Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump
Exclusive: The new Russia-gate furor is over
Donald Trump Jr. meeting a Russian who claimed
to have dirt on Hillary Clinton, but the Clinton
team’s Russian cash-for-trash search against
Trump Sr. is all but forgotten, writes Robert
Parry.
By Robert Parry
July 11, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Yes, I realize that the editors of The New
York Times long ago cast aside any journalistic
professionalism to become charter members of the
#Resistance against Donald Trump. But the latest
frenzy over a meeting between Donald Trump Jr.
and a Russian lawyer who was dangling the
possibility of information about the Democrats
receiving money from Russians represents one of
the more remarkable moments of the entire
Russia-gate hysteria.
Essentially, Trump’s oldest son is being accused
of taking a meeting with a foreign national who
claimed to have knowledge of potentially illegal
activities by Trump’s Democratic rivals,
although the promised information apparently
turned out to be a dud.
Yet, on
Monday, the Times led its newspaper with a story
about this meeting – and commentators on MSNBC
and elsewhere are labeling Trump Jr. a criminal
if not a traitor for hearing out this lawyer.
Yet, no
one seems to remember that Hillary Clinton
supporters paid large sums of money, reportedly
about $1 million, to have ex-British spy
Christopher Steele use his Russian connections
to dig up dirt on Trump inside Russia, resulting
in a salacious dossier that Clinton backers
eagerly hawked to the news media.
Also,
the two events – Trump Jr.’s meeting with the
Russian lawyer and the Clinton camp’s
commissioning of Steele’s Russia dossier – both
occurred in June 2016, so you might have thought
it would be a journalistic imperative to
incorporate a reference or two to the dossier.
But the
closest the Times came to that was noting:
“Political campaigns collect opposition research
from many quarters but rarely from sources
linked to foreign governments.” That would have
been an opportune point to slide in a paragraph
about the Steele dossier, but nothing.
The
Times doesn’t seem to have much historical
memory either. There actually have been a number
of cases in which American presidential
campaigns have ventured overseas to seek out
“opposition research” about rivals.
For
instance, in 1992, President George H.W. Bush
took a personal role in trying to obtain
derogatory information about Bill Clinton’s 1970
student trip to Eastern Europe, including to
Moscow.
That
effort started out by having senior State
Department officials rifle through the passport
files of Clinton and his mother, looking for a
purported letter in which some Republican
operatives thought Clinton might have renounced
his U.S. citizenship.
Bush
and his team were called out on that caper,
which became known as “Passport-gate.” During
the Oct. 11, 1992 debate, Clinton even compared
Bush’s tactics to Joe McCarthy’s during the
1950s Red Scare. But the Bush campaign didn’t
let the issue entirely go.
Czech-ing
on Bill
In the
days after the debate, phone records revealed a
flurry of calls from Bush’s campaign
headquarters to Czechoslovakia, another stop on
Clinton’s student tour. There were also fax
transmissions on Oct. 14 and 15, 1992, according
to a later official investigation.
On Oct.
16, what appears to have been a return call was
placed from the U.S. Embassy in Prague to the
office of ad man Sig Rogich, who was handling
anti-Clinton themes for the Bush campaign.
Following those exchanges, stories about
Clinton’s Prague trip began popping up in Czech
newspapers. On Oct. 24, 1992, three Czech
newspapers ran similar stories about Clinton’s
Czech hosts. The Cesky Denik story had
an especially nasty headline: “Bill Was With
Communists.”
The
Czech articles soon blew back to the United
States. Reuters distributed a summary, and
The Washington Times, over three
consecutive days, ran articles about Clinton’s
Czech trip. The Clinton campaign responded that
Clinton had entered Czechoslovakia under normal
procedures for a student and stayed with the
family of an Oxford friend.
Despite
those last-minute efforts to revive Clinton’s
loyalty issue, the Democrat held on to defeat
Bush in a three-way race (with Ross Perot).
You also could go back to
Republican contacts
with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage
President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks
in 1968 and similar meetings with Iranian
emissaries to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s
Iran hostage negotiations in 1980, including
a curious meeting
involving senior Ronald Reagan campaign aides at
the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C.
But the
Steele dossier is a more immediate and direct
example of close Hillary Clinton supporters
going outside the United States for dirt on
Trump and collaborating with foreign nationals
to dig it up – allegedly from Kremlin insiders.
Although it is still not clear exactly who
footed the bill for the Steele dossier and how
much money was spread around to the Russian
contacts, it is clear that Clinton supporters
paid for the opposition research and then
flacked the material to American journalists.
The
Mystery Dossier
As I
wrote on March 29, “An irony of the escalating
hysteria about the Trump camp’s contacts with
Russians is that one presidential campaign in
2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly
came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources.
Friends of that political campaign paid for this
anonymous hearsay material, shared it with
American journalists and urged them to publish
it to gain an electoral advantage. But this
campaign was not Donald Trump’s; it was Hillary
Clinton’s.
“And,
awareness of this activity doesn’t require you
to spin conspiracy theories about what may or
may not have been said during some seemingly
innocuous conversation. In this case, you have
open admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin
claims were used.
“Indeed, you have the words of Rep. Adam Schiff,
the ranking Democratic member of the House
Intelligence Committee, in his
opening statement
at [a] public hearing on so-called
‘Russia-gate.’ Schiff’s seamless 15-minute
narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged
collaboration with Russia followed the script
prepared by former British intelligence officer
Christopher Steele who was hired as an
opposition researcher last June [2016] to dig up
derogatory information on Donald Trump.
“Steele, who had worked for Britain’s MI-6 in
Russia, said he tapped into ex-colleagues and
unnamed sources inside Russia, including
leadership figures in the Kremlin, to piece
together
a series of sensational reports
that became the basis of the current
congressional and FBI investigations into
Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.
“Since
he was not able to go to Russia himself, Steele
based his reports mostly on multiple hearsay
from anonymous Russians who claim to have heard
some information from their government contacts
before passing it on to Steele’s associates who
then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of
rumors and alleged inside dope into ‘raw’
intelligence reports.
“Besides
the anonymous sourcing and the sources’
financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s
reports had numerous other problems, including
the inability of a variety of investigators to
confirm key elements, such as the salacious
claim that several years ago Russian
intelligence operatives secretly videotaped
Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he
lay in the same bed in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton
used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle
Obama.
“That
tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele’s
opening report to his new clients, dated June
20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in
whetting the appetite of Clinton’s mysterious
benefactors who were financing Steele’s dirt
digging and who have kept their identities (and
the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first
report were the basic outlines of what has
become the scandal that is now threatening the
survival of Trump’s embattled presidency.”
The Trump
Jr. Meeting
So,
compare that with what we know about the June 9,
2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York City,
which Donald J. Trump Jr. says he agreed to
because someone was claiming knowledge about
Russian payments helping Hillary Clinton.
Trump
Jr. said Russian lawyer Natalie Veselnitskaya
“stated that she had information that
individuals connected to Russia were funding the
Democratic National Committee and supporting
Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague,
ambiguous and made no sense. No details or
supporting information was provided or even
offered. It quickly became clear that she had no
meaningful information.”
According to Trump Jr.’s account, Veselnitskaya
then turned the conversation to President
Vladimir Putin’s cancellation of an adoption
program which had sent Russian children to
American parents, a move he took in reaction to
the so-called Magnitsky Act, a 2012 punitive law
passed by the U.S. Congress in retaliation for
the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian
jail.
The
death became a Western cause célèbre with
Magnitsky, the accountant for hedge-fund
executive William Browder, hailed as a martyr in
the cause of whistleblowing against a profoundly
corrupt Russian government. After Magnitsky’s
death from a heart attack, Browder claimed that
his “lawyer” Magnitsky had been tortured and
murdered to cover up official complicity in a
$230 million tax-fraud scheme involving
companies ostensibly under Browder’s control.
Because
of Browder’s wealth and political influence, he
succeeded in getting the European Parliament and
the U.S. Congress to buy into his narrative and
move to punish the presumed villains in the tax
fraud and in Magnitsky’s death. The U.S.-enacted
Magnitsky Act in 2012 was an opening salvo in
what has become a new Cold War between
Washington and Moscow.
Only One
Side Heard
The
Magnitsky narrative has now become so engrained
in Western geopolitical mythology that the
storyline apparently can no longer be questioned
or challenged. The New York Times reports
Browder’s narrative as flat fact, and The
Washington Post took pleasure in denouncing a
2016 documentary that turned Browder’s version
of events on its head.
The
documentary, entitled “The Magnitsky Act. Behind
the Scenes,” was essentially blocked for
distribution in the West, with the European
Parliament pulling the plug on its planned
premiere in Brussels shortly before it was
scheduled for showing.
When the documentary got a single showing at the
Newseum in Washington,
a Washington Post editorial
branded the documentary Russian “agit-prop.”
The
Post sought to discredit the filmmaker, Andrei
Nekrasov, without addressing his avalanche of
documented examples of Browder’s misrepresenting
both big and small facts in the case. Instead,
the Post accused Nekrasov of using “facts highly
selectively” and insinuated that he was merely a
pawn in the Kremlin’s “campaign to discredit
Mr. Browder and the Magnitsky Act.”
The
Post concluded smugly: “The film won’t grab a
wide audience, but it offers yet another example
of the Kremlin’s increasingly sophisticated
efforts to spread its illiberal values and
mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and
on French and German television networks,
showings were put off recently after questions
were raised about the accuracy of the film,
including by Magnitsky’s family.
“We
don’t worry that Mr. Nekrasov’s film was
screened here, in an open society. But it is
important that such slick spin be fully exposed
for its twisted story and sly deceptions.”
Given
the fact that virtually no one in the West was
allowed to see the film, the Post’s gleeful
editorial had the feel of something you might
read in a totalitarian society where the public
only hears about dissent when the Official
Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown
person for saying something that almost no one
heard.
What
the Post didn’t want you to know was that
Nekrasov started off his project with the goal
of producing a docu-drama that accepted
Browder’s self-serving narrative. However,
during the research, Nekrasov uncovered evidence
that revealed that Magnitsky was neither a
“lawyer” nor a whistleblower; that the scam
involving Browder’s companies had been exposed
by a woman employee; and that Magnitsky, an
accountant for Browder, was arrested as a
conspirator in the fraud.
As the
documentary unfolds, you see Nekrasov struggling
with his dilemma as Browder grows increasingly
abusive toward his erstwhile ally. Nekrasov
painfully concludes that Browder had deceived
him.
But,
don’t worry, as a citizen in the Free World, you
probably will never have to worry about viewing
this documentary, since it has been effectively
flushed down the memory hole. Official
references to Magnitsky are back in the proper
form, treating him as a Martyr for Truth and a
victim of the Evil Russians.
Plus,
if you rely on The New York Times, The
Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the
U.S. mainstream media for your news, you won’t
have to think about the far more substantive
case of the Steele Dossier in which Hillary
Clinton’s allies spent gobs of money seeking out
sources in Russia to serve up dirt on Donald
Trump.
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).
This article was first published by
Consortium News
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.