WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - An unpublished compilation of all the findings of the investigation into Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia - dubbed the "Alternative Mueller Report" - has been found in Justice Department files and could be released soon, a letter submitted to a US federal court said.

The investigation into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was opened by the FBI in July 2016, ahead of the presidential election in November 2016. In May 2017, Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey, under whose leadership the probe was initiated, and special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to lead the investigation. Mueller released a report on his findings in April 2019. The investigation did not find evidence of the alleged collusion, which was repeatedly denied by both Trump and Russia.

 

In his book 'Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation', published last year, Mueller deputy Andrew Weissmann mentioned that there is also "an internal report memorialising everything" their team found. The New York Times filed a lawsuit in July to request these records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

 

"This is a FOIA action in which the plaintiff seeks release of an internal record created by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller ('SCO') referenced in former SCO prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s book 'Where the Law Ends: Inside the Muller Investigation'. Since the plaintiff filed its complaint, the defendant has located and begun processing this record and intends to release all non-exempt portions to the plaintiff once processing is complete," Assistant US Attorney, Jennifer Jude, wrote in the letter dated 2 December.

 

The "primary processing of the record" will be complete by the end of January 2022, according to the document.

 

"In light of this progress, the parties jointly request that the 10 December initial conference be adjourned sine die and propose that they submit a joint status letter to the court by 14 February 2022, proposing next steps in this case. Additionally, because no discovery is anticipated in this FOIA case, the parties respectfully request that they be relieved of the obligation to file a proposed case management plan for this case," it added.

 

 

 Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/20211203/alternative-mueller-report-could-be-released-soon-1091228678.html

 

 

BECAUSE  many people know what's in this "report", there will be little chance for the Biden administration to fiddle with it... But one never knows. All one needs is to redact the word "no" or "not" to create a positive... It's been done before...

 

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

 

 

Political analysts, scholars and close observers of government are explicitly raising the possibility that the polarized American electoral system has come to the point at which a return to traditional democratic norms will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

The endangered state of American politics is the dominant theme of eight articles published by the National Academy of Sciences on Tuesday, with titles like “Polarization and tipping points” and “Inter-individual cooperation mediated by partisanship complicates Madison’s cure for ‘mischiefs of faction.’”

The academy is not alone. On Dec. 6, The Atlantic released “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” by Barton Gellman, and “Are We Doomed? To head off the next insurrection, we’ll need to practice envisioning the worst,” by George Packer.

On Dec. 10, The Washington Post published “18 Steps to a Democratic Breakdown,” which warned:

Democracy is most likely to break down through a series of incremental actions that cumulatively undermine the electoral process, resulting in a presidential election that produces an outcome clearly at odds with the voters’ will. It is this comparatively quiet but steady subversion, rather than a violent coup or insurrection against a sitting president, that Americans today have to fear most.

Michael W. Macy, a professor of sociology at Cornell and the lead author of “Polarization and tipping points,” put it this way in an email:

Unlike the threat to democracy posed by a military coup, the threat posed by authoritarian populism is incremental. If the water temperature increases only one degree per hour it may take a while before you notice it is too hot and by that time it is too late. We might be better off if we faced an armed insurrection, which might be the exo-shock needed to get the G.O.P. establishment to wake up.

The political scientist Suzanne Mettler, also at Cornell, used the same metaphor of slowly boiling water in her reply to my query:

The greatest danger to democracy right now has emerged in one of our two major parties — a longstanding party that helped to protect democracy until recently, and this makes it hard for people to recognize what is going on. Finally, I think that most Americans now see politics through very partisan lenses and are mostly attentive to how their “team” is doing; they are much less likely to be thinking about the health of the basic pillars of democracy, e.g. electoral integrity, the rule of law, the legitimacy of the opposition, and the integrity of rights. Our political system is in crisis and we should be shouting from the rooftops about it and coming together to save it.

Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox, writing on Dec. 9, raised similar concerns: “We are experiencing failures on both the elite and mass public level,” he wrote, as Republican elites “have chosen to normalize the violence committed by their extreme right flank on Jan. 6.”

 

The activist anti-democratic Trump wing of the Republican Party, committed to avoiding at nearly any cost a political system dominated by an Election Day majority of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and social and cultural liberals, has adopted an aggressive strategy to preserve the political power of white people, especially heteronormative white Christians.

OPINION DEBATEWill the Democrats face a midterm wipeout?

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Democracy — meaning equal representation of all citizens and, crucially, majority rule — has, in fact, become the enemy of the contemporary Republican Party. As The Washington Post noted on Jan. 24, “The last two Republicans to win a majority of the popular vote in a presidential contest were father and son: George H.W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2004.” In the four elections since 2004, the Republican nominee has consistently lost the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, including Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.

The widely publicized efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to politicize election administration and to disenfranchise Democrats through gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws testify to the determination of Republicans — especially the 66 percent who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen — to wrest control of election machinery. On Sept. 2, ProPublica documented a national movement to take over the Republican Party at the grass-roots level in “Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the G.O.P. — and Reshape America’s Elections.”

These developments, taken together, are amplifying alarms about the viability of contemporary democracy in America.

“The nonlinear feedback dynamics of asymmetric political polarization,” a Dec. 14 paper by Naomi Ehrich Leonard and Anastasia Bizyaeva, both at Princeton, Keena Lipsitz at Queens College, Alessio Franci at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Yphtach Lelkes at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that in the case of polarization, there are:

critical thresholds or moments when processes become difficult if not impossible to reverse. Our model suggests that this threshold has been crossed by Republicans in Congress and may very soon be breached by Democrats.

I sent the five authors a series of questions asking them to elaborate on a number of points, and they replied in a jointly written email. My first question was: “Could you explain in terms accessible to the layperson how ‘political processes reinforce themselves’ in ways that can push a political party past a ‘tipping point’?”

 

Their reply:

Political processes, like any other natural dynamical process, in nature, technology, or society, have the capacity to feed themselves and enter an unstable positive, or, self-reinforcing, feedback loop. A classic example is an explosion: when thermal energy is provided to burn a few molecules of a combustible substance, they in turn produce more energy, which burns more molecules, producing more energy in a never-ending loop, at least until combustibles are no longer available.

A similar process can take place in politics, they argue:

For example, elected officials can respond to the signals of extremist donors by becoming more extreme themselves. When these extremist representatives become party leaders, they are then in a position to punish moderates in their party by backing more extreme candidates in primaries. This in turn leads to the election of more extremist candidates and the cycle continues.

In theory, voters

are a potential check on this cascading extremism, but they must be willing to punish ideologically extreme legislators by voting them out of office. As voters have become more concerned about party labels than ideology, they have become less willing to do that, allowing cascading extremism to continue.

What about the Democratic Party?, I asked.

The Democrats are indeed still below the tipping point; therefore, their polarization state is still evolving slowly, or, linearly. But looking at the current policy mood trend and projecting our model slightly into the future, the present large left shift in policy mood due to the Trump era could easily cause the Democrats to tune up their ideological self-reinforcing behavior and let them pass their polarizing tipping point.

The good news, the five authors continued, “is that the Democratic Party is still very much in control of their trajectory.”

Leonard and her co-authors are apprehensive about the future course of the Republican Party:

Even if Republican voters suddenly decide to start punishing extremists in their party, so many other parts of the political process — interest groups, right-wing media, donors — encourage and reinforce the extremism that we expect it would have little effect. In fact, Republican leaders would very likely simply stop listening to Republican voters or ignore elections altogether. Indeed, this is already happening.

In “Polarization and tipping points” Macy, along with Manqing Ma, Daniel R. Tabin, Jianxi Gao and Boleslaw K. Szymanski, all of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, map out the risks of escalating partisan hostility, citing the danger of

the existence of a tipping point beyond which the activation of shared interests can no longer bring warring factions together, even in the face of a common threat. Our interest in this problem is motivated by a series of crises that might be expected to activate a broad political identity and unified response: the Great Recession, Russian electoral interference, impending climate catastrophe, a global pandemic, and, most recently, the January 6. attack on the U.S. Congress.

As partisanship becomes a core element of voters’ self-identity and as voters adopt policy stands in line with their party, polarization reaches new and threatening heights, Macy and his four co-authors argue. In an email, Macy wrote:

The most likely outcome of increasing polarization is political paralysis in which the parties are more interested in preventing the other side from winning than in solving problems. We have heard politicians even feel so emboldened that they can publicly acknowledge that their goal is obstruction, not problem solving. That is the most likely outcome of extreme polarization. A less likely but more frightening outcome is that the partisan animosity against the opposition becomes so intense that each side now views the other as “traitors” or “enemies of the people.” When that happens, the party in power may feel justified in changing the rules of the game to prevent the other party from being able to hold it accountable.

An R.P.I. report on the Macy paper quotes Szymanski:

We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue.

“If we reach that point,” Szymanski added, “we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics or other challenges to the survival of our society.”

I asked Szymanski to describe the nature of a tipping point that, once triggered, would preclude reversion to traditional democratic norms. He replied by email:

In our democracy, the tipping point is achieved when all discussions on divisive issues are within polarized groups and none across groups, because then neither can differences be resolved, nor can we agree to disagree.

In “Inter-individual cooperation mediated by partisanship complicates Madison’s cure for ‘mischiefs of faction,’” Mari Kawakatsu, Simon A. Levin and Corina E. Tarnita, all of Princeton, and Yphtach Lelkes of the University of Pennsylvania make the case that the core strategy developed by one of the nation’s founders to constrain destructive partisan divisions no longer works. The phrase they refer to in the title of their paper comes from James Madison’s famous argument, in Federalist Paper No. 10, that the pluralist character of a country as large and diverse as the United States equips the nation to counter “the mischiefs of faction.”

The potential of a majority to exercise tyrannical domination diminishes as “you take in a greater variety of parties and interests,” Madison wrote, making it “less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”

Kawakatsu and her colleagues argue that in theory, contemporary trends should favor Madison’s strategy:

Potentially driven by increases in educational attainment, the nationalization of politics, and changes to the information environment, the number of issues people care about and consider within the realm of national politics has markedly increased. Despite this trend, and the consequent expectation that an abundance of issues will improve the collective cohesion by decreasing the likelihood of monoliths, polarization is markedly worse.

How has this come about?

“A potential explanation for this paradox is the decreasing dimensionality of the issue space,” Kawakatsu and her colleagues write. “In other words, although the number of issues may have increased, individuals’ opinions on these issues might be so strongly correlated with their political ideology that, in effect, there are only one or two issue dimensions.” Put another way, members of both parties have increasingly adopted the beliefs and issue stands of their fellow partisans, effectively eliminating crosscutting interests, leaving the only salient division the split between Democrats and Republicans.

When partisan bias is extreme, the authors write,

individuals become completely closed off to influence from ideologically divergent peers, and the emergent tribalism boosts inter-individual cooperation at the cost of a weakened, polarized collective. This suggests that, in a highly polarized state, there will be an emergent tension between the individual and the collective levels, with little incentive for individuals to reduce the collective polarization.

The Kawakatsu article builds on the work of Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, political scientists at Berkeley, who wrote the 2020 essay “Madison’s Constitution Under Stress: A Developmental Analysis of Political Polarization” and the chapter “Polarization and the Durability of Madisonian Checks and Balances” in the November 2021 book “Democratic Resilience.”

In the chapter, Pierson and Schickler write:

Our two-party system has been grounded in a structural decentralization of political authority. Yet the emergence of hyper-partisanship means that the check on authoritarian developments in the presidency that the Madisonian system relies on most, Congress, may not work. Instead, G.O.P. members of Congress in particular face multiple incentives to bandwagon rather than resist. Among those incentives are the intense preferences of the party’s interest groups, the heavily “red” and negatively partisan electoral bases of these politicians, and the likelihood that influential partisan media will exact a very high price for defection.

Given these realities, Pierson and Schickler continue,

the developmental perspective we offer raises a disturbing prospect: Under conditions of hyperpolarization, with the associated shifts in meso-institutional arrangements and the growth of tribalism, the Madisonian institutions of the United States may make it more vulnerable to democratic backsliding than many other wealthy democracies would be.

In an email, Pierson wrote:

Today, polarization has become self-reinforcing. Most of that decentralization is gone — state parties are more linked to national parties; so are many very powerful interest groups; so is the media (especially for the G.O.P.). Everything gets fed into the existing lines of division rather than producing something crosscutting. Defection from one’s party “team” becomes harder to contemplate because victory for the team has become so important, and defection is more likely to result in swift retribution. There is nothing in the system “pulling things back to the middle” or disrupting lines of division. This situation is truly novel for the United States (although there are some parallels to the 1850s, when politics became nationalized around a single issue divide). It is in a very real sense a new and quite different political system.

An Aug. 3-Sept. 7 CNN survey of 2,119 people demonstrates the differing ways Democrats and Republicans are responding to the emerging threats to democracy.

 

Far higher percentages of Republicans, many of them preoccupied by racial and tribal anxiety, believe “American democracy is under attack” (75 percent agree, 22 percent disagree) than Democrats (46 percent agree, 48 percent disagree). Republicans are also somewhat more likely to believe (57-43) than Democrats (49-51) “that, in the next few years, some elected officials will successfully overturn the results of an election in the United States because their party did not win.”

This level of anxiety is in and of itself dangerous, all the more so when it masks the true aim of America’s contemporary right-wing movement, the restoration and preservation of white hegemony. It is not beyond imagining that Republicans could be prepared, fueled by a mix of fear and provocation, to push the nation over the brink.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/opinion/republicans-democracy-minority-rule.html

 

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GusNote: pursuing the January 6th protesters in not helping either. It shows the US as a vengeance laden country — one that keeps JULIAN ASSANGE IN PRISON...

 

‘Russiagate’ is indeed worse than Watergate. Here’s why

 

BY  Nebojsa Malic

Durham document exposes extent of operation involving a tech company, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and DNC lawyers

 

The fascinating thing about special counsel John Durham’s investigation is that it keeps revealing things about “Russiagate” almost incidentally, in seemingly unrelated procedural filings concerning prosecutions of process crimes. 

For example, a simple conflict-of-interest statement in the case of a high-caliber lawyer charged with lying to the FBI spotlighted a Democrat plot to spy first on candidate then on President Donald Trump, while feeding scurrilous allegations against him to both the FBI and the CIA. 

Back in September, Durham charged Michael Sussmann – partner in the DC law firm Perkins Coie, on retainer to the Democratic National Committee – with lying to the FBI. Sussmann allegedly fed the discredited “Alfa Bank” story to the FBI general counsel James A. Baker, claiming he was not acting on anyone’s behalf, while actually coordinating with a tech executive and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

On Friday, Durham filed an innocuously-titled Motion to Inquire into Potential Conflicts of Interest in the Sussmann case. The 13-page document pointed out that the legal firm representing Sussmann – Latham & Watkins LLP – previously represented his firm of Perkins Coie, its former partner Marc Elias, and the Clinton campaign, all in dealings with the Durham investigation.

 

So far, so boring – except that the filing also lays out the role of a tech company that exploited access to Trump Tower, another Trump-owned building, a “healthcare provider,” and even “the Executive Office of the President of the United States” (EOP) in order to “mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.”

While the Durham documents do not name the company or the executive, they have since been identified by the New York Times as Neustar and Rodney Joffe, respectively. Durham says Neustar was hired by the Obama administration to “access and maintain dedicated servers for the EOP as part of a sensitive arrangement whereby it provided DNS resolution services,” and had access to these servers since at least 2014.

Recall that Sussmann was accused of “coordinating” the tech company’s work with the Clinton campaign, including feeding the Alfa Bank story to the FBI. He allegedly also leaked the story to the press, which then ran multiple articles about the FBI investigation – which were promoted by Clinton herself as well as her aide Jake Sullivan, now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

According to Durham, Sussmann also packaged the false Alfa Bank story with another claim that came from Joffe and Neustar – that Trump and his aides used “Russian-made wireless phones” at the White House – and fed it to the CIA, on February 9, 2017, almost three weeks into Trump’s presidency.  Durham “identified no support for these allegations” by Joffe.

Now, the FBI is not supposed to spy on Americans without a warrant, while the CIA is not supposed to spy on US soil at all. So how did these two agencies respond to these attempts to weaponize them for political purposes? Well, we know that the FBI was instrumental in the ploy to pressure Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn to resign over allegedly lying about his perfectly legitimate conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US. 

As for the CIA, its then-director and confirmed Trump-hater John Brennan actually briefed President Barack Obama in July 2016 that Clinton had signed off on a proposal to vilify Trump by “stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” Three days later, the FBI opened a probe dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” – targeting not Clinton, but Trump.

 

On Jul 28, 2016, Obama was briefed that Hillary had received “a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” On Jul 31, 2016 the FBI opened an investigation into...Trump. https://t.co/0KhdhwKrF7

— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) February 15, 2022

 

Previously, Durham’s probe has revealed the primary sub-source of the infamous “Steele Dossier” – another smear job against Trump, funded by the Clinton campaign, using Perkins Coie, Elias, and the DNC as cutouts – by indicting Igor Danchenko. The former Brookings Institute researcher allegedly fed British spy Christopher Steele the scurrilous allegations about Trump and Russia. The dossier was later used by the FBI to justify the FISA court application to spy on Trump during the campaign and well into his presidency, via campaign aide Carter Page. 

 

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith admitted to falsifying evidence about Page to obtain the FISA warrant, but was given a slap on the wrist and a lesser charge of lying to federal agents instead. He was sentenced to probation by a friendly judge and his law license has since been reinstated, in a remarkable show of partisan standards in Washington. 

The narrative that emerges from all these indictments is that Clinton’s 2016 campaign paid a British spy to manufacture a “dossier” of lies against Trump, used a tech company with access to White House servers to manufacture another set of lies, and fed both to the FBI and the CIA – with full knowledge of the Obama administration – all in a bid to prevent Trump from winning the election, and later to sabotage his presidency. That would make “Russiagate” orders of magnitude worse than Watergate, the scandal involving a 1972 burglary of DNC offices that ended up forcing President Richard Nixon to resign a year later.

So obviously, almost every corporate press outlet in the US – 99% of which had endorsed Clinton in 2016, after all – spent the past five years screaming about the (literally nonexistent) Trump-Russia “collusion” and describing it as “worse than Watergate.” Projection is the oldest play in the propaganda book, after all.

 

 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/549580-durham-investigation-russiagate-trump/

 

 

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GusNote: pursuing the January 6th protesters in not helping either. It shows the US as a vengeance laden country — one that keeps JULIAN ASSANGE IN PRISON...

 

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Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused 45th President Donald Trump and Fox News of “spinning up a fake scandal” after Department of Justice Special Counsel John Durham made his latest filing in the investigation into Russiagate’s origin and its alleged connections to her presidential campaign.

Trump claimed in a statement on Saturday that Durham’s most recent filing “provides indisputable evidence” that his campaign and then administration “were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely prefabricated connection to Russia.”

“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Trump argued, adding that “in a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

Clinton responded to the scandal in a Twitter post on Wednesday, accusing Trump and Fox News of “desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones.”

“So it's a day that ends in Y. The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie,” Clinton declared, encouraging her followers to read “a good debunking” from Vanity Fair on Trump’s “latest nonsense.”

 

Former federal prosecutor Michael Sussmann – who worked as a partner at a law firm on retainer by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – was charged by Durham with lying to the FBI in September.

Sussmann has been accused of feeding discredited Trump-Russia collusion stories to the FBI while coordinating with Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

 

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https://www.rt.com/russia/549638-clinton-responds-durham-probe/

 

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Bombshell court filing suggests the FBI knew 'Russiagate' was a fraud in January of 2017, but it kept up its pressure on Trump

 

Igor Danchenko's confession appears to reveal the bureau's true intentions

 

Lawyers for Igor Danchenko, the primary source of the notorious and utterly discredited "Trump-Russia|" dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, have filed a motion to dismiss the charges brought against their client by special counsel John Durham.

In the process, they have revealed another startling and potentially criminal dimension to the FBI’s probe of potential collusion between the campaign of former President Donald Trump and the Kremlin.

Danchenko’s case

Durham charged Danchenko in November 2021 with five counts of lying to the bureau. Four of those relate to statements he made in a February 2017 interview, in which he repeatedly claimed to have met and had conversations with Sergey Millian, a Belarusian-born businessman who claimed ties with the Trump campaign.

Danchenko, and thus Steele, claimed Millian was a key source of the dossier’s most explosive allegations – namely, that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, that Russia’s GRU had hacked the Democratic National Convention email server and provided the content for WikiLeaks for the purposes of “plausible deniability,” and the then-Presidential candidate had received a “golden shower” from prostitutes while in Moscow years earlier, which was filmed by Russian intelligence and could be used as “kompromat.”

In his FBI interview, conducted between February 9 and 12, 2017, Danchenko claimed to have received this incendiary intelligence through telephone conversations and email exchanges with Millian, who also suggested they discuss matters further in person in New York City. However, Durham charges that Danchenko fabricated these calls, repeatedly emailed Millian without response, and was never invited to any meeting anywhere.

The new court filing shows that to buttress these claims, Danchenko provided the Bureau with a synopsis of a mid-August email he sent to Millian, a month prior to his sit-down interview series. Yet, as the filing notes, the communication makes no mention of the phonecalls they’d purportedly engaged in previously, or the prospect of meeting in person. 

Danchenko’s lawyers now argue that this email in fact proves he wasn’t lying about having had direct contact with Millian, and made clear they’d never spoken to his interviewers. Problematically for all involved, though, Danchenko, and as a result Steele, both attributed wild charges against the Trump campaign to Millian before this email.

FBI vs the truth

In turn too, this means the FBI had concrete reasons to believe at least some of the Steele dossier was bogus on January 25, 2017 at the very latest. But the Bureau, undeterred, continued to not only “assess” the dossier’s veracity, but to use it as a justification for further surveillance of Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page, and intensifying its investigation of the campaign.

The FBI’s questionable use of the dossier in court submissions to secure FISA warrants against Page is well-known, and was a key criticism of a December 2019 Justice Department Inspector General review, which determined the Bureau made 17 errors or omissions in its FISA applications. 

Even more damningly though, just two days after Danchenko presented the discrediting email to the FBI, Trump privately met with then-FBI director James Comey, and the President specifically raised the Steele dossier.

According to Comey’s account of the dinner, as retold in the Mueller report: “the President…stated that he was thinking about ordering the FBI to investigate the [Steele] allegations to prove they were false. Comey responded that the President should think carefully about issuing such an order because it could create a narrative that the FBI was investigating him personally, which was incorrect.”

in other words, Comey played Trump, appealing to his ego and feigning concern for his reputation, when he knew better than anyone bar Steele and Danchenko themselves that the FBI was already investigating the former MI6 operative’s “allegations” and knew them to be meritless. Had he told the truth, perhaps the entire Russiagate fraud would’ve collapsed before it had even properly erupted publicly.

If he'd known, the President may not have been successfully pressured into demonstrating his anti-Russian credentials with an increasingly hostile and belligerent stance towards Moscow, which saw Trump go to dangerous lengths the previous administration had deliberately avoided, such as arming and legitimizing the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and shredding vital Cold War arms control treaties, brinksmanship that brought us to where we are today.

Hate of Bureau

In any event, while the filing is in many ways useful confirmation of top-level FBI knowledge of the dossier’s inherent worthlessness at an early stage, it could pose problems for Danchenko’s prosecution. 

His conviction hangs on the ability of Durham’s team to prove his lies to the FBI materially influenced its investigation, and it can be easily argued that the Bureau’s evident determination to investigate Trump’s non-existent Russia ties meant no disclosure, true or false, would’ve convinced the agency to stop.

That the FBI was utterly determined irrespective of facts to damage Trump, first as a candidate, then as leader, has long-been clear, yet it has largely faded from public memory. One might argue it’s quite incredible that even the former president’s supporters have not invoked this dubious history in the wake of the Bureau’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, which bears clear hallmarks of being likewise politically motivated.

Evidence of the FBI’s anti-Trump agenda is amply available in black and white - so too the agency’s surging Russophobia. Two of the key Bureau figures central to the Trump-Russia probe, one-time lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, spelled this out both in public testimony and private text messages.

 

 

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https://www.rt.com/news/563090-fbi-knew-russiagate-was-fraud/

 

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By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report

Shortly after the election of Donald Trump, revelations that a Russian disinformation campaign had helped sweep the 45th president to power shook the media and the wider culture. The unfolding drama of the Mueller Report and a Senate investigative panel gripped the nation for the next four years. But now, journalist Matt Taibbi has revealed that the source of many of the claims of ongoing Russian disinformation during the Trump presidency, Hamilton 68, was itself a disinformation operation concocted by former US intelligence officials. Matt Taibbi joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his findings and dissect how legacy media, the public, and even Congress were taken along for the ride in the ‘Russiagate’ saga.

Matt Taibbi is a journalist, author, and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast.

Studio: Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
Video Post-Production: Adam Coley
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Hedges:  Matt Taibbi has published an investigation – Which you can read on his Substack – About a vast propaganda campaign called Hamilton 68, launched a year after Donald Trump won the presidency. It smeared critics of the Democratic Party from the left and the right as Russian assets. Hamilton 68 claimed it used a complex data analysis and relied on so-called disinformation experts to ferret out fake news on social media that emanated from the Kremlin.

Hamilton 68, a computerized dashboard designed to be used by reporters and academics to “measure Russian disinformation” was run by Democratic operatives including John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, and figures from the intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, and Homeland Security, as well as neoconservatives and establishment Republicans, such as Bill Crystal, who do not support Trump and have been warmly embraced by the Democratic Party.

Mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, as well as Mother Jones, which ran 14 stories based on the group’s alleged research, cited Hamilton 68 as an authoritative source, even as the site refused to disclose the data or methods it used to make its assessments. Hundreds, if not thousands, of media headlines were flagged as Russian bought infiltrations in online discussions about Brett Kavanaugh, Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign, the Parkland shooting, US missile strikes in Syria, and Bernie Sanders’s campaign, many other stories. Fact checking sites such as Politi Fact and Snopes also relied on Hamilton 68.

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Taibbi, given access to Twitter’s internal memos and emails by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, was able to expose not only fraudulent claims of Hamilton 68, but the massive failure of the press, which was a full partner in one of the worst forms of censorship since the red baiting of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, one that targeted people with dissident or unconventional opinions and accused them, in essence, of un-American activities.

So let’s go back, just set the stage. This is, I think his name was… Was it Watts? This FBI guy, Clint Watts. But set the stage right after the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s response, just to remind viewers of the loss, and how that response led to the rise of so-called disinformation experts and groups like Hamilton 68.

Matt Taibbi:  Well, it’s a complicated story. I think the backdrop to the Hamilton 68 story is, if you really want to look at the full timeline, the Columbia Journalism Review has a whole 26,000 word piece this week. But the shortcut version of this story is that after Trump won the election, Chris, there was immediately a series of stories coming from different directions saying that the election was illegitimate, that Trump had been assisted by Russians, that there was some kind of collusion going on, and that there was disinformation in the news media that had been amplified by Russian accounts that Trump’s own accounts and hashtags and tweets had been amplified by Russian forces. And then formally in, I believe it was August of 2017, this group Hamilton 68 came out. It’s an outgrowth of both the German Marshall Fund and a think tank called the Alliance for Securing Democracy. And it was basically a tool designed to be used by reporters and academics that “track Russian disinformation” by monitoring accounts that were called linked, “linked to Russian influence activities online.”

Now, they never disclosed what was on this list or what they were actually tracking, and it was only by accident looking through some Twitter files, emails that we find this big conversation where internally Twitter is saying, we’ve got the list. We’ve reversed engineered it, and they’re not Russians. These are mostly ordinary people. Out of 644 accounts, only 36 of them began in Russia, and most of the rest of them, from what I’ve found, were ordinary people, a lot of them right leaning, but some of them on the left, too. So it was a fraud. It was a big gigantic media fraud, basically, where I think the story here is equal parts disinformation on the part of this think tank, but also, as you alluded to, the enormous media failure, which would be… I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Chris Hedges:  Of those 36, weren’t a lot of them from your story RT? It was Russia Today. It was the Russian television station.

Matt Taibbi:  There were several RT related accounts. There were some Sputnik accounts. There were some Russian embassy accounts. There was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, if I’m not mistaken. So a lot of these were sort of official Russian accounts. Now, Hamilton eventually transitioned to a more open system that was only tracking Russian official accounts, which is interesting in itself that that’s actually more of a real service. But what they did is they piled all these real accounts that had real opinions that maybe a channel like RT or the Russian Foreign Ministry, they might have an interest that coincided, but these were real people in America and Canada and Great Britain who had these opinions. They either favored Trump or were retweeting hashtags like #WalkAway or #FireMcMaster. And this group just described that as part of a Russian influence campaign when, in fact, it was not that.

Chris Hedges:  Just give us, before we go in, you actually reached out to these people, some of these people. I’ll let you explain that. But just give us a sense of the scale, because it was massive. It just dominated the press. I mean, we were talking before we went on the air. I think one of the reasons the media organizations are going to ignore it is because what are they going to say? We’re sorry for the last four years. It’s such an egregious failure that it’s… To admit what they did, it ends up looking like an article from The Onion.

Matt Taibbi:  Yeah, this would be a difficult thing to retract, in a way. I wanted to hear what the innocent explanation was not only from this group, but from all the media companies that ran these stories. So I not only sent queries up, but I kind of threw a fit about it publicly on Twitter and online, basically daring them or taunting them in an effort to try to get comment out. Because if there was some reason that I wasn’t privy to, I really wanted to hear it. And they no commented to me until the story made a big splash on the internet, at which point some of them started to come in.

Now, the media people haven’t commented yet, but there’s no excuse for what happened with them. Because you and I have both been reporters, Chris, if someone comes to me with a story and says, we’re tracking Russian… We have a magic box that tracks Russian influence, and they are connected to all these organic political activities, you think about things like #WalkAway, that’s Democrats who are leaving the party, hashtag #FireMcMaster, that’s Republicans who are against HR McMaster, right? #ReleaseTheMemo. That’s Republicans who want Devin Nunez’s memo out. All these things were “linked” to Russian influence on all the biggest channels and newspapers in America. And the source was wrong. I mean, again, what would you do as a reporter, Chris? I’d say, what’s in the box? Right? Tell me how it works. And they never asked that question.

Chris Hedges:  Well, I love this. This is from your article, it’s Laura Rosenberg, the two founders of Hamilton 68, the blue and red team of former counselor to Marco Rubio, Jamie Fly, and Hillary for America, foreign policy advisor, Laura Rosenberger told Politico they couldn’t reveal the names of the accounts because the Russians will simply shut them down. It’s kind of like Joe McCarthy’s empty briefcase.

Matt Taibbi:  Oh yeah, there are exactly 57 [inaudible].

Chris Hedges:  Right.

Matt Taibbi:  I guess I’m mixing [inaudible]. That was [inaudible] candidate. But yeah, that’s what they were doing. They were saying inside this thing, there are subversives who are linked to Russia, but they weren’t that. I looked at the list. The chronology here is a little complicated. Twitter was upset about all this stuff, and so they figured out what was in the list, being in a unique position to do it because they have the data. And so they recreate the list, and it’s full of all these people. It’s like Consortium editor, Joe Loreo. There are all these small, low influenced Trump accounts with names like Classy Girl for DJT, Trump Dyke is another one. There’s lots and lots of these people. And I reached out to probably a couple of dozen of them, talked to a bunch of them on the phone. They’re all over the world, but they’re real people. They’re not Russian agents. They just had these opinions. And so they were used as fodder to create these fake news stories.

Chris Hedges:  So why did the most prestigious and powerful media organizations, and why did universities such as Harvard, Princeton, MIT, why do you think they so enthusiastically signed on for the witch hunt?

Matt Taibbi:  Well, I think this is connected to a bigger picture that I don’t fully have yet. I mean, I think there are things that are going to come into view, maybe not necessarily for me, but there are people working on it. And the idea is, I think, that this whole concept of Russian disinformation was used as a battering ram to get inside of companies like Twitter and to influence them to open their doors to government efforts to moderate the platforms.

We don’t like the fact that you’re not letting us censor this or that. We want to have more direct control over things. And you are housing Russian disinformation activities online. They all got dragged to the Senate floor and the House floor in late 2017, if you remember that. It started with Senator Warner, Mark Warner of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It spread to all the House committees, House Intelligence Committee. Then there was energy and commerce. It never ended. The companies finally said uncle and let these people in. I think this is all related. These stories were used, basically, to make the argument that you have to let us start censoring people.

Chris Hedges:  So as you know, I was overseas for 20 years, and it just smells like these CIA front groups. CIA, in some countries I was in, actually owned newspapers. But do we know the genesis of it? Do we know how deep these roots go?

Matt Taibbi:  That’s a tough question to answer yet. I think we got to look at some of those things. If you look at the advisory board of who’s on the think tank that birthed this thing, it’s chock full of former intelligence officials. Michael Morrell, the acting CIA director. He was going to be Hillary’s CIA chief, Mike Chertoff, who was the Homeland Security Chief during the Iraq Wars, Iraq period. There’s a deputy, former deputy head of the NSA on there. And then Hamilton’s also connected to a company called New Knowledge that was an advisor to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. A number of their people were involved in testifying before the Senate and the House.

Some of those folks, if you look at their backgrounds, they have definitely government ties, Department of Defense specifically. We don’t know yet exactly, but I think it’s a very interesting question that we need to know more about the genesis of how this got created. And look, Hamilton 68 is just one of these shops. It was the progenitor version of this kind of activity. There are a lot of these things now proliferating in universities and then in the think tank space.

Chris Hedges:  Twitter was complicit, because as you point out, Roth, I think, was his name. They did, through this reverse engineering, realize that this was a scam, but they did not make it public, and continued to engage in the censorship that was demanded of them. Talk about that. And also, can you talk about Twitter’s secret blacklist?

Matt Taibbi:  The first question, yes. Yoel Roth, who is the Trust and Safety Chief at Twitter, who became kind of an infamous figure after the first batch of Twitter files was released, because he was influential in suppressing the Hunter Biden story, but he actually pushed back against this. There’s a number of quotes from him. He’s saying, “I think we have to just call this out on the BS it is.” That’s one of the more explosive quotes from him. He’s saying that people are… This dashboard will take ordinary Russians and accuse, I’m sorry, ordinary conservatives and accuse them of being Russian.

But he was met with opposition within the company, senior former White House officials who worked in the comms department were saying we have to be careful on how we push back. And there’s a gentleman named Carlos Manier who went on to work for Pete Buttigieg who says, I want to push back too, but we have to play the longer game. And so as you say, Twitter’s role is difficult to assess, because on the one hand, they didn’t play ball with Hamilton 68, but they also didn’t make it public either. So I don’t know how you call that one. I mean, they are complicit in a way, for sure.

Chris Hedges:  So there were three major classes of accounts on the Hamilton list, and they included media figures, David Horowitz, Joe Loreo, you mentioned, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. Explain those three accounts, how they worked.

Matt Taibbi:  As I said before, there was a thin layer of real Russian accounts at the top. Then there’s a big middle layer of basically real ordinary people with very low followings. There’s a few small media accounts in there. Not small, I would say medium sized. So Joe Loreo went on to be editor of Consortium. At the time, he was just a writer for Consortiumliving in Iraq. He’s on the list. There was a conservative broadcast figure named Dennis Michael Lynch who was on Newsmax and Fox. He’s on there, and there’s an internet site called the Sirius Report that’s on there. There’s a few media sites, but then mainly it’s just these regular people with less than 5,000 followers. And then at the very bottom, there is a thin layer, I would say somewhere beneath 20% – And Twitter did a forensic analysis of this – That was half dead, zombified accounts that followers were decreasing. Now, that could happen for any number of reasons at Twitter. That could be because you got banned for something, or it could be because you’re a bot.

So the way to understand this I think is best: Real Russians at the top, then a whole bunch of ordinary people, and then there’s some suspicious accounts at the bottom and they might just be commercial. Who knows what they are. Hard to say.

Chris Hedges:  So let’s talk about the press formula. I love it when you do these. You have a habit of boiling it right down to the essence. You said, here’s the formula for how it worked. Defamation became hardwired into the media landscape. “Research Institute makes invented pot claims, reporters toss said claims at hated targets like Tulsi Gabbard, headlines flow.” You said, “The scam needs just three elements: Credentials of someone like former FBI agent Watts, the absence of any semblance of fact checking, and the silence of companies like Twitter.” But it was. It did. It worked exactly as you pointed out. And with just no incredulity. I mean they just swallowed it whole.

Matt Taibbi:  Yeah, and that’s the part that is hard for me to grasp, because I can understand a couple of reporters getting beat by this, but all of them? I mean, that’s difficult to understand. And then there were obviously a few of us… I know you would never follow. You and I talked about this at the time, how ridiculous all these stories were. People like Glenn Greenwald specifically called out this site. I did as well, a few times. There was actually, believe it or not, a Tucker Carlson segment about it. But I would say 99% of the working reporters fell for this. And nobody within these institutions to whom this was pitched backed up on it as far as I know. I haven’t found that yet. But there aren’t reporters coming out of the woodwork who said, oh, I got pitched by these folks, then I didn’t do that story. Or I exposed them.

Because there’s only two ways this can go. If somebody pitches you and you find out they’re fake, you have an obligation at that point to out it, don’t you? I would think. It’s remarkable not only that it happened, but also now that we know what they did that nobody’s backing up.

Chris Hedges:  I think your fundamental job as a reporter is to determine whether it’s fake or not. That’s what being a reporter means. But there was zero effort.

Matt Taibbi:  Right. And that’s what’s so amazing. Again, you know, you think about what you did for a living, what I’ve done for so long. You think about what somebody like Jeff Gerth did for years before this Columbia Journalism Review piece that came out this week, phone call after phone call to ascertain what happened. And during this period, you had these incredible pieces where somebody at a magazine like Mother Jones would say, here’s what Russian bots are pushing today. And they would just look at the dashboard and then just start writing. There’s no middle part to this where you make a phone call.

So they basically automated the sourcing process for these folks, and it was phony. So I think it’s a dangerous thing. And the problem with this is that while this was a pretty simple, cartoonish, almost scam, there are lots of more sophisticated ones out there that will be harder to unravel.

Chris Hedges:  I mean, David Corn at Mother Jones has dined out on this for five years, and I think you mentioned before he’s written some kind of a response to Jeff Gerth. What did he say? That –

Matt Taibbi:  The Columbia Journalism Review’s 24,000 word piece is a big fail. And again, at first I sympathized. I knew David a little bit, and in this business, it happens. Sometimes sources lie to you, and you screw up. You fall for something. It does happen. It shouldn’t. It is not like being a doctor where if you screw up, somebody dies, necessarily. But sometimes mistakes happen, and you get a source like Christopher Steele who comes to you and he’s got all these credentialed people vouching for him. You could see how that could happen, but you gotta own it when that happens. You can’t turn around and attack people for describing how that was wrong. I was very upset by Mother Jones‘s response to this whole thing.

These organizations need to reestablish their credibility. And Gerth, who worked on your paper, Bob Woodward now is saying that these companies need to look themselves in the mirror, and they won’t do it. Curious to hear your thoughts about why.

Chris Hedges:  I think it goes back to your book Hate Inc. First, tell us what the response has been. I mean, it’s been this deafening silence.

Matt Taibbi:  Nothing, nothing. Again, it’s a 20, I guess it started out as a 26,000 word piece. If a story, a book length investigation in the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t get you 30 seconds on CNN, then I don’t know what would prompt a response at this point.

Chris Hedges:  Well, but what about the data? I mean, you have printed the data and there’s no response.

Matt Taibbi:  Well, it’s worse than that, they’ve actively said the opposite. I mean, not that I mind, I’m used to it at this point, but there have been lots of stories about what an awful person I am and what an awful person Elon Musk is.

Chris Hedges:  All of that’s true. But it doesn’t take away from the work of your journalism. I mean, it’s irrelevant what kind of person you are.

Matt Taibbi:  Well, yeah, of course. Yeah.

Chris Hedges:  I mean, nobody’s ever accused Sye Hersh of being warm and fuzzy. I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s just silly. I’m joking of course, because I like you very much, but it just has nothing to do with the topic.

Matt Taibbi:  Yeah, it’s a total… To use a journalism cliche, it’s a non-denial denial. You’re not addressing the issue. There was an amazing line in the Mother Jones piece about the CGR thing where they’re saying Gerth is arguing that the collusion didn’t happen. But, in a sense, it did happen. I don’t know, that’s exactly what we’re trained to assess. Did it happen really or in a sense, right? If it’s just in a sense, we can’t print it. That’s the entire purpose of a newspaper.

Chris Hedges:  What you’re watching is the complete moral bankruptcy in real time of the press, and I’ll go to your book Hate Inc., because I think you made an important point, where media organizations, unlike the old model, have now siloed themselves to cater to a particular demographic. And when you’re catering to that demographic, what you’re in essence doing is feeding that demographic what it wants to hear.

And we had mentioned the other day when we spoke about the Caliphate podcast at The New York Times, which was based on one source that was completely fraudulent. And I had been in the Middle East for seven years. I remember listening to just the first 10 minutes, and it had this kind of snuff porn quality to it, people being crucified on crosses and stuff. And it just stank of fiction, having come out of the Middle East, and there’s no accountability. I mean, the reporter wasn’t fired because they fed their demographic what they wanted to hear. And I think that that has eroded accountability because it all becomes about stroking the demographic as a commercial model. I’m just summing up the points you made in your book.

Matt Taibbi:  Oh no, but you’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. Once upon a time. And not to be all back in the day about it, but if you printed something like Caliphate, if you did a story like that and put your whole weight into it, and it was completely fake, and you did no work to see whether it happened, it was a career ending thing. It could be a career ending thing. And that hung over every reporter’s head. That was the defense mechanism of the business. That’s gone. There is no sword of Damocles over your head now when you work. If you make a mistake, it’s accepted. It’s understood, because this is an entertainment product now. It’s not a service, and you’re not trying to determine the truth, it’s not like an evidentiary process. It’s different. I mean, I don’t know how to think about it, honestly.

Chris Hedges:  Well, and if you report, as you have done, in such a way that discredits or critiques or undermines that narrative, then – I think you and Glen have become examples of this – You are very viciously attacked. I don’t follow it closely, but I think they’re now calling you some kind of closet right-winger. I don’t know what they’re calling you. But that becomes a response.

Matt Taibbi:  Yeah, that’s the go-to response. Now, The Washington Post, amusingly, actually described me as conservative journalist in one of their pieces. And before I even heard about it, there was such an uproar online that they silently edited it out of the piece.

Chris Hedges:  Isn’t it The Washington Post that won the Pulitzer for the Russiagate material that they then took down off their website? Is that the same?

Matt Taibbi:  That’s the same Washington Post that ran a house editorial this week talking about how objectivity is dead. And I was no fan of objectivity, necessarily, as a model, but as an aspiration, absolutely. That was what the business was all about. We’re trying to ascertain what’s true or not. That’s the basic function of what we do. And they’re moving into something, some other world now, and it’s very sad to watch.

Chris Hedges:  Well, that’s why they’re crucifying Julian Assange. I mean, the Democrats loved him with the Iraq, Afghan war logs, and then he had the honesty to print the Podesta emails. And if you have them and don’t make them public, you can do that as a choice, but you can’t then call yourself a journalist. So I find the state, and I’ve been in the business a long time, it’s extremely depressing.

I want to, before we close, bring up, so we saw the Biden administration attempt to appoint this woman, Nina Yanakovich, as the Russian disinformation czar. She’s been at the forefront of Russian disinformation. She calls Julian Assange scum. So they tried to set this up in Homeland Security. It was too much, too unpalatable to establish at this moment a Ministry of Truth in the United States. Is that where we’re headed?

Matt Taibbi:  I think that was the idea. Whether we’re going to get there or not is an open question. I think some of the companies don’t want to go along. That’s the subtext, actually, of the whole Trump years, is that the government wanted increasing amounts of control over these platforms. Some of the platforms, sometimes for reasons because they were greedy and they wanted to keep some certain foreign markets open, push back. And now there’s been this increasingly intense cry for access by agencies like the DHS, which was what Nina Jaquez was going to be, was going to be under Homeland Security.

While they did still go through with something like that, they just didn’t create the open board. Lee Fong did a report in The Intercept outing how that works. We’ve seen sort of echoes of it in the Twitter files. We do see how requests for content moderation are routed through the FBI and DHS specifically. There’s a bureaucracy that’s been set up. So that’s what they want. Whether they’re going to get it absolutely or how much they’ve gotten it is an open question. As you see, some of the companies are breaking ranks openly, and that’s what this argument’s about.

Chris Hedges:  Well, aren’t they getting it through subterfuge, in essence?

Matt Taibbi:  Yeah, no, they’re creating a panic around something. And look, yes, these things all do exist. There are foreign information operations that do exist. Russia has one. They based it on ours, but they do have one. They do these things. They do create social media accounts. They do try to introduce themes into our conversations. And there are domestic extremists in America. As you know, there are lunatics on all sides. But there are, of course, racists and crazies and people who make threats. It’s a difficult question, though, how to deal with that. But they amplified these problems in order to get access. They said, these problems are emergencies. We must get in. You must let us have control. And they lied about the scale of it.

Chris Hedges:  Well, the difference is this isn’t against extremism. It is about protecting a neoliberal order, which has visited tremendous suffering on the American people that they have no intention of changing. In fact, they will accelerate it. And so it becomes, in essence, finding a scapegoat. I mean, the reason Trump wins the election is not because the white working class has been impoverished and dethroned, but because of Russia.

That was Matt Taibbi. You can read his article, which you should read, on Substack on Hamilton 68. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

 

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