The
Politics Behind 'Russia-gate'
The hysteria over “Russia-gate” continues to
grow – as President Trump’s enemies circle – but
at its core there may be no there there while it
risks pushing the world toward nuclear
annihilation, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
March 05,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News"
- J
There may be a turn-about-is-fair-play element
to Democrats parsing the words of Attorney
General Jeff Sessions and other Trump
administration officials to hang them on
possible “perjury” charges. After all, the
Republicans made “lock her up” a popular chant
citing Hillary Clinton’s arguably illegal use of
a private email server as Secretary of State and
her allegedly false claim under oath that her
lawyers had hand-checked each of her 30,000 or
so emails that were
deleted as personal.
But
there is a grave danger in playing partisan
“gotcha” over U.S. relations with the world’s
other major nuclear superpower. If, for
instance, President Trump finds himself having
to demonstrate how tough he can be on Russia —
to save his political skin — he could easily
make a miscalculation that could push the two
countries into a war that could truly be the war
to end all wars – along with ending human
civilization. But Democrats, liberals and the
mainstream news media seem to hate Trump so much
they will take that risk.
Official Washington’s Russia hysteria has
reached such proportions that New York Times
columnist Thomas L. Friedman has even compared
the alleged Russian hacking of Democratic emails
to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, two incidents that led
the United States into violent warfare. On
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, Friedman
demanded
that the hacking allegations be taken with the
utmost seriousness: “That was a 9/11 scale
event. They attacked the core of our democracy.
That was a Pearl Harbor scale event. … This goes
to the very core of our democracy.”
But
what really goes to “the very core of our
democracy” is the failure to deal with this
issue – or pretty much any recent issue – with
the sobriety and the seriousness that should
accompany a question of war or peace. Just as
Friedman and other “star” journalists failed to
ask the necessary questions about Iraq’s WMD or
to show professional skepticism in the face of
U.S. propaganda campaigns around the conflicts
in Libya, Syria or Ukraine, they have not
demanded any actual evidence from the Obama
administration for its lurid claims about
Russian “hacking.”
Before this madness goes any further, doesn’t
anyone think that the U.S. intelligence
community should lay its cards on the table
regarding exactly what the evidence is that
Russian intelligence purloined Democratic emails
and then slipped them to WikiLeaks for
publication? President Obama’s intelligence
officials apparently went to great lengths
to spread these allegations around
– even passing the secrets around overseas – but
they never told the American people what the
evidence is. The two official reports dealing
with the issue
were laughably short on anything approaching
evidence.
They amounted to “trust us.”
Further, WikiLeaks representatives have
indicated that the two batches of emails – one
from the Democratic National Committee and the
other from Clinton’s campaign chairman John
Podesta – did not come from the Russians but
rather from two different American insiders.
That could be wrong – it is possible that
Russian intelligence laundered the material
through some American cutouts or used some other
method to conceal Moscow’s hand – but Obama’s
intelligence officials apparently don’t know how
WikiLeaks obtained the emails. So, the entire
“scandal” may rest upon a foundation of sand.
No ‘Fake
News’
It’s
also important to note that nothing that
WikiLeaks published was false. There was no
“fake news.” Indeed, a key reason why the emails
were newsworthy at all was that they exposed
misconduct and deception on the part of the
Democrats and the Clinton campaign. The main
point that the DNC emails revealed was that the
leadership had violated its duty to approach the
primary campaign even-handedly when instead they
tilted the playing field against Sen. Bernie
Sanders. Later, the Podesta emails revealed the
contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street
bankers, which she was trying to hide from the
voters, and the emails exposed some of the
pay-to-play tactics of the Clinton Foundation.
In
other words, even if the Russians did reveal
this information to the American people, how
does knowing relevant facts regarding a
presidential campaign translate into an attack
on “the core of our democracy”? Usually,
journalists believe that getting the truth out,
even if it embarrasses some politician or some
political party, is healthy for a democracy. As
an American journalist, I prefer getting
information from people who have America’s best
interests at heart, but I’m not naïve enough to
think that people who “leak” don’t often do so
for self-interested reasons. What’s most
important is that the information is genuine and
newsworthy.
Frankly, I found the WikiLeaks material far more
appropriate for an American political debate
than the scurrilous rumors that the Clinton
campaign was circulating about Trump supposedly
getting urinated on by Russian prostitutes in a
five-star Moscow hotel, claims for which no
evidence has been presented.
Also,
remember that no one thought that the DNC/Podesta
emails were significant in deciding the 2016
election. Clinton herself blamed FBI Director
James Comey for briefly reopening the FBI
investigation into her private email server near
the end of the campaign as the reason her poll
numbers cratered. It’s relevant, too, that
Clinton ran a horrific campaign, which included
breathtaking gaffes like referring to many Trump
supporters as “deplorables,” relying way too
heavily on negative ads, failing to articulate a
compelling vision for the future, and ignoring
signs that her leads in Rust Belt states were
disappearing. In other words, the current effort
to portray the disclosure of Democratic emails
as somehow decisive in the campaign is
revisionist history.
Yet,
here we are with The Washington Post, The New
York Times, CNN and almost the entire mainstream
media (along with leading liberals and
Democrats) panting every time they discover that
someone from Trump’s circle met with a Russian.
We are supposed to forget that the Russian
government for many years was collaborating
closely with the U.S. government – and
particularly with U.S. national security
agencies – on vital issues. Russia assisted in
supplying the U.S. military in Afghanistan;
President Putin played a crucial role in getting
Iran to curtail its nuclear program; and he also
arranged for the Syrian government to surrender
its stockpiles of chemical weapons. The last two
accomplishments were among President Obama’s
most important foreign policy successes.
But
those last two areas of cooperation – Iran and
Syria – contributed to making Putin a target for
Washington’s powerful neoconservatives who were
lusting for direct U.S. military strikes against
those two countries. The neocons, along with the
Israeli and Saudi governments, wanted “regime
change” in Tehran and Damascus, not diplomatic
agreements that left the governments in place.
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Neocons inside the U.S. government – including
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland,
Sen. John McCain and National Endowment for
Democracy president Carl Gershman – then took
aim at “regime change” in Ukraine, realizing its
sensitivity to Russia. Gershman, whose NED is
funded by the U.S. government, called Ukraine
“the biggest prize” and a key step toward
ousting Putin inside Russia; McCain cheered on
Ukraine’s ultranationalists who were firebombing
police in Kiev’s Maidan square; and
Nuland was conspiring with U.S. Ambassador to
Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt
on how to “glue” or “midwife” a change in
government.
This
neocon strategy worked by overthrowing Ukraine’s
elected President Viktor Yanukovych and causing
Putin to intervene on behalf of threatened
ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
That, in turn, was transformed by the Western
media into a “Russian invasion.”
Partisan
Interests
Instead
of standing up to this neocon troublemaking,
Obama fell in line. Later, the Democrats saw
political advantage in becoming the super-hawks
standing up to Russia, essentially maneuvering
to the right of the Republicans, especially when
Donald Trump unexpectedly won the nomination, in
part, by calling for better relations with
Russia.
As the
2016 presidential campaign sank into infamy as
one of the ugliest in U.S. history, Clinton
hammered Trump over Russia, calling him a Putin
“puppet.” But the Russia-bashing didn’t seem to
help Clinton very much. Although it was
calculated to pull in some “moderate”
Republicans, it also alienated many
peace-oriented Democrats.
Still, despite the shaky foundation and the
haphazard construction, Official Washington is
now adding more and more floors to this Russia
“scandal.” Obama holdovers slapped together a
shoddy pretext for going after Trump’s National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn – citing the
never-prosecuted Logan Act of 1799 and then
trapping Flynn because he didn’t have total
recall of
a phone conversation
with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Dec.
29 while Flynn was vacationing in the Dominican
Republic.
Similarly, the mainstream media and Democrats
are framing in a “perjury” case against Attorney
General Sessions because of a sloppily worded
response during his confirmation hearing about
contacts with Russians. He had met twice with
Kislyak (as many others in Washington have
done). The heavy-breathing suspicion is that
perhaps Sessions and Kislyak were plotting how
the Kremlin could help the Trump campaign, but
there is zero evidence to support that
conspiracy theory.
What’s
actually happening here should be obvious. The
Obama administration, the Democrats and the
mainstream media were horrified at Trump’s
election. They understandably were offended by
Trump’s personal behavior and his obvious
unfitness for the presidency. Many Clinton
supporters, especially women, were bitterly
disappointed at the failure of the first female
major-party presidential nominee who lost to a
lout who boasted about how he could exploit his
fame and power by grabbing the genitals of
vulnerable women whom he assumed couldn’t do
anything to stop him.
There
was also alarm about Trump’s policies on the
environment, immigration, education and the
courts. Among the neocons and their
liberal-interventionist sidekicks, there was
concern, too, that Trump would not continue
their “regime change” strategies in the Middle
East and their hostility toward Russia.
So,
these anti-Trump forces grabbed at the most
potent weapon available, the suspicions that
Trump had somehow colluded with Russia. It
didn’t matter that the evidence was weak to
non-existent. It would be enough to spread the
allegations around under the cloak of U.S.
intelligence “assessments.”
Nobody important would demand to review the
evidence and, surely, with the availability of
National Security Agency intercepts, people’s
memories could be tested against the transcripts
of conversations and be found wanting. Verbal
missteps could become perjury traps. There could
be
a witch hunt against anyone who talked to a
Russian.
Any pushing back from the Trump people could be
construed as a “cover-up.”
Having worked in Washington for nearly four
decades, I have seen political investigations
before, both in steering away from real crimes
of state (such as
Nicaraguan Contra cocaine trafficking
and Republican collaboration with foreign
governments to undercut Democrats in
1968 and
1980)
and in fabricating scandals that weren’t there
(such as the fictional offenses of Whitewater,
Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate, etc. under Bill
Clinton who was finally cornered for the heinous
crime of lying about sex). So far at least,
“Russia-gate” fits much more with the latter
group than the former.
What I
also have learned over these years is that in
Official Washington, power – much more than
truth – determines which scandals are taken
seriously and which ones are not. “Russia-gate”
is revealing that the established power centers
of Washington arrayed against Trump – the major
news media, the neoconservatives and the
Democratic Party – have more power than the
disorganized Trump administration.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book,
America’s
Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as
an e-book (from
Amazon
and
barnesandnoble.com).
