Friday, March 29, 2024

FARNAN: How The Russia Lie Doomed The Durham Investigation

America is now more than four years into The Russia Lie and nobody has gone to jail for it. The Spygate conspirators have escaped prosecution and, instead, are smiling smugly on the sets of their swank CNN gigs. 

How can that be? Well, hate to say it, but once Republicans conceded that Vladimir Putin meddled in the election, it gave the bad guys an airtight alibi. This is their story, and they’re sticking with it: 

John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper et al. will say that whatever they did to stop the Red Menace from interfering in our democracy makes them American heroes. 

Brennan recently shrugged off the smoking-gun disclosure that Hillary Clinton schemed to blame Trump and Russia for her embarrassing email problems because, he suggested, her campaign was entitled to highlight Russian interference.

In their August sit-down, 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 made Durham tug at his beard and ask, “How do you indict high ranking officials for protecting America?”

Here’s how.

As I show in my short ebook, The Russia Lie: How the Military Industrial Complex Targeted Trump, all of the Russian cloak and dagger was itself phony.  

download ‘the russia lie’ for more information.

The stranger-than-fiction truth is that the DNC and the Clinton campaign joined with the CIA, the FBI, think tanks, private contractors, and foreign intelligence services, to raise a false Russian flag over the Trump campaign.

Spygate is not just the collusion hoax, it’s the Russia hoax. Obviously, Russia did not tell the DNC to pay CrowdStrike to phony up a story blaming Russia for the hack. It makes no sense. 

President Trump seems to be the only person in Washington who, from the beginning, has grasped this Deep State trick.

When he met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, the president 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 then dared to bring up the FBI’s failure to test the DNC servers that were supposedly hacked: “You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server — haven’t they taken the server,” he noted. “Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?”

In the end, the only actual Russians Robert Mueller indicted were associated with an internet troll farm that, the indictment suggested, Putin 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 useless Republican-controlled 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 actual social media posts uncovered by the Senate and the Special Counsel, though, were beyond strange. Most had nothing to do with the election.  Below is a representative sampling. 

You’ve probably never seen these because the media does not want you to know how stupid the idea of Russian interference really is.

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 slink away in shame and dismiss the indictment. After tens of millions of dollars in investigations, and countless words spilled in the media alluding to a Russian conspiracy to steal the election, there was nothing there. 

mueller never came

Forget collusion, there is no real evidence of Russian interference, either.

“Putin is a thug” is a mantra dressed as a tautology 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 we supply F-15s and military training? 

The Republican establishment’s slavish acceptance of the blame-Russia mantra perfectly illustrates why it regularly loses political battles. Gifted with undeserved victory in a generational realignment that Republicans were dragged to kicking and screaming, they proceed 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 a hapless beneficiary. The basket of deplorables were not only racist losers, they were also Putin’s unwitting stooges. 

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. 

This scandal is huge, much bigger than Watergate, and compromising in its resolution is destructive.

In his press conference on April 18, 2019 releasing Robert Mueller’s report, Attorney General Bill Barr lauded the special counsel’s work in tracking down Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

That part of the investigation, Barr suggested, was justified. 

Therein lies the basic design flaw of Durham’s probe: Nobody has gone to jail because Republicans stupidly conceded phony Russian intrigue and the plotters have said they were justified to investigate it. 

This insidious false flag operation continues to do political damage to President Trump because those in power have been duped by The Russia Lie.

This excerpt is from The National Pulse’s serialized ebook, The Russia Lie: How the Military Industrial Complex Targeted Trump. Purchase the ebook here for $5 and read the whole sordid tale that Washington does not want you to hear.

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