'Bigger than Iraq's WMD': The 12 fake news stories that form 'Russiagate'

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran

Examination of the evidence for every one of the 12 claims made about Russiagate shows that they are untrue.

As others have pointed out, June has been a cruel month for believers in Russiagate. I had previously expressed the view that it would collapse in early summer, ie. around now. Whilst that has turned out to be over-optimistic, the scandal is certainly sagging, what with the revelations from within CNN about the cynicism with which the scandal is being seen there.

I would add in passing that in Britain CNN revelations have been entirely unreported.

In any event, since the scandal looks to be sagging, and may be in the early stages of collapse, this seems to me a good moment to give a comprehensive overview of all the various claims which have made over the course of the scandal, and to see how they stack up. I will therefore deal here with them all, concentrating initially on the three which are by far the most important.
(1) The Russians hacked the DNC's and John Podesta's computers and stole the emails they found there

This is the original, central claim in the Russiagate scandal. Every other claim which has been made by its believers stems from it. Should it ever be proved to be untrue then all the theories which have abounded during the scandal, and all the claims of Russian meddling in the US Presidential election and of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, will collapse.

Not surprisingly believers in the scandal therefore insist on the truth of this claim. To deny it, or to express skepticism about it, is to open oneself up to charges of being a Kremlin stooge or a Putin apologist or - worse still - an agent of the Russian government. Unsurprisingly no political figure in the US is prepared to risk that, with even Donald Trump - the only politician in the US who has ever publicly expressed doubts about this claim - saying nonetheless that he still "believes" it.

In reality the evidence for Russian hacking of the DNC's and of John Podesta's computers is extremely thin.
No agency of the US government has examined these computers. The only examination of the computers which has taken place, and the only investigation of the hacking allegation which has been carried out, has been the work of a private company - CrowdStrike - whose opinions the relevant US government agencies have simply accepted as true.

I have never come across such a situation before, where a police agency bases its conclusions not on its own investigations but entirely on the opinions of a private detective agency.
 
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Pizzagate turned PedoGate Leads to Momentum Surge in Busting Global Child Sex Trafficking Rings

Joachim Hagopian
Sott.net

This article will examine the current status of the so called "Pizzagate" scandal. But from here on out this presentation will refer to it as PedoGate for several reasons. Pedogate involves global child sex trafficking networks that have been operating over a lengthy period of time, far beyond the WikiLeaks release of the John Podesta emails and his obsession over "pizza," and incriminating contents found on disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop leading up to last November's election. PedoGate also extends far beyond the so called Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Northwest DC that was last year's epicenter of alleged child sex crime activity resulting from an intensive online investigation linking Comet to the Podesta brothers, the Clintons, Obama and George Soros. And though virtually every business on that entire DC block located so close to the White House may well be [or have been] involved in a major Washington child trafficking sex ring based on substantive circumstantial evidence uncovered, PedoGate addresses the growing global epidemic of children being abducted from their hometowns and moved across both state and international borders for the purpose of sexual exploitation as victims of pedophilia, pornography, Satanic ritual abuse and even sacrificial murder.

With the internet age, 76% of pedophile sex with underage girls starts out as online contact. Of the estimated up to 800,000 victims of human trafficking each year, 76% are women and girls and 27% are children. When internally trafficked victims are included, the numbers jump to 2-4 million annually raped, beaten and tortured. Half of the worldwide trafficked humans within a country are children. In the global commercial sex trade, 2 million children are being exploited. Worldwide human trafficking has skyrocketed since 2012 with over 20.9 million victims.

At $32 billion a year, profit from human trafficking has even surpassed the total global illegal arms sales. Up to 300,000 US children are lured annually into the commercial sex trade. Of those exploited children, 14,500 to 17,500 are trafficked into America from other countries. The average age is 11-14 and the average lifespan of child trafficking is only 7 years with death caused by attack, abuse, overdose, HIV/STD's, malnutrition and suicide. Clearly, sexually exploited children have reached the global crisis stage.

Just prior to the election last year psychiatrist and longtime intelligence operative within the state department Steve Pieczenik has stated publicly that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are pedophiles having made multiple trips on their buddy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express to his Caribbean sex slave island.

Epstein is the most infamous case in recent years that links the Clintons, Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, Hillary's longtime aide. Multi-billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was investigated in 2005 in Florida, arrested in 2006 and convicted in 2008 of pedophilia, having to register as a sex offender after being convicted of having sex with underage girls. His mansion on his private Caribbean island, Little St. James in the Virgin Islands, has been the Lolita Express getaway destination for a number of high profile pedophiles who "partied," engaging in sex with child slaves. One victim said the mansion was wired with secret cameras in a number of rooms where recorded orgies and sex with minors are filmed for blackmailing purposes of powerful invited guests. In addition to the Clintons and Weiners, retired Harvard law professor and attorney Alan Dershowitz who represented Epstein and got him off with a sweetheart deal along with English royalty Prince Andrew and Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey are all known to have traveled on Epstein's private Boeing 727.

Veteran CIA case officer and US Marine Corps intelligence officer Robert David Steele maintains that Epstein has been a Mossad agent who was set up as a "made" financier to work on behalf of Israel to entice numerous high profile politicians both from America and abroad to his island, equipped with electronic monitoring in order to get the dirt on the world's major power players for potential blackmail and subsequent control. Department store tycoon and ultra-Zionist Leslie Wexler took a young Epstein under his wing as his mentor, and suddenly Jeffrey Epstein went from prep school math teacher and college dropout to owning Wexler's Manhattan East Side mansion and managing billionaire hedge funds. Epstein also employed media mogul-Mossad spy Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine Maxwell as his longtime girlfriend and closest assistant. As a Mossad agent Epstein was nearly overnight transformed mysteriously into a billionaire owning massive amounts of real estate properties in Palm Beach, NYC, his "Virgin" Island, New Mexico and a Paris apartment.

By capturing on video file the world's political elite in compromising positions as pedophiles, such pro-Israel senators as John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer are forever controllable and beholding to the Greater Israel Project, committed haters of Russia and Trump, and traitors of America. That way Congress and presidents are easily bought, sold and completely owned by the powers-that-shouldn't-be.  

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Trump is wrong - Saudi Arabia, not Iran is the world's 'number one terrorist state'

Jon Wight
RT

Donald Trump is proving himself a President prone to unleashing inconvenient truths side by side with blatant falsehoods. One of the most scurrilous of those falsehoods is his recent claim that Iran is the “number one terrorist state.” 

 

Throughout his campaign for the White House in 2016, and since assuming office in January, Trump has made Iran the focus of his ire, to the point where the Iranians are more than justified in preparing for the very real prospect of military confrontation with the US - and sooner rather than later.

The Trump administration’s consistent and ongoing demonization of Iran flies in the face of reality in which Iran has stood, alongside Syria, Russia, the Kurds, and the Iranian-backed Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, as a pillar against the very same Salafi-jihadist terrorism that poses a threat to the American people. It is a struggle in which the Iranians have expended both resources and blood in recent years, and as such justice demands that the world, including the United States, acknowledges that it owes Tehran a debt of gratitude.

In truth, and as most people are only too aware, the real number one terrorist state in the world today is not Iran it is Saudi Arabia, America’s friend, and ally. What is more, Washington has long been well aware of the fact. In a September 2014 email from John Podesta to Hillary Clinton (one of the many among the batches of emails exchanged between John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the White House, and Clinton that were released by Wikileaks) Podesta writes, “While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

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Establishment media goes nuts after Ben Swann airs segment investigating #PizzaGate - See the evidence for yourself

Brently Kopopolous
Sott.net

In this day and age the media itself has become a hot story. Back when reddit and 4chan investigators started digging into the leaked Podesta emails, they found something a little odd. Strange references to pizza, ping pong, and a little place in Northwest DC called Comet Ping Pong. Investigators then started browsing Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis's Instagram profile and found some rather disturbing images along with comments that seemed suggestive of a connection to pedophilia.

Shortly thereafter, the Washington Post broke a huge story with the headline: "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say" and immediately, anything the establishment didn't want to discuss became fake news. The timing here is worth noting: it was only after PizzaGate was gaining traction on the internet, connecting high-ranking democratic officials to pedophilia with their own words and their own pictures that the media started screaming fake news.

In an ironic twist, mainstream media outlets themselves then became the greatest purveyors of factually inaccurate news (Russia hacked the elections, Russia hacked a Vermont Electric Grid and Russia has blackmail material on Trump for a few examples) and in a stunning reversal, people all over the world began applying the term to outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN - the enshrined media mega-mouths with decades of history bringing news to Americans.

Clearly, they didn't see that coming. The Washington Post then decided it was time to 'retire' the term fake news, because heck, if the weapon you invented is working against you, you should try to get rid of it, and fast! But that hasn't seemed to work either. Once Pandora's box is opened, there's no closing it back up.

This brings me to the latest analysis of Pizzagate. Ben Swann, known for his hard-hitting, fact-full Reality Check segments on CBS and online did a piece in which he examined the evidence and discussed it as openly as he could on TV.

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The CIA's foxes are guarding the Facebook henhouse

F. William Engdahl
New Eastern Outlook

The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the "Pizzagate" leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called "Fake News." The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the "fact check" private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO's including George Soros' Open Society Foundations.

In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.

The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.

The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting "anonymous sources" who supposedly said the CIA "believed" Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent. 

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Unable to face reality: Hillary's sore losers

Diana Johnstone
Counterpunch

If the 2016 presidential campaign was a national disgrace, the reaction of the losers is an even more disgraceful spectacle. It seems that the political machine backing Hillary Clinton can't stand losing an election.

And why is that?

Because they are determined to impose "exceptional" America's hegemony on the entire world, using military-backed regime changes, and Donald Trump seems poised to spoil their plans. The entire Western establishment, roughly composed of neoconservative ideologues, liberal interventionists, financial powers, NATO, mainstream media and politicians in both the United States and Western Europe, committed to remaking the Middle East to suit Israel and Saudi Arabia and to shattering impertinent Russia, have been thrown into an hysterical panic at the prospect of their joint globalization project being sabotaged by in ignorant intruder.

Donald Trump's expressed desire to improve relations with Russia throws a monkey wrench into the plans endorsed by Hillary Clinton to "make Russia pay" for its bad attitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. If he should do what he has promised, this could be a serious blow to the aggressive NATO buildup on Russia's European borders, not to mention serious losses to the U.S. arms industry planning to sell billions of dollars worth of superfluous weapons to NATO allies on the pretext of the "Russian threat".

The war party's fears may be exaggerated, inasmuch as Trump's appointments indicate that the United States' claim to be the "exceptional", indispensable nation will probably survive the changes in top personnel. But the emphasis may be different. And those accustomed to absolute rule cannot tolerate the challenge. 

Bad Losers On the Top

Members of the U.S. Congress, the mainstream media, the CIA and even President Obama have made fools of themselves and the nation by claiming that the Clintonite cabal lost because of Vladimir Putin. Insofar as the rest of the world takes this whining seriously, it should further increase Putin's already considerable prestige. If true, the notion that Moscovite hacking could defeat the favorite candidate of the entire U.S. power establishment can only mean that the United States' political structure is so fragile that a few disclosed emails can cause its collapse. A government notorious for snooping into everybody's private communication, as well as for overthrowing one government after another by less subtle means, and whose agents boasted of scaring the Russians into re-elected the abysmally unpopular Boris Yeltsin in 1996, now seems to be crying pathetically, "Mommy, Vlady is playing with my hacking toys!"

Of course, Russians would quite naturally prefer a U.S. president who openly shies away from the possibility of starting a nuclear war with Russia. That doesn't make Russia "an enemy", it is just a sign of good sense. Nor does it mean that Putin is so naïve as to imagine that Moscow could throw the election by a few dirty tricks. The current Russian leaders, unlike their Washington counterparts, tend to take a longer view, rather than imagining that the course of history can be changed by a banana peel.

This whole miserable spectacle is nothing but a continuation of the Russophobia exploited by Hillary Clinton to distract from her own multiple scandals. As the worst loser in American electoral history, she must blame Russia, rather than recognize that there were multiple reasons to vote against her.

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Was the mysterious death of Andrew Breitbart connected with his investigation of Pizzagate in 2012?

ausbitbank
steemit

Andrew Breitbart was a journalist, author and tv personality as well as founder of the Breitbart News Network.

He has been a vocal critic of many US policies, and towards the end of his life he was focused on John Podesta.

This clip from the 2012 documentary "Hating Breitbart" shows the growing anger and resentment of Andrew towards John : 

"Coincidentally" this documentary is also being claimed to be "most (critically) hated movie .. ever" because according to RottenTomatos reviews it has a 0% score from film critics , but a 96% approval from regular users. That's a little weird.

If you'd like to see the full documentary yourself , you may be interested in these lucky numbers 460FD935E47A6189031D46E4F3A87BA53C1FD2B5 ...

This wasn't the only time Andrew had spoken out publicly against John Podesta, towards the end he got increasingly agitated and made some powerfull enemies in John Podesta, Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood and Media Matters.

He claimed he had video that would harm Obama's re-election, and that both Media Matters and John Podesta were involved in covering up a child sex trafficking operation, a full FIVE YEARS before the pizzagate story broke.

I'll try and dig up every related bit of information for these claims and archive them on the Steem blockchain. 

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