[Peace-discuss] Russiagate: Luke Harding & The Guardian providing laughs as though what they publish is journalism

[J.B. Nicholson]

Russiagate might just outlive us all.

The latest chapter comes courtesy of Luke Harding, Senior International 
Correspondent for The Guardian, in 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house 
which is a bunch of lies written so noncommittally that you can't take 
it seriously. David Corn and some others provide the echo chamber 
pointing to Harding's lies, highlighting how unserious they are.

RT has a couple of segments on it in 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GWBKftBdZXo (infographics version) and 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QN1ds03W7OA (interview version). The former 
also includes a reminder of who Luke Harding is from a previous Guardian 
outing where Harding claimed that "Manafort held secret talks with 
Assange in Ecuadorian embassy" (later the Guardian added "sources say" 
to that title[1]) yet in this extremely surveilled city nobody can come 
up with any shots of Manafort arriving at or leaving the embassy to 
support the allegation of his visits to Assange. There are no records of 
Manafort signing the visitor log that everyone else had to sign. And the 
CIA hired a Spanish outfit to record what went on in the embassy while 
Assange was there (including the bathroom) which was illegal as this 
included privileged discussions between Assange and his legal team 
working on his case. But there's no footage of Manafort in that footage. 
There's simply no record of Manafort having been there.

There's also Luke Harding's book, "Mafia State: How one reporter became 
an enemy of the brutal new Russia" in which he claimed (according to the 
aforementioned former RT report) that while he lived in Russia, Russians 
would break into his home to steal his TV remote control, open and close 
windows, and defecate in his toilet without flushing. Given what Harding 
spread from the Steele dossier, it's clear that he earned his bona fides 
as an establishment liar (and there's never a price to pay when lying at 
the behest of the establishment) and a friend to the DNC (which paid for 
the Steele dossier).

Jimmy Dore and Aaron Maté cover Harding's garbage in 
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CymL65yiXJA .

All are highly worth watching.



[1] Which The Guardian is still publishing years later with no 
retraction or explanation of who the sources are on 
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret-talks-with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy 
. Here's a hint on who the "sources" are: the Christopher Steele 
dossier, home of the "pee tape" nobody ever saw.