September 26, 2019, Strategic
Culture Foundation (Russia) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/09/26/from-russiagate-to-ukrainegate/
With the “Russiagate”
hoax proving to be the “most fraudulent political scandal in American history,”
as Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen puts it, now we have emerging an
alternative – “Ukrainegate”.
President Donald Trump
is being accused of abusing his White House office to put pressure on Ukrainian
counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to dig into alleged corrupt dealings by Joe
Biden, the top Democratic candidate for the forthcoming presidential elections
in 2020.
To make matters worse
for Trump, he is also accused of threatening to withhold $250 million of
military aid as a way to pressure
the Kiev authorities to investigate Biden’s
past relations with Ukraine, when he was serving as Vice President in the Obama
administration. That could amount to extortion by Trump, if proven.
Democratic political
opponents and the anti-Trump liberal media are renewing demands for his impeachment. They
are adamant that he has now crossed a clear red line of criminality by seeking
a foreign power to interfere in US elections by damaging a presidential rival.
For his part,
Trump denies his conversations with the
Ukrainian president were improper. He said he phoned Zelensky back in July to
mainly congratulate him on his recent election. Trump does however admit that
he mentioned Biden’s name to Zelensky in the context of Ukraine’s notorious
culture of business corruption. The American leader maintains that Joe Biden
should be investigated for possible conflict of interest and abusing the office
of vice president back in 2016 in order to enhance the business affairs of his
son, Hunter.
Trump’s phone call to
Ukraine hit the news last week when a US intelligence officer turned
whistleblower to allege that the president was overheard in a conversation
inappropriately making “a promise to a foreign leader”. The identity of the
foreign leader was not disclosed. But immediately, the anti-Trump US media
began speculating that it was Russian President Vladimir Putin. The keenness to
point fingers at Putin showed that the Russiagate fever is still virulent in
the US political establishment, even though the long-running narrative alleging
Russian interference or collusion collapsed earlier this year when the two-year
Robert Mueller “Russia investigation” floundered into oblivion for lack of
evidence.
Turns out now that
Trump’s telephone liaison was not with Putin, but rather Ukraine’s Zelensky.
And the anti-Trump politicos and media are getting all fired up with
“Ukrainegate” – as a replacement for the non-entity Russiagate.
Trouble is that this
alternative conspiracy could backfire badly for Trump’s enemies. Because,
despite the obsession with trying to impeach Trump, the renewed focus on
Ukraine raises legitimate and serious questions about the past dealings of Joe
Biden.
In March 2014, Biden’s
son Hunter was slung out of the Navy Reserve for his
cocaine habit. Then a month later, the younger Biden ends up on the executive
board of Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. This was all only weeks
after the Obama administration and European allies had backed an illegal coup
in Kiev against the elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Vice President Joe
Biden was the White House’s point man to Ukraine, supporting the new regime in
Kiev by organizing financial and military aid. Biden even boasted how he
personally warned Yanukovych that the game was up and that he better step down
during the tumultuous CIA-backed street violence in Kiev during February 2014.
“He was a dollar short and a day late,” quipped Biden about the ill-fated
president.
The appointment of
Biden’s washed-up son to a plum job in Ukraine should have merited intense US
media scrutiny and investigation. But it didn’t. One can only imagine their
reaction if, say, it had been Trump and one of his sons involved.
Moreover, in 2016,
when Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was conducting a probe into
allegations of corruption and sleaze at the gas company Burisma, among other
businesses, it was Vice President Joe Biden who intervened in May 2016 to call
for the state lawyer to be sacked. Biden threatened to withhold a $1 billion
financial loan from Washington if the prosecutor was not axed. He duly was in
short order and the probe into Burisma was dropped.
Potentially, Joe
Biden, the current top Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidency, could see
his chances unraveling if “Ukrainegate” is pushed further. The dilemma for his
supporters among the political establishment is that the more they try to beat
up on Trump over his alleged horse-trading with Ukraine, the more the heat can
be turned by him on Biden over allegations of graft and abuse of office to
further his family’s business interests.
Senator Lindsey
Graham, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is this week calling for an investigation into
Biden’s conduct in Ukraine.
“Joe Biden said
everybody’s looked at this and found nothing. Who is everybody? Nobody has
looked at the Ukraine and the Bidens,” Mr.
Graham told Fox News.
“There is enough smoke
here,” Graham added. “Was there a relationship between the vice president’s
family and the Ukraine business world
that was inappropriate? I don’t know. Somebody other than me needs to look at
it and I don’t trust the media to get to the bottom of it.”
Ukrainegate could turn
out to be even far more damaging to the Democrats. Because there is evidence
that it was the US-backed Kiev regime which helped seed political dirt on Paul
Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager. Manafort is facing jail time for
fraud and tax offenses unearthed by the Mueller probe. Mueller did not find any
link between Manafort and a “Kremlin influence campaign”, as was speculated.
However, because Manafort did work previously as a political manager for the
ousted Ukrainian President Yanukovcyh, he was seen as a liability for Trump.
Was Russiagate always Ukrainegate all along?
Apart from Biden’s
potential personal conflict of interests in Ukraine, the country may turn out
to be the key to where the whole Russiagate fiasco was first dreamt up by
Democrats, Kiev regime operatives and US intelligence enemies of Trump.
Ukrainegate has a lot
more political skeletons to tumble from the wardrobe. Those skeletons may bury
Democrats and their liberal media-intelligence backers, rather than Trump.
How Did Russiagate Begin?
May 30, 2019, The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/how-did-russiagate-begin/
Why Barr’s investigation is important and should be encouraged.
It
cannot be emphasized too often: Russiagate—allegations that the American
president has been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to
put him in the White House—is the worst and (considering the lack of actual
evidence) most fraudulent political scandal in American history. We have yet to
calculate the damage Russiagate has inflicted on America’s democratic
institutions, including the presidency and the electoral process, and on
domestic and foreign perceptions of American democracy, or on US-Russian
relations at a critical moment when both sides, having “modernized” their
nuclear weapons, are embarking on a new, more dangerous, and largely unreported
arms race.
Rational (if politically innocent) observers may
have thought that when the Mueller report found no “collusion” or other
conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, only possible
“obstruction” by Trump—nothing Mueller said in his May 29 press statement
altered that conclusion—Russiagate would fade away. If so, they were badly
mistaken. Evidently infuriated that Mueller did not liberate the White House
from Trump, Russiagate promoters—liberal Democrats and progressives foremost
among them—have only redoubled their unverified collusion allegations, even in
once-respectable media outlets. Whether out of political ambition or
impassioned faith, the damage wrought by these Russiagaters continues to mount,
with no end in sight.
One way to end Russiagate might be to discover
how it actually began. Considering what we have learned, or been told, since
the allegations became public nearly three years ago, in mid-2016, there seem
to be at least three hypothetical possibilities:
1.
One is the orthodox Russiagate explanation: Early on, sharp-eyed top officials
of President Obama’s intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI,
detected truly suspicious “contacts” between Trump’s presidential campaign and
Russians “linked to the Kremlin” (whatever that may mean, considering that the
presidential administration employs hundreds of people), and this discovery legitimately
led to the full-scale “counterintelligence investigation” initiated in July
2016. Indeed, Mueller documented various foreigners who contacted, or who
sought to contact, the Trump campaign. The problem here is that Mueller does
not tell us, and we do not know, if the number of them was unusual.
Many foreigners seek “contacts” with US
presidential campaigns and have done so for decades. In this case, we do not
know, for the sake of comparison, how many such foreigners had or sought
contacts with the rival Clinton campaign, directly or through the Clinton
Foundation, in 2016. (Certainly, there were quite a few contacts with
anti-Trump Ukrainians, for example.) If the number was roughly comparable, why
didn’t US intelligence initiate a counterintelligence investigation of the
Clinton campaign?
If readers think the answer is because the
foreigners around the Trump campaign included Russians, consider this: In 1986,
when Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination, he went to Russia—still Communist Soviet Russia—to
make contacts in preparation for his anticipated presidency, including meeting
with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. US media coverage of Hart’s visit was
generally favorable. (I accompanied Senator Hart and do not recall much, if
any, adverse US media reaction.)
2.
The second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending
pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin”
pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through
what became known as the Steele Dossier. As I
pointed out nearly a year and a half ago,
this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests
that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as
Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a
Russiagate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin
would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump
“information”? On the other hand, there
is plenty of evidence that “researchers” in the
United States (some, like Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign)
were supplying him with the fruits of their research.
3.
The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I
explore in my recent book War
With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is
that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy,
first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of
“Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has
said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous
remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.
The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by
apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan
Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk.
What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of
them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.
US Attorney General William Barr now proposes to
investigate the origins of Russiagate. He has appointed yet another special
prosecutor, John Durham, to do so, but the power to decide the range and focus
of the investigation will remain with Barr. The important news is Barr’s
expressed intention to investigate the role of other US intelligence agencies,
not just the FBI, which obviously means the CIA when it was headed by John
Brennan and Brennan’s partner at the time, James Clapper, then director of
national intelligence. As I argued in The Nation,
Brennan, not Obama’s hapless FBI Director James Comey, was the godfather of
Russiagate, a thesis for which more
evidence has
since appeared. We should hope that Barr intends to exclude
nothing, including the two foundational texts of the deceitful Russiagate
narrative: the Steele Dossier and, directly related, the contrived but equally
ramifying Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017. (Not
coincidentally, they were made public at virtually the same time, inflating
Russiagate into an obsessive national scandal.)
Thus far, Barr has been cautious in his public
statements. He has acknowledged there was “spying,” or surveillance, on the
Trump campaign, which can be legal, but he surely knows that in the case of
Papadopoulos (and possibly of General Michael Flynn), what happened was more
akin to entrapment, which is never legal. Barr no doubt also recalls, and will
likely keep in mind, the
astonishing warning Senator Charles Schumer issued to
President-elect Trump in January 2017: “Let me tell you, you take on the
intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
(Indeed, Barr might ask Schumer what he meant and why he felt the need to be
the menacing messenger of intel agencies, wittingly or not.)
But Barr’s thorniest problem may be
understanding the woeful role of mainstream media in Russiagate. As Lee Smith,
who contributed important investigative reporting, has
written: “The press is part of the operation, the
indispensable part. None of it would have been possible…had the media not
linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by
Clinton operatives.” How does Barr explore this “indispensable” complicity of
the media in originating and perpetuating the Russiagate fraud without
impermissibly infringing on the freedom of the press?
Ideally, mainstream media—print and
broadcast—would now themselves report on how and why they permitted
intelligence officials, through leaks and anonymous sources, and as “opinion”
commentators, to use their pages and programming to promote Russiagate for so
long, and why they so excluded well-informed, nonpartisan alternative opinions.
Instead, they have almost unanimously reported and broadcast negatively, even
antagonistically, about Barr’s investigation, and indeed about Barr personally.
(The
Washington Post even found a way to print
this: “William Barr looks like a toad…”) Such is the seeming panic of the
Russiagate media over Barr’s investigation, which promises to declassify
related documents, that The New York Times again
trotted out its easily
debunked fiction that public disclosures
will endanger a purported US informant, a Kremlin mole, at Putin’s side.
Finally, but most crucially, what was the real
reason US intelligence agencies launched a discrediting operation against
Trump? Was it because, as seems likely, they intensely disliked his campaign
talk of “cooperation with Russia,” which seemed to mean the prospect of a new
US-Russian détente? Even fervent political and media opponents of Trump should
want to know who is making foreign policy in Washington. The next intel target
might be their preferred candidate or president, or a foreign policy they
favor.
Nor, it seems clear, did the CIA stop. In March
2018, the current director, Gina Haspel, then deputy director,
flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order
to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly
did. Several
non–mainstream media
outlets have reported the true story.
Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of
this year, reported
it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.
We are left, then, with this paradox, formulated
in a tweet on May 24 by the British journalist John O’Sullivan: “Spygate is the
first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published
transparently but the media want to cover them up.”
This commentary is based on Stephen F.
Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of
The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.
Stephen
F. CohenStephen F. Cohen is a
professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and
Princeton University. A Nation contributing
editor, his most recent book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump &
Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook edition.
His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in their
sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com.
*Finian Cunningham: Former
editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written
extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several
languages
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