Key Democratic Officials Now
Warning Base Not to Expect
Evidence of Trump/Russia
Collusion
By Glenn Greenwald
March 17, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Intercept"
- From MSNBC politics shows to
town hall meetings across the
country, the overarching issue
for the Democratic Party’s base
since Trump’s victory has been
Russia, often
suffocating attention for other
issues. This fixation has
persisted even though it has no
chance to sink the Trump
presidency unless it is proven
that high levels of the Trump
campaign actively colluded with
the Kremlin to manipulate the
outcome of the U.S. election — a
claim for which absolutely no
evidence has thus far been
presented.
The
principal problem for Democrats
is that so
many media figures
and
online charlatans are
personally benefiting from
feeding the base increasingly
unhinged, fact-free conspiracies
— just as
right-wing media polemicists did
after both Bill Clinton and
Obama were elected — that there
are now millions of partisan
soldiers absolutely convinced of
a Trump/Russia conspiracy for
which, at least as of now, there
is no evidence. And they are all
waiting for the day, which they
regard as inevitable and
imminent, when this theory will
be proven and Trump will be
removed.
Key Democratic officials are
clearly worried about the
expectations that have been
purposely stoked and are now
trying to tamp them down. Many
of them have tried to signal
that the beliefs the base has
been led to adopt have no basis
in reason or evidence.
The
latest official to throw cold
water on the MSNBC-led circus is
President Obama’s former acting
CIA chief Michael Morell. What
makes him particularly notable
in this context is that Morell
was one of Clinton’s most vocal
CIA surrogates. In August, he
not only endorsed Clinton
in the pages of the New York
Times
but also became the first high
official to explicitly accuse
Trump of disloyalty, claiming,
“In the intelligence business,
we would say that Mr. Putin had
recruited Mr. Trump as an
unwitting agent of the Russian
Federation.”
But
on Wednesday night, Morell
appeared
at an intelligence community
forum to “cast doubt” on
“allegations that members of the
Trump campaign colluded with
Russia.” “On the question of the
Trump campaign conspiring with
the Russians here, there is
smoke, but there is no fire at
all,” he said, adding, “There’s
no little campfire, there’s no
little candle, there’s no spark.
And there’s a lot of people
looking for it.”
Obama’s former CIA chief also
cast serious doubt on the
credibility of the infamous,
explosive “dossier” originally
published by BuzzFeed, saying
that its author, Christopher
Steele, paid intermediaries to
talk to the sources for it. The
dossier, he said, “doesn’t take
you anywhere, I don’t think.”
Morell’s comments echo the
categorical remarks by Obama’s
top national security official,
James Clapper, who told Meet the
Press last week that during the
time he was Obama’s DNI, he
saw no evidence to
support claims of a Trump/Russia
conspiracy. “We had no evidence
of such collusion,” Clapper
stated unequivocally. Unlike
Morell, who left his official
CIA position in 2013 but remains
very integrated into the
intelligence community, Clapper
was Obama’s DNI until just seven
weeks ago, leaving on January
20.
Perhaps most revealing of all
are the Democrats on the Senate
Intelligence Committee — charged
with investigating these matters
— who
recently told BuzzFeed
how petrified they are of what
the Democratic base will do if
they do not find evidence of
collusion, as they now suspect
will likely be the case.
“There’s a tangible frustration
over what one official called
‘wildly inflated’ expectations
surrounding the panel’s
fledgling investigation,”
BuzzFeed’s Ali Watkins wrote.
Moreover, “several committee
sources grudgingly say, it feels
as though the investigation will
be seen as a sham if the Senate
doesn’t find a silver bullet
connecting Trump and Russian
intelligence operatives.” One
member told Watkins: “I don’t
think the conclusions are going
to meet people’s expectations.”
What makes all of this most
significant is that officials
like Clapper and Morell are
trained disinformation agents;
Clapper in particular has proven
he will lie to advance his
interests. Yet even with all the
incentive to do so, they are
refusing to claim there is
evidence of such collusion; in
fact, they are expressly urging
people to stop thinking it
exists. As even the law
recognizes, statements
that otherwise lack credibility
become more believable when they
are
ones
made “against interest.”
Media figures have similarly
begun trying to tamp down
expectations. Ben Smith, the
editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed,
which published the Steele
dossier, published
an article yesterday warning that
the Democratic base’s
expectation of a smoking gun “is
so strong that Twitter and cable
news are full of the theories of
what my colleague Charlie Warzel
calls
the Blue Detectives — the left’s
new version of Glenn Beck,
digital blackboards full of
lines and arrows.” Smith added:
“It is also a simple fact that
while news of Russian actions on
Trump’s behalf is clear, hard
details of coordination between
his aides and Putin’s haven’t
emerged.” And Smith’s core
warning is this:
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Trump’s critics last year
were horrified at the rise
of “fake news” and the
specter of a politics shaped
by alternative facts,
predominantly on the right.
They need to be careful now
not to succumb to the same
delusional temptations as
their political adversaries,
and not to sink into a
filter bubble which, after
all, draws its strength not
from conservative or
progressive politics but
from human nature.
And those of us covering the
story and the stew of real
information, fantasy, and —
now — forgery around it need
to continue to report and
think clearly about what we
know and what we don’t, and
to resist the sugar high
that comes with telling
people exactly what they
want to hear.
For
so long, Democrats demonized and
smeared anyone trying to inject
basic reason, rationality, and
skepticism into this
Trump/Russia discourse by
labeling them all Kremlin agents
and Putin lovers. Just this
week, the Center for American
Progress released a report using
the language of treason to
announce the existence of a
“Fifth Column”
in the U.S. that serves Russia
(similar to
Andrew Sullivan’s notorious 2001
decree
that anyone opposing the war on
terror composed an anti-American
“Fifth Column”), while John
McCain listened to Rand Paul
express doubts about the wisdom
of NATO further expanding to
include Montenegro and then
promptly announced:
“Paul is working for Vladimir
Putin.”
But with serious doubts — and
fears — now emerging about what
the Democratic base has been led
to believe by self-interested
carnival barkers and partisan
hacks, there is a sudden,
concerted effort to rein in the
excesses of this story. With so
many people now doing this, it
will be increasingly difficult
to smear them all as traitors
and Russian loyalists, but it
may be far too little, too late,
given the pitched hysteria that
has been deliberately cultivated
around these issues for months.
Many Democrats have reached the
classic stage of deranged
conspiracists where evidence
that disproves the theory is
viewed as further proof of its
existence, and those pointing to
it are instantly deemed suspect.
A formal, credible investigation
into all these questions, where
the evidence is publicly
disclosed, is still urgently
needed. That’s true primarily so
that conspiracies no longer
linger and these questions are
resolved by facts rather than
agenda-driven anonymous leaks
from the CIA and cable news
hosts required to feed a
partisan mob.
It’s certainly possible to
envision an indictment of a
low-level operative like Carter
Page, or the prosecution of
someone like Paul Manafort on
matters unrelated to hacking,
but the silver bullet that
Democrats have been led to
expect will sink Trump appears
further away than ever.
But given the way these Russia
conspiracies have drowned out
other critical issues being
virtually ignored under the
Trump presidency, it’s vital
that everything be done now to
make clear what is based in
evidence and what is based in
partisan delusions. And most of
what the Democratic base has
been fed for the last six months
by their unhinged stable of
media, online, and party leaders
has decisively fallen into the
latter category, as even their
own officials are now
desperately trying to warn.
