. In fact, the whole case is based on a redacted
draft report from an anti-Russian cyber-security outfit called CrowdStrike that
was on the DNC payroll and had every incentive to find secret evidence of Russian
hacking that has never been made public – or even available to Mueller and his
posse of alleged criminal sleuths.
So what we are left with is the fact that Binney, a NSA veteran and actually
the father of much of today’s NSA Internet spying capability, says that the
recorded download speed of the DNC emails could only have been done by plugging
a thumb-drive into the machines on site. That is, nothing downloads across 5,000
miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7 megabytes per second.
In short, if the Russians hacked them, the evidence is all there in the hard
drives; and if they didn’t, the entire RussiaGate hoax should have been shutdown
long ago.
That’s because the only thing that remotely smacks of untoward meddling by
the Kremlin is the DNC emails – and even then, they only concerned intra-party
squabbles between the Clinton and the Sandernista factions of the Dem party
that were already well advertised and known to the American electorate.
Left-wing investigator Aaron Mate has distilled the same facts we have examined
and come to the same conclusions.
But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline
assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly available
sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts
of interest of key players involved:
-
The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events,
indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain
whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or
how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks. -
The report’s timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to
its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication
of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but
before he even communicated with the source that provided them. -
There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged
Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange. -
Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure
who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness
to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions. -
US intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about
the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because
they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the
forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not
a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher
Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired
contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair –
a key circumstance that Mueller ignores. -
Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party’s
legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the
government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
At the end of the day, there can be nothing more pitiful after 22 months of
prosecutorial scorched earth on the Russian collusion file than Mueller’s list
of indictments. To remind once again, they include:
- 13 Russian college kids for essentially practicing English as a third language
at a St. Petersburg troll farm for $4 per hour; - 12 Russian intelligence operatives who might as well have been picked from
the GRU phonebook; - Baby George Papadopoulos for mis-recalling an irrelevant date by two weeks;
- Paul Manafort for standard Washington lobbyist crimes committed long before
he met Trump; - Michael Cohen for shirking taxes and running Trump’s bimbo silencing operation;
- Michael Flynn for doing his job talking to the Russian Ambassador and confusing
the confusable Mike Pence on what he said and didn’t say about Obama’s idiotic
11th hour Russian sanctions; - Rick Gates for helping Manafort shakedown the Ukrainian government and other
oily Washington supplicants.; - Sam Patten, another Manafort operative who forget to register correctly
as a foreign agent; - Richard Pinedo, a grifter who never met Trump and got caught selling forged
bank accounts on-line to Russians for a couple bucks each; - Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyers who wrote a report for Manafort in 2012
and misreported to the FBI what he told Gates about it.
That’s all she wrote and it’s about as pathetic as it gets. Mueller should
have been guffawed out of town on account of this tommyrot long before belatedly
delivering a report that proved exactly that.
And today he said exactly nothing to alter that conclusion.
Perhaps there is a silver lining, however. Maybe now the RussiaGate "investigation"
can turn to the real election meddling – the Deep State conspiracy lead by
CIA director John Brennan and the anti-Trump cabal at the FBI to thwart Trump’s
candidacy and then discredit his Presidency once he was elected to the nation’s
highest office.
We will have more to say about the real assault on American democracy from
within in the future, but if you do not believe that the entire Russian influence
investigation was motivated by rank political animus against the GOP’s presidential
candidate because he advocated the sensible path of rapprochement with Russia,
just consider the paragraph below.
It tells you all you need to know about why RussiaGate happened; why the Mueller
investigation dragged on for two years and still pollutes the media airways;
and, most importantly, how the so-called progressive party in America in its
grief over losing the 2016 election to an incompetent megalomaniacal bully like
Donald Trump has become a pathetic handmaid of the Warfare State.
“I do always hate the Russians,” Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer
on the Russia case testified to Congress in July 2018. “It is my opinion
that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for
as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life.”
As he opened the FBI’s probe of the Trump campaign’s ties to
Russians in July 2016, FBI agent peter Strzok texted Page: “fuck the cheating
motherfucking Russians… Bastards. I hate them… I think they’re
probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages.” Speaking
to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James
Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and
Russian nationals as a cause for alarm: “The Russians,” Clapper said,
“almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever,
which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned.”
In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim
Baker, who helped oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation
as follows: “It was about Russia, period, full stop.… When the [George]
Papadopoulos information comes across our radar screen, it’s coming across
in the sense that we were always looking at Russia.… we’ve been thinking
about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades.”
Indeed, all along it was all about War Party policy on Russia. Per the NYT:
Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents
when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack
into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize
Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators
had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform
on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.
Trump’s July 2016 comment was a joke, and the story about the GOP platform
change was overblown, while the policy change made all the sense in the world.
Even then, it was later undermined in practice when Trump sold weapons to Ukraine – a
move that even Obama had opposed.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the
Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan.
After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street.
He’s the author of three books, The
Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The
Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED!
A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder
of David
Stockman’s Contra Corner and David
Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
Gloss