The End of Russiagate

Aaron Maté
Le Monde Diplomatique

The former special counsel still has a lot he can clarify.

"For two years, Democrats have waited on Robert Mueller to deliver a death blow to the Trump presidency," The New York Times observed on July 20. "On Wednesday, in back-to-back hearings with the former special counsel, that wish could face its final make-or-break moment." The very fact that Democrats had to subpoena Mueller in order to create this final moment should in fact be the final reminder of what a mistake it was for Democrats to have waited on him. If Mueller had incriminating information yet to share, or had been stymied from doing his work, or if Attorney General William Barr had somehow misrepresented his findings, then it stands to reason that Mueller would be welcoming the opportunity to appear before Congress, not resisting it. The reality is that Mueller's investigation did not indict anyone on the Trump campaign for collusion with Russia, or even for anything related to the 2016 election. Mueller's report found no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, and even undermined the case for it.

That said, there are unresolved matters that Mueller's testimony could help clarify. Mueller claimed to have established that the Russian government conducted "a sweeping and systematic" interference campaign in order to elect Trump, yet the contents of his report don't support that allegation. The Mueller report repeatedly excludes countervailing information in order to suggest, misleadingly, that the Trump campaign had suspect "links" and "ties" to people connected with Russia. And Mueller and other intelligence officials involved in the Russia probe made questionable investigative decisions that are worthy of scrutiny. To address these issues, here are some questions that Mueller could be asked.

I should note that missing from my list is anything related to obstruction. This topic will surely dominate Democrats' line of questioning, but I view it as secondary and more appropriate for a law school seminar. The core issue of the Mueller investigation is alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign's potential coordination with it. The obstruction issue only began to dominate after it was clear that Mueller had found no such conspiracy. Although the report does show examples of Trump's stated intent to impede the Mueller investigation, the probe itself was unhindered.

There is also the fact that Mueller himself declined to make a call on obstruction, and even presented arguments that could be used to refute it. The obstruction section of the report notes that Trump was not "involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference." Although not dispositive, Mueller says that "the absence of that evidence affects the analysis of the President's intent and requires consideration of other possible motives for his conduct." In a joint statement with Barr, Mueller also made clear that "he was not saying that, but for the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice." Accordingly, I see no reason why congressional Democrats are so confident that Mueller found otherwise.

1. Why did you suggest that juvenile clickbait from a Russian troll farm was part of a "sweeping and systematic" Russian government interference effort?

The Mueller report begins by declaring that "[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." A few paragraphs later, Mueller tells us that Russian interference occurred "principally through two operations." The first of these operations was "a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton," carried out by a Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).  

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La-La-Land: US Media Cites Fake News Disinfo Site to Prove 'Russia' Behind 'Theory' Clinton Hitmen Killed Seth Rich

Sott.net via RT

The man who first reported on the discredited Steele dossier has a brand new conspiracy theory about Russia. The idea that DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed on the order of Hillary Clinton was invented by - guess who?

Yahoo News Chief Investigator Michael Isikoff, who is also the co-author of hit Russiagate book 'Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,' has a new example of how the nefarious Russians supposedly subverted democracy in the US. According to him, it was Russian intelligence that started a conspiracy theory about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich on July 10, 2016 during an apparent botched robbery.

The supposed Russian disinformation showed up three days after Rich's death on a website called WhatDoesItMean.com. Befitting of the site's '90s design, it is, well, a badly written thriller fiction about Rich trying to expose the corruption of the Clinton campaign to the FBI, and instead being ambushed by her hit team. It is complete with a gun battle "just blocks from the White House" - all based on a 'report' by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). 

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FBI Never Saw CrowdStrike Unredacted or Final Report on Alleged Russian Hacking Because None was Produced

Ray McGovern
Consortium News

CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department has admitted.

The revelation came in a court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump. Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness.

The filing was in response to a motion by Stone’s lawyers asking for “unredacted reports” from CrowdStrike in an effort to get the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. “The government … does not possess the information the defandant seeks,” the filing says.

In his motion, Stone’s lawyers said he had only been given three redacted drafts. In a startling footnote in the government’s response, the DOJ admits the drafts are all that exist. 

“Although the reports produced to the defendant are marked ‘draft,’ counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced,” the footnote says.

In other words CrowdStrike, upon which the FBI relied to conclude that Russia hacked the DNC, never completed a final report and only turned over three redacted drafts to the government.

These drafts were “voluntarily” given to the FBI by DNC lawyers, the filing says. “No redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors,” the filing quotes DNC lawyers as saying.

In Stone’s motion his lawyers argued: “If the Russian state did not hack the DNC, DCCC, or [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’s servers, then Roger Stone was prosecuted for obstructing a congressional investigation into an unproven Russian state hacking conspiracy … The issue of whether or not the DNC was hacked is central to the Defendant’s defense.”

The DOJ responded: “The government does not need to prove at the defendant’s trial that the Russians hacked the DNC in order to prove the defendant made false statements, tampered with a witness, and obstructed justice into a congressional investigation regarding election interference.”

Thousands of emails from the DNC server were published by WikiLeaks in July 2016 revealing that the DNC interfered in the Democratic primary process to favor former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders for the party’s presidential nomination. The U.S. indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents in 2018 for allegedly hacking the DNC server and giving the emails to WikiLeaks.

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Mueller Caught In Another Deception; Key ‘Russia Link’ Exposed As Informant For US, Ukraine

Zero Hedge

A Ukrainian businessman painted in the Mueller report as a sinister link to Russia was actually a “sensitive” intelligence source for the US State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian issues – and passed messages between the Washington and Kiev, according to The Hill‘s John Solomon.

Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was described on page 6 of the Mueller report as having “ties to Russian intelligence” – and was cast in a sinister light as a potential threat to democracy. Mueller completely omitted the fact that Kilimnik was working as an informant and intermediary between America and Ukraine, and subsequently indicted him for obstruction of justice.

Kilimnik was not just any run-of-the-mill source, either.
He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.
The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded. –The Hill

What’s more, the chief political officer at the Kiev embassy from 2014 to 2017, Alan Purcell, told the FBI that State officials – including senior embassy officials Alexander Kasanof and Eric Schultz, thought Klimnik was such a valuable asset that they wouldn’t mention his name in official cables out of fear that WikiLeaks would expose him.

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Bipartisan Support for Trump’s Aggressive Iran Policy Reveals the Hollowness of Russiagate

Whitney Webb
Mint Press News

In early May, MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow — known as one of the top promoters of the new Cold War and Russiagate in American media — emphatically endorsed regime change in Venezuela after she claimed that President Donald Trump’s hawkishness towards the South American country had changed, all because of a single phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. 
 
Though Maddow’s claims were arguably the most extreme in suggesting that Trump was “taking orders” from Putin on Venezuela, she wasn’t alone in making them. For instance, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks also made the claim that the Trump-Putin phone call on Venezuela was “direct evidence that he is literally taking orders from Putin.” In addition, several corporate media outlets supported this narrative by suggesting that Trump “echoed” Putin’s Venezuela stance after the phone call and directly contradicted his top staffers and even himself in doing so.

Yet now, strangely, those same corporate media voices remain silent on the Trump administration’s other regime-change project — in Iran — despite the fact that the Putin-led Russian government is set to be the biggest winner as tensions between the U.S. and the Islamic Republic boil over and threaten to send the Middle East into a fresh bout of destruction and chaos.  

As tensions between the U.S. and Iran have grown in recent months, analysts in both corporate and independent media have speculated about what country is set to benefit the most from the U.S.’ campaign of “maximum pressure” and regime change against the Islamic Republic. Of the many analyses, two countries have stood out as likely beneficiaries: Russia and China.

The cases for China and Russia’s benefit are somewhat similar given that the Trump administration’s focus on Iran results in less pressure on both Russia and China. This is despite the fact that, officially, the U.S.’ current National Defense Strategy explicitly calls for focusing attention on preparing for a “long war” against Russia and China to prevent either from superseding the U.S. as a global superpower. Yet, with the U.S. focused on regime change in Iran and Venezuela, Russia and China can avoid bearing the brunt of U.S. military adventurism, either directly or by proxy, while the U.S. wears itself thin by trying to do it all at once.

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Trump Targets UK, Australia And Ukraine Over 'Greatest Hoax In The History Of Our Country'

Zero Hedge

President Trump on Friday said that he wants Attorney General William Barr to investigate the UK, Australia and Ukraine for their roles in the 'greatest hoax in the history of our country.'

Speaking with reporters at the White House on Friday before his trip to Japan, Trump discussed his decision this week to issue a sweeping declassification order - leaving it in the hands of Barr to determine exactly what happened to Trump and his campaign before and after the 2016 US election. 

"For over a year, people have asked me to declassify. What I've done is declassified everything," said Trump, adding "He can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine." 

"It's the greatest hoax probably in the history of our country and somebody has to get to the bottom of it. We'll see. For a long period of time, they wanted me to declassify and I did."

"This is about finding out what happened," said Trump. "What happened and when did it happen, because this was an attempted takedown of the president of the United States, and we have to find out why."

"We're exposing everything. We're being a word that you like, transparent. We're being, ultimately we're being transparent. That's what it's about. Again, this should never ever happen in our country again."

After the Mueller report made clear that Trump and his campaign had in no way conspired with Russia during hte 2016 election, Democrats immediately pivoted to whether Trump obstructed the investigation. Trump and his supporters, however, immediately pivoted to the conduct of the US intelligence community, including the involvement of foreign actors and possibly their governments. 

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Russia-obsessed Journalist Plays The Victim Card, Demands More Social Media Censorship

Eino Virtanen
Sott.net

A group of self-identified 'fake news victims' recently published an open letter in Avaaz.org to social media giants and their CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Susan Wojcicki (Youtube). Their plea goes as follows:

"This week victims of disinformation from across the world have come to Silicon Valley to confront social media companies for the first time. The meetings were highly emotional, bringing social media employees to tears, as they came face-to-face with the human cost of the crisis fueled by their platforms. Following their meetings, these victims have issued an open letter calling for urgent action to stop the spread of disinformation and to recognize the deadly damage it can cause."

One of the 'victims' is Finnish mainstream media journalist, Jessikka Aro, who focuses almost exclusively on bashing Russia and Putin, and 'exposing the trolls in our midst'.

Aro became a visible 'Russia-expert' in Finland after writing an article in 2015 filled with wild speculations about the St. Petersburg 'Troll Factory', i.e the Internet Research Agency (IRA). In reality the IRA was revealed to be not much more than a low-level social media marketing (spamming) company with zero impact on the 2016 elections. Just as the whole Russia-collusion story has been proven to be false, the basis of Aro's journalistic career rests on similar outlandish conspiracy theories. Aro has won international awards for her work, and in March this year was set to travel to Washington and claim a $5,000 grant for winning the International Women of Courage Award issued by the US State Department, until it was rescinded because someone there came across her bashing of Trump as 'Russian agent' on Twitter.

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Wikipedia isn’t just spreading fake news about natural medicine; it’s also pushing the fake media’s lies about the Trump Russia hoax

Natural News

Though it pretends to be an unbiased source of factual information maintained by “the people,” Wikipedia has once again been exposed as a Leftist propaganda outlet for pushing fake news about the revelations contained in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

Dispelling all doubts that the site only spreads lies and misinformation about natural medicine, Wikipedia was recently caught pushing the myth that the Mueller report did “not exonerat[e]” President Donald Trump on the issue of obstruction of justice, even though Attorney General William Barr and deputy AG Rod Rosenstein both agreed that the report did, in fact, exonerate the Commander-in-Chief.

As revealed by Breitbart News, some Wikipedia editors on the Trump-Russia entry page actually referred to the bogus Steele Dossier as “evidence” of Russian collusion, even though that conspiracy theory has long been debunked as Leftist-contrived fake news.

According to reports, it was Newsbusters, a project of the Media Research Center, that first identified these problem on the Jimmy Wales-owned website, noting that many paTrumpges related to Trump and the investigation “had not been updated with the result or didn’t place it more prominently,” to quote Breitbart News‘s T.D. Adler.

“While many articles were eventually updated to include the results or place them more prominently in the article, they also criticized an effort to downplay or misrepresent Barr’s letter announcing the results,” Adler adds.

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Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America’s Real Foreign Agent

Philip Giraldi
Strategic Culture

Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior advisor to the president.

The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered “the full facts of Russia’s interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president’s cooperation with it.”

Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale and basically ineffective.

One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would be taking a very hard line against Moscow.

The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be sentenced tomorrow.

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Russia Releases Big 120-Page Report on Russophobia, Russiagate Hysteria in US

Sputnik

Numerous politicians, officials, political experts, and media outlets in the US have been pushing a narrative about an alleged conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Moscow for the past three years. Their speculations were cut short by the publication of Special Counsel Mueller's report - which indicates there were no signs of collusion.

The Russian Embassy in the US has published a comprehensive report on the three-year-long Russiagate hysteria, including comments from political figures and media personalities accusing Moscow of allegedly meddling in the US elections in 2016.

The embassy indicates in the report that this period has seen a "case of severe Russophobia" based not on facts, but on attempts by different groups to push an anti-Russian narrative in their interests with wild claims, such as an alleged conspiracy between the Donald Trump campaign and Moscow to "rig the elections".

The paper points out that following the release of the results of the 22-month investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, no reason remains to believe that any collusion took place. The embassy also indicated that no proof has also been presented on Russia's alleged involvement in cyberattacks on the US, despite numerous probes over the course of the last three years.

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See also:  Game Over, No Collusion With Russia - Trump on Mueller Probe

Mueller Report Reveals an Empire of Bullshit

James Howard Kunstler
kunstler.com

After two years of gaslighting the public while it blew smoke up America's ass, the Jacobin news media enjoyed its final feeding frenzy with the release of the 400-page Mueller report. They expected 1000 pounds of raw filet mignon, but it turned out to be tofu fried in olestra. The ensuing fugue of hyperventilating hysteria was also duly expected and William Barr stoically endured their hebephrenic peevings at the release ceremony - a press conference which itself offended the media.

The threats and raving continued all the livelong day and far into the peeper-filled night with CNN's Chris Cuomo blustering "It's time to rumble," and the lugubrious hack David Gergen muttering soulfully, "This was not fake news," and The Times' Maggie Haberman fuming that the White House had played the "Nazi anthem" Edelweiss - very fake news, it turned out, since the tune was written for Rodgers' and Hammerstein's 1959 Broadway show, The Sound of Music (and sung by the anti-Nazi hero Baron von Trapp). Meanwhile Rachel Maddow had the balls to confab in prime time with disgraced former FBI mandarin Andy McCabe, officially identified as a liar by his own colleagues at the agency. What a circus of perfidious freakery!

Understand that the Mueller Report itself was the mendacious conclusion to a deceitful investigation, the purpose of which was to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election, in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign, to derail Mr. Trump's campaign, and then disable him when he managed to win the election. Mr. Mueller was theoretically trying to save the FBI's reputation, but he may have only succeeded in injuring it more gravely. 

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Julian Assange exposed the crimes of powerful actors, including Israel

Alison Weir
If Americans Knew 

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange is incarcerated in a UK prison that has been called “Britain’s Guantanamo.” His crime was exposing actions the US government, the media, the Democratic–Clinton machine, Israel, and others wanted kept hidden, including war crimes and torture.

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has finally been imprisoned, an objective long sought by powerful parties he helped to expose over the past dozen years.

Assange’s “crime” was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the U.S. government, the media, the Democratic Party-Clinton machine, and Israel.

Wikileaks revealed the U.S. government’s cover up of torture, cruelty, the killing of civilians, spying on its own citizens and others. It exposed Democratic Party cheating and manipulation, the fraudulence of “Russiagate.” It unmasked Israeli plans to keep Gaza on the brink of collapse, to use violence against Palestinian nonviolence, to make war upon civilians. All of this will be detailed below.

Without Wikileaks’ exposés, many of these actions would quite likely have remained hidden from the general public, as the perpetrators hoped.

The actual charge against Assange is allegedly conspiring with Chelsea Manning “to commit computer intrusion,” violating a somewhat problematic law with what one expert terms “overly expansive wording.”

The government seems to have resorted to this charge after the Justice Department had concluded in 2013 that it could not charge Assange for publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs (which revealed various U.S war crimes detailed below), because government lawyers said this would also require charging various U.S. news organizations and journalists.

The Washington Post reported that Justice officials “realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem.’ If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.”

Even the current charge, when examined closely, turns out to be problematic on free press grounds. As Glenn Greenwald notes: “Assange is charged with helping a source preserve anonymity, a common practice by investigative reporters.”

Assange is being held in a maximum-security prison in London that has been called the UK’s Guantanamo. It has been used to detain alleged terrorists, sometimes indefinitely.

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RAY McGOVERN: Unaccountable Media Faced with Dilemma in Next Phase of Deep State-gate

Ray McGovern
Consortium News

Now that the media has been exposed for wrongly siding with the intelligence agencies, how will it handle Devin Nunes’s criminal referrals in Deep State-gate?, asks Ray McGovern.

Readers of The Washington Post on Monday were treated to more of the same from editorial page chief Fred Hiatt. Hiatt, who won his spurs by promoting misleading “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and suffered no consequences, is at it again.

This time he is trying to adjust to the fading prospect of a Deus ex Mueller to lessen Hiatt’s disgrace for being among the most shameless in promoting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. 

He is not giving up. When you are confident you will not lose your job so long as you adhere to the agenda of the growing Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT if you will), you need not worry about being a vanguard for the corporate media. It is almost as though Hiatt is a tenured professor in an endowed chair honoring Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who perhaps did most to bring us Iraqi WMD.

In his Monday column Hiatt warned: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls, which he openly sought and celebrated. But he did not (or so we are told) secretly conspire with them.” In effect, Hiatt is saying, soto voce: “Fie on former (now-de-canonized) Saint Robert of Mueller; we at the Post and our colleagues at The New York Times, CNN et al. know better, just because we’ve been saying so for more than two years.”

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Why the 'Intelligence Community' aggressively pushed RussiaGate conspiracy theories

Debra Heine
PJ Media

James Clapper behind John Brennan and Robert Muller

Why did anonymous members of the intelligence community and top Obama administration officials like James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan so aggressively push the Russia collusion narrative for over two years in the midst of ongoing investigations? Who does that? Why have these Obama alumni been so conspicuously loud in their protestations against the president?

"They doth protest too much," Monica Crowley explained in her Washington Times piece this week, as she fleshed out what many of us have been thinking from the beginning.

The best defense, the saying goes, is a good offense.

The key orchestrators of the Big Trump-Russia Collusion Lie seem to have hewed tightly to that tactical advice.

Over the past two years, one of their biggest "tells" has been their hyper-aggressive and gratuitous attacks on the president. Given that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation found no collusion or obstruction of justice, their constant broadsides now look, in retrospect, like calculated pre-emptive strikes to deflect attention and culpability away from themselves.

By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.

We now know that former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, are hip-deep in the conspiracy. Both wrote supposed "tell-all" books and carpet-bombed the media with interviews in which they regularly flung criminal accusations against the president. Whenever asked about their own roles, they reverted to denouncing Mr. Trump.

With Mr. Mueller's findings, Mr. Comey's and Mr. McCabe's media benders look increasingly suspicious.

As do those of their comrades in the Obama national security apparatus, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and his partner in possible crime, former CIA Director John Brennan, who, apart from former President Barack Obama himself, may be the biggest player of them all.

Every clip of Brennan fulminating against the president on MSNBC, every insufferable tweet from James Comey, and every pearl clutch from James Clapper on CNN should be seen with this in mind.

Because there is so much corruption and malfeasance to cover up.

For instance, The Daily Caller investigative reporter Luke Rosiak recently discovered a provision in a 2012 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court motion that expanded the FBI's ability to share information with foreign officials, laying the groundwork for the 2016 abuses against U.S. citizens. To put it bluntly, "the UK and Australia would be able to trade information back and forth with the U.S. about campaign workers who are American citizens." Like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, for instance.

Ace of Spades explained how it works:

Remember the US intelligence trick? They can't spy on US citizens without a warrant sufficient to clear the probable cause evidentiary hurdle. But if they tell foreign intelligence services to do the spying and slip the results back to the US intelligence community, they get their spying done by proxy, avoiding a judge's scrutiny and any intersection with the US Constitution at all.

Former prosecutor Sidney Powell told The Daily Caller that the language in the 2012 FISA provision was "very concerning." 

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“The Russians are Still Coming” “Without RussiaGate”: The “Fake News” Witch-hunt against the Independent Media

Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research

From one day to the next,  following the release of the Mueller report, the shaky RussiaGate consensus created by the corporate media has collapsed.  

What the Mueller investigation contends is that there is no proof that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential elections. 

The demise of the RussiaGate narrative, however, does not mean that the Trump administration will renew its relations with the Kremlin. “The Russians are still coming”… without RussiaGate. Russia is still portrayed as a threat to America’s National Security. 

In this regard, the objective of the Neocons has been achieved. The Trump administration, with its hawk team of  advisers including Pompeo and Bolton, not to mention Gina Haspel at the CIA, is towing the line. 

Corporate and Political Rivalries

The RussiaGate narrative was required to sustain the multibillion dollar contracts in favor of the military industrial complex including the 1.2 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program.

What was at stake in 2016 were fundamental rivalries within the US establishment marked by the clash between competing corporate (and political) factions, each of which was intent upon exerting control over the incoming US presidency.

In this regard,  Trump was not entirely in the pocket of the lobby groups. He was not a groomed politician. As a member of the business establishment, he had his own corporate sponsors and fund raisers. His stated foreign policy agenda including his “commitment” to revise Washington’s relationship with Moscow did not fully conform with the interests of the defence contractors.

Prior to the elections, a smear campaign was launched by the media on behalf of the  “Clinton faction”. At the height of the election campaign Trump was portrayed by the US media as  “an agent” of the Kremlin, a modern Manchurian candidate.  Barely a month before the November 8 2016 elections, former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leo Panetta  intimated that Trump represented a threat to National Security. The Atlantic (October 8, 2016),  described Trump is a “Modern Manchurian Candidate”. 

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It's Official: Russiagate is This Generation's WMD

Matt Taibbi
taibbi.substack.com

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief's independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no "presidency-wrecking" conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman's definition of "collusion" with Russia.

With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.

Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to congress summarizing Mueller's conclusions. The money line quoted the Mueller report:

[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as apposed to religious allegory, with Mueller cast as the hero sent to slay the monster.

The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing "All I Want for Christmas is You" to him featuring the rhymey line: "Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup."

The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller's reputation, noting Trump's Attorney General William Barr's reaction was an "endorsement" of the fineness of Mueller's work:

In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a "witch hunt," Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.

Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?

For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia "contacts," inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:

It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole...

This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting "We don't need to read the Mueller report" because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: "Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?"

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like itself made galactic errors by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to "history's judgment" on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a "witch hunt."

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller's final report might leave audiences "disappointed," as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you'd have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn't prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There's an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and...

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How the 'Illusory Truth Effect' duped millions into believing in Russiagate

Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com

"Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy", read the front page headline of Sunday's New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.

There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump's own family, leading seedy characters to "flip" on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller's sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they're coming around.

The question still remains, though: what the hell happened? How did a fact-free conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among mainstream Americans? How were millions of people persuaded to invest hope in a narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to be completely false?

The answer is that they were told that the Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over again by politicians and mass media pundits, and, because of a peculiar phenomenon in the nature of human cognition, this repetition made it seem true. 

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Russiagate skeptics rightly boast about being proven 100% correct

Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com

There is nothing more epic than a Youtube video by Jimmy Dore immediately after he has been proven right about something. It's thunderous. It's unequivocal. And it happens a lot.

"Now, I've gotten Russiagate right here," Dore said in a new video following revelations about the finalized Mueller report that there will be no further indictments, leaving the grand total of Americans charged with Russian conspiracy at exactly zero.

"I did that in my garage," Dore added. "Those other stations didn't do that. Not because they don't have the resources I have. They did that 'cause they didn't want to. They did that 'cause they weren't interested in the truth. They did that because what they wanted to do was fuckin' get Donald Trump so bad they were willing to turn off their critical thinking skills and just listen to their lizard brains. And they wrecked America in the process. And we stood up against it, and we got smeared for standing up against it, and we still get smeared."

"Congratulations to everyone here, congratulations to our crew," Dore said. 

"Congratulations to Ron and Steph and everybody, congratulations to Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal and Kyle Kulinski, and whoever else got this right; it's a small club, it's a short list. And we took a lot of slings and arrows for it, and we're still taking. People hate you when you out-left them. We out-lefted everybody, and we did it in the right way. And so congratulations to you guys, congratulations to myself, congratulations to this show, and thank God I didn't try to get into journalism school but I tried to get into comedy first. 
Because if I was trying to get into that club, I would be just as shitty as the reporters at the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN, and half the Youtubers, and we're not. We did a much better job."

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Caitlin Johnstone Rages: "Mock The Russiagaters. Mock Them Ruthlessly"

Caitlan Johnstone
Medium.com 

The Robert Mueller investigation which monopolized political discourse for two years has finally concluded, and his anxiously awaited report has been submitted to Attorney General William Barr. The results are in and the debate is over: those advancing the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government were wrong, and those of us voicing skepticism of this were right.

The contents of the report are still secret, but CNN’s Justice Department reporter Laura Jarrett has told us all we need to know, tweeting, “Special Counsel Mueller is not recommending ANY further indictments am told.” On top of that, William Barr said in a letter to congressional leaders that there has been no obstruction of Mueller’s investigation by Justice Department officials.

So that’s it, then. A completely unhindered investigation has failed to convict a single American of any kind of conspiracy with the Russian government, and no further indictments are coming. The political/media class which sold rank-and-file Americans on the lie that the Mueller investigation was going to bring down this presidency were liars and frauds, and none of the goalpost-moving that I am sure is already beginning to happen will change that.

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Top Mueller Prosecutor Weissmann Steps Down In Latest Sign Probe Ending

Zero Hedge

Andrew Weissmann, perhaps the ‘angriest‘ Democrat on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, is leaving the investigation and will return to the private sector, according to NPR, citing two sources.

Considered the “architect” of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – who was sentenced to a combined 7.5 years in prison for financial crimes related to his private business dealings, Weissmann will now study and teach at New York University. He will also embark on several public service projects, such as how to prevent wrongful convictions by improving forensic science standards.

As NPR notes, “The departure is the strongest sign yet that Mueller and his team have all but concluded their work.”

Weissmann – who wasn’t able to link Manafort to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has come under fire from conservatives for his extreme liberalism. He attended Hillary Clinton’s election night party in 2016, and was one of several officials told by then-DOJ #4 Bruce Ohr prior to the DOJ obtaining a FISA surveillance warrant that the ‘Steele Dossier’ was opposition research connected to Clinton and might be biased. Weissmann was the head of the DOJ’s fraud section at the time.

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