The Mueller Report: When Things Fall Apart

The problem presented by the release of the redacted Mueller report for the massive disinformation campaign which is Russiagate, a.k.a., "Putin Stole my Election!" -- well, there are several problems -- is that Mueller clearly places the burden on Congress to act: No proof of criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government (see Glenn Greenwald's "Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.," as well as his debate with David Cay Johnston). Obstruction of justice charges, if they are to be pursued, should be taken up by a co-equal branch of government.

But the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives will not begin impeachment proceedings because then there would have to be hearings, testimony given, witnesses cross-examined. All the fluff and gossip contained in the Steele dossier would go up in smoke.

So what are the Democrats to do? Their precious status as victims of Putin's evil machinations is fast disappearing.

The New York Times is busy re-conjuring the genie from his bottle. Yesterday's unsigned editorial -- "The Mueller Report and the Danger Facing American Democracy: A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious risk for the United States." -- restates that case against Russia:

The report of the special counsel Robert Mueller leaves considerable space for partisan warfare over the role of President Trump and his political campaign in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. But one conclusion is categorical: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”

What are we really talking about here? The Times itself acknowledges that "there is no way to gauge with any certainty how much impact the Russian activities actually had on voters."

We appear to be talking about a modest effort by the reputedly Kremlin controlled Internet Research Agency (IRA) to influence voters. We are supposed to believe that digital ads "purchased in rubles using 470 fake accounts and pages" could have had any impact at all in an election campaign where $6.5 billion was spent.

(My reply to cries of "Putin is dividing us!" is "That's the whole point of the two-party system," which usually generates a stunned silence.)

We are also talking about the DNC hack and Podesta hack, both of which, absent proof, are ascribed to Russian military intelligence. That's just baldly accepted; to question it, to request the evidence for the assertion, is to invite ridicule.

The reality is that all nations fiddle about with influence campaigns on the internet. For instance, close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia was caught red-handed running a botnet in the wake of Jamal Khashoggi's disappearance; Israel has waged cyber-warfare against the BDS movement; and let's not forget the fake Russian botnet created by Jonathon Morgan, a Russiagate conspiracy theorist and author of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia's use of social media during the 2016 election.

The Times editorial seems to acknowledge this by saying that it is the influence campaigns of "hostile" nations that are a threat to U.S. democracy:

A perceived victory for Russian interference poses a serious danger to the United States. Already, several American agencies are working, in partnership with the tech industry, to prevent election interference going forward. But the Kremlin is not the only hostile government mucking around in America’s cyberspace — China and North Korea are two others honing their cyber-arsenals, and they, too, could be tempted to manipulate partisan strife for their ends.

I'm surprised Iran wasn't mentioned, or Venezuela.

And that is what we're really talking about here: The establishment of a censorship regime for the new media environment.

In 2016 things got out of hand because voters no longer get their information from a trusted daily newspaper or the nightly television news. They get their information from the internet. The internet is too wild and woolly an environment to keep a nation of hundreds of millions pacified. Thus, the internet must be regulated.

And that's been happening under the cover of the Russian bogeyman. The tech companies are being brought to heel, to hunt and fetch for the master.

The problem is that the elite political consensus being protected is indefensible. People are miserable. The planet is undergoing a massive die-off. And all the rich want to do is get richer.

In the end, this counterintelligence campaign, this Russiagate, which is really a massive domestic pacification program like COINTELPRO, is going to have to resort to violence, and that's when things fall apart.