Part I of this article showed a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. Part II today will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy to destroy Trump. The facts are not in dispute. We are left only to decide if the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally, or as part of a conspiracy.

The first part of the smoking gun may have been hiding in plain sight for some time now. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI Director Comey’s drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete. In a damning passage, Horowitz found it was “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors… for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey’s boss, is criticized for meeting privately with Bill Clinton as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. “Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem… and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment.” Lynch then doubled-down, refusing to recuse herself from the Clinton case, creating “public confusion.”

The report also criticizes FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one exchange that read, “Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Another Strzok document stated “we know foreign actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message,” thought that was never prosecuted.

Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton’s in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as “the President” and in a message told a friend “I’m with her.” The FBI also allowed Clinton’s lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to  possible crimes committed by Clinton.

If that does not add up to a smoking gun that the FBI conspired pre-dossier to help Hillary Clinton, how about this?

Following Hillary’s exoneration over her emails and mishandling of classified information, the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump-Russia, based in whole or large part on the infamous Christopher Steele dossier. The public now knows the dossier was paid for and stocked with falsehoods by the Clinton campaign. The unanswered questions from that investigation themselves comprise a second smoking gun of FBI conspiracy. For example:

— Why did the FBI not inquire into Steele’s sources and methods, which would have quickly revealed the information was wholly false? Why was the FBI unable to discover Steele (and later, Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who gave false info to the FBI about Trump and Alfa Bank) were double agents working for and paid by the Clinton campaign?

— When the FBI found the target of its first FISA warrant out of the dossier, Carter Page, was actually a paid CIA asset, why did they hide this information from the FISA court instead of dropping Page? Why did this not cause them to question the credibility of Steele, a master spy who couldn’t even identify his source was actually a CIA asset? Steele claimed the Russians offered Page an insanely huge bribe, billions of dollars, to end U.S. sanctions if Trump became president. Page clearly could never have played a significant role in ending sanctions. Why did the FBI find those statements credible enough to pursue the warrant?

— Why did the FBI cite an open-source press article by Michael Isikoff claiming Trump had Russian ties as part of its FISA warrant application against Page without finding out who Isikoff’s source was? The source of course was Christopher Steele, who was interviewed in a hotel room booked by Fusion GPS who was paid by Clinton. The FBI nonetheless claimed an article from Yahoo! corroborated the dossier, a cite unlikely to pass muster on an undergrad term paper. Were they really fooled?

— Why did the FBI not discover the dossier’s false claim Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet with Russians? Robert Mueller was able to conclusively dismiss the report. Confirming Cohen in Prague would have been a cornerstone of the FBI’s larger case, but the matter was left open until Mueller.

— Why did the FBI not question Sussmann about the source of his DNS data, some of which came directly from inside the White House? Why would a private citizen have such information?

— When Sussmann, claiming to be a concerned citizen with White House DNS data, first approached the FBI, why was he assigned to meet with the FBI’s General Counsel, its lawyer, and not a case agent? Was something other than his information, such possibly FBI collusion with fraud, being validated?

— Why was the CIA investigation referral saying Hillary was behind Russiagate ignored by the FBI? The memo was addressed to Director James Comey, who claims he has no knowledge of it, and Peter Strzok, who should have been the action officer but did nothing?

— Why did Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief, say “The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign. And yet they knowingly ran with its false information.”

— Despite the investigation being run by the FBI, why was it CIA Director John Brennan who briefed (LINK) Obama on the Hillary connection in July 2016 and not Comey?

If any of those questions seem kind of obvious, that is the point. The cover stories only had to hold for a short time, enough to infect the media, enough to make things seem plausible for the FBI. Team Clinton and its co-conspirators were so certain they would win the election they felt none of their tricks needed to stay hidden much past victory. The story is waist-deep rotten.

At this point you can believe the multiple ops paid for and run by Clinton people were uncoordinated events, or that they were part of the broad campaign Hillary was an active participant in, and about which John Brennan warned Barack Obama, and which the CIA warned the FBI, not knowing they were in on it. You can believe the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally (yet consistently, no breaks went Trump’s way), or as part of a conspiracy.

What you cannot do any more is pretend this did not happen, and that the person most involved came close to being elected president because of it. If you worry about democracy, worry about that.

In preparing this article, it was fascinating to review the many shameful articles written in 2016 and 2017, the crazy days when every hinted rumor was worth a Breaking! designator. But one piece stood out, from Forbes in 2017. Hillary denied paying for the dossier, and the truth — the campaign paid the law firm Perkins and Coie who paid Fusion GPS who paid Orbis who paid Steele — was not known. The Forbes journalist wrote “If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes Hillary Gate.” The article went on to say how James Comey refused to comment on Fusion GPS and the dossier in May 2017. Comey by then knew the real story and remained silent, even as the press was still running with the idea the dossier had been paid for by anonymous Democratic donors. If only we’d known.

wemeantwell.com

Aubrey Cottle, the hacker claiming credit for stealing convoy donor info, has boasted of work with the FBI and Canadian law enforcement. The data was published by DDoSecrets, an anti-Wikileaks non-profit which has targeted states in the crosshairs of US intelligence.

By Kit KLARENBERG

On February 13th, the names and personal details of almost 100,000 individuals who donated sums to support the Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates through the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo appeared online via Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), an online archive seeking to easily connect journalists and researchers with leaked information.

The mainstream media used the trove to frame the convoy as essentially foreign-funded, and harass small donors from average backgrounds. Numerous fascinating nuggets, such as the gifting of $215,000 by a donor whose identity, email, IP address and ZIP code was not recorded by the website, unlike every other giver, were in the process ignored.

The hack-and-leak represented just the latest broadside against the convoy activists. Hours later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau activated the Emergencies Act for the very first time in Canadian history, an unprecedented move effectively suspending the civil rights of the protesters and granting federal law enforcement the power to seize their bank accounts without a court order.

An alleged founder of hacktivist collective Anonymous, Canadian Aubrey Cottle, took credit for the hack of the convoy donors’ information in the form of an online “manifesto” and accompanying video overlaying a clip from the Disney musical Frozen. Echoing Liberal Canadian politicians, Cottle accused the convoy of holding Ottawa “hostage for weeks while terrorizing the peaceful citizens who live there.”

The hacker went on to baselessly allege the donations were being used “to fund an insurrection,” and that individuals who had contributed had also bankrolled the January 6th, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Next, Cottle warned without evidence that the global “convoy movement” could be “a cover for a type of Trojan Horse attack where extremists and militia groups arrive in large numbers with weapons,” as “large convoys of trucks moving in capital cities will look normal given the theme of these world wide protests.”

Absolutely nothing I say could EVER prepare you for this video of Aubrey Cottle, dude who hacked #GiveSendGo, writhing, preening, full-throated screaming into the camera “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO ME HUHHHH??!?”pic.twitter.com/852h2RB6UB

— Mandy Stadtmiller (@mandystadt) February 18, 2022

It was a characteristically volatile outburst from the eccentric hacker, who has been praised in mainstream media for taking on the far-right despite his history of overtly anti-Semitic commentary.

Operating in broad daylight for many years, the prolific cyber-warrior has somehow been able to function freely without any legal repercussions.

Cottle’s impunity may stem in part from his apparently intimate relationship with a variety of intelligence services. In 2007, Cottle was reportedly visited at home by a representative of Canada’s Security Intelligence Service, the nation’s equivalent to the CIA, which wished to exploit his hacking nous to battle “al-Qaeda and terrorist groups.” He allegedly declined the offer after some consideration.

Nonetheless, Cottle claims to have “often…dealt with feds” such as the FBI and Royal Canadian Mountain Police. His activities include running “child porn honeypot operations” involving multiple sites that “still give [him] nightmares.”

“I’ve done work for the fbi before and i give zero fucks,” Cottle wrote on Twitter on January 20, 2017.

As the right-wing outlet American Greatness noted, Cottle has boasted that he has been “lucky” enough to be granted “the blessing of alphabet agencies” – slang for intelligence services – to “weaponize Anonymous” for “antiterrorism” purposes.

Further indications of Cottle’s ties to law enforcement arrived in July 2021 when journalist Barrett Brown released documents revealing how the hacker had collaborated with notorious neo-Nazi cyber-activist “weev” to conduct major hacks that could be blamed on Antifa. Brown suggests this “just happened” via GiveSendGo.

We released documents in July showing FBI assets led by Nazi leader Weev and fronted by racist police asset Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle were planning to conduct major #Anonymous hacks that would be blamed on #Antifa. It just happened via #GiveSendGo. https://t.co/VnSb7NK5TY

— Barrett Brown (@BarrettB) February 17, 2022

Cottle has recently taken to Twitter to praise the Canadian government for activating the Emergencies Act. The hacker declared that “THEY F***ED AROUND AND FOUND OUT.” Though his Twitter account has since been locked, he has continued to brag about his GiveSendGo hack in a series of bizarre videos.

In another possible hint of national security state involvement, a non-profit self-styled whistleblower site called Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has taken possession of the information supposedly obtained by Cottle, and begun distributing it to mainstream media outlets.

Besides targeting right-wing websites, DDoSecrets has previously been implicated in hacking operations against the Russian government. Its founder, Emma Best, is a vitriolic antagonist of Julian Assange and has gone to extreme lengths to paint him as an asset of the Kremlin.

Emma Best of DDoSecrets

DDoSecrets’ founder smears Assange, implicates Wikileaks

Before its role in publicizing the GiveSendGo donors list, DDoSecrets published lists of GiveSendGo donors to causes such as the heavily-FBI penetrated Proud Boys, Kyle Rittenhouse, and an effort to fight “voter fraud” in the 2020 US Presidential election.

Clearly aligned with liberal and Democratic Party objectives, DDoSecrets has also been a key hosting ground for terabytes of hacked data on private and public communications between members of militias, neo-Nazi and far-right groups hacked from social networks Gab and Parler, which Cottle claims to have obtained themself. Data scraped from Parler, including video from the January 6th riot, was subsequently used in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in February 20201.

DDoSecrets is a largely opaque outfit. Operated by an almost entirely anonymous or pseudonymous team living across the globe, its founder, Emma Best, is the group’s only public-facing member. A former WikiLeaks collaborator and prolific Freedom of Information requester, Best’s dissident bona fides seem on the surface to be beyond doubt.

In 2016, after hammering the FBI with seemingly endless FOI demands, the Bureau appears to have considered prosecuting Best for “vexsome” activities. Five years later, it outright banned Best from filing such requests at all, but the decision was later overturned. Best also played a pivotal role in compelling the CIA to publish its 13 million-strong declassified document archive online in 2017.

Likewise, DDoSecrets’ June 2020 release of 269 gigabytes of sensitive US law enforcement fusion center data – dubbed “BlueLeaks” – exposed all manner of abuses, corruption, criminality and excesses on the part of American police forces, leading to official investigations, and the seizure of servers hosting the information in Germany by local authorities.

So why have mainstream media enthusiastically embraced DDoSecrets while advancing the Western security state’s crusade against WikiLeaks?

The latter organization has faced condemnation, censure, and designation by the CIA as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” leading to the Agency hatching plots to kidnap or even kill its founder, Julian Assange, while subjecting his collaborators to intensive surveillance and harassment.

By contrast, in 2019, the same year Julian Assange was arrested in London’s Ecuadorian embassy and hauled off to Belmarsh Prison to face extradition to the US, the federally funded Congressional Research Service recognized Best’s organization as a legitimate “transparency collective” – and not long after the IRS granted it 501(c)(3) non-profit status.

The repeated hailing by mainstream and US government sources of DDoSecrets as a WikiLeaks successor – or even its replacement – is all the more perverse given that Best has repeatedly published private Twitter communications between the Wikileaks collaborators.

The contents of these private discussions were dished out to corporate news outlets like Buzzfeed, which presented them as proof Assange was deliberately seeking to secure the election of Donald Trump, and knowingly collaborating with Russian intelligence to do so.

You now have evidence? Emma Best’s role in 2016 was to obtain evidence for BuzzFeed that would tie Guccifer2 to WikiLeaks. Emma shopping leaks that we’re already in WikiLeaks possession is the proverbial dish “best served” cold. Thanks for playing. Game over. https://t.co/MHiZEbLtSf

— Pirate Party Weekly (@PiratePartyINT) April 6, 2018

Numerous interviews conducted by Best over the years amplified the fraudulent narratives used to frame Assange as a Russian asset. In the eyes of many, they have played a role in justifying or minimizing his life-threatening incarceration in Britain’s Gitmo on trumped up, bogus charges.

A handful of independent journalists have been harshly critical of Best as a result, wondering how the public interest was served by publishing private communications that implicated Wikileaks in a security state intrigue. The DDoSecrets founder has consistently attempted to parry criticism by claiming their actions were not an attempt to attack or undermine Assange, and were “curated for relevance.”

However, Best overwhelmingly curated comments and interactions painting Assange and WikiLeaks in the worst possible light, which inevitably proved extremely alluring to a hostile media. Any exculpatory content included in the leaks was summarily and unsurprisingly ignored.

What’s more, the DDoSecrets founder’s own surging contempt for Assange is unambiguous. Over the years, Best has branded Assange as among things a “cowardly, transphobic, antisemitic trash person made of tepid mayo and a bleached wig.”

1. I am going through the #AssangeLeaks by @NatSecGeek @DDoSecret: I still haven’t found a single problematic exposé/scenario/scandal.What I do find really problematic is to publish internal communications/meetings of a media org, UNLESS this is necessary to reveal serious crimes

— Stefania Maurizi (@SMaurizi) July 14, 2020

CIA hack-and-dump ops against Iran and Russia raise further suspicions

In November 2021, Yahoo! News reported that the administration of US President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to “run wild” with covert actions in a bid to destabilize Iran. In 2018, Trump sanctioned the Agency to conduct “much more aggressive” offensive cyber activities, leading to the CIA launching “covert hack-and-dump operations” against Iran and Russia and “cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure” with “less White House oversight” than before.

Given that DDoSecrets was launched in December that same year, the timing of the effort was striking. The first major coup of DDosSecrets arrived weeks later when it published 175 gigabytes of “messages and files from Russian politicians, journalists, oligarchs, religious figures, and nationalists/terrorists in Ukraine.” The collection was dubbed “The Dark Side of the Kremlin,” and avowedly sourced from a “hacking spree” conducted against Russian targets.

Transparency activists release massive trove of hacked, leaked Russian documents https://t.co/pyYTBtsW7W pic.twitter.com/hd550XKTXX

— The Hill (@thehill) January 26, 2019

Best claimed to The New York Times that the tranche was not published “explicitly as payback” for Russia’s alleged release of the DNC emails in 2016, while remarking that “it does add some appreciable irony.” She also used the opportunity to take aim once again Assange and WikiLeaks, stating she was “disappointed” at their “dishonest and egotistic behavior.”

Best insisted that her organization had also posted material favorable to Assange “leaked from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.” This refers to internal files from National Intelligence Secretariat (SENAIN), a now-defunct Ecuadorian intelligence agency charged with protecting the WikiLeaks chief and extracting him to safety. The Guardian reported on these documents in 2018 and went to great pains to present SENAIN as villains in the process.

Oddly, those files have since been removed from the DDoSecrets archive.

In November of that year, The Intercept and New York Times published a number of articles titled “The Iran Cables” based on an “unprecedented leak” of 700 pages of reports supposedly compiled by Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The series sought to expose the scale of Iranian “influence” in Iraq, in the process revealing “the surprising ways in which Iranian and US interests often aligned” in the years following the illegal war.

News about Trump’s loosening restrictions on CIA cyberwarfare to authorize hack-and-dump ops makes me wonder if Langley was behind the ICIJ’s #ChinaCables and the Intercept’s Iran Leaks, among other leaks targeting designated enemies https://t.co/YMl3XbPMgM pic.twitter.com/MdDskVoRHB

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 16, 2020

The release of the leaked files may have played a role in escalating conflict between the US and Iran. A New York Times story based on the material focused heavily on the alleged role of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani as the shadowy puppet master of the Iraqi government, claiming he “more than anyone else” had employed “the dark arts of espionage and covert military action to ensure that Shiite power remains ascendant.” Two months later, Soleimani was incinerated in an illegal US drone strike launched as he left Baghdad International Airport for a peace conference.

An Intercept article purporting to tell the true “story behind” the cables’ release wove a dramatic narrative straight out of a Le Carré novel, and which may have been just as fictional, claiming a nameless Iraqi approached the publication with the material in order to “let the world know what Iran is doing in my country.”

Even if the outlet’s narrative was accurate, and the Russian and Iranian document troves had not been obtained through the CIA “hack-and-dump operations” sanctioned under Trump, it would be an extraordinary if not inexplicable coincidence that content which precisely matched that description was released the following year.

CIA hack-and-leak operations are an increasingly common information warfare tactic. For example, in June 2021 a US government official acknowledged Washington was secretly financing “investigative journalists and investigative NGOs” and employing “components of the intelligence community” including the Agency to expose corruption by public officials abroad, having created the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) to serve as a funnel for this material.

OCCRP is funded by a welter of US intelligence cutouts, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In October 2021, the OCCRP released the Pandora Papers, raising obvious questions about whether the underlying information was obtained through a US intelligence-related hack.

Back in December 2019, DDoSecrets partnered with the OCCRP to publish documents and data related to the operations of Formations House, which registered and operated companies for organized crime syndicates, dubious state-owned companies, and fraudulent banks.

Whether DDoSecrets and its founder are witting or unwitting pawns of the CIA is a moot point. Its commitment to publishing and hosting as much leaked material as possible makes the organization an extremely attractive conduit for ill-gotten sensitive documents, and the origins of this material is never questioned by news outlets that report upon it. After all, the imprimatur of DDoSecrets lends its releases credibility and legitimacy.

DDoSecrets has been scrupulous about attributing sources in particular cases. For example, the DDoSecrets entry on the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks forcefully asserts the documents were “hacked by Russian intelligence services.” This claim was undermined, however, by the admission of the CEO of CrowdStrike – the cybersecurity firm that made the attributions – admitting under oath there is no “concrete evidence” the emails were “actually exfiltrated” by anyone.

Meanwhile, other entries are careful to note constituent material was released by individuals associated with Russian intelligence, and may include “forged” documents.

The only comparable disclaimer that can be found in respect of any Western intelligence service anywhere else on the DDoSecrets website today relates to Syrian government emails originally dumped by WikiLeaks. The emails now include an accompanying blurb noting “the hack itself was not [emphasis in original] directly sponsored or conducted” by Washington, although its subsequent release was “carried out under the direct supervision of the US via FBI informant Hector ‘Sabu’ Monsegur.”

Since its foundation, DDoSecrets has provided a reliable archive for compromising information and data tranches stolen from the servers of foreign states which happen to be in the US government’s crosshairs.

Following Biden’s call to Trudeau, during which he demanded swift action against the truckers’ convoy filling downtown Ottawa and blockading US-Canadian border crossings in protest of vaccine mandates, DDoSecrets surfaced once again as a promotional platform for hacked data on convoy donors.

And while Assange languishes in prison, DDoSecrets is once again shopping its data to mainstream media outlets and advancing the critical interests of crisis-wracked Western governments.

thegrayzone.com

The surveillance activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Portland and other American cities earlier this year is reminiscent of FBI-CIA-NSA efforts to disrupt anti-Vietnam protest groups in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2021, FBI agents, dressed in plainclothes,  were embedded in Portland’s racial justice protests.  Agents alerted local police to potential arrests. The Department of Justice and its Office of the Inspector General must investigate these activities closely because they replicate the illegal activities of the FBI’s counterintelligence program during the Cold War.

The FBI has been conducting domestic surveillance operations since its inception in the 1920s, marking nearly a hundred years of violating the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Very few of these operations involved the investigation and gathering of evidence of a serious crime, the only justification for FBI surveillance.  J. Edgar Hoover, appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in1924, amassed illegal powers of surveillance that enabled him to conduct extra-legal tracking of activists, collect compromising information, and even to threaten and intimidate sitting presidents.

Hoover created the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1950s to counter the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, but it morphed into a program of covert and illegal activities to disrupt numerous political organizations, particularly the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights organizations of the 1960s and 1970s.  He exaggerated the threat of communism to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.  (The Pentagon similarly exaggerates the Russian and Chinese threats to elicit greater defense spending, such as the record-setting budget that President Biden signed on Monday.)  When Supreme Court decisions made it more difficult to prosecute individuals for their political opinions, Hoover formalized a covert “dirty tricks” program that included illegal wiretaps, forged documents, and burglaries.

The FBI programs were ostensibly designed to protect U.S. national security, but targets were typically nonviolent and had no connections with foreign powers.  Martin Luther King Jr. became a major target when he emerged as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement. Hoover authorized an anonymous blackmail letter to King in 1964, urging him to commit suicide.  The FBI worked to widen the rift between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, which ultimately led to Malcolm’s assassination in 1965.

COINTELPRO soon expanded to include the illegal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense.  From the Church Committee hearings in 1975, we learned that NSA worked with Western Union to collect copies of telegrams that entered and left the United States.  The FBI worked with AT&T to eavesdrop on domestic political opponents and civil rights advocates.  The CIA program, aptly named Operation Chaos, was late to the game in 1967, cooperating with the White House to investigate the anti-war movement and to find evidence of Soviet control.  There was none.  In any event, the CIA charter prevents any involvement in domestic operations for any reason.

The Congress developed a law to regulate surveillance for national security purposes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which led to the creation of a secret court that approved nearly every U.S. request for secret surveillance against U.S. citizens.  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ultimately expanded secret powers that allowed warrantless surveillance on domestic soil.  A top-secret FISA Court order required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed to domestic calls to NSA.

The NSA’s involvement in massive surveillance against U.S. citizens was exposed by the revelations of Edward Snowden ten years ago.  Snowden leaked an internal NSA directive that told its employees to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities.  It noted, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”  Snowden has been vilified, although his public service alerted the entire country to the dangers of massive surveillance.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has a full slate of possible investigations regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the role of the FBI in Portland and other U.S. cities must not be ignored. (It is noteworthy that there was no FBI presence on the Hill on January 6.)  FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress in September 2020 that the domestic terrorist investigations were “properly predicated” regarding “violent anarchist extremists.”  He provided no evidence to support the surveillance of political gatherings, which demands a high bar to allow such activities.  Unfortunately, we know a great deal more about the surveillance activities of Russia and China against its own citizens than we know about the role of the FBI in “spying” on democracy at home.

Following a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General has begun an investigation of the FBI’s role in Portland.  The Portland protests were consistent with free speech activities that didn’t require a FBI presence.  The FBI is authorized to conduct surveillance when there is a threat of federal crimes or a risk to national security.  The Department of Homeland also took part in the surveillance, compiling intelligence reports on protesters without any legal justification.  DHS did its best to conceal identities and affiliations of its officials.

George Orwell’s “1984” represented the all-seeing state with a two-way television set installed in every home.  Today’s location-tracking cell phones provide actual access and too much power over our lives.  There is far too much unmonitored federal surveillance and unregulated cyber-surveillance.  The combination of modern technology; a seemingly unlimited budget for intelligence operations; and the secret accumulation of a surveillance bureaucracy has created an unacceptable degree of “spying on democracy.”

Unfortunately, the American public has ignored policies and political actions that in fact weaken U.S. stature abroad and our democracy at home.  The anti-war movement and the arms control lobby are endangered institutions. According to the New York Times, U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians with virtually no effort from the Pentagon to discern how many were killed and what went wrong.  According to Airwars, a nonprofit organization, the United States has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,00 civilian deaths.

The Pentagon and the CIA used sadistic torture and abuse, but faced no accountability.  CIA Director John Brennan even tried to block the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of these programs, but suffered no consequences despite the obvious violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.  Meanwhile, President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex have been ignored.  As a result, our bloated defense spending has limited opportunities to expand needed domestic programs and to rebuild infrastructure.

It takes physical courage to fight our wars, but it takes moral courage to expose the illegalities of our military involvement.  We need more dissidents and whistleblowers to expose the secrecy and lies that often accompany our national security decision making.  The overuse of secrecy limits our debate on foreign policy and deprives citizens of information needed to debate life-and-death issues. A culture of openness is needed to remedy the decision making of the past 20 years that resulted in so much harm to our governance and democracy.

counterpunch.org

By John PILGER

“Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening to us” –-  Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre’s words should echo in all our minds following the grotesque decision of Britain’s High Court to extradite Julian Assange to the United States where he faces “a living death”. This is his punishment for the crime of authentic, accurate, courageous, vital journalism.

Miscarriage of justice is an inadequate term in these circumstances. It took the bewigged courtiers of Britain’s ancien regime just nine minutes on Friday to uphold an American appeal against a District Court judge’s acceptance in January of a cataract of evidence that hell on earth awaited Assange across the Atlantic: a hell in which, it was expertly predicted, he would find a way to take his own life.

Volumes of witness by people of distinction, who examined and studied Julian and diagnosed his autism and his Asperger’s Syndrome and revealed that he had already come within an ace of killing himself at Belmarsh prison, Britain’s very own hell, were ignored.

The recent confession of a crucial F.B.I. informant and prosecution stooge, a fraudster and serial liar, that he had fabricated his evidence against Julian was ignored. The revelation that the Spanish-run security firm at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Julian had been granted political refuge, was a C.I.A. front that spied on Julian’s lawyers and doctors and confidants (myself included) – that, too, was ignored.

Collage of UC Global surveillance photos made for C.I.A. inside Ecuador embassy.  (Cathy Vogan)

Each of these “matters”, as lawyers like to say, was enough on its own for a judge upholding the law to throw out the disgraceful case mounted against Assange by a corrupt U.S. Department of Justice and their hired guns in Britain. Julian’s state of mind, bellowed James Lewis, QC, America’s man at the Old Bailey last year, was no more than “malingering” – an archaic Victorian term used to deny the very existence of mental illness.

To Lewis, almost every defence witness, including those who described from the depth of their experience and knowledge, the barbaric American prison system, was to be interrupted, abused, discredited. Sitting behind him, passing him notes, was his American conductor: young, short-haired, clearly an Ivy League man on the rise.

Nine Minutes of Infamy

In their nine minutes of dismissal of journalist Assange’s fate, two of Britain’s most senior judges, including Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett (a lifelong buddy of Sir Alan Duncan, Boris Johnson’s former foreign minister who arranged Assange’s brutal police kidnapping from the Ecuadorean embassy) referred in their summary judgment to not one of a litany of truths that had struggled to be heard in a lower court presided over by a weirdly hostile judge, Vanessa Baraitser.

Her insulting behaviour towards a clearly stricken Assange, struggling through a fog of prison-dispensed medication to remember his name, is unforgettable.

What was truly shocking Friday was that the High Court judges – Lord Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, who read out their words – showed no hesitation in sending Julian to his death, living or otherwise. They offered no mitigation, no suggestion that they had agonised over legalities or even basic morality.

Their ruling in favour, if not on behalf of the United States, is based squarely on transparently fraudulent “assurances” scrabbled together by the Biden administration when it looked in January like justice might prevail.

These “assurances” are that once in American custody, Assange will not be subject to the Orwellian SAMS – Special Administrative Measures – which would make him an un-person; that he will not be imprisoned at ADX Florence, a prison in Colorado long condemned by jurists and human rights groups as illegal: “a pit of punishment and disappearance”; that he can be transferred to an Australian prison to finish his sentence there.

Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner, addressing his supporters on Oct 28, during the U.S. appeal hearing in London. (Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign)

There are abundant examples of the U.S. doing just that. As investigative journalist Richard Medhurst revealed last month, David Mendoza Herrarte was extradited from Spain to the U.S. on the “promise” that he would serve his sentence in Spain. The Spanish courts regarded this as a binding condition.

“Classified documents reveal the diplomatic assurances given by the U.S. Embassy in Madrid and how the U.S. violated the conditions of the extradition,” wrote Medhurst. “Mendoza spent six years in the U.S. trying to return to Spain. Court documents show the United States denied his transfer application multiple times.”

The High Court judges, who were aware of the Mendoza case and of Washington’s habitual duplicity, describe the “assurances” – not to be beastly to Julian Assange – as a “solemn undertaking offered by one government to another.”

The Imperial Way

This article would stretch into infinity if I listed the times the rapacious United States has broken “solemn undertakings” to governments, such as treaties that are summarily torn up and civil wars that are fueled. It is the way Washington has ruled the world, and before it Britain: the way of imperial power, as history teaches us.

It is this institutional lying and duplicity that Julian Assange brought into the open and in so doing performed perhaps the greatest public service of any journalist in modern times.

Julian himself has been a prisoner of lying governments for more than a decade now. During these long years, I have sat in many courts as the United States has sought to manipulate the law to silence him and WikiLeaks.

This reached a bizarre moment when, in the tiny Ecuadorean embassy, he and I were forced to flatten ourselves against a wall, each with a notepad in which we conversed, taking care to shield what we had written to each other from the ubiquitous spy cameras – installed, as we now know, by a proxy of the C.I.A., the world’s most enduring criminal organization.

Look at Ourselves

This brings me to the quotation at the top of this article: “Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening.”

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote this in his preface to Franz Fannon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the classic study of how colonised and seduced and coerced and, yes, craven peoples do the bidding of the powerful.

Who among us is prepared to stand up rather than remain mere bystanders to an epic travesty such as the judicial kidnapping of Julian Assange? What is at stake is both a courageous man’s life and, if we remain silent, the conquest of our intellects and sense of right and wrong: indeed our very humanity.

consortiumnews.com

Establishment institutions usually start their implementation of censorship and the throttling of press freedom by going after individuals and outlets that are small and/or not well liked by a cross-section of the public.  The obscurity or general unpalatable nature of the target ensures the success of setting the precedent.

Most Americans have probably never heard of Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) and many would be unsympathetic once they learn that the U.S. government claims it is a think tank and journal associated with Russian military intelligence, although no evidence is offered to back up this assertion, and SCF denies it has ties to the Russian government.  But years of anti-Russia sentiment in the political sphere and in most American media ensures that the claim alone will suffice to tar any Americans associated with Strategic Culture Foundation with a black brush.

I have confirmed that two American writers for SCF have received letters from the US Treasury Department in recent weeks warning them of fines of over $300,000 if they continue to write for the journal.  These threats are in response to alleged Russian interference in the 2020 US election and part of the US government’s enforcement of Executive Order 13848 signed by President Donald Trump in September of 2018 which sought to ascertain foreign interference in any future elections in the US and to punish those deemed guilty.  Threats to US elections included not only tampering with actual voting and its supporting infrastructure but “covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation.”

According to the Treasury Department’s April 15, 2021 press release in connection with the designation of SCF and other Russian entities to be sanctioned pursuant to the executive order, the US government stated its intent to target those they see as Russia’s enablers on behalf of its alleged program to interfere in US elections:

“Treasury will target Russian leaders, officials, intelligence services, and their proxies that attempt to interfere in the US electoral process or subvert US democracy,” said Secretary Janet L. Yellen. “This is the start of a new US campaign against Russian malign behavior.” (emphasis added)

The release also accuses SCF specifically, without evidence, of being directed by Russian military intelligence and that its articles spread “disinformation” – which appears to mean opinion and analysis that the US government doesn’t like:

The Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF) is an online journal registered in Russia that is directed by the SVR and closely affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. SCF is controlled by the SVR’s Directorate MS (Active Measures) and created false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning US officials involved in the 2020 US presidential election. It publishes conspiracy theorists, giving them a broader platform to spread disinformation, while trying to obscure the Russian origins of the journal so that readers may be more likely to trust the sourcing…

…Treasury designated…the Strategic Culture Foundation pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having engaged in foreign interference in the US 2020 presidential election.

The ordeal started for the two American writers in July of 2020 when they each received a visit at their home from FBI agents inquiring about SCF and its connections to Russia.  Daniel Lazare, an author and journalist told Finian Cunningham recently that the agents wanted to know about alleged links of SCF to Russian intelligence: “I replied that I wasn’t interested because I regard the entire avenue of inquiry as bogus and a product of the anti-Moscow hysteria that’s running rampant in Washington. So the agents left. Everything was polite and low-keyed, and the entire exchange took no more than four or five minutes.”

Similarly, Michael Averko, who had written for SCF since 2015, stated that two FBI agents came to his home in July of 2020 and asked about SCF ties to the Russian government.  They told him at the time that he wasn’t in any trouble and didn’t have to answer their questions, but Averko was hesitant to say much, recalling what had happened to Michael Flynn: “The only question I answered was on whether the SCF has any ties to Russian military intelligence. I answered by saying I can’t say for sure and doubt it. I added that my impression is that the SCF comprises politically interested Russians, who want to be involved with the issues they cover.”

It wasn’t until November of this year that Lazare and Averko both received letters dated October 15, 2021 from the Treasury Department, delivered personally by the FBI.  The letters advised that they were in violation of sanctions against SCF per executive order 13848 and were potentially subject to fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars if they did not stop contributing articles to SCF:

“[P]ursuant to Executive Order 13848 of September 12, 2018…all property and interests in property of SCF that are subject to US jurisdiction are blocked, and US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them…[E]ach violation… is subject to a statutory maximum civil monetary penalty of up to the greater of $311,562 or twice the value of the underlying transaction.”

When asked whether he thought this would set a troubling precedent for Americans who write for foreign media outlets, Lazare said he believed it would:

“Absolutely.  Why not ban RT, formerly known as Russia Today?  If the government is pissed off against Emmanuel Macron, why not go after Agence France-Presse?  The US complains when Russia harasses western news outlets, yet it’s guilty of precisely the same activities at home.  As far as I’m concerned, threatening US journalists with fines for writing for a Russian press outlet is a flagrant assault on freedom of the press.”

Averko was a bit more circumspect and thinks the government believes because SCF is a relatively small outlet, it can more easily get away with sanctioning it: “The SCF and its US based American writers are (in the overall comparative scheme of things) small potatoes and an easier target to beat up on.”

Both writers say they know of other US contributors to the outlet who have received the same letter and are intimidated.  Lazare stated:

“While I have no particular concerns in my own case, other journalists are so frightened that they’ve not only stopped writing, but don’t even want to speak about their experience with other reporters.  No one wants to mess with the federal government because they know the feds can make your life a misery if they’re so motivated.  So they’ve clammed up. If you’ve ever wondered what “chilling effect” means, this is it.”

While US officials may be unlikely to go after major foreign media, it’s very possible this could be a precedent to go after smaller outlets with unsubstantiated accusations of foreign interference and spreading of “disinformation.”

Lazare is in the process of seeking legal advice about the government threats.  Averko said he was considering it and believes it would probably be best for all SCF contributors who received the letter to work together on any possible legal claim, though he’s aware of at least one who is unwilling to do so.

This is another example of the US undermining its own purported democratic values, which it touts to the rest of the world, in order to punish those who associate with the latest bogeyman country while providing no evidence that this outlet is even guilty of what they assert.  After WMD’s and Russiagate, it would be foolish to take US government claims at face value as we are again being asked to do.

antiwar.com

The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.

Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.

Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.

Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.

In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.

That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.

The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos)  into “flipping” on the candidate.

Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.

What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.

“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”

The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.

How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.

From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again. 

If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?

I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.

This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?

History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which led to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.

wemeantwell.com

With the arrest of the principal source of the bogus dossier, The New York Times belatedly admits what the dossier was, a fact reported in Consortium News four years ago.

Igor Danchenko, the main source for the phony Clinton campaign, opposition research dressed up as an intelligence report that for a time duped the FBI and Democratic mainstream media for several years, has been arrested in the ongoing investigation into the deceptive origins of Russiagate by Special Counsel John Durahm, The New York Timesreported Thursday. The Times lead reads:

“Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.”

The key phrase is “turned out to be”, as the Times has belatedly come to understand that the Steele Dossier, which became the focal point of manic Democratic-slanted reporting, was nothing more than opposition research, a mix of some fact and mostly fiction, which both parties routinely serve up in campaigns to sling mud at their opponents.

But the Steele Dossier was fervently believed by Democratic partisans, at times fanatically, as if it were solid intelligence, in the face of the facts. Robert Parry, the late founder of this website, was in the forefront of questioning and debunking the bogus story that was widely and profoundly believed, to the point of U.S. sanctions being imposed on Russia, spiking tensions between the nuclear-armed powers.

CN‘s editor, Joe Lauria, at the time a writer for Consortium News, spelled out as early as October 2017 — just 10 months into the Trump regime — that the Democrats were behind both the phony dossier and the private firm CrowdStrike’s examination of Democratic National Committee servers, which the party kept away from the FBI. Lauria wrote this piece on Oct. 29, 2017, entitled “The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate.” It began:

“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.

 

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 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.”

After the article appeared in Consortium News, Lauria published the piece on the HuffPo, which he had been contributing to since 2006. With establishment Democrats still clinging to Russiagate as if it were an article of religious faith, the HuffPo retracted the article. Here is what happened:

How Russiagate Rationalized Censorship

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Dec. 4, 2017

At the end of October 2017, I wrote an article for Consortium News about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The piece showed that the Democrats’ two, paid-for sources that have engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky. First was former British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.

And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company, examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a Russian “hack.” In a similar examination using the same software of an alleged hack of a Ukrainian artillery app, CrowdStrike also blamed Russia but its software was exposed as faulty and it was later forced to rewrite it. CrowdStrike was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.

My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.

After the article appeared at Consortium News, I tried to penetrate the mainstream by then publishing a version of the article on the HuffPost, which was rebranded from the Huffington Post in April this year by new management. As a contributor to the site since February 2006, I was trusted by HuffPost editors to post my stories directly online. However, within 24 hours of publication on Nov. 4, HuffPost editors retracted the article without any explanation.

This behavior breaks with the earlier principles of journalism that the Web site claimed to uphold. For instance, in 2008, Arianna Huffington told radio host Don Debar that, “We welcome all opinions, except conspiracy theories.” She said: “Facts are sacred. That’s part of our philosophy of journalism.”

But Huffington stepped down as editor in August 2016 and has nothing to do with the site now. It is run by Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times reporter and editor, who evidently has very different ideas. In April, she completely redesigned the site and renamed it HuffPost.

Before the management change, I had published several articles on the Huffington Post about Russia without controversy. For instance, The Huffington Post published my pieceon Nov. 5, 2016, that predicted three days before the election that if Clinton lost she’d blame Russia. My point was reaffirmed by the campaign-insider book Shattered, which revealed that immediately after Clinton’s loss, senior campaign advisers decided to blame Russia for her defeat.

On Dec. 12, 2016, I published another piece, which the Huffington Post editors promoted to the front page, called, “Blaming Russia To Overturn The Election Goes Into Overdrive.” I argued that “Russia has been blamed in the U.S. for many things and though proof never seems to be supplied, it is widely believed anyway.”

After I posted the updated version of the Consortium News piece — renamed “On the Origins of Russia-gate” — I was informed 23 hours later by a Facebook friend that the piece had been retracted by HuffPost editors. As a reporter for mainstream media for more than a quarter century, I know that a newsroom rule is that before the serious decision is made to retract an article the writer is contacted to be allowed to defend the piece. This never happened. There was no due process. A HuffPost editor ignored my email asking why it was taken down.

Support from Independent Media

Like the word “fascism,” “censorship” is an over-used and mis-used accusation, and I usually avoid using it. But without any explanation, I could only conclude that the decision to retract was political, not editorial.

I am non-partisan as I oppose both major parties for failing to represent millions of Americans’ interests. I follow facts where they lead. In this case, the facts led to an understanding that the Jan. 6, 2017 FBI/NSA/CIA intelligence “assessment” on alleged Russian election interference, prepared by what then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts, was based substantially on unvetted opposition research and speculation, not serious intelligence work.

The assessment even made the point that the analysts were not asserting that the alleged Russian interference was a fact. The report contained the disclaimer: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

Under deadline pressure on Jan. 6, Scott Shane of The New York Times instinctively wrote what many readers of the report must have been thinking: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

Yet, after the Jan. 6 report was published, leading Democrats asserted falsely that the “assessment” represented the consensus judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies – not just the views of “hand-picked” analysts from three – and much of the U.S. mainstream media began treating the allegations of Russian “hacking” as flat fact, not as an uncertain conclusion denied by both the Russian government and WikiLeaks, which insists that it did not get the two batches of Democratic emails from Russia.

(There is also dissent inside the broader U.S. intelligence community about whether an alleged “hack” over the Internet was even possible based on the download speeds of one known data extraction, which matched what was possible from direct USB access to a computer, i.e., a download onto a thumb drive presumably by a Democratic insider.)

However, because of the oft-repeated “17 intelligence agencies” canard and the mainstream media’s careless reporting, the public impression has built up that the accusations against Russia are indisputable. If you ask a Russia-gate believer today what their faith is based on, they will invariably point to the Jan. 6 assessment and mock anyone who still expresses any doubt.

For instance, an unnamed former CIA officer told The Intercept last month, “You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.”

That the supposedly dissident Intercept would use this quote is instructive about how imbalanced the media’s reporting on Russia-gate has been. We have actual film of Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor and American ships burning – and we have the eyewitness accounts of thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors. Yet, on Russia-gate, we only have the opinions of some “hand-picked” intelligence officials who themselves say that they are not claiming that their opinions are fact. No serious editor would allow a self-interested and unnamed source to equate the two in print.

In this groupthink atmosphere, it was probably easy for HuffPost editors to hear some complaints from a few readers and blithely decide to ban my story. However, before it was pulled, 125 people had shared it. Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and frequent contributor to Consortium News, then took up my cause, being the first to write about the HuffPost censorship on his blog. McGovern included a link to a .pdf file that I captured of the censored HuffPost story. It has since been republished on numerous other websites.

Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about it. British filmmaker and writer Tariq Ali posted it on his Facebook page. Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams interviewed me at length about the censorship on their TV program. ZeroHedge wrote a widely shared piece and someone actually took the time, 27 minutes and 13 seconds to be exact, to read the entire article on YouTube. I began a petition to HuffPost’s Polgreen to either explain the retraction or restore the article. It gained 3,517 signatures. If a serious fact-check analysis was made of my article, it must exist and can and should be produced.

Watchdogs & Media Defending Censorship

Despite this support from independent media, a senior official at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, I learned, declined to take up my cause because he believes in the Russia-gate story. I also learned that a senior officer at the American Civil Liberties Union rejected my case because he too believes in Russia-gate. Both of these serious organizations were set up precisely to defend individuals in such situations on principle, not preference.

Vladimir Putin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 10, 2015, at the Kremlin. (Russian government photo)

In terms of their responsibilities for defending journalism and protecting civil liberties, their personal opinions about whether Russia-gate is real or not should be irrelevant. The point is whether journalists should be permitted to show skepticism toward this latest dubiously based groupthink. I fear that – amid the frenzy about Russia and the animosity toward Trump – concerns about careers and funding are driving these decisions, with principles brushed aside.

One online publication decidedly took the HuffPost’s side. Steven Perlberg, a media reporter for BuzzFeed, asked the HuffPost why they retracted my article. While ignoring me, the editors issued a statement to BuzzFeed saying that “Mr. Lauria’s self-published” piece was “later flagged by readers, and after deciding that the post contained multiple factually inaccurate or misleading claims, our editors removed the post per our contributor terms of use.” Those terms include retraction for “any reason,” including, apparently, censorship.

Perlberg posted the HuffPost statement on Twitter. I asked him if he inquired of the editors what those “multiple” errors and “misleading claims” were. I asked him to contact me to get my side of the story. Perlberg totally ignored me. He wrote nothing about the matter. He apparently believed the HuffPost and that was that. In this way, he acquiesced with the censorship.

BuzzFeed, of course, is the sensationalist outlet that irresponsibly published the Steele dossier in full, even though the accusations – not just about Donald Trump but also many other individuals – weren’t verified. Then on Nov. 14, BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold wrote one of the most ludicrous of a long line of fantastic Russia-gate stories, reporting that the Russian foreign ministry had sent money to Russian consulates in the U.S. “to finance the election campaign of 2016.” The scoop generated some screaming headlines before it became clear that the money was to pay for Russian citizens in the U.S. to vote in the 2016 Duma election.

That Russia-gate has reached this point, based on faith and not fact, was further illustrated by a Facebook exchange I had with Gary Sick, an academic who served on the Ford and Carter national security staffs. When I pressed Sick for evidence of Russian interference, he eventually replied: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…” When I told him that was a very low-bar for such serious accusations, he angrily cut off debate.

Part of this Russia-gate groupthink stems from the outrage – and even shame – that many Americans feel about Trump’s election. They want to find an explanation that doesn’t lay the blame on the U.S. citizenry or America’s current dysfunctional political/media process. It’s much more reassuring, in a way, to blame some foreign adversary while also discrediting Trump’s legitimacy as the elected president. That leaves open some hope that his election might somehow be negated.

And, so many important people and organizations seem to be verifying the Russia-gate suspicions that the theory must be true. Which is an important point. When belief in a story becomes faith-based or is driven by an intense self-interest, honest skeptics are pushed aside and trampled. That is the way groupthink works, as we saw in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq when any doubts about Iraq possessing WMD made you a “Saddam apologist.”

As the groupthink grows, the true-believers become disdainful of facts that force them to think about what they already believe. They won’t waste time making a painstaking examination of the facts or engage in a detailed debate even on something as important and dangerous as a new Cold War with Russia.

This is the most likely explanation for the HuffPost‘s censorship: a visceral reaction to having their Russia-gate faith challenged.

Why Critical News is Suppressed

But the HuffPost’s action is hardly isolated. It is part of a rapidly growing landscape of censorship of news critical of American corporate and political leaders who are trying to defend themselves from an increasingly angry population. It’s a story as old as civilization: a wealthy and powerful elite fending off popular unrest by trying to contain knowledge of how the insiders gain at the others’ expense, at home and abroad.

Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Whitehouse.gov)

A lesson of the 2016 campaign was that growing numbers of Americans are fed up with three decades of neoliberal policies that have fabulously enriched the top tier of Americans and debased a huge majority of the citizenry. The population has likewise grown tired of the elite’s senseless wars to expand their own interests, which these insiders try to conflate with the entire country’s interests.

America’s bipartisan rulers are threatened by popular discontent from both left and right. They were alarmed by the Bernie Sanders insurgency and by Donald Trump’s victory, even if Trump is now betraying the discontented masses who voted for him by advancing tax and health insurance plans designed to further crush them and benefit the wealthy.

Trump’s false campaign promises will only make the rulers’ problem of a restless population worse. Americans are subjected to economic inequality greater than in the first Gilded Age. They are also subjected today to more war than in the first Gilded Age. American rulers today are engaged in multiple conflicts following decades of post-World War II invasions and coups to expand their global interests.

People with wealth and power always seem to be nervous about losing both. So plutocrats use the concentrated media they own to suppress news critical of their wars and domestic repression. For example, almost nothing was reported about militarized police forces until the story broke out into the open in the Ferguson protests and much of that discontent has been brushed aside more recently.

Careerist journalists readily acquiesce in this suppression of news to maintain their jobs, their status and their lifestyles. Meanwhile, a growing body of poorly paid freelancers compete for the few remaining decent-paying gigs for which they must report from the viewpoint of the mainstream news organizations and their wealthy owners.

To operate in this media structure, most journalists know to excise out the historical context of America’s wars of domination. They know to uncritically accept American officials’ bromides about spreading democracy, while hiding the real war aims.

Examples abound: America’s role in the Ukraine coup was denied or downplayed; a British parliamentary report exposing American lies that led to the destruction of Libya was suppressed; and most infamously, the media promoted the WMD hoax and the fable of “bringing democracy” to Iraq, leading to the illegal invasion and devastation of that country. A November 2017 60 Minutes report on the Saudi destruction of Yemen, conspicuously failed to mention America’s crucial role in the carnage.

I’ve pitched numerous news stories critical of U.S. foreign policy to a major American newspaper that were rejected or changed in the editorial process. One example is the declassified Defense Intelligence Agency  documentof August 2012 that accurately predicted the rise of the Islamic State two years later.

The document, which I confirmed with a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. and its Turkish, European and Gulf Arab allies, were supporting the establishment of a Salafist principality in eastern Syria to put pressure on the Syrian government, but the document warned that this Salafist base could turn into an “Islamic State.”

But such a story would undermine the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism” narrative by revealing that the U.S.-backed strategy actually was risking the expansion of the jihadists’ foothold in Syria. The story was twice rejected by my editors and has received attention almost entirely — if not exclusively — on much-smaller independent news Web sites.

Another story I pitched in June 2012, just a year into the Syrian war, about Russia’s motives in Syria being guided by a desire to defeat the growing jihadist threat there, was also rejected. Corporate media wanted to keep the myth of Russia’s “imperial” aims in Syria alive. I had to publish the article outside the U.S., in a South African daily newspaper.

In September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed my story about Russia’s motives in Syria to stop jihadists from taking over. Putin invited the U.S. to join this effort as Moscow was about to launch its military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian government. The Obama administration, still insisting on “regime change” in Syria, refused. And the U.S. corporate media continued promoting the myth that Russia intervened to recapture its “imperial glory.”

It was much easier to promote the “imperial” narrative and to ignore Putin’s clear explanation to French TV channel TF1, which was not picked up by American media.

“Remember what Libya or Iraq looked like before these countries and their organizations were destroyed as states by our Western partners’ forces?” Putin said. “These states showed no signs of terrorism. They were not a threat for Paris, for the Cote d’Azur, for Belgium, for Russia, or for the United States. Now, they are the source of terrorist threats. Our goal is to prevent the same from happening in Syria.”

Why Russia Is Targeted

So, where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are suppressed?

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin wall, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)

The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has provided an opening for some. This has presented a new problem for the plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media (and through some dissident Western news sites on the Internet).

The solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that most Americans have been kept from hearing. But just because these views – many coming from Americans and other Westerners – are not what you commonly hear on the U.S. mainstream media doesn’t make them “propaganda” that must be stigmatized and silenced.

As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow American view of the world.

The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and others are never fully reported in the Western media although the supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those countries, making it easier to gain U.S. popular support to go to war against them.

Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness, racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70 years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions, coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare.

Now, these American transgressions are projected onto Moscow. There’s also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people with a stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.

The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be blamed. Russia is both an old and a new scapegoat.

The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election meddling is a good example of how this works. A third of its content is an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all things, holding a “third party candidate debates.”

According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties.” In other words, reporting on newsworthy events and allowing third-party candidates to express their opinions undermine democracy.

The report also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,” but it should be noted those protests by dissatisfied Americans are against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected, a status quo that the intelligence agencies routinely protect.

There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted. The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents. Russia wants Americans to see this perspective.

Accelerated Censorship in the Private Sector

The Constitution prohibits government from prior-restraint, or censorship, though such tactics were imposed, largely unchallenged, during the two world wars. American newspapers voluntarily agreed to censor themselves in the Second World War before the government dictated it.

In the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said he didn’t “desire to reestablish wartime censorship” and instead asked the press for self-censorship. He largely got it until the papers began reporting American battlefield losses. On July 25, 1950, “the army ordered that reporters were not allowed to publish ‘unwarranted’ criticism of command decisions, and that the army would be ‘the sole judge and jury’ on what ‘unwarranted’ criticism entailed,” according to a Yale University study on military censorship.

After excellent on-the-ground reporting from Vietnam brought the war home to America and spurred popular anti-war protests, the military reacted by instituting, initially in the first Gulf War, serious control of the press by “embedding” reporters from private media companies which accepted the arrangement, much as World War II newspapers censored themselves.

It is important to realize that the First Amendment applies only to Congress and not to private companies, including the media. It is not illegal for them to practice censorship. I never made a First Amendment argument against the HuffPost. However, under pressure from Washington, even in peacetime, media companies can be pressured to do the government’s dirty work to censor or limit free speech for the government.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen an acceleration of attempts by corporations to inhibit Russian media in the U.S. Both Google and Facebook, which dominate the Web with more than 50 percent of ad revenue, were at first resistant to government pressure to censor “Russian propaganda.” But they are coming around.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said on Nov. 18, 2017 that Google would “derank” articles from RT and Sputnik in the Google searches, making the stories harder for readers to find. The billionaire Schmidt claimed Russian information can be “repetitive, exploitative, false, [or] likely to have been weaponized,” he said. That is how factual news critical of U.S. corporate and political leadership is seen, as a weapon.

“My own view is that these patterns can be detected, and that they can be taken down or deprioritized,” Schmidt said.

Though Google would effectively be hiding news produced by RT and Sputnik, Schmidt is sensitive to the charge of censorship, even though there’s nothing legally to stop him.

“We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate,” Schmidt said cynically. “I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do.”

But the “deranking” isn’t only aimed at Russian sites; Google algorithms also are taking aim at independent news sites that don’t follow the mainstream herd – and thus are accused of spreading Russian or other “propaganda” if they question the dominant Western narratives on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria. A number of alternative websites have begun reporting a sharp fall-off of traffic directed to their sites from Google’s search engines.

Responding to a deadline from Congress to act, Facebook on Nov. 22, 2017 announced that it would inform users if they have been “targeted” by Russian “propaganda.” Facebook’s help center will tell users if they liked or shared ads allegedly from the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which supposedly bought $100,000 in ads over a two-year period, with more than half these ads coming after the 2016 U.S. election and many not related to politics.

(The $100,000 sum over two years compares to Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue. Plus, Facebook only says it “believes” or it’s “likely” that the ads came from that firm, whose links to the Kremlin also have yet to be proved.)

Facebook described the move as “part of our ongoing effort to protect our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to undermine our democracy.” Congress wants more from Facebook, so it will not be surprising if users will eventually be told when they’ve liked or shared an RT report in the future. [The suppression of dissident news and manipulation of information has since grown worse with the advent of NewsGuard and the discovery of the Integrity Initiative.]

While the government can’t openly shut down a news site, the Federal Communications Commission’s vote on whether to deregulate the Internet by ending net neutrality will free private Internet companies in the U.S. to further marginalize Russian and dissident websites by slowing them down and thus discouraging readers from viewing them.

Likewise, as the U.S. government doesn’t want to be openly seen shutting down RT operations, it is working around the edges to accomplish that.

After the Department of Justice forced, under threat of arrest, RT to register its employees as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nuaert said last Tuesday that “FARA does not police the content of information disseminated, does not limit the publication of information or advocacy materials, and does not restrict an organization’s ability to operate.” She’d earlier said that registering would not “impact or affect the ability of them to report news and information. We just have them register. It’s as simple as that.”

Then on Wednesday the Congressional press office stripped RT correspondents of their Capitol Hill press passes, citing the FARA registration. “The rules of the Galleries state clearly that news credentials may not be issued to any applicant employed ‘by any foreign government or representative thereof.’ Upon its registration as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), RT Network became ineligible to hold news credentials,” read the letter to RT.

Even so, Russia-gate faithful ignore these aggressive moves and issue calls for even harsher action. After forcing RT to register, Keir Giles, a Chatham House senior consulting fellow, acted as though it never happened. He said in a Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Brief on Nov. 27, 2017: “Although the Trump administration seems unlikely to pursue action against Russian information operations, there are steps the U.S. Congress and other governments should consider.”

I commented on this development on RT America. It would also have been good to have the State Department’s Nuaert answer for this discrepancy about the claim that forced FARA registrations would not affect news gathering when it already has. My criticism of RT is that they should be interviewing U.S. decision-makers to hold them accountable, rather than mostly guests outside the power structure. The decision-makers could be called out on air if they refuse to appear, as many may well do.

Growing McCarthyite Attacks

Western rulers’ wariness about popular unrest also can be seen in the extraordinary and scurrilous attack on the Canadian website Globalresearch.ca. The attack started with a chilling study by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the relatively obscure website, followed by a vicious hit piece on Nov. 18 by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper. The headline was: “How a Canadian website is being used to amplify the Kremlin’s view of the world.”

Lawyer Roy Cohn (right) with Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“What once appeared to be a relatively harmless online refuge for conspiracy theorists is now seen by NATO’s information warfare specialists as a link in a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of mainstream Western media – as well as the North American and European public’s trust in government and public institutions,” the Globe and Mail reported. “Global Research is viewed by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence – or StratCom – as playing a key accelerant role in helping popularize articles with little basis in fact that also happen to fit the narratives being pushed by the Kremlin, in particular, and the Assad regime.”

I’ve not agreed with everything I’ve read on the site. But it is a useful clearinghouse for alternative media. Numerous Consortium News articles are republished there, including a handful of mine. But the site’s typical sharing and reposting on the Internet is seen by NATO as a plot to undermine the Free World.

Drawing from the NATO report, The Globe and Mail’s denunciation of this website continued: “It uses that reach to push not only its own opinion pieces, but ‘news’ reports from little-known websites that regularly carry dubious or false information. At times, the site’s regular variety of international-affairs stories is replaced with a flurry of items that bolster dubious reportage with a series of opinion pieces, promoted on social media and retweeted and shared by active bots.”

The newspaper continued, “’That way, they increase the Google ranking of the story and create the illusion of multi-source verification,’ said Donara Barojan, who does digital forensic research for [StratCom]. But she said she did not yet have proof that Global Research is connected to any government.”

This sort of smear is nothing more than a blatant attack on free speech by the most powerful military alliance in the world, based on the unfounded conviction that Russia is a fundamental force for evil and that anyone who has contacts with Russia or shares even a part of its multilateral world view is suspect.

High-profile individuals are now also in the crosshairs of the neo-McCarthyite witchhunt. On Nov. 25 The Washington Post ran a nasty hit piece on Washington Capitals’ hockey player Alex Ovechkin, one of the most revered sports figures in the Washington area, simply because he, like 86 percent of other Russians, supports his president.

“Alex Ovechkin is one of Putin’s biggest fans. The question is, why?” ran the headline. The story insidiously implied that Ovechkin was a dupe of his own president, being used to set up a media campaign to support Putin, who is under fierce and relentless attack in the United States where Ovechkin plays professional ice hockey.

“He has given an unwavering endorsement to a man who U.S. intelligence agencies say sanctioned Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election,” write the Post reporters, once again showing their gullibility to U.S. intelligence agencies that have provided no proof for their assertions (and even admit that they are not asserting their opinion as fact).

Less prominent figures are targeted too. John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who blew the whistle on torture and was jailed for it, was kicked off a panel in Europe on Nov. 10 by a Bernie Sanders supporter who refused to appear with Kiriakou because he co-hosts a show on Radio Sputnik.

Then last week, Reporters Without Borders, an organization supposedly devoted to press freedom, tried to kick journalist Vanessa Beeley off a panel in Geneva to prevent her from presenting evidence that the White Helmets, a group that sells itself as a rescue organization inside rebel-controlled territory in Syria, has ties to Al Qaeda. The Swiss Press Club, which hosted the event, resisted the pressure and let Beeley speak.

Russia-gate’s Hurdles

Much of this spreading global hysteria and intensifying censorship traces back to Russia-gate. Yet, it remains remarkable that the corporate media has failed so far to prove any significant Russian interference in the U.S. election at all. Nor have the intelligence agencies, Congressional investigations and special prosecutor Robert Mueller. His criminal charges so far have been for financial crimes and lying to federal authorities on topics unrelated to any “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russians to “hack” Democratic emails.

There may well be more indictments from Mueller, even perhaps a complaint about Trump committing obstruction of justice because he said on TV that he fired Comey, in part, because of the “Russia thing.” But Trump’s clumsy reaction to the “scandal,” which he calls “fake news” and a “witch hunt,” still is not proof that Putin and the Russians interfered in the U.S. election to achieve the unlikely outcome of Trump’s victory.

The Russia-gate faithful assured us to wait for the indictment of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security adviser. But again there was nothing about pre-election “collusion,” only charges that Flynn had lied to the FBI or omitted details about two conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding policy matters during the presidential transition, i.e., after the election.

And, one of those conversations related to trying unsuccessfully to comply with an Israeli request to get Russia to block a United Nations resolution censuring Israel’s settlements on Palestinian land.

As journalist Yasha Levine tweeted: “So the country that influenced US policy through Michael Flynn is Israel, not Russia. But Flynn did try to influence Russia, not the other way around. Ha-ha. This is the smoking gun? What a farce.”

There remain a number of key hurdles to prove the Russia-gate story. First, convincing evidence is needed that the Russian government indeed did “hack” the Democratic emails, both those of the DNC and Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta – and gave them to WikiLeaks. And, further that somehow the Trump campaign was involved in aiding and abetting this operation, i.e., collusion.

There’s also the question of how significant the release of those emails was anyway. They did provide evidence that the DNC tilted the primary campaign in favor of Clinton over Sanders; they exposed the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying to hide from the voters; and they revealed some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation and its foreign donations.

But – even if the Russians were involved in providing that information to the American people – those issues were not considered decisive in the campaign. Clinton principally pinned her loss on FBI Director James Comey for closing and then reopening the investigation into her improper use of a private email server while Secretary of State. She also spread the blame to Russia (repeating the canard about “seventeen [U.S. intelligence] agencies, all in agreement”), Bernie Sanders, the inept DNC and other factors.

As for the vaguer concerns about some Russian group “probably” buying $100,000 in ads, mostly after Americans had voted, as a factor in swaying a $6 billion election, is too silly to contemplate. That RT and Sputnik ran pieces critical of Hillary Clinton was their right, and they were hardly alone. RT and Sputnik‘s reach in the U.S. is minuscule compared to Fox News, which slammed Clinton throughout the campaign, or for that matter, MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream news outlets, which often expressed open disdain for Republican Donald Trump but also gave extensive coverage to issues such as the security concerns about Clinton’s private email server.

Another vague Russia-gate suspicion stemming largely from Steele’s opposition research is that somehow Russia is bribing or blackmailing Trump because Trump has done some past business with Russians. But there are evidentiary and logical problems with these theories, since some lucrative deals fell through (and presumably wouldn’t have if Trump was being paid off) — and no one, including the Russians, foresaw Trump’s highly improbable election as U.S. President years earlier.

Some have questioned how Trump could have supported detente with Russia without being beholden to Moscow in some way. But Jeffery Sommers, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a convincing essay explaining adviser Steve Bannon’s influence on Trump’s thinking about Russia and the need for cooperation between the two powers to solve international problems.

Without convincing evidence, I remain a Russia-gate skeptic. I am not defending Russia. Russia can defend itself. However, amid the growing censorship and a dangerous new McCarthyism, I am trying to defend America — from itself.

An intriguing though fragmentary espionage story made headlines eleven days ago and then disappeared abruptly, suggesting that some folks in high places in the government and media were fearing that the full tale would prove to be embarrassing to someone. I am referring to the report of the arrest made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service of an American government employee who worked in nuclear engineering. Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana apparently had stolen highly sensitive information on nuclear propulsion systems and the stealth hull designs of the next generation U.S. Navy Virginia class attack submarine fleet and had been caught after several times seeking to sell their wares to what they thought to be a foreign power.

Two days after the arrest, the Toebbes appeared in court in Martinsburg West Virginia and were ordered to remain in jail as they were considered a flight risk. So far, so good but the interesting part of the story is that the intended purchaser was apparently not obvious adversaries like Russia and China, but rather an ostensibly friendly country, which was not identified. The Toebbes clearly thought they were offering their technology to a foreign country’s intelligence service, one presumes, but they were in fact in contact with the FBI, which allowed them to arrange dead drops in Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia and paid them to continue providing new material on small digital computer cards before closing the trap and making the arrest.

And how the FBI learned about the Toebbes is another interesting part of the story. Apparently in April 2020 the couple had mailed a package containing manuals and other material relating to the propulsion systems to a foreign country, together with an offer to establish a covert relationship in return for payment in cryptocurrency. The package somehow wound up in someone’s hands in the foreign postal system or government and eventually made its way anonymously eight months later to the FBI legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy. It included a note that read “Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. This is not a hoax.”

One has to suspect that the material actually had reached the foreign intelligence agency that it had been sent to where it was considered too hot to handle, so it was forwarded on to the U.S. officials anonymously to get rid of it.

The documents involved relating to the arrest and the alleged crimes committed by the Toebbes are heavily redacted, far beyond the identity of the foreign country involved, so it is somewhat difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened. Toebbe, a former naval officer, has held senior positions in the Navy bureaucracy, up to and including serving on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, which would have given him access to beyond top secret codeworded details of next level submarine technology. It is information that is only shared with Great Britain and, in a recent policy move, with Australia, both U.S. allies that will deploy nuclear powered submarines in the Pacific to deter China. The documents the Toebbes reportedly stole and tried to sell were produced by a little-known U.S. government facility the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin Pennsylvania.

One of the most interesting aspects of the case is the question of who might have been the potential buyer of the stolen technology. Building nuclear submarines is not exactly high on the priority list of any but a small handful of countries that have global or regional pretensions that might be supported by having cruise missile nuclear weapons capable ships that can stay under water for months at a time. Germany could conceivably build such vessels but has no defensive needs that require such an expedient. So could France, presumably. Japan and South Korea are perhaps more plausible recipients, particularly as they have the industrial and scientific bases that could benefit from and use the technology if they chose to go that route, and both are threatened by China.

And, of course, there is always Israel, which frequently tends to come up when there are stories of espionage committed by a friendly country against the United States. In this case, of course, the Israelis, if targeted by the Toebbes, apparently did not seek the approach and that may be why the information sent in the package possibly to Mossad was sat on for over six months. Nevertheless, there is a definite resemblance to what the Toebbes set out to do with the Jonathan Pollard case of the 1980s. Pollard, a non-practicing Jew and Navy analyst, stole a whole roomful of top-secret defense materials. He was in it for the money and tried to sell the intelligence to several foreign governments before he “got religion” and found a buyer in Israel. He became the most damaging spy in the history of the United States. After being caught, tried, convicted and spending twenty-eight years in federal prison, he was released on parole but not allowed to travel. The Donald Trump administration did not renew the parole in 2020 and he moved to Israel, where he was met at the airport by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who presented him with his citizenship papers. He is regarded as a hero in Israel and he has a city square named after him. So, the question becomes, was history repeating itself with the Toebbes?

Against that speculation is the fact that Israel already has an established nuclear deterrent more than capable of eliminating its regional enemies if needs be. It has no use for an expensive submarine with abilities that are not required in the goldfish bowl of the Middle East, unless of course if the United States were to gift Jerusalem with such a new military bauble. It would also have no need to get involved in something that might ultimately have tremendous blowback if exposed, potentially severely damaging the relationship with Washington.

My own theory is that Israel was indeed the target of the Toebbes’ scheme. It is widely known that the Jewish state is the most aggressive and successful “friendly” nation spying on Washington and it is backed up by a host of wealthy and powerful co-religionists who work hard to both “help” it and cover-up for its crimes. I suspect that if Israeli intelligence were interested in collecting on the submarine technology they would eschew potential screwballs like the Toebbes and instead work their other sources in Washington to collect the information independently, accounting for the time lag between the mailing of the package and the forwarding of it to the FBI. When Pollard was active, his Israeli Embassy handler would sometimes ask him for specific files by number, indicating they had other high level agents at work, and it must be assumed that that is still the case. Far too many in Congress and the Pentagon are very happy to have a lunch with that nice young man or woman from the Israeli Embassy and maybe share a secret or two.

But, that speculation aside, perhaps the strongest indicator that Israel was the planned recipient of what the Toebbe’s stole is the silence over who the target might have been. When the media and the federal government are silent on a foreign policy or national security issue it often means that Israel is involved, directly or indirectly. Will we the American public ever learn “who was it?” Probably not. Just one more secret.

It’s the biggest political hoax since Titus Oates’s allegations of a “Popish Plot” to assassinate King Charles II in 1678. Oates’s charge of a Jesuit conspiracy swept through London and led to the execution of four innocent men before Oates was proved a fraud.

The full consequences of the great political hoax of our time — the charge that former President Donald Trump was colluding with Russia — are not yet fully apparent.

Yet they are surely serious. We have heard from many Democrats and those in media that Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 presidential election tend to delegitimize the government and distort the political process. They have a point.

It’s a stretch to call the streaming of Trump supporters into the Capitol on Jan. 6 an “insurrection,” but as I wrote at the time, Trump’s words that day “were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.”

But Trump is not the only losing candidate who has cast doubt on an election result recently. While he has faced the derision of most of the news media and the disagreement of some in his party, that wasn’t true of the utterly baseless charges that Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

It took some time for Oates’s Popish Plot to be revealed as a hoax and for many who believed it to acknowledge it as such. The Russia collusion hoax now seems to be unraveling, but we have yet to see many confessions of error from Democrats or their friends in the press.

The latest in the unraveling comes in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI general counsel when he denied he was acting “for any client” in forwarding bogus documents that supposedly showed communications between Trump’s business and a Russian bank.

Sussmann is entitled in court to the presumption of innocence. But the facts alleged in the 27-page indictment are powerful evidence of a concerted attempt by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including those reporting to the candidate herself, to delegitimize the candidacy and, after his surprise victory, the presidency of Trump by charges as false as those of Oates.

“Here is where the prosecutor appears to be going,” writes former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy in the New York Post. “The Trump-Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign — particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie — who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf.”

The agents include the investigative firm Fusion GPS and the purported Russia expert Christopher Steele. During the campaign, the FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretapping warrant on Trump adviser Carter Page and therefore gained access to the whole campaign. After Trump took office, an FBI lawyer lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to renew the warrant. He was indicted by Durham and pleaded guilty, though astonishingly was given no jail time.

The Clinton campaign’s duplicitous encouragement of an FBI investigation led to an October 2016 Slate story — the beginning of multiyear media charges that Trump was colluding with Russia. Clinton herself immediately tweeted a statement by her foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, saying, “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia.”

What followed were more than two years of frenzied pursuit of bogus Russia collusion charges by Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff, by the New York Times, MSNBC and countless others until the case collapsed with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in April 2019 and his congressional testimony that July.

Few peddlers of this hoax have apologized. New York Times editor Dean Baquet admitted that “we’re a little tiny bit flat-footed” in August. Have we heard as much from the likes of Schiff or MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow? If so, I missed it.

Trump is charged with violating the political norm of not challenging a close election result. The thought is that if you question an election result, you weaken the legitimacy of, and unnecessarily distract, a president and you weaken the United States.

It’s a norm that Richard Nixon observed in 1960 and that, after litigating unsuccessfully, Al Gore observed in 2000. It’s not a norm that Clinton has observed in 2016 or in the years since.

She and her advisers damaged the nation by promoting false charges against a duly elected president. She owes the nation an apology, just as Oates owed England an apology 343 years ago.

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