Summary: An update on RussiaGate. Who is winning? What does it all mean?
Let’s be clear about RussiaGate, repeating what I said one year ago: The bottom line about RussiaGate: no explanation makes sense.
(1) “Trump has been bought or blackmailed by Putin”
“There’s really no question about Trump/Putin collusion, and Trump in fact continues to act like Putin’s puppet.”
— Paul Krugman at the NYT on 17 November 2017.
Trump has boosted the military budget to the moon, granting almost all the top items on DoD’s multi-trillion dollar wish list. He has continued the Bush-Obama policy of expanding our wars – into Africa, into Afghanistan, into Yemen, into Syria (directly taunting Putin: “Get ready Russia“). His national security team consists of generals plus a few neocon warmongers.
The accusations of Krugman and his fellow leftists are without foundation. Which is why they are usually stated without explanation or supporting evidence.
(2) Russia “hacked” the election
For months after the election the media overflowed with lurid articles about vulnerable voting machines and massive social media advertising – Russian operations that helped Trump win. All were eventually debunked, and now have been put down the memory hole, replaced by new and equally exciting stories. They are still believed only by the true Trump-haters who (like all extremists) are immune to fact and logic.
For details see Exposing the farcical claims about Russian hacking of the election.
(3) The Steele dossier
The story as told to us makes no sense. Since its sources were Russian, it makes more sense as a deception op run by Russians against Trump.
The Left greeted stories about “Piss Trump” as gospel (literally “good news from God”). The lack of supporting evidence after two years does not disturb them.
(4) The FBI’s involvement in the election
The evidence shows that key FBI agents wanted to bring Trump down, either before or after the election. The FBI — and the former FBI Director as Special Prosecutor — have pursued the RussiaGate investigation with great energy, but no visible results. We are approaching the two year mark on the FBI’s investigation, with nothing substantial yet revealed to the public. Just rumors, sustained by aggressive leaks to the media.
Unless this something happens soon, the RussiaGate investigation will be unlike Watergate (Nixon resigned 26 months after the Watergate burglary). It might closely resemble Mueller’s four-year long persecution (not prosecution) of Steven Hatfill for the anthrax (see the LAT summary and the Wikipedia entry). This was so maliciously conducted that Hatfill achieved the almost-impossible: winning a $4.6 million award from the Federal government.
(5) The latest strange story
“About That FBI ‘Source’“
An op-ed in the WSJ by Kimberley A. Strassel (journalist, columnist).
“Did the bureau engage in outright spying against the 2016 Trump campaign?”
“The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it allowed House Intelligence Committee members to view classified documents about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications. …
“Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source” of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. …Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.
“This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting. It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough. Obama political appointees rampantly “unmasked” Trump campaign officials to monitor their conversations, while the FBI played dirty with its surveillance warrant against Carter Page, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its supporting information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now we find it may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carré style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign. …
“{It} is clear is that we’ve barely scratched the surface of the FBI’s 2016 behavior, and the country will never get the straight story until President Trump moves to declassify everything possible. It’s time to rip off the Band-Aid.“
(6) Conclusions
The bottom line: we know almost nothing after two years of headlines. What we have are pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together without the kind of imagination possessed by political extremists of the Left or Right. Each month we get new pieces, but with no visible progress at seeing the full picture.
At some point Strassel’s recommendation might become the only way for the public to gain closure on RussiaGate, lest it become an endless pursuit of the great white whale Trump – distorting American public policy. Release it all for the public to see. So far the investigation has generated little but rumors — daily stories that either Mueller is about to indict Trump or Trump is about to fire Mueller (both predictions often stated with mad confidence).
More broadly, since Reagan these attempts to overturn elections by investigations have grown in frequency and intensity. These are symptoms of the deterioration of America’s political machinery.