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The Durham Report and Russiagate


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Serious questions for the Education Forum.

Both sides can't be correct about this subject.

1) Was Trump's Russia-gate scandal a "hoax," as Trump, Trump propagandists, and Benjamin Cole have repeatedly claimed on this forum during the past two years?

2) Did the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump, as the Mueller investigation and GOP-led Senate Intel Committee concluded?

3)  Did multiple members of Trump's 2016 campaign team -- including his son, son-in-law, former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, et.al. -- meet with Kremlin officials (and cut outs) during the 2016 campaign, (e.g., Kilimnik, Veselnitskaya) to discuss hacked Emails, and U.S. polling data?

4)  Why did Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his December 2016 phone calls with Sergei Kisylak?

 

Meanwhile, the Durhan investigation was a four-year Bill Barr nothing burger that resulted in two dubious criminal charges and zero convictions-- contrary to the Republican spin in the M$M this week.

Edited by W. Niederhut
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9 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Serious questions for the Education Forum.

Both sides can't be correct about this subject.

1) Was Trump's Russia-gate scandal a "hoax," as Trump, Trump propagandists, and Benjamin Cole have repeatedly claimed on this forum during the past two years?

2) Did the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 U.S. election on behalf of Donald Trump, as the Mueller investigation and GOP-led Senate Intel Committee concluded?

3)  Did multiple members of Trump's 2016 campaign team -- including his son, son-in-law, former Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, et.al. -- meet with Kremlin officials (and cut outs) during the 2016 campaign, (e.g., Kilimnik, Veselnitskaya) to discuss hacked Emails, and U.S. polling data?

4)  Why did Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his December 2016 phone calls with Sergei Kisylak?

 

Meanwhile, the Durhan investigation was a four-year Bill Barr nothing burger that resulted in two dubious criminal charges and zero convictions-- contrary to the Republican spin in the M$M this week.

W--

Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, CJR, Kim Iversen, Chris Hedges, Michael Schellenberger, Aron Matte, Lee Fang, Saager Enjeti, Ryan Grim...the list goes on and on of independent journalists---none of them Trump supporters---who have correctly interpreted what happened in the Russiagate Hoax.

One M$M reporter, Bret Stephens of NYT, called Russiagate "an elaborate hoax." 

These are not MAGA people or Trump propagandists. 

Add on: You can call Kilimnik a "cut out." It may even be true. I doubt he was FSB, as real spies almost always operate under diplomatic immunity, for obvious reasons. 

When Russian citizens go abroad, and are asked by Moscow to provide information, they probably do. A good idea, no? Same thing for Chinese nationals.

Manafort said he did not know if Kilimnik was a Russian asset. That makes sense. People usually do not not identify themselves thusly, and say "I am a CIA asset," or "I am a FSB asset."  That is called blowing your cover. 

So Manafort had meetings with Kilimnik, who may or may not be a FSB asset (or an asset of some other alphabet soup agency). 

Then what? 

They discussed polling data? That is a national secret? If you are running a campaign, talking about polling data is probably compulsive. The polls were wildly inaccurate anyway. 

This confection of allusions and innuendoes called Russiagate is a typical government investigation, designed to reach an expedient conclusion and gut the opposition, assisted by a compliant media. 

There are "links" and "ties" and people who both belong to the same organization, so something fishy must be going on. 

Government investigations are like kangaroo courts--any "evidence" is admissible, and there is no defense counsel. The media loves it--of course, such investigative narratives are formed with the media in mind. 

Cuts both ways, btw. The GOP witch-hunt impeachment of Bill Clinton was an ugly farce also. 

In any event, water under the bridge.

The question now: Will RFK Jr. get Russiagated to prevent the opening up of the JFK Records?  

They would have done it to Tulsi Gabbard too. 

 

Edited by Benjamin Cole
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My reading of the Durham report is that the Russia investigation was begun without enough evidence to justify it. That does not mean that the investigation didn’t find evidence of collusion. 

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36 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

My reading of the Durham report is that the Russia investigation was begun without enough evidence to justify it. That does not mean that the investigation didn’t find evidence of collusion. 

Agree.

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1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

My reading of the Durham report is that the Russia investigation was begun without enough evidence to justify it. That does not mean that the investigation didn’t find evidence of collusion. 

It is worse than that. The whole Russiagate confection was Clinton campaign smear job. 

Worth watching. 

I can barely watch any of the TV talking heads for more than a couple minutes---left wing, right wing, whatever.  

Greenwald is smart and earnest. Somehow he is watchable. 

But the key point is not Trump: The key point is what happened to Trump what can happen to any non-establishment candidate, such as RFK Jr. (or possibly Tulsi Gabbard) 

They can get Russiagated. 

 

 

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So, Ben Cole goes 0-for-4 in answering my specific questions (above) about the Russia-gate facts, then simply repeats his alternate reality Trump/MAGA narrative about Russia-gate for the umpteenth time.

Ben and the MAGA media traffic in what Kellyanne Conway openly referred to as "alternate facts."

This illustrates a broader, more serious problem in American society nowadays.

Why is it that we are continually witnessing conflicting dual narratives in our media and social discourse about anything relating to Donald Trump?

Worth contemplating.

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2 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

It is worse than that. The whole Russiagate confection was Clinton campaign smear job. 

Worth watching. 

I can barely watch any of the TV talking heads for more than a couple minutes---left wing, right wing, whatever.  

Greenwald is smart and earnest. Somehow he is watchable. 

But the key point is not Trump: The key point is what happened to Trump what can happen to any non-establishment candidate, such as RFK Jr. (or possibly Tulsi Gabbard) 

They can get Russiagated. 

 

 

According to Greenwald the Durham report says that on July 26, 2016, CIA Director Brennan briefed Obama  and security officials, including the FBI, that the Clinton campaign had concocted a plan as a campaign tactic to stir up a scandal for Trump by claiming Russians were interfering in the election in support of him.
 
This was in the middle of the 2016 Democratic convention, which started on July 25.
 
I think there was a more specific proximate cause of Hillary's plan than just being useful in the coming campaign against Trump.
 
Wikileaks had just released a bunch of Hillary's emails, which showed, among other things how the DNC, run and financed by Hillary, had been systematically cheating Bernie in the race for the nomination.
 
Hillary and her staff  got together the weekend before the convention to discuss their response to the revelations that they knew would come.  Russiagate was born as the solution to their dilemma . 
 
I happened to be watching the convention when Clinton's campaign manager, Robbie Mook, appeared to answer the questions.  He immediately responded that the emails should be disregarded because Russia had hacked them from the DNC and given them to Assange. For that reason, he would not respond to questions about the contents. Which of course is a bogus answer if the emails were genuine.  Which they were. 
 
No matter, the ploy worked with the media.   Waiting in the wings was a gaggle of sycophants to amplify the story and suppress, as much as they could, the substance of the what emails showed. 
 
Later, when Hillary lost the election, Russiagate became front and center as a main culprit in her defeat.  And has led to an orgy of fear and hate towards Russia, unlike anything we've seen since McCarthy in the 1950s.  That just happens to fit the policy goals of the war mongers in both parties.
 
The emails, it turns out, weren't hacked by Russia or anyone else.  Had they been, the NSA, which monitored all emails from anywhere, would have known about it at the time, or at least had no difficulty identifying who did it.  Instead, they were *leaked* to Wikileaks by someone with access to them, presumably at the DNC.  
 
Ray McGovern and William Binney have explained how the emails were gotten several times in great detail over the years   Here is McGovern's latest with more detail, posted a few days ago. https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2023/05/08/no-one-hacked-those-dnc-emails-in-2016/.  And  https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/05/08/what-the-media-still-isnt-telling-you-about-russiagate/.
 
Russiagate was a hoax, originally built on another fabrication that Russians hacked the DNC emails. It has had many ancillary benefits for those claiming it.  One of the important ones is that it ties Assange in as one of the villains in the Russian plot to damage Hillary, helping to raise support for whatever the government wants to do to him.
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Roger O.,

   When did Veselnitskaya meet with Don, Jr. and the Trump campaign team at Trump Tower?  Any idea?

   When did Paul Manafort meet with Konstantin Kilimnik in 2016?

   When did the GRU launch their 2016 hacking operations on Trump's behalf?

   When did Trump and Manafort alter the GOP platform on U.S. support for Ukraine?

   When did Felix Sater first announce that Putin intended to put Trump in the White House?

    

 

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