donderdag 22 februari 2018

Massive Russia Investigation Ends in a Whimper

Hallo Stan,

Stuurde deze kleine selectie ook aan de nrc ten behoeve van een meer gebalanceerd commentaar.
Mike Witney blijft een van mijn favourits.


Een Nothing Burger. De ontrafeling van de Mueller indictments.
Een kleine selectie met artikelen die voor de corporate media (en voor de Nederlandse pers) niet bestaan. 

Voormalig CIA director James Woolsey bij Ingraham Angle (Fox): 
"Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?" Laura Ingraham asked former CIA Director James Woolsey this weekend.
With a grin, Woolsey replied, "Oh, probably."
"We don’t do that anymore though?" Ingraham interrupted. "We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?"
"Well," Woolsey said with a smile. "Only for a very good cause."
Indeed, what is the National Endowment for Democracy all about, if not aiding the pro-American side in foreign nations and their elections?

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/deep-state-2-800x416-600x312.jpg
Judicial Watch founder and President Tom Fitton hammered the corrupt Mueller investigation on FOX and Friends Weekend on Saturday morning. Tom blasted the corrupt Obama Justice Department and declared the Trump-Russia collusion investigation over after Friday’s sham announcement of the indictment of 13 Russians.
Tom Fitton calls out the corrupt Justice Department on their criminal activity against candidate and President Trump.
Tom Fitton: At the end we have the massive Russia investigation that finds no collusion with the Trump Campaign. I don’t understand why we are still talking about a Special Counsel investigating the president in light of this indictment… Look those who say the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians are going to have to start providing evidence other than the Clinton-DNC dossier. Look this was in the news this week. We had the Susan Rice memo indicting Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Sally Yates, James Comey and Susan Rice in a conspiracy to get Trump on Russia. You had information that the number four at the Obama Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, hid information on his relationship with the Clinton Campaign cash machine – basically Fusion GPS that was collaborating with the Russia[ns] to launch dirt or really defamatory dirt against President Trump into the FBI-DOJ apparatus. And now you have this indictment of Russians abroad, an indictment that’s never going to see the light of day in short of trial because they’re never going to come here. It’s never going to be tried. We’re never going to find out whether anything in the indictment’s true. And what would they rather be talking about? This indictment where they found, despite all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, not one American colluded with the Russians.
Why isn’t this Justice Department looking into the abuse of the FISA process? Look the Russians were trying to make it clear to the Clinton Camp that they had dirt on Trump and they were going to use it against him. And all of that was false. And Trump was victimized and the FBI, rather than trying to protect him, used it as a pretext working with the Clinton campaign to target him under the corrupt Obama administration. Look this indictment shows the Russian scandal is over as far as Trump is concerned.

by sundance (19 febr.)

A large number of people who read the Mueller 13-person Russian Indictment released on Friday noted a transparent lack of actual substance.  Today the absence of substance turns toward the hilarious.

h like the heavily touted sketchy 2017 Joint Analysis Report (the infamous “14 U.S. intelligence agencies report“) was really only three political intel agencies, FBI (Comey), CIA (Brennan) and ODNI (Clapper), Friday’s Russian indictment had a lot of pages and citations but in the aggregate was an assembly of nothing-burger reporting of various insignificant social media events.
Today the absurdity of the report becomes even more laughable.  As Gateway Pundit reports almost everything in the Mueller indictment was previously outlined in a Radio Free Europe report from 2015.   If that wasn’t funny enough, even the Washington Post finds the majority of the indictment was published last October in a Russian Business Magazine (RBC) article.
(WaPo) A 37-page indictment issued by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team on Friday brings fresh American attention to one of the strangest elements of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election: The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a state-sponsored “troll factory” in St. Petersburg.
But much of the information Mueller published on Friday about the agency’s efforts to influence the election had already been published last October — in an article by a Russian business magazine, RBC.
In a 4,500-word report titled “How the ‘troll factory’ worked the U.S. elections,” journalists Polina Rusyaeva and Andrey Zakharov offered the fullest picture yet of how the “American department” of the IRA used Facebook, Twitter and other tactics to inflame tensions ahead of the 2016 vote. The article also looked at the staffing structure of the organization and revealed details about its budget and salaries.  (read more)
So what exactly is going on here?  Is this entire narrative really just creating the illusion of something, anything, simply because something began… continued… and was really nothing.
Well, essentially, YES.
The reality of the weak-sauce structure of the indictment reflects the abject absurdity of the two-year-long enterprise known as the vast Muh-Russia’ investigation.  Essentially, a joint collaborative effort between the political intelligence community and their codependent media narrative engineers to manufacture a false premise.
Everyone should have noticed the actual missing substance from the 2016 Joint Analysis Report as it was enhanced an presented in 2017.  It was a goofy assembly of odd data labeling Russian hackers and such as planetary arch-villains.
Hillary Clinton herself started pushing it on August 26th, 2016, with Pickle’s Vast Russian Planetary Conspiracy Theorem. REMINDER:


We all laughed at the time, but where we are today is nothing more than what happens when the media, then government officials, follows the Clinton campaign’s pied piper.  Madness.
Abject absurdity.

Rob Rosenstein, plaatsvervanged Attorney General
Deputy AG Rosenstein: "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the [Russians'] conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election."

Smith

James George Tatras

Lee Smith

Zero Hedge, 17 febr.
‘It’s also worth nothing that not all of the money spent by the Russian operation was used to campaign for President Donald Trump. According to the Mueller indictment released Friday, Russian trolls also supported Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders and even planted seeds for leftist groups like “Blacktivist” and “Woke Blacks.” ‘

Paul Craug Roberts (17 febr.)

James Howard Kunstler
‘The beauty in Robert Mueller’s indictment of thirteen Russian Facebook trolls is that they’ll never face trial, so Mr. Mueller will never have to prove his case. In the new misrule of law made popular by the #Me Too movement, accusations suffice to convict the target of an investigation.’
[…]
I’m surely not the only one to notice how this hysteria is designed to distract the public attention from the documented misconduct among FBI, CIA, NSA, State Department officials and the leaders of the #Resistance itself: the Democratic National Committee, its nominee in the 2016 election, HRC, and Barack Obama’s White House inner circle. You would think that at least some of this mischief would have come to Robert Mueller’s attention, since the paper trail of evidence is as broad and cluttered as the DC Beltway itself. It actually looks like the greatest act of bureaucratic ass-covering in US history.

Mike Witney (19 febr.)
[…]
[Laatste alinea:] As I expected, Trump is going to save his own skin, but allow the “Bigger Lie” to persist. It looks to me that Trump may have cut a deal with his deep state antagonists to support their spurious claims of Russian meddling as long as they exonerate him on the charges of collusion. That means, he will NOT use his power as President to try to uncover the roots of Russia-gate fabrication. (that would probably expose the former Directors of the CIA and NSA and, perhaps, even the former president of the United States, who likely gave Brennan the greenlight to set the wheels in motion.) All of these suspects will go uninvestigated, unindicted, and unpunished just like the perpetrators of the Iraq War, just like the perpetrators of the Financial Meltdown, and just like the perpetrators of all the major crimes against the American people. As always, it is complete and total immunity for Parasite Class while the rest of us have to play by the rules. But you probably already knew that.
Trump will get off the hook while the rest of us languish in permanent ignorance of how the shadow government really works. You heard it first here.

Paul Craig Roberts (19 febr)

Corbet report
luister naar het begin, oud directeur James Woolsey en 

Zero Hedge (20 febr.)
A brief review:
·         The former director of the FBI has assembled a "dream team" of investigators for his Special Counsel probe and concluded that 13 Russians and 3 entities tried to meddle in the election after an entire year of investigation.
·         Those efforts had zero impact on the election
·         Facebook's VP of ads is on record saying "I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal
·         The same FB Exec noted that most of the ads were purchased after the election.
·         Suggesting that the real, underlying narrative is one of US media propaganda, he was then made to walk back his comments and apologize for his "uncleared thoughts
·         CNN is rooting around in the trash outside the troll farm.
And for all of this, Obama and Congress slapped sanctions on Russia, evicted two diplomatic compounds, and launched several Congressional investigations over.
Een commenter:
The United States, through a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) called The National Endowment for Democracy has spent over $27,000,000 since 2013 in Russia to “promote democracy”.

[…]
NED was banned in Russia as an undesirable international NGO in for "using Russian commercial and noncommercial organizations under its control... to declare the results of election campaigns illegitimate, organize political actions intended to influence decisions made by the authorities, and discredit service in Russia’s armed forces.
Former Congressman Ron Paul also argued against NED funding stating that NED has "very little to do with democracy. It is an organization that uses US tax money to actually subvert democracy, by showering funding on favored political parties or movements overseas. It underwrites color-coded ‘people’s revolutions’ overseas that look more like pages out of Lenin’s writings on stealing power than genuine indigenous democratic movements."
Investigative reporter and editor of Consortiumnews Robert Parry has characterized NED as a "neocon slush fund," whose founding was the brainchild of Reagan Administration CIA Director William Casey and its leading propagandist Walter Raymond Jr., then on the staff of the National Security Council. The idea was to set up an organization funded by the U.S. Congress to take over CIA programs that attempted to influence foreign elections by promoting the selection of candidates who supported U.S. policy and would "do what the U.S. government tells them to do.

David Stockman (21 febr.)
[…]
The lion's share of these postings and ads probably disappeared into cyberspace like the sound of a falling tree in an empty forest, anyway. According to Facebook itself, the seemingly ubiquitous social media ad campaign despicted in the indictment was nothing of the kind. It actually amounted to just 3,000 placements at a cost of $100,000---more than half of which were purchased after the election, and 25%of which ended-up in its dead letter office (unread).
In fact, RNC, Fox News and the Trump campaign were already saturating the internet with these messages, anyway----along with millions of pro-Trump social media activists. The 80 Russian operatives cited by Mueller didn't add one damn bit to the massive social media messaging that was already out there.
[…]
Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like. Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland [De gebouwen van de NSA], where 20,000 SIGINT spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing but troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys.

[…]

In that context, Charles Hugh Smith cogently reminds that the real farce in the Mueller comic book is that it is the ultimate case of the pot-calling-the-kettle black:
America's foreign policy is one of absolute entitlement to influence the domestic affairs and politics of every nation of interest, which to a truly global empire includes every nation on the planet to the degree every nation is a market and/or a potential threat to U.S. interests.
Assassination of elected leaders--no problem. Funding the emergence of new U.S.-directed political parties--just another day at the office. Inciting dissent and discord to destabilize regimes--it's what we do, folks. Funding outright propaganda--one of our enduring specialties.
Finally, as Pat Buchanan further observed in his post on the Mueller indictment, political and election meddling is what Imperial Washington does. And now we are surprised that others do the same - even that pathetic efforts of a Russian oligarch laid out in Mueller's ham sandwich indictment:

Reaction to Robert Muellers 13 Russian Indictments (AKA Underwhelming Farce) 


Finian Cunningham

 M.C. Matthijsen

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Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...