[Peace-discuss] HuffPo Yanks Article On Russiagate Hysteria By Award Winning Journalist Joe Lauria - So Here It Is

Sat Mar 17 13:42:52 UTC 2018

interesting, but clearly he is selling something and not really acting as a
reporter - but then you folks did not like Hillary Clinton so you must love
the current Liar-in-Chief and his stripping Andrew McCabe of his well
deserved retirement and pension -

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/16/1749674/-Just-Read-Andrew-McCabe-s-Statement-Regarding-His-Firing-By-Donald-Trump-Just-Read-it?detail=emaildkbn

On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 4:20 AM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> *HuffPo Yanks Article On Russiagate Hysteria By Award Winning Journalist
> Joe Lauria – So Here It Is *
>
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>
> Tue, 11/07/2017 - 20:56
>
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> Award winning journalist and UN correspondent of 25 years, Joe Lauria,
> penned an outstanding article on the origins of “Russiagate” which he
> published to the liberal *Huffington Post* this week.
>
> 24 hours later, HuffPo yanked the article
> <http://raymcgovern.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/CLEANOn-The-Origins-of-Russia-gate-_-HuffPost.pdf>
> – leaving a dead link and a sad message in its place.
>
> [image: http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/byed.png]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/byed.png>
>
> Perhaps the insights offered in the article didn’t quite conform to
> HuffPo’s approved narratives, or maybe it has something to do with Lauria’s
> new book <http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/how-i-lost/> “*How I Lost By
> Hillary Clinton*,” with a forward written by Julian Assange.
>
> Considering Joe Lauria’s tenure as the Wall St. Journal’s UN correspondent
> of nearly seven years, as well as the Boston Globe’s for six – covering
> just about every major world crisis over the past quarter century, his
> unique perspective on the matter merits a read.
>
> Reproduced below for your edification:
>
> The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate
>
> As Russia-gate continues to buffet the Trump administration, we now know
> that the “scandal” started with Democrats funding the original dubious
> allegations of Russian interference, notes Joe Lauria.
>
> By Joe Lauria
>
> The two sources that originated the allegations claiming that Russia
> meddled in the 2016 election — without providing convincing evidence — were
> both *paid for* by the Democratic National Committee, and in one instance
> also by the Clinton campaign: the Steele dossier and the CrowdStrike
> analysis of the DNC servers. Think about that for a minute.
>
> [image:
> http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/portrait-clinton-300x226.jpg]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/portrait-clinton.jpg>Former
> Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
>
> We have long known that the DNC did not allow the FBI to examine its
> computer server for clues about who may have hacked it – or even if it was
> hacked – and instead turned to CrowdStrike, a private company co-founded by
> a virulently anti-Putin Russian. Within a day, CrowdStrike blamed Russia on
> dubious evidence.
>
> And, it has now been disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid
> for
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_dossier-630pm:homepage/story&utm_term=.707164d050ef&tid=a_inl> opposition
> research memos written by former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher
> Steele using hearsay accusations from anonymous Russian sources to claim
> that the Russian government was blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump in a
> scheme that presupposed that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw
> Trump’s presidency years ago when no one else did.
>
> Since then, the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to corroborate
> Steele’s allegations, but those suspicions still colored the thinking of
> President Obama’s intelligence chiefs who, according to Director of
> National Intelligence James Clapper, “hand-picked” the analysts who
> produced the Jan. 6 “assessment” claiming that Russia interfered in the
> U.S. election.
>
> In other words, possibly all of the Russia-gate allegations, which have
> been taken on faith by Democratic partisans and members of the anti-Trump
> Resistance, trace back to claims paid for or generated by Democrats.
>
> If for a moment one could remove the sometimes justified hatred that many
> people feel toward Trump, it would be impossible to avoid the impression
> that the scandal may have been cooked up by the DNC and the Clinton camp in
> league with Obama’s intelligence chiefs to serve political and geopolitical
> aims.
>
> Absent new evidence based on forensic or documentary proof, we could be
> looking at a partisan concoction devised in the midst of a bitter general
> election campaign, a manufactured “scandal” that also has fueled a
> dangerous New Cold War against Russia; a case of a dirty political “oppo”
> serving American ruling interests in reestablishing the dominance over
> Russia that they enjoyed in the 1990s, as well as feeding the voracious
> budgetary appetite of the Military-Industrial Complex.
>
> Though lacking independent evidence of the core Russia-gate allegations,
> the “scandal” continues to expand into wild exaggerations about the
> impact of a tiny number of social media pages
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/10/russia-gate-jumps-the-shark/> suspected
> of having links to Russia but that apparently carried very few specific
> campaign messages. (Some pages reportedly were devoted to photos of
> puppies.
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/04/the-mystery-of-the-russia-gate-puppies/>
> )
>
> *‘Cash for Trash’*
>
> Based on what is now known, Wall Street buccaneer Paul Singer paid for GPS
> Fusion, a Washington-based research firm, to do opposition research on
> Trump during the Republican primaries, but dropped the effort in May 2016
> when it became clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. GPS Fusion has
> strongly denied
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/politics/trump-dossier-paul-singer.html?_r=0> that
> it hired Steele for this work or that the research had anything to do with
> Russia.
>
> [image: http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/hpop-228x300.png]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/hpop.png>Couple walking
> along the Kremlin, Dec. 7, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)
>
> Then, in April 2016 the DNC and the Clinton campaign paid
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_dossier-630pm:homepage/story&tid=a_inl&utm_term=.d971e593bee8> its
> Washington lawyer Marc Elias to hire Fusion GPS to unearth dirt connecting
> Trump to Russia. This was three months before the DNC blamed Russia for
> hacking its computers and supposedly giving its stolen emails to WikiLeaks
> to help Trump win the election.
>
> “The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee retained
> Fusion GPS
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/politics/clinton-dnc-russia-dossier.html> to
> research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his
> campaign team and Russia, court filings revealed this week,” The New York
> Times reported
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/us/politics/trump-dossier-paul-singer.html?_r=0> on
> Friday night.
>
> So, linking Trump to Moscow as a way to bring Russia into the election
> story was the Democrats’ aim from the start.
>
> Fusion GPS then hired ex-MI6 intelligence agent Steele, it says for the
> first time, to dig up that dirt in Russia for the Democrats. Steele
> produced classic opposition research, not an intelligence assessment or
> conclusion, although it was written in a style and formatted to look like
> <http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453104/russia-dossier-story-clinton-lies-media-irresponsibility-democratic-moral-blindness>
>  one.
>
> It’s important to realize that Steele was no longer working for an
> official intelligence agency, which would have imposed strict standards on
> his work and possibly disciplined him for injecting false information into
> the government’s decision-making. Instead, he was working for a political
> party and a presidential candidate looking for dirt that would hurt their
> opponent, what the Clintons used to call “cash for trash” when they were
> the targets.
>
> Had Steele been doing legitimate intelligence work for his government, he
> would have taken a far different approach. Intelligence professionals are
> not supposed to just give their bosses what their bosses want to hear. So,
> Steele would have verified his information. And it would have gone through
> a process of further verification by other intelligence analysts in his and
> perhaps other intelligence agencies. For instance, in the U.S., a National
> Intelligence Estimate requires vetting by all 17 intelligence agencies and
> incorporates dissenting opinions.
>
> Instead Steele was producing a piece of purely political research and had
> different motivations. The first might well have been money, as he was
> being paid specifically for this project, not as part of his work on a
> government salary presumably serving all of society. Secondly, to continue
> being paid for each subsequent memo that he produced he would have been
> incentivized to please his clients or at least give them enough so they
> would come back for more.
>
> *Dubious Stuff*
>
> Opposition research is about getting dirt to be used in a mud-slinging
> political campaign, in which wild charges against candidates are the
> norm. This “oppo” is full of unvetted rumor and innuendo with enough facts
> mixed in to make it seem credible. There was so much dubious stuff in
> Steele’s memos
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/29/the-sleazy-origins-of-russia-gate/> that
> the FBI was unable to confirm its most salacious allegations and apparently
> refuted several key points.
>
> [image:
> http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/clapper-obama-oval-office-300x200-300x200.jpg]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/clapper-obama-oval-office-300x200.jpg>Director
> of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack
> Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security
> aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)
>
> Perhaps more significantly, the corporate news media, which was largely
> partial to Clinton, did not report the fantastic allegations after people
> close to the Clinton campaign began circulating the lurid stories before
> the election with the hope that the material would pop up in the news. To
> their credit, established media outlets recognized this as ammunition
> against a political opponent, not a serious document.
>
> Despite this circumspection, the Steele dossier was shared with the FBI at
> some point in the summer of 2016 and apparently became
> <http://www.businessinsider.com/carter-page-fbi-dossier-fisa-warrant-case-2017-4> the
> basis for the FBI to seek Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants
> against members of Trump’s campaign. More alarmingly, it may have formed
> the basis for much of the Jan. 6 intelligence “assessment”
> <https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf>by those
> “hand-picked” analysts from three U.S. intelligence agencies – the CIA, the
> FBI and the NSA – not all 17 agencies that Hillary Clinton continues to
> insist were involved. (Obama’s intelligence chiefs, DNI Clapper and CIA
> Director John Brennan, publicly admitted that only three agencies took part
> and The New York Times printed a correction
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/29/nyt-finally-retracts-russia-gate-canard/> saying
> so.)
>
> If in fact the Steele memos were a primary basis for the Russia collusion
> allegations against Trump, then there may be no credible evidence at all.
> It could be that because the three agencies knew the dossier was dodgy that
> there was no substantive proof in the Jan. 6 “assessment.” Even so, a
> summary of the Steele allegations were included in a secret appendix that
> then-FBI Director James Comey described to then-President-elect Trump just
> two weeks before his inauguration.
>
> Five days later, after the fact of Comey’s briefing was leaked to the
> press, the Steele dossier was published in full
> <https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia?utm_term=.riWVKwnRzz#.pnnG0lKjxx>by
> the sensationalist website BuzzFeed behind the excuse that the allegations’
> inclusion in the classified annex of a U.S. intelligence report justified
> the dossier’s publication regardless of doubts about its accuracy.
>
> *Russian Fingerprints*
>
> The other source of blame about Russian meddling came from the private
> company CrowdStrike because the DNC blocked the FBI from examining its
> server after a suspected hack. Within a day, CrowdStrike claimed to find
> Russian “fingerprints” in the metadata of a DNC opposition research
> document, which had been revealed by an Internet site called DCLeaks,
> showing Cyrillic letters and the name of the first Soviet intelligence
> chief. That supposedly implicated Russia.
>
> [image: http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/dmitri-300x300.jpg]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/dmitri.jpg>Dmitri
> Alperovitch, the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike
> Inc., leading its Intelligence, Technology and CrowdStrike Labs teams.
>
> CrowdStrike also claimed that the alleged Russian intelligence operation
> was extremely sophisticated and skilled in concealing its external
> penetration of the server. But CrowdStrike’s conclusion about Russian
> “fingerprints” resulted from clues that would have been left behind by
> extremely sloppy hackers or inserted intentionally to implicate the
> Russians.
>
> CrowdStrike’s credibility was further undermined when *Voice of
> America reported
> <https://www.voanews.com/a/crowdstrike-comey-russia-hack-dnc-clinton-trump/3776067.html>* on
> March 23, 2017, that the same software the company says it used to blame
> Russia for the hack wrongly concluded that Moscow also had hacked Ukrainian
> government howitzers on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
>
> “An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a
> report that the U.S. cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress
> its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election,” *VOA *reported.
> Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is also a senior fellow at
> the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
>
> More speculation about the alleged election hack was raised with
> WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release, which revealed that the CIA is not beyond
> covering up its own hacks by leaving clues implicating others. Plus,
> there’s the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has declared again
> and again that WikiLeaks did not get the Democratic emails from the
> Russians. Buttressing Assange’s denials of a Russian role, WikiLeaks
> associate Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he
> met a person connected to the leak during a trip to Washington last year.
>
> And, William Binney, maybe the best mathematician to ever work at the
> National Security Agency, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern have published
> a technical analysis
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/20/more-holes-in-russia-gate-narrative/> of
> one set of Democratic email metadata showing that a transatlantic “hack”
> would have been impossible and that the evidence points to a likely leak by
> a disgruntled Democratic insider. Binney has further stated that if it were
> a “hack,” the NSA would have been able to detect it and make the evidence
> known.
>
> *Fueling Neo-McCarthyism*
>
> Despite these doubts, which the U.S. mainstream media has largely ignored,
> Russia-gate has grown into something much more than an election story. It
> has unleashed a neo-McCarthyite attack on Americans who are accused of
> being dupes of Russia if they dare question the evidence of the Kremlin’s
> guilt.
>
> [image:
> http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/twp26p1-300x188.jpg]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/twp26p1.jpg>The
> Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit:
> Washington Post)
>
> Just weeks after last November’s election, The Washington Post published
> a front-page story
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/27/washington-posts-fake-news-guilt/> touting
> a blacklist from an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, that alleged that
> 200 news sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other leading independent
> news sources, were either willful Russian propagandists or “useful idiots.”
>
> Last week, a new list <http://www.europeanvalues.net/rt/> emerged with
> the names of over 2,000 people, mostly Westerners, who have appeared on RT,
> the Russian government-financed English-language news channel. The list was
> part of a report entitled, “The Kremlin’s Platform for ‘Useful Idiots’ in
> the West,” put out by an outfit called European Values, with a long list
> <http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/page/sponsors-of-the-2008-survey.html> of
> European funders.
>
> Included on the list of “useful idiots” absurdly are CIA-friendly
> Washington Post columnist David Ignatius; David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s
> opposition research chief; and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
>
> The report stated: “Many people in Europe and the US, including
> politicians and other persons of influence, continue to exhibit troubling
> naïveté about RT’s political agenda, buying into the network’s
> marketing ploy that it is simply an outlet for independent voices
> marginalised by the mainstream Western press. These ‘useful idiots’ remain
> oblivious to RT’s intentions and boost its legitimacy by granting
> interviews on its shows and newscasts.”
>
> The intent of these lists is clear: to shut down dissenting voices who
> question Western foreign policy and who are usually excluded from Western
> corporate media. RT is often willing to provide a platform for a wider
> range of viewpoints, both from the left and right. American ruling
> interests fend off critical viewpoints by first suppressing them in
> corporate media and now condemning them as propaganda when they emerge on
> RT.
>
> *Geopolitical Risks*
>
> More ominously, the anti-Russia mania has increased chances of direct
> conflict between the two nuclear superpowers. The Russia-bashing rhetoric
> not only served the Clinton campaign, though ultimately to ill effect, but
> it has pushed a longstanding U.S.-led geopolitical agenda to regain
> control
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/27/europeans-contest-us-anti-russian-hype/>over
> Russia, an advantage that the U.S. enjoyed during the Yeltsin years in the
> 1990s.
>
> [image:
> http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/Time-Yeltsin-227x300.jpg]
> <http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/files/2017/11/Time-Yeltsin.jpg>Time
> magazine cover recounting how the U.S. enabled Boris Yeltsin’s reelection
> as Russian president in 1996.
>
> After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wall Street rushed in
> behind Boris Yeltsin and Russian oligarchs to asset strip virtually the
> entire country, impoverishing the population. Amid widespread accounts of
> this grotesque corruption, Washington intervened
> <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/05/americans-spot-election-meddling-doing-years-vladimir-putin-donald-trump> in
> Russian politics to help get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The political rise
> of Vladimir Putin after Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve 1999 reversed
> this course, restoring Russian sovereignty over its economy and politics.
>
> That inflamed Hillary Clinton and other American hawks whose desire was to
> install another Yeltsin-like figure and resume U.S. exploitation of
> Russia’s vast natural and financial resources. To advance that cause, U.S.
> presidents have supported the eastward expansion of NATO and have deployed
> 30,000 troops on Russia’s border.
>
> In 2014, the Obama administration helped orchestrate
> <https://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/05/if-russia-had-freed-canada/> a
> coup that toppled the elected government of Ukraine and installed a
> fiercely anti-Russian regime. The U.S. also undertook the risky policy of
> aiding jihadists to overthrow a secular Russian ally in Syria. The
> consequences have brought the world closer to nuclear annihilation than at any
> time since
> <https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/13/stephen_cohen_this_is_most_dangerous> the
> Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
>
> In this context, the Democratic Party-led Russia-gate offensive was
> intended not only to explain away Clinton’s defeat but to stop Trump —
> possibly via impeachment or by inflicting severe political damage — because
> he had talked, insincerely it is turning out, about detente with Russia.
> That did not fit in well with the plan at all.
>
> *Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for
> the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall Street Journal
> among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton
> <http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/how-i-lost/> published by OR Books in June
> 2017. He can be reached at joelauria at gmail.com <joelauria at gmail.com> and
> followed on Twitter at @unjoe <https://twitter.com/unjoe>.*
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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