The Democratic Party Must Be Destroyed #3

In my lifetime the Democratic Party -- I'm speaking here of the rank'n'file -- has always shown a concern for peace. I think it's non-controversial to say that Obama won the presidency because he was the only mainstream candidate of either major party to have a public record opposing the Iraq War. Who can deny that Trump's margin of victory in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania was due to his running as the anti-war candidate in 2016?

Rank'n'file Democratic Party opposition to war tracks back to Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy was blocked at the convention in Chicago by the old bull party bosses congregated around Hubert Humphrey. George McGovern became the placeholder for Kennedy delegates after Senator Teddy Kennedy declined to pick up the mantle of his assassinated brother. 

McGovern would go on to lead the McGovern-Fraser Commission which would rewrite the rules on how Democrats nominate their presidential candidate. The work McGovern did on the commission would pave the way for his nomination in 1972. In the general election McGovern would lose every state to Nixon except for the Kennedys' Massachusetts and the Black-majority District of Columbia. Nixon's '72 landslide victory would come to naught as his administration imploded over Watergate. 

Which brings us to Seymour Hersh. I recently finished reading his memoir, Reporter. In it Hersh explains how his reporting on Watergate gave way to the revelation of the "Family Jewels," a compendium of CIA crimes commissioned by agency head James Schlesinger as a response to Nixon's  attempt to deflect White House responsibility for the Watergate burglary by asserting it was a CIA operation.

What struck me about Hersh's account was that after the initial splash the Family Jewels created, along with related followups, there wasn't the interest or support from his editors at The New York Times to pursue more of these national security state bombshells. Hersh mentions that congressional committees, e.g., Church and Pike, would continue the work with subpoena power; so off he goes on vacation and then relocates to New York City where he starts reporting on corporate corruption for The Times.

That's 1975. You have to get all way to the mid-1990s in Hersh's memoir to understand what happened (really, what didn't happen) with the Church and Pike investigations of national security state crimes. Hersh explains that senate leaders were reticent to give Frank Church chairmanship of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities because they knew that he coveted a presidential run as leader of the Democratic Party and they didn't want to muddy the investigation with presidential politics. Church promised that he would not run for president in 1976. He lied.

The result of this lie, according to Hersh, is that the committee's work was compromised and the crimes of the Kennedy administration were obscured or soft-pedaled because Church believed to win the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1976 the victorious candidate had to be perceived by primary voters as the true representative of the Kennedy legacy; to tarnish that legacy was to guarantee defeat.

To correct the record and debunk the myth of Camelot Hersh writes The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).

I purchased a copy of the book as soon as it appeared. In the 1990s I worked nights and spent my free time studying Kennedy assassination literature. I was drawn to the topic because, from college days, I was a Derridean, someone who believed that perception is textual. When it comes to textuality you would be challenged to find a field larger than that provided by the Kennedy assassination. My thinking was -- at the time I was still south of 35 years of age -- that if one could master that mass of literature, one could claim to have mastered perception itself.

But I never finished The Dark Side of Camelot. I think I made it halfway through, and then, because none of the material was what I considered at the time to be of a bombshell nature, since I was so thoroughly immersed in the literature, I set it aside. Hersh was pilloried at the time in the mainstream press for material, forged documents, that never even made it into the book. He was also criticized for getting marginal stuff wrong.

After I finished Hersh's memoir, I picked up the copy of The Dark Side of Camelot I set aside more than 20 years ago.

It's a tremendous book. I truly savored it. Hersh systematically demolishes the Kennedy legacy:

• JFK worked with the mob to win the presidency
• Bay of Pigs is laid at JFK's feet
• JFK/RFK fulsomely supported "Executive Action," a.k.a., assassination
• Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear holocaust (then Kennedy lied about swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba)
• Kennedy supported the assassination of Diem because Diem was negotiating with the North to end the war

There's much more. Overall the picture -- both of Jack and Bobby -- is of an unhinged presidency. Jack Kennedy was addicted to sex, in poor health, committed to ruthless skulduggery, seemingly always in crisis, and Bobby was his loyal little brother enabler.

If I would've finished the book back in 1990s I could've seen that Hersh basically affirms the hypothesis -- that Kennedy's assassination tracks back to LBJ -- that I was working on. Hersh doesn't make this argument explicitly because he, improbably, accepts the conclusion of the Warren Commission, that there was no conspiracy to kill Kennedy, but Hersh does say that in final months of Kennedy's life the decision was finalized to boot Johnson off the ticket in 1964. The Bobby Baker Quorum Club scandal taken up by the Senate Rules Committee tainted both Jack (because of his affair with German party girl Ellen Rometsch) and Lyndon (because of petty kickbacks, the details of which RFK was surreptitiously feeding to Republicans on the committee). Then Kennedy's brains are blown out in Texas.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that RFK's rebirth as an anti-war politician post-Tet might have been sincere but it was most likely mere crass opportunism. Bobby was no peacenik.

Nonetheless, as decades plodded on after '68, there remained and remains a significant constituency within the Democratic Party which is opposed to the national security state and perpetual warfare. This constituency elected Obama and probably defeated Hillary. 

Russiagate was designed and continues to be used to neuter and bleach this constituency, and in this regard it has been largely successful. The Democratic Party is now just as bellicose as the Republican Party, and for that reason it needs to be destroyed. Because even if the George Floyd Rebellion and the Black Lives Matter renaissance are fundamentally anti-imperialist and pro-peace, a lot of the white liberals who have supported the movement are card-carrying Russiagaters and defenders of the CIA , NSA and FBI.

Russiagate 2016 is Dead. Long Live Russiagate 2020!

The legal test for Russiagate 2016 is being scrapped (see "Justice Dept. Moves to Drop Charges Against Russian Firms Filed by Mueller" by Katie Benner and Sharon LaFraniere):

The Justice Department moved on Monday to drop charges against two Russian shell companies accused of financing schemes to interfere in the 2016 election, saying that they were exploiting the case to gain access to delicate information that Russia could weaponize.

The companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting, were charged in 2018 in an indictment secured by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, along with 13 Russians and another company, the Internet Research Agency. Prosecutors said they operated a sophisticated scheme to use social media to spread disinformation, exploit American social divisions and try to subvert the 2016 election.

The U.S. Government is justifying the move by saying that "Concord seized on the case to obtain confidential information from prosecutors, then mount a campaign of information warfare."

The reality is that the U.S. is unable to prove any connection between the shell companies and the Russian government. Russiagate stands revealed as a massive U.S. Government/mainstream media PSYOP with the American voting public its target.

Aaron Mate tweeted that DOJ's decision to drop the case is proof that Russiagate was a massive waste of time. Mate's tweet was countered by another which argued that actually Russiagate was a great success: It turned broken down old Joe Biden into the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party.

I think that's the way to interpret this decision by the DOJ. Mission accomplished. Bernie Sanders blocked and confined to congress as the junior senator from Vermont. Embarrassing headlines about the flimsy foundations of Russiagate 2016 averted. Russiagate 2020 already deployed and Sanders neutralized. Next stop? The general election.

Russiagate is Coming for Bernie Sanders

Matt Taibbi made an interesting point on his weekly "Useful Idiots" podcast with Katie Halper. The Buttigieg boom in Iowa and New Hampshire actually aids the campaign of Bernie Sanders because it subtracts voters from Biden and Warren. Even if Mayor Pete manages to win Iowa and New Hampshire, the primary campaign moves on next, after Nevada, to South Carolina where Buttigieg is polling at 0% among black voters. It doesn't get any better for Buttigieg on Super Tuesday.

I suppose that's why Bloomberg's primary strategy is built around a big showing on Super Tuesday. Bloomberg will grab the neoliberal baton from a flagging Buttigieg. That's of course assuming that Democrats will cast an appreciable number of votes for a conservative billionaire Republican.

So, yes, it's looking pretty good for Bernie. I think he knows it -- he was surprisingly relaxed and in good spirits during last week's debate -- and the oligarchy knows it. Hence the rehabilitation of Russiagate during the final day of impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee in the form of testimony by New Cold Warrior Fiona Hill.

That was Thursday. Friday and Saturday there were frontpagers in The New York Times featuring Hill's warning that the Russians are up to their dirty tricks again and they will steal another election in 2020 unless the U.S. government is vigilant.

Sunday evening 60 Minutes televised a rehash of "Russia Stole My Election!" National Security Division Assistant Attorney General John Demers admits on camera that the main point of a Russiagate prosecution isn't to bring anyone to justice; it's a psyop directed at the American public.

The Justice Department's National Security Division is overseeing the Russian hacking case.

Assistant Attorney General John Demers runs the division, along with deputies Adam Hickey and Sean Newell. DOJ attorney, Heather Alpino, worked with special counsel Mueller on the Russian indictments. All have access to the underlying intelligence, and have no doubt the Russians interfered in the 2016 election.

Bill Whitaker: This really happened.

John Demers: Yes. That really happened. And we believe that if we had to we could prove that in court tomorrow using only admissible, non-classified evidence to 12 jurors.

Bill Whitaker: Do you ever expect to get the 12 Russian officials to trial?

John Demers: I would be surprised. But the purpose of the indictment isn't just that, although that's certainly one of the purposes. The purpose of this kind of indictment is even to educate the public.

Educate the public about what? Not to read social media?

Wait and see. If Bernie rolls along in the Democratic primary, as Taibbi thinks, then we'll see Russiagate revivified and applied to the Sanders campaign.

Fake News and Censorship, A.K.A, Propaganda

Western corporate mainstream media is performing poorly these days. Examples are numerous. The week-long absurd effort to airbrush the coup in Bolivia as a resignation by a corrupt autocrat comes to mind. Then there is framing of Roger Stone's conviction Friday as a vindication of Russiagate, when, as Craig Murray explains, it was the exact opposite:

The headline “Roger Stone: Trump Adviser Found Guilty On All Charges in Trump Hacking Case” is deliberately designed to make you believe a court has found Stone was involved in “Wikileaks hacking”. In fact this is the precise opposite of the truth. Stone was found guilty of lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee by claiming to have links to Wikileaks when in fact he had none. And of threatening Randy Credico to make Credico say there were such links, when there were not.

Let's not forget Jonathan Steele's OPCW bombshell published Friday by CounterPunch, "The OPCW and Douma: Chemical Weapons Watchdog Accused of Evidence-Tampering by Its Own Inspectors." You won't find a hint of that story in NYT, WaPo, AP, Reuters, or the Guardian. The corporate mainstream media are actively censoring the story. OPCW leadership generated a fraudulent report in order to shield the United States, France and the United Kingdom from war crimes allegations.

What you will find are stories about Prince Andrew and his connection with the late sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Unfortunately you won't find anything about Amy Robach's revelation that ABC spiked a story three years ago about Epstein's pedophile ring unless you watch Fox News, which Katie Halper correctly identifies as feeding into the information tribalism that divides (and rules) the nation.

The Hong Kong uprising and the Buttigieg presidential campaign also need to be included as "events" animated by the corporate media. So much reporting is devoted to both that "facts on the ground" are being created in the Western mind. This is how propaganda works.

Ukrainegate is Not Russiagate

UPDATE: The whistle-blower complaint has been released.

****

It is now becoming clear that transcript of the July 25 Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation released yesterday was edited. According to Charlie Savage, Michael Schmidt and Julian Barnes in "Whistle-Blower Is Said to Allege Concerns About White House Handling of Ukraine Call":

[T]he whistle-blower complaint went beyond Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Zelensky. It also dealt in part with the unusual manner in which White House officials handled internal records describing the call. The atypical proceeding heightened internal concerns about the content of the call, the two people said.

Bowing to pressure, the Trump administration permitted members of the intelligence committees and congressional leaders to read a copy of the complaint, which remains classified, late on Wednesday.

Its allegations were “deeply disturbing” and “very credible,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said after emerging from reviewing the complaint.

After reading it, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee told reporters that it contained far more information that reinforced their mounting concerns. They could disclose very little, but several of the lawmakers said it discussed other witnesses.

Granted that the on-the-record quotes are from odious Russiagater Adam Schiff, this is not Russiagate. It's too bad to see outlets like RT and blogs like Moon of Alabama dismiss the impeachment drive as more of the same. What the whistle-blower complaint appears to allege is White House records were altered to remove or obscure portions of the call. It also appears that
the whistle-blower complaint Justice Department memo, signed by Steven A. Engel, the head of its Office of Legal Counsel, was edited:

Mr. Engel’s memo, dated Sept. 24, said in a footnote that it was a revision of an original from Sept. 3, and that the department had “changed the prior version to avoid references to certain details that remain classified.”

Bolton Firing and Russiagate Resuscitation Proof of Rising People Power

My interpretation of Trump's termination of national security adviser John Bolton is that the president is not sanguine about his reelection. Trump ran to Hillary's left on issues of war and peace, but there's little hope that he will be able to do it again in 2020 (though he should be able to muddy the waters if Biden ends up being the Democratic Party's nominee).

I opined this past spring that Bolton would have to be kept in employment well into 2020 to guarantee access to Sheldon Adelson's casino coffers for the presidential election campaign. Trump either thinks fundraising won't be a problem or he feels that Bolton's regime-change foreign policy has become too much a drag on his brand. Likely it is a combination of both.

In any event, Trump's foreign policy, minus any of the peace overtures, was crafted by John Bolton. We should know fairly quickly if things are going to be any less bellicose under the new national security adviser based on the number of provocations in the Middle East. Recently there have been reports of "mystery airstrikes" killing members of the Iraqi popular mobilization forces on the Syrian border.

Trump might be frightened of losing the election, but so too are the grandees on the national security state. How else to interpret the frontpage resuscitation of Russiagate? After the most ardent of MSNBC/CNN viewers have moved on with their lives following Mueller's popcorn fart, the CIA is calling them back with old promises that it was rock solid human intel from a Putin loyalist within the walls of Kremlin that proves Russia stole their election.

As Andre Damon concludes,

In the name of combating “Russian meddling,” politicians pressured American technology firms to undertake the most onerous program of political censorship in the history of the internet in the US. Accounts with millions of followers were deleted overnight, while Google manipulated search results to bury left-wing viewpoints.

There was a massive effort to poison public opinion against Julian Assange, the courageous publisher and exposer of war crimes. He was slandered by the Democrats and the Times as a Russian agent who colluded with Trump, setting the stage for his imprisonment.

More information will no doubt emerge about the background and possible motivations of Smolenkov. But regardless, the fact that the source behind allegations the newspaper breathlessly proclaimed as fact had serious credibility problems makes clear that the Times made no serious efforts to question, much less validate, its chosen political narrative.

This newspaper functions as a clearinghouse for unquestioned, unexamined dispatches from within the American intelligence apparatus. Its role in promoting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was not an aberration, but its modus operandi.

Russiagate is an Excuse for the U.S. to Interfere in Elections at Home and Abroad

UPDATE: Here's how my hipster hometown weekly encapsulates the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

A Senate Intelligence Report confirms "extensive" Russian election interference: The bipartisan report, issued a day after Mueller warned the Russians are currently working to interfere with our 2020 election, found that our nation's election infrastructure is unprepared to deal with the "extensive activity" by Russia.

Note how "extensive activity" becomes "extensive interference" in the header. The putative "underground" press operates almost completely in the orbit of mainstream politics. Since Russiagate is a mainstream political construct, it's no wonder that the urban elite are busy tub thumping about the Russia menace.

****

The headline is breathtaking -- "Russia Targeted Elections Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds" -- but the accompanying story by David Sanger and Catie Edmondson about the Senate Intelligence Committee's release yesterday of the first volume of its report on Russian election interference is more of the same: More hype, more obfuscation and misdirection, more fear and loathing; all heavily redacted, with no guidelines offered in conclusion.

As to the hype, Sanger and Edmondson report that

The report — the first volume of several to be released from the committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference — came 24 hours after the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III warned that Russia was moving again to interfere “as we sit here.”

While details of many of the hackings directed by Russian intelligence, particularly in Illinois and Arizona, are well known, the committee described “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” intended largely to search for vulnerabilities in the security of the election systems.

It concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data” in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so.

Aaron Mate's  point about Mueller's team being rebuked by a federal judge for conflating the Russian government with the Saint Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency is worth mentioning here. "Russian cyberactors" could be anyone. We know from WikiLeaks' release of Vault 7, the treasure trove of CIA hacking tools, that planting false flags in code is pro forma in cyber warfare. This speaks to the report's misdirection.

As Sanger and Edmondson note, the report, given the enormous existential threat to American democracy, can only list recommendations, not guidelines:

The committee’s recommendations ranged from the concrete — ensure a paper trail for voter machines and paper backups for registration systems — to the strategic, like adopting a doctrine of how to deter different kinds of cyberattacks.

While the committee suggested holding “a discussion with U.S. allies and others about new cybernorms,” it did not say what those norms should be — nor did it say election manipulation should be off limits for all nations. One reason for that hesitance, some government officials acknowledge, is the debate inside the administration over how much the United States itself is willing to forgo the option of using its own cyberabilities abroad.

[snip] 

But Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, appended an impassioned dissent to the report, arguing that the committee did not go far enough. “The committee report describes a range of cybersecurity measures needed to protect voter registration databases,” he wrote, “yet there are currently no mandatory rules that require states to implement even minimum cybersecurity measures. There are not even any voluntary federal standards.”

The committee found that the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. warned states in the late summer and fall of 2016 of the threat of Russian interference. But they did not provide election officials with “a clear reason” to take the threat more seriously than other warnings that are regularly issued, the report said.

Basically all of Russiagate is a farce. The Russians actually want to sign an international cyber agreement. But as The Nation pointed out this spring, the U.S. has refused, not wanting to blunt its attack capabilities: "[T]he Bush and Obama administrations rejected multiple Russian proposals for an international cyber code of conduct."

The conclusion I draw from Russiagate is that it is a U.S. Government effort to stifle dissent among its domestic population. U.S. internet censorship has accelerated since 2016 behind the screen of Russiagate. Google and Facebook are cracking down on "inauthentic" voices. Take the example of anti-war presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. She's suing Google for pulling her ads out of the blue just at the time she was peaking right after the first Democratic presidential debate. According to The New York Times in "Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Candidate, Sues Google for $50 Million":

Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.

After the first Democratic debate, Ms. Gabbard was briefly the most searched-for candidate on Google. Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads that would have placed its website at the top of search results for her name.

The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” when compared with emails from other Democratic candidates.

Google can't explain why Gabbard's account was suspended:

Gabbard campaign workers sent an email to a Google representative on June 27 at 9:30 p.m. once they realized the account had been suspended. In emails reviewed by The New York Times, the campaign sent Google a screenshot of a notice of suspension for “problems with billing information or violations of our advertising policies.”

The account was reactivated at 3:30 a.m. on June 28. In the email announcing that it had reinstated the account, Google wrote that the company temporarily suspended the campaign’s account to verify billing information and policy compliance, but offered no other explanation for what had happened.

The campaign said it had opened the Google advertising account in February and had bought ads on Google search before the suspension. It said there was no problem with its billing information and that it had not violated Google’s terms of service.

“To this day, Google has not provided a straight answer — let alone a credible one — as to why Tulsi’s political speech was silenced when millions of people wanted to hear from her,” the lawsuit said.

The most likely reason, one that Google will never publicly acknowledge, is that Gabbard's account was suspended because she's been tarred by U.S. intelligence agencies as a Russian agent.

Russiagate is an excuse for the U.S. Government to brazenly interfere in elections both at home and abroad in order to manufacture electoral consent for the broadly unpopular neoliberal-perpetual-warfare Washington Consensus.

Will a Pedophile Turn Russiagate into UAEgate?

Burbling right below the surface of the Mueller probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election is the actual meddling foreign power (or one of them at least), the United Arab Emirates (UAE). David Kirkpatrick had a lengthy article, "The Most Powerful Arab Ruler Isn’t M.B.S. It’s M.B.Z.," in the Sunday paper on the de facto ruler of the UAE, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

This morning comes the delightful news that George Nader, a bagman for Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, was arrested at Kennedy International Airport yesterday on child pornography charges. (See "Witness in Mueller Inquiry Is Arrested on Child Pornography Charges" by Mark Mazzetti.)

Mazzetti writes that

After the election, Mr. Nader helped set up a meeting in the Seychelles Islands off the coast of eastern Africa between Mr. Dmitriev, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater who was serving as an unofficial adviser to the Trump transition.

Months earlier, Mr. Nader and Mr. Prince had met Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower. During that meeting, in August 2016, Mr. Nader told the younger Mr. Trump that both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were eager to help his father be elected president.

As an adviser to Prince Mohammed, Mr. Nader used his patron’s vast fortune to try to influence foreign policy during the early months of the Trump administration. Working with Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fund-raiser seeking Emirati and Saudi contracts for his security firm, Mr. Nader helped steer the White House to take a hard line against Qatar — the small Persian Gulf nation engaged in a bitter dispute with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

Kirill Dmitriev, head of a Russian investment fund purportedly close to Vladimir Putin, is the red herring here. Most of the smoking guns in the 2016 election are of Saudi, Emirati and Israeli origin.

Cui bono? It's certainly hasn't been the Russians. On the other hand, Trump's foreign policy is pretty much dictated by the Saudis, Emiratis and Israelis. 

Democrats Adrift: There Will Be No Impeachment

It is obvious at this point that Pelosi is not going to change her tune about impeachment (see Lisa Mascaro's "Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains cautious on impeachment talk"). A reading of Mueller's statement reveals that he is not urging congress to begin impeachment proceedings; rather, he says that the special counsel cannot bring the president to justice for obstructing justice: “[T]he Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrongdoing.”

That's it. Not much of a ringing endorsement of all the breathless reporting in the mainstream media about Trump being a Kremlin stooge. Even the truly odious Adam Schiff, singing from the Pelosi hymn book, declines to support impeachment.

Mueller does uphold the basic narrative though. He asserts Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Mueller just couldn't uncover any evidence that the Trump campaign worked with Russian agents, and he doesn't absolve the president of wrongdoing for impeding his investigation.

So basically we are back to where we started, which is nowhere. Democrats concocted a "stab in the back" hypothesis to explain Trump's victory. But they never bothered to explain how revealing Hillary's speech to Goldman Sachs or the DNC's systematic efforts to torpedo Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign or the fake Facebook accounts illuminating the Clinton record on criminal justice actually led to her loss of the White House. To do so would be to admit that their candidate is truly horrible and didn't deserve to be anointed.

Now the Democratic rank'n'file feel set adrift. They have been told to resist, to fight the stab in the back, but now their leaders refuse to fight.

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.

New York Times Attempts to Link Assange to Russiagate

What's odd about the main dispatch on Julian Assange's arrest published by The New York Times  (see "Julian Assange Arrested on U.S. Extradition Warrant, London Police Say" by Richard Pérez-Peña) is that the center of the story is all about Russiagate, capped by this paragraph:

“The big questions that it seems like he should be able to answer are about the relationships between WikiLeaks and the Russian government and between Roger Stone and the Trump campaign,” said Scott R. Anderson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor of the online publication Lawfare, who has tracked the investigation. “There are certainly a lot of factual gaps that it seems like Assange could help fill.”

Then you have to read 14 more paragraphs until arriving at the final two paragraphs:

During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emailsstolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.

Mr. Assange made no secret of his intent to damage Mrs. Clinton, but he has insisted that he did not get the emails from Russia.

The whole "Stone worked with Assange, and therefore the Russians, to sabotage the Clinton campaign" line is a complete canard. Mueller could have interviewed Assange and elected not to. What does that tell you?

It tells you that the excessive focus on Russiagate and the allegations of Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno are meant to disparage the character of Assange and bias readers against him.

There is no mention of the UN's finding that Assange was being arbitrarily detained and that the UK must allow him to leave the Ecuadorian embassy freely.

There is no mention of the absurd Luke Harding story published by The Guardian alleging a meeting between Assange and Paul Manafort at the Ecuadorian embassy.

There is precious little mention -- a couple paragraphs -- of the trove of U.S. Government filth Assange published in 2010.

Ted Rall Defines Russiagate

Craig Murray posted this Ted Rall cartoon the other day in "Muellergate and the Discreet Lies of the Bourgeoisie."

Russiagaters Beat a Retreat

A coworker poked her head into my office Friday afternoon and announced, "Mueller has delivered his report."  A few hours later, at the entrance to my apartment building, I ran into a neighbor, a bitter transsexual, who seemed to be in an unusually good mood, confident that once the contents of Mueller's report are revealed, Trump will be exposed as Putin's plaything.

What are all these liberal Democrats going to do now that Mueller has finished his Russia investigation without charging Trump?

Clearly the expectation was that Trump would be charged with accepting cash from the Kremlin or somehow facilitating the purported hack of the Democratic National Committee or the pilfering of John Podesta's Gmail password.

Trump's collusion with Putin has been an article of faith among card-carrying Democrats, and a mainstay of the mainstream media, for more than two years. Now what?

The walk-back is not going to be a walk-back but a double-time retreat. As Matt Taibbi writes,
"It’s Official – Russiagate is This Generation’s WMD."

The perspective of a proponent of Russiagate is just as illuminating. In "Three Takeaways From the Barr Report"  David Leonhardt utters the unthinkable:

I’m obviously not a fan of the president. And I think it’s important for all of Trump’s critics to accept the possibility — the likelihood, at this point — that his campaign did not work together with Russia in a meaningful way.

Yes, the Trump campaign seemed shockingly and unpatriotically open to doing so. But that’s not the same as following through. Progressives shouldn’t go down the Fox News road and start adopting their own factually weak or outright false conspiracy theories, like those involving Barack Obama’s birthplace, voter fraud, Uranium One, George Soros, Solyndra and on and on.

But that is exactly what Russiagate has been for the last two-plus years. There wasn't a vast conspiracy by a foreign power to elect Trump because no one, Trump himself, thought Trump was going to win.

Russiagate was a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the "greatest nation on earth" freely elected a white supremacist billionaire huckster who campaigned against the "Washington Consensus."

Russophobia Remains Alive

I went out to lunch yesterday with a friend. This is a friend, now retired, who I have written of before. He considers himself a progressive, but he believes that Russia stole the election from Hillary, and people who fervently supported Bernie played a role in spreading Russian disinformation. He read and recommends Russian Roulette by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

Usually I politely joust with him and ask how is that Russia can be blamed for doing something -- "dividing us" -- that is the very basis of our two-party political system. But yesterday I found myself unable to control my anger. I told him to read Ray McGovern, who in December noted that Michael Isikoff had to walk back Russian Roulette's credulous acceptance of the Steele Dossier. I told him the critical thing to factor in regarding the purported Russian hack of the DNC (which revealed that the DNC was conspiring against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries) is that it was not a hack but a leak on a thumb drive.

Ray McGovern confronted former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at a promotional event for Clapper's book:

JC: Well, I have talked with NSA a lot, and I also know what we briefed to then-President Elect Trump on the 6th of January. And in my mind, uh, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT [signals intelligence] business, the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever. The Intelligence Community Assessment that we rendered that day, that was asked, tasked to us by President Obama – and uh – in early December, made no call whatsoever on whether, to what extent the Russians influenced the outcome of the election. Uh, the administration, uh, the team then, the President-Elect’s team, wanted to say that – that we said that the Russian interference had no impact whatsoever on the election. And I attempted, we all did, to try to correct that misapprehension as they were writing a press release before we left the room.

However, as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn’t have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election.

RM: That’s what the New York Times says. But let me say this: we have two former Technical Directors from NSA in our movement here, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity; we also have forensics, okay?

Now the President himself, your President, President Obama said two days before he left town: The conclusions of the intelligence community – this is ten days after you briefed him – with respect to how WikiLeaks got the DNC emails are “inconclusive” end quote. Now why would he say that if you had said it was conclusive?

JC: I can’t explain what he said or why. But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails. I’m not going to go into the technical details about why we believe that.

RM: We are too [pretty sure we know]; and it was a leak onto a thumb drive – gotten to Julian Assange – really simple. If you knew it, and the NSA has that information, you have a duty, you have a duty to confess to that, as well as to [Iraq].

JC: Confess to what?

RM: Confess to the fact that you’ve been distorting the evidence.

JC: I don’t confess to that.

RM: The Intelligence Community Assessment was without evidence.

JC: I do not confess to that. I simply do not agree with your conclusions.

There is little doubt that we'll see "Russians aiding Sanders" stories appear as we get closer to 2020. One thing that terrifies the neoliberals is the following from Sydney Ember's write-up of Bernie's announcement of his presidential candidacy:

Mr. Sanders will start with several advantages, including the foundation of a 50-state organization; a massive lead among low-dollar donors that is roughly equivalent to the donor base of all the other Democratic hopefuls combined; and a cache of fervent, unwavering supporters who spent the day exulting in his decision to run. A coveted speaker, he can still electrify crowds in a way few politicians can. He enjoys wide name recognition, and several early polls had him running second behind former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The strength of that donor list was quickly apparent: In the 12 hours after Mr. Sanders formally joined the race, his campaign said it had pulled in more than $4 million.

Remember, Democrat Lobbyists Worked for Manafort and Yanukovych

Look past the latest front-page Facebook Russiagate bombshell ("Facebook Identifies an Active Political Influence Campaign Using Fake Accounts"), the import of which, incidentally, is based on an enormous suspension of disbelief that "eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles and seven Instagram accounts" created in the last year or so could have any measurable impact on the U.S. body politic, and focus instead on "Mueller Passes 3 Cases Focused on Illicit Foreign Lobbying to Prosecutors in New York," by Matthew Rosenberg, Kenneth P. Vogel and Katie Benner.

As Jeffrey St. Clair commented some months ago when the Manafort indictment was announced, if the laws on foreign lobbying were truly enforced the D.C. gravy train would come to a halt. Now Mueller has referred cases involving three big names --Tony Podesta, Vin Weber and Greg Craig (two of whom are prominent Democrat lobbyists) -- to the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan:

Under American law, anyone who lobbies or conducts public relations on behalf of a foreign interest in the United States must register with the Justice Department. The law carries stiff penalties, including up to five years in prison. But it had rarely been enforced, and thus widely ignored, until recently.

Now, it appears to have become a weapon for prosecutors. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, was facing possible charges of violating the law over his secret work for the Turkey during the campaign before he agreed to cooperate with Mr. Mueller last year.

The three cases referred to prosecutors in New York appear to be another sign that the Justice Department intends to more strenuously enforce the law.

Yet, as the cases show, such investigations often confront prosecutors with interlaced financial arrangements that can prove difficult to untangle.

The Podesta Group, Mr. Podesta’s firm; Mercury Public Affairs, where Mr. Weber worked; and Skadden, where Mr. Craig practiced, were all recruited by Mr. Manafort to assist with his work in Ukraine on behalf of that country’s president at the time, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was considered a Kremlin ally.

But two of the firms — the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs — were retained through a nonprofit group in Brussels, the European Center for a Modern Ukraine. The nonprofit was directed by Mr. Manafort, and the firms lobbied in Washington on behalf of the nonprofit for what Mr. Manafort billed as Mr. Yanukovych’s efforts to move Ukraine into the West.

The firms were paid more than $1.1 million each for the work. But they did not initially register to lobby with the Justice Department as foreign agents. Doing so would have required them to make detailed disclosures of the lobbying activity they had performed.

They instead had filed less detailed lobbying reports with Congress, based at least partly on misleading characterizations that Mr. Manafort’s deputy later admitted to providing. The firms retroactively registered to lobby for foreigners with the Justice Department in 2017. The Podesta Group collapsed in part because of the scrutiny from the case.

Skadden was hired directly by Mr. Yanukovych’s government to analyze the prosecution of one of Mr. Yanukovych’s leading political rivals, former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko. Led by Mr. Craig, the firm published a report in 2012 that was used — mostly without success — to try to allay concerns about Mr. Yanukovych’s leadership in Washington.

Skadden also did not register its activity under lobbying rules, despite Mr. Craig himself being involved in promoting the report to journalists and members of Congress — activity that experts said should have prompted registration requirements.

Mr. Craig left Skadden in April as investigators made inquiries about his work with Mr. Manafort. While the departure was presented as voluntary, a lawyer familiar with the situation said that Mr. Craig was forced out.

Mr. Mueller’s team repeatedly referenced the work of the firms in his filings in Mr. Manafort’s case, including accusing Mr. Manafort and his longtime deputy of using an offshore account to “funnel $4 million to pay for the report” from Skadden.

Mr. Mueller’s team also indicted a Skadden lawyer who worked with Mr. Manafort on the report. The lawyer pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his communications with a former Trump campaign aide, and has already completed a jail sentence.

Don't Blame Russia: The Entire Point of the Two-Party System is to "Divide the Country"

FiveThirtyEight is all in when it comes to Russiagate. The latest is this morning's "Why We’re Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets," by Oliver Roeder, which invites readers to peruse a database of tweets allegedly produced by the infamous Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg:

FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical record to date of Russian trolls’ actions on social media, showing a relentless and systematic onslaught. In concert with the researchers who first pulled the tweets, FiveThirtyEight is uploading them to Github so that others can explore the data for themselves.

The data set is the work of two professors at Clemson University: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social media tracking software, they pulled the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter has acknowledged as being associated with the IRA. The professors shared their data with FiveThirtyEight in the hope that other researchers, and the broader public, will explore it and share what they find. “So far it’s only had two brains looking at it,” Linvill said of their trove of tweets. “More brains might find God-knows-what.”

The data set published here includes 2,973,371 tweets from 2,848 Twitter handles. It includes every tweet’s author, text and date; the author’s follower count and the number of accounts the author followed; and an indication of whether the tweet was a retweet. The entire corpus of tweets published here dates from February 2012 to May 2018, with the vast majority from 2015 to 2017.

[snip]

“Russia’s attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war,” the authors conclude in their paper. “This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war.”

This war may or may not have had an effect on the 2016 election, but it certainly wreaked havoc. The man who would be named national security adviser followed and pushed the message of Russian troll accounts, according to the Daily Beast, and Trump’s eldest son, campaign manager and digital director each retweeted a Russian troll in the month before the election. Twitter itself informed 1.4 million people that they’d interacted with Russian trolls.

But the researchers emphasized that the Russian disinformation and discord campaign on Twitter extends well beyond even that.

“There were more tweets in the year after the election than there were in the year before the election,” Warren said. “I want to shout this from the rooftops. This is not just an election thing. It’s a continuing intervention in the political conversation in America.”

“They are trying to divide our country,” Linvill added.

No, they're trying to make money. Nothing refutes Moon of Alabama's analysis from when Mueller's indictment was made back in February: The Internet Research Agency is a run-of-the-mill marketing firm engaged in the type of commercial activity common in the online world. You would think that FiveThirtyEight would reference the story from earlier this month of Twitter closing millions of fake accounts, which primarily didn't have to do with Russia but normal business activity of boosting commercial products and personalities.

Does a foreign power really need to expend any effort to divide the United States? That's the entire point of the two-party system.

Mueller's Russia Indictment is Bullshit

All you need to know whether there is any there there to the Mueller indictment is to read Trump's response, as reported by Mark Landler and Michael Shear in "Indictment Makes Trump’s Hoax Claim Harder to Sell," one of four stories as well as the lede editorial published by The New York Times in today's national edition:

Far from being rattled, Mr. Trump was elated, according to his advisers, because he viewed it as evidence that Mr. Mueller now knows who the malefactors are — and they do not include him or members of his team. (The indictment refers to campaign officials who met or communicated with Russians, but says they were “unwitting.”)

The Mueller indictment boils down to this: An internet troll farm in St. Petersburg, the Internet Research Agency, ran a three-year social media campaign to "sow discord" in the American electorate and undermine confidence in Hillary Clinton. According to Matt Apuzzo and Sharon LaFraniere in "13 Russians Indicted as Mueller Reveals Effort to Aid Trump Campaign":

The Russian nationals were accused of working with the Internet Research Agency, which had a budget of millions of dollars and was designed to reach millions of Americans. The defendants were charged with carrying out a massive fraud against the American government and conspiring to obstruct enforcement of federal laws.

Their tasks included undermining Mrs. Clinton by supporting her Democratic primary campaign rival, Bernie Sanders, prosecutors said. Those instructions were detailed in internal documents: “Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump — we support them).” Mr. Mueller identified 13 digital advertisements paid for by the Russian operation. All of them attacked Mrs. Clinton or promoted Mr. Trump.

With the above -- Trump elation combined with the indictment's quantification of 13 digital ads funded by an ambiguous "budget of millions" -- we have all we need to know that this indictment is  bullshit.

The "budget of millions" is the strong tell.  The indictment  states that the Internet Research Agency's entire annual budget "totaled the equivalent of millions of U.S. dollars."

But we're not talking about the entire Internet Research Agency, which has many departments with different tasks; we're only talking about one ad hoc department allegedly created in the spring of 2014 to engage in "information warfare" in the United States, the "translator project." The indictment states that by July 2016 more than 80 employees were assigned to "translator project."

But being assigned to something doesn't mean that you're actually doing any work. Where's the quantification?

To provide that quantification, the indictment does a little fudging. It stops talking about "translator project" and starts talking about "Project Lakhta":

Project Lakhta had multiple components, some involving domestic audiences within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in various countries, including the United States.

By in or around September 2016, the ORGANIZATION's [Internet Research Agency] monthly budget for Project Lakhta submitted to CONCORD [company owned by Kremlin-friendly mogul Yevgeny V. Prigozhin] exceed 73 million Russian rubles (over 1,250,000 U.S dollars), including approximately one million rubles in bonus payments.

So we have 80 workers assigned to something called the "translator project," which is waging info war within the U.S. by means of social media. Then we have something call "Project Lakhta," which is an all-points-of-compass info-war campaign, targeting audiences both domestic and foreign. The indictment states that Project Lakhta's monthly budget is $1.25 million.

Look what this becomes in the NYT editorial:

By the spring of 2016, the operation had zeroed in on supporting Mr. Trump and disparaging Hillary Clinton. The Internet Research Agency alone had a staff of 80 and a monthly budget of $1.25 million. On the advice of a real, unnamed grass-roots activist from Texas, it had focused its efforts on swing states like Colorado, Virginia and Florida.

Staffers bought ads with messages like “Hillary is a Satan,” “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison” and “Vote Republican, Vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment!”

The "newspaper of record" can't even keep this straight. The passage regarding the "unnamed grass-roots activist in Texas" is particularly embarrassing. According to Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, "Inside a 3-Year Russian Campaign to Influence U.S. Voters":

The Russian operatives contacted, among others, a real Texas activist who, evidently assuming they were Americans, advised them to focus on “purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida.” After that, F.B.I. agents found that the phrase “purple states” became a mantra for the Russian operation.

So we're supposed to believe that secret Russian agents traveled all the way to the Lone Star State in order to discover the philosopher's stone of U.S. electioneering -- purple states?

Are we really that stupid?

The obvious thing about the indictment is included the Shane and Mazzetti story: There is no mention of the hack of the DNC, nor of Podesta's Gmail account:

Mr. Mueller’s indictment does not present evidence that the campaign overseen by Mr. Prigozhin was ordered by Mr. Putin. American officials have traced other elements of the Russian meddling, notably the hacking and leaking of leading Democrats’ emails, to Russian intelligence agencies carrying out Mr. Putin’s orders.

While the indictment certainly undermines Mr. Trump’s blanket assertions that the Russian interference is a political “hoax,” it does not accuse anyone from his campaign or any other American of knowingly aiding in the effort.

No connection to the Russian government; no collusive tie to the Trump campaign. Caitlin Johnstone does a good job collecting frantic Democratic tweets in her post "Insane Anti-Trumpists Call For Even More Escalations Against A Nuclear Superpower."

Another obvious thing about the indictment, which is mentioned by Apuzzo and LaFraniere, is that this kind of background info war is stock and trade of the U.S. government:

Such anecdotes are rare examples of how intelligence agencies work covertly to influence political outcomes abroad. The C.I.A. has conducted such operations for decades, but both Mr. Mueller’s indictment and an intelligence assessment last year present a startling example — unprecedented in its scope and audacity — of a foreign government [the indictment doesn't name a foreign government -- sloppy editing] working to help elect an American president.

I imagine all governments employ these kind of private-sector contractors to test messaging and fiddle about in their neighbors' affairs. Russia has promised to expose U.S. meddling in its upcoming presidential election. What is Navalny's presidential boycott campaign if not a U.S. intelligence operation?

The Democrats are headed into the midterms with their dirigible deflating. They will try to keep the New Cold War inflated at all costs. Judging from CBS News "Key Takeaways," it is going to be a lot of effort for not much return. Russiagate has been deflating for months. It has required periodic scare headlines to refocus the citizenry's wandering attention.

Even though Democrats have real, powerful issues with which to mobilize their base -- gun safety and immigration, to name but two -- this is a party that has a visceral aversion to reality. Their cry will be for Trump to slap even more sanctions on Russia, to lock in the New Cold War, to guarantee the New McCarthyism will determine the Democratic nominee, which will assure Trump's reelection. That is how self-destructively stupid the power brokers of the Democratic Party are. Rather than fight to win, they choose to lose so that they can retain power in the organization.

The Absurdity of Russiagate

It was easy to miss, which I am sure was the newspaper's intention, tucked as it was in the interior of last Tuesday's science section, but Benedict Carey's story about the first serious academic study on fake news -- "‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests" -- pretty much demolishes "the Russians stole my election" narrative pushed in the mainstream media, the Democratic Party and by U.S. intelligence agencies:

[N]ow the first hard data on fake-news consumption has arrived. Researchers last week posted an analysis of the browsing histories of thousands of adults during the run-up to the 2016 election — a real-time picture of who viewed which fake stories, and what real news those people were seeing at the same time.

[snip] 

In the new study, a trio of political scientists — Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College (a regular contributor to The Times’s Upshot), Andrew Guess of Princeton University and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter — analyzed web traffic data gathered from a representative sample of 2,525 Americans who consented to have their online activity monitored anonymously by the survey and analytic firm YouGov.

The data included website visits made in the weeks before and after the 2016 election, and a measure of political partisanship based on overall browsing habits. (The vast majority of participants favored Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton.)

[snip]

“For all the hype about fake news, it’s important to recognize that it reached only a subset of Americans, and most of the ones it was reaching already were intense partisans,” Dr. Nyhan said.

“They were also voracious consumers of hard news,” he added. “These are people intensely engaged in politics who follow it closely.”

Given the ratio of truth to fiction, Dr. Watts said, fake news paled in influence beside mainstream news coverage, particularly stories about Mrs. Clinton and her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Coverage of that topic appeared repeatedly and prominently in venues like The New York Times and the Washington Post.

In other words, the alleged victims of fake news are cagey news junkies and political partisans who consume a lot of product overwhelmingly from corporate chains.

Can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

Many times over the last year I thought "The Russians Did It" campaign would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity -- was there any serious mainstream engagement with the assertion that the compromising information from the Democratic National Committee came from a leak (via thumb drive) and not a hack (because of online download speeds)? -- but it has chugged along all the same. It is even accepted in toto in the hipster weekly paper of my hometown.

Each week The New York Times publishes a "bombshell" front-pager purporting to document that Trump should be indicted any day now. My guess is that most people have given up reading these stories. The headlines get read, and I'm sure elite partisans continue to read everything, but for the most part Russiagate has become just noise.

And for good reason because that is what it is -- a deep state disinformation campaign targeting its domestic population. If you read Friday's "Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation" by Michael Schmidt you know that the Mueller investigation is boiling down to next to nothing. There is no evidence of collusion with Russia, and chicken shit when it comes to obstruction:

Mr. Mueller has also been examining a false statement that the president reportedly dictated on Air Force One in July in response to an article in The Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials had with Russians in 2016. A new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, says that the president’s lawyers believed that the statement was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears,” and that it led one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen to quit because he believed it was obstruction of justice.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer dealing with the special counsel’s investigation, declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have said the president has fully cooperated with the investigation, and they have expressed confidence that the inquiry will soon be coming to a close. They said that they believed the president would be exonerated, and that they hoped to have that conclusion made public.

Legal experts said that of the two primary issues Mr. Mueller appears to be investigating — whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice while in office and whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — there is currently a larger body of public evidence tying the president to a possible crime of obstruction.

But the experts are divided about whether the accumulated evidence is enough for Mr. Mueller to bring an obstruction case. They said it could be difficult to prove that the president, who has broad authority over the executive branch, including the hiring and firing of officials, had corrupt intentions when he took actions like ousting the F.B.I. director. Some experts said the case would be stronger if there was evidence that the president had told witnesses to lie under oath.

Once again, can you say "There is no there there" any louder?

An interesting development is the GOP's decision to go on the offensive with a criminal referral to the DOJ on Christopher Steele, and the FBI's re-opening the Clinton Foundation corruption case. Trump delivered the tax cut and with midterms looming, Republicans are circling the wagons.

I  hope that things get interesting. The problem is that Democrats have very little game.

Once Again: A Leak, Not a Hack

Yesterday The Nation published a lengthy article by Patrick Lawrence, "A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack," which categorically refutes the foundation of Russiagate, that computer servers for the Democratic National Committee were hacked last year by Russian agents. Lawrence, using a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity recapitulation of events, says:

• On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

• On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.

• On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described. 

• On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.

It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent.”

We now know that it could not be hack -- the smoking gun, as it were -- because of what the metadata reveals about download speeds. As Lawrence explains:

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

These statistics are matters of record and essential to disproving the hack theory. No Internet service provider, such as a hacker would have had to use in mid-2016, was capable of downloading data at this speed. Compounding this contradiction, Guccifer claimed to have run his hack from Romania, which, for numerous reasons technically called delivery overheads, would slow down the speed of a hack even further from maximum achievable speeds.

What is the maximum achievable speed? Forensicator recently ran a test download of a comparable data volume (and using a server speed not available in 2016) 40 miles from his computer via a server 20 miles away and came up with a speed of 11.8 megabytes per second—half what the DNC operation would need were it a hack. Other investigators have built on this finding. Folden and Edward Loomis say a survey published August 3, 2016, by www.speedtest.net/reports is highly reliable and use it as their thumbnail index. It indicated that the highest average ISP speeds of first-half 2016 were achieved by Xfinity and Cox Communications. These speeds averaged 15.6 megabytes per second and 14.7 megabytes per second, respectively. Peak speeds at higher rates were recorded intermittently but still did not reach the required 22.7 megabytes per second.

“A speed of 22.7 megabytes is simply unobtainable, especially if we are talking about a transoceanic data transfer,” Folden said. “Based on the data we now have, what we’ve been calling a hack is impossible.” Last week Forensicator reported on a speed test he conducted more recently. It tightens the case considerably. “Transfer rates of 23 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second) are not just highly unlikely, but effectively impossible to accomplish when communicating over the Internet at any significant distance,” he wrote. “Further, local copy speeds are measured, demonstrating that 23 MB/s is a typical transfer rate when using a USB–2 flash device (thumb drive).”

Lawrence mentions a couple other forensic revelations of the metadata having to do with time stamps and the pasting of documents into a "a Russianified [W]ord document with Russian language settings and style headings," but to my mind it is the download-speed data -- something anyone who uses a computer and browses the internet understands intimately -- to which the intelligence community must respond:

By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment, the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the way these people have spoken to us for the past year.

Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.

“We continue to stand by our report,” CrowdStrike said, upon seeing the VIPS blueprint of the investigation. CrowdStrike argues that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC’s computers. But the presence or absence of malware by that time is entirely immaterial, because the event of July 5 is proven to have been a leak and not a hack. Given that malware has nothing to do with leaks, CrowdStrike’s logic appears to be circular.

In effect, the new forensic evidence considered here lands in a vacuum. We now enter a period when an official reply should be forthcoming. What the forensic people are now producing constitutes evidence, however one may view it, and it is the first scientifically derived evidence we have into any of the events in which Russia has been implicated. The investigators deserve a response, the betrayed professionals who formed VIPS as the WMD scandal unfolded in 2003 deserve it, and so do the rest of us. The cost of duplicity has rarely been so high.

Will there be a response? An "Aw, shucks" moment of mea culpa? I doubt it. All signs, such as recent evidence of a Google blacklist, point to the marginalization of dissent. The deep state has become so irrational it can no longer parry counter-narratives. It is sealed off and considers itself impregnable. Trump, for all his "As-Seen-on-TV" hucksterism, breached the castle walls. The effort underway is to make sure that doesn't happen again.