May 20, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
The Russia hoax against Trump was not the DNC and John Podesta hack, it was the false allegation that Trump somehow helped
By Robert Romano
“It happened. It impacted a presidential election. It is not just Russia now. There's a tsunami of misinformation out there. Russia, China, various other countries, all aimed at our increasingly fragile democracy.”
That was MSNBC’s Mike Barnacle on May 19, maintaining that in 2016 Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta emails and sent them to Wikileaks, where they were posted.
Let’s assume this was true. On June 11, 2016 Julian Assange told ITV that Wikileaks had emails related to Hillary Clinton: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct.” This was an apparent reference to the John Podesta emails that would publish later that year.
Then, on June 14, 2016, the Washington Post had published its story on the DNC hack by Russia.
On June 15, 2016, seven days prior to when Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges Wikileaks contacted Guccifer 2.0, the WordPress blog by Guccifer 2.0 appeared, taking credit for the DNC hack, and saying everything had already been given to Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0 claimed, “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.”
While in 2016 this was indeed questioned, as it should have been, by July 2018 in his indictment of Russian intelligence officers for the DNC and John Podesta hacks, Special Counsel Robert Mueller laid out the timeline for when the government says the hacks took place. The Podesta emails were hacked by Russia in March 2016, and the DNC emails were hacked in May and June 2016 and then delivered to Wikileaks in July 2016.
Again, let’s just assume all of that is true. After six years, nobody has satisfactorily debunked the Mueller indictments and the case itself never went to trial where a defense might have been presented. All we have to go on are these media sources and then the indictments.
When conservatives, Republicans and others talk about the Russia hoax, this is not what they’re referring to. The hoax was that former President Donald Trump and his campaign were responsible for it!
Specifically, the hoax was the allegations by former British spy Christopher Steele, paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, the so-called Steele dossier that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years.” It alleged there was “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, and others as intermediaries.”
Steele defined the conspiracy: “the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the WikiLeaks platform. The reason for using WikiLeaks was ‘plausible deniability’ and the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue…”
And Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was said to have traveled Prague, Czech Republic, according the Steele dossier, “in order to clean up the mess left behind by western media revelations of Trump ex-campaign manager [Paul] Manafort’s corrupt relationship with the former pro-Russian [Viktor] Yanukovych regime in Ukraine and Trump foreign policy advisor, Carter Page’s secret meetings in Moscow with senior regime figures in July 2016” where the Trump campaign according to Steele allegedly coordinated with Moscow to put the Democratic National Committee emails on Wikileaks.
And, it was to “cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed” and the “overall objective had been to ‘to sweep it all under the carpet and make sure no connections could be fully established or proven’”.
Eventually, Special Counsel Robert Mueller debunked the entire conspiracy theory. From the Mueller report: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”
That included all members of campaign. Per Mueller, “the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government — or at its direction, control or request — during the relevant time period.” As for former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, per Mueller, “Cohen had never traveled to Prague…”
That was the hoax. That Russia hacked the Democrats and Trump helped.
The Oct. 2016 application to the FISA Court stated, “The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a U.S. person, and an agent of a foreign power… The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the U.S. State Department…”
To make the accusation, as the FBI and the Justice Department had to give the FISA Court a “statement of the facts and circumstances relied upon by the applicant to justify his belief that… the target of the electronic surveillance is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power…” under 50 U.S. Code § 1805(a)(2)(A).
Those allegations relied Steele’s “well-developed conspiracy” but that was just the pretext. The hoax itself and the surveillance of the Trump campaign that came later were both justified because of the Trump campaign’s stated foreign policy positions, specifically opposing U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine after former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The principal allegation was that Russia was attempting to convince the Trump campaign to not send weapons to Ukraine and to instead recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, telling the FISA Court that the Trump campaign, per the FISA application, “worked behind the scenes to make sure [the Republican] platform would not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces” stating Trump “might recognize Crimea as Russian territory and lift punitive U.S. sanctions against Russia,” citing news reports.
The Justice Department also included an Aug. 2016 Politico story highlighting Trump’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Ukraine, including his suggestion the people of Crimea preferred to live in Russia, and his doubts that the territories Russia had seized could be reclaimed suggested without risking World War III.
At a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Politico report relied upon by the Justice Department quoted Trump saying a military conflict to take back Crimea would risk nuclear war: “You wanna go back? …You want to have World War III to get it back?” And it quoted Trump on ABC’s “This Week” suggesting the people of Crimea supported Russian annexation: “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
Later, in 2019, Trump would be impeached and ultimately acquitted as he considered what to do about foreign aid to Ukraine. As soon as he became inclined to act on his instincts and exercise his Article II powers in that region, House Democrats immediately sought to have him removed.
In short, the President cannot set U.S. foreign policy in that region, even if he runs explicitly on that platform and wins. No, that is just a product of Russian disinformation and must be negated. In the meantime, the war in Ukraine has escalated dramatically after Russia’s full-scale invasion in Feb. 2022, threatening a wider conflict with President Joe Biden warning that could even involve nuclear weapons.
It might all have been avoided, but only with diplomacy, which was absolutely undermined by the U.S. legal and foreign policy establishment not-so-well-developed bullshit allegations against Trump that he was some sort of Manchurian Candidate.
The baseline allegation against Trump and his campaign leading to the targeting via FISA, in 2016, and the frivolous impeachment in 2019, was simply for having different foreign policy views about Ukraine, apparently the most important country in the world ever. And it’s driven the Washington, D.C. political establishment insane. Maybe the DNC hack was real, but the “well-developed conspiracy” wasn’t. That was the real hoax—and it might get us all killed.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Video: Biden Trying To Pivot On Inflation (But It’s Too Late)
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfWnPBsvPRQ
Mollie Hemingway: NBC News, New York Times Replay Russia Hoax For 2024 Election
By Mollie Hemingway
As Joe Biden’s presidency fails and his 2024 campaign falters, the media and other Democrats are hitting the big red panic button and bringing back their Russia-collusion hoax for another spin.
Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host who sets Democrat talking points, spent last week claiming Biden’s 2024 troubles aren’t due to his unpopular policies or lack of mental acuity but rather a secret and nefarious Russian plot to help Donald Trump win the election. Scarborough excitedly claimed Republicans in Congress were working with Russian President Vladimir Putin to help Trump win. Putin endorsed Biden in February, for what it’s worth.
Democrats’ ability to push their Russia hoax 2.0 is hampered by the previous Russia-collusion hoax they peddled from 2016 through 2019. That lie was exhaustively and painstakingly debunked, but Scarborough has bitterly clung to it and wants to rewrite history.
“One of the maddening things that you will see out there, people talking about the Russian hoax. They keep talking about the Russian hoax,” Scarborough said, calling out The Wall Street Journal for its reporting against the Russia-collusion hoax. “Russian disinformation is being spread on the House floor by Republican members. Here we have more reporting of what has never really stopped. That is, Vladimir Putin and Russia are trying to help Donald Trump get elected again! Hoax? There is no hoax!” he shouted.
The Russia-collusion hoax was the incredibly false and damaging lie that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election, not the fairly obvious fact that Russia spreads propaganda. Scarborough leaves out the whole actual hoax in his retelling. He does not mention the fabricated Steele dossier, the debunked pee tape, the lies about Michael Cohen going to Prague for secret meetings with Russian officials, the fraudulent efforts to secure warrants to spy on Trump affiliates, the spying by Rodney Joffe, the Alfa-Bank hysteria, or any of the other falsehoods the media and other Democrats peddled for years.
The cause of last week’s Scarborough hysteria was an anonymously sourced New York Times story describing a single video it claimed had been produced by Russian operatives purporting to be Ukrainians. The video, which may or may not have been watched by any Americans, apparently claimed Ukrainians were being told by the CIA to help Biden win. The anonymous “current and former” CIA officials said this meant Russians were meddling in U.S. elections. The story was exactly like the hundreds of other New York Times stories that ran in the first iteration of the Russia-collusion hoax — anonymous intelligence sources, lack of substantiation, and outlandish inferences.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., tweeted out a link to the story with the note, “Trump/Russia. Trump/Russia. Trump/Russia. How obvious does it have to be??”
A CIA spokesman told The New York Times the claim made in the video was “patently false” and the “type of disinformation that the intelligence community has long warned about.” He added, somewhat hilariously, that “C.I.A. is a foreign-focused organization that takes our obligation to remain uninvolved in American politics and elections very seriously.”
Among a wide variety of other domestic-focused activities, CIA employees helped organize the letter signed by former CIA leaders on the eve of the 2020 election falsely claiming that the very real Hunter Biden laptop detailing the corrupt Biden family business was Russian disinformation. That CIA-fueled lie was spread by American media and was highlighted in one of the two presidential debates that cycle. Americans who spoke accurately about the laptop were censored by Big Tech.
NBC’s Mika Brzezinski, Scarborough’s latest spouse, read The New York Times story on air, regurgitating its anonymous spin that Russian propaganda was a major threat to the election. The same claim was made by Democrats eight years ago, unable to accept that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election fair and square. Yes, Russians run election-related social media campaigns. But Democrats hype the effect of these campaigns to an absurd extent to censor American speech and debate they fear will harm Democrat election prospects.
In 2017, Democrats and the media claimed they’d found a smoking gun of collusion between Trump and Russia to steal the 2016 election. They held hearings and rolled out stories about 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by Russia that supposedly affected the outcome — except that wasn’t true. Of the 3,000 ads, 56 percent were viewed after the election. Twenty-five percent were seen by no one. Most of the ads didn’t mention the election, voting, or any particular candidate. Only a dozen or so targeted swing states, and they ran in 2015. Most of the ads had very little reach on account of the lack of funding behind them. Many were written in broken English. Here’s an example of one from a Russian troll farm, which said, “You can’t hold hands with God when you are masturbating.” How crude masturbation jokes hurt Democrat candidates is never explained.
One of the panelists on the Scarborough show last week was Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director. Clinton and the Democrat National Committee secretly financed the Russia-collusion lie in 2016, paying for disinformation about Trump and Russia to be manufactured and spread throughout the media. In any case, Palmieri told Scarborough with a straight face how frustrating it was in 2016 that people didn’t believe the Clinton campaign’s claims about Russian disinformation.
“The hardest thing to combat in 2016 was no one believed us. Even after there had been reporting on what Russia was doing in the [Washington] Post, we’d go to the press and say, you know, we think a lot of this is coming from Russia. It was just so fantastic for everyone, that they couldn’t really — you know, they couldn’t appreciate that that’s what was really happening. Now people do know that,” Palmieri said.
NBC’s Mike Barnicle described Palmieri’s fantastical claims as “factual.” He said, “It happened. It impacted a presidential election. It is not just Russia now. There’s a tsunami of misinformation out there. Russia, China, various other countries, all aimed at our increasingly fragile democracy. So part of what you do for a living is teach, and teach about race in this country and the culture of this country today. This is a potential lethal threat to our country.”
A potential lethal threat to our country? This is the same spin that occurred in 2016, when Democrats said that a few Facebook ads were a “digital Pearl Harbor.” What an absurd and offensive claim.
Remember, this entire segment was about a video featuring a woman supposedly from Kiev saying she had been putting out pro-Zelensky content until mysterious Americans visited, who were “probably CIA,” and told her to switch to attacking Trump. “Probably CIA”? Wow, what a convincing propaganda video. Is this really a super sophisticated attack that threatens our democracy or a low-rent video indistinguishable from a billion other videos online?
A few hours after The New York Times story ran, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., mentioned it, despite its lack of details or sourcing, in his hearing on “election interference.” What a remarkable coincidence that the story, which gave the CIA’s perspective uncritically, ran the very same morning as that hearing! What are the odds?
It’s clear the media and Democrats plan to spend the rest of the year framing opposition to their failed and unpopular policies as the result of Russian disinformation, even though it’s a flat-out lie. Further, it is clear that to have their lie work, they are going to whitewash their shameful history in the Russia-collusion hoax.
They will do it, and do it brazenly, because they know they own the information complex and can get away with lying. Remember, they won Pulitzers and other prizes for spreading the 2016 Russia hoax. Even after it was completely debunked, they claimed they had done nothing wrong. They further understand that they control Big Tech and the censorship-industrial complex as well.
The use of Russian disinformation as a pretext to destabilize and delegitimize an elected president, and its use as a pretext to censor Americans, are far greater threats than some broken-English Facebook ads, Kiev trolls, or email scammers.
To view online: https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/20/nbc-news-new-york-times-replay-russia-hoax-for-2024-election/