House Republicans––Stooges or Traitors?

Last night the New York Times published a remarkable op-ed written by Glenn Simpson (a former Wall Street Journal reporter) and Peter Fritsch, the clients for whom Christopher Steele, the former longtime British intelligence agent, assembled the so-called Steele Dossier.

The opening paragraph is particularly astute:

"A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

The Dossier has been targeted and rubbished by Republicans for many months because it casts their president in a bad light. Devin Nunes has recused himself from the House Committee trying to investigate the president's Russian entanglements but he has kept his hands on the wheel and he keeps pumping the brakes. He's not in the chair but is definitely running things. Nunes Recused himself unseriously, the way a film star says she doesn't want any attention. Nunes wants attention, hence the drama. He sometimes acts like he wants to be James Bond. His envy may explain why he despises Steele, who was a real James Bond.

The Republicans on the committee have been behaving strangely for over a year, sounding off like children desperate to distract Mother from their own misbehavior, blaming their playmates for the broken window. If there has been a witch hunt it has been Republicans endlessly hunting for evidence to justify burning Hillary Clinton in the public square, evidence that never emerged. They have fantasized about this auto da fé for over a decade in various committees. It is a vendetta. But the FBI doesn't go in for vendettas, so the FBI must be in the Hillary camp, or so the Republican drama queens say. There is a very large and dangerous bear loose in our country, endangering our democracy and our institutions and our national security, but the Republicans whose party spent decades hunting the Russian bear are off hunting rabbits.

It’s strange how closely one R’s agenda aligns with the agenda of the other R out there.

Republican motives and efforts and tactics and actions align very closely with Russia’s. We need to hear this stated more explicitly in news reporting. It is dangerous and disorienting when something so obvious and alarming is not stated clearly. People begin to doubt the obvious that isn't stated. Certainly we need to wait for and respect rules of evidence, but we need to stop hiding and ignoring what is staring us in the face. Distraction and obfuscation is the strategy employed by guilty parties.

Both the Russians and the Republicans want to discredit the Mueller investigation, both want to discredit witnesses testifying to serious crimes. Both Rs make perverse and inverse responses to things to which most Americans would see one clear set of responsible responses: get the truth, contact law enforcement, pay attention, take evidence, do the right thing. There is another apt term for what we need: Due Diligence.

Due Diligence is what Americans deserve from their political parties when they are putting a presidential candidate on the menu. Is he or she sound? Is he or she capable? Is he or she insane? Is he or she a criminal? Is he or she engaged in shady financial dealings with foreign enemies? During the selection process, and the convention, and the campaign, and the transition, the Republicans––notably Mike Pence who chaired the transition and Devin Nunes who worked on it––who were tasked with Due Diligence were not just undiligent, they were the opposite of diligent, they were carefully and aggressively ignoring every warning they heard and silencing the citizens who were warning them. Were they willfully blind and carefully ignorant, or were they obstructing justice?

Try to get your head around this––it isn't easy: When the Republicans in Congress heard people warning about Russian interference in our election, instead of seeking the truth they did everything they could to shut down and discredit the truth. They wanted to hide it. They wanted to shut up the witnesses. What investigators would logically see as a roadmap to finding and nailing the criminals the Republicans saw as a roadmap to protecting the criminals and nailing the people who were calling in the crime. And once the FBI took the warnings seriously they began discrediting the FBI.

The Republicans seem determined to arrest and prosecute people who are doing their civic duty to help protect our democracy from a foreign enemy... (Mr. Pence's Bible names False Witness as one of the ten gravest offenses against God.) How can being a good citizen be criminal or anything less than patriotic? But to listen to Jim Jordan and Chuck Grassley and Devin Nunes and others you would think testifying honestly about a dangerous crime you’ve witnessed is itself a crime. To listen to Republicans you would think the professional lawmen and women in the FBI were dangerous career criminals. (President Trump accuses law enforcement of crimes and accepts the reassurances of Vladimir Putin, one of the planet's most successful criminals.)

Imagine friends learned of organized criminal activity in your neighborhood and notified your elected officials and law enforcement. The law officers begin an investigation but the elected officials (Republicans) do everything they can to discredit the investigation and protect the criminals, using the evidence not as a guide to finding the criminals but a guide to help the criminals find the witnesses, your friends, and shut them up––the way criminals shut witnesses up, permanently.

How many key witnesses against Putin have died mysteriously in the months since this story began to break? We reasonably suspect the Russians are behind some or all of the mysterious deaths. We might ask: Are the Republicans also helping find and terminate or at least intimidate witnesses? Are the Republicans supplying a handy roadmap for the lawbreakers to help them cover up the evidence and derail the enforcement of our laws?

Why would they do this? It seems improbable that a major political party would actively collude with a foreign enemy, but until last year it was improbable that a major political party would nominate, run, and elect a president who our intelligence agencies and the FBI suspect might be in bed with the Russians. This improbability has been a useful cloak for what happened, the way a con man's plausibility and confidence and his nice suits and his nice offices and top public relations staff help to cloak his real business. People need to ask how genuine someone is before they hand him the keys and the nuclear codes. This is called Due Diligence and the Republicans failed to do it.

Now that they are implicated, and they are implicated beyond being plain fools, they must rearrange their mindset to justify what they have done. Republicans who once criticized Trump now praise him and protect him. Why? They have to decriminalize the dodgy things they've done ("That was his job," "Everybody would do the same thing.") They have to decriminalize the criminals they've thrown in with, and then criminalize the responsible behavior of their accusers. They need to make their treason into patriotism. Their accusers, who've done the Paul Revere bit by warning about the foreign threat, they have to recast as traitors.

The Republicans have realigned their policies and strategies and talking points to match their captors'. If you write down a list of Trump's achievements and the Republicans' achievements of the past year they could serve as a wish list for any of America's foreign rivals. Splitting alliances: check. Hollowing out America's global diplomacy: check. Alienating America's allies: check. Debasing America's standing in the world (in many western nations America's poll numbers have declined by as much as 70%): check. Cast doubt on the soundness of the dollar by loading the budget with large unnecessary debt as far as the eye can see (not to secure the prosperity of working Americans but to enrich offshore billionaires): check. Worst of all, perhaps, has been Trump's abandonment of the Paris Accords on climate change; climate change being listed as the #1 threat to American national security by the Pentagon and other agencies whose job it is to warn and prepare for threats. Check. The Republicans and the Russians appear to be working from the same set of plans to do the same kinds of harm to our country. Why would they do this? I've suggested two possible reasons: Blackmail and Bribery.

Putin is reputed to be the richest individual in the world. Most of that wealth having been looted from his own country. Putin placed these billions offshore in more covert ways than the ways American billionaires offshore their wealth. It appears Trump may have been one of his money launderers. But offshore billionaires do have shared interests and goals. This collusion would work like bribery but disguised as shared goals, shared values, simply doing business: there's so much money coming from Russia how can a rich person refuse to accept it when it's offered? Afterwards it would work like blackmail once the transactions became known and began to stink.

Regarding the Russian hacking of public comments on net neutrality and Wall Street fairness: it appears Republicans and Russian mobsters have matching agendas on these issues as well. An internet rigged to favor the very wealthy (and no one is richer than Putin) is easier for the Russians to hack. Unfair wealth markets are easier for the rich both Russian and Republican, to profit from by making the unrich easier prey. Both Rs, the Russians and the Republicans, are working against our national interests, so Americans need to be informed. Newspapers and all journalists need to report it. Connect the dots. Follow the money.

Is the FBI Biased? And Which Way?

Lest anyone think the FBI is biased against Trump…

A year ago, just before the election, the FBI put its big fat thumb on the scale to help Trump get elected by announcing a nothingburger* reopening of its Hillary investigation.

Why did they do this?

Why did they loudly announce unfounded suspicions about Hillary at the same time they were being alerted to genuine evidentiary concerns that Trump was in bed with the Russians?

And why did they keep the Russia worries secret while going public about the bogus worries about Hillary?

Stories from various news sources indicated that the FBI’s NY office had a “white hot” hatred of Hillary Clinton. Trump cheerleader Rudy Giuliani was selling this narrative as if FBI agents' bias against her was a good thing.

Today, a year later, instead of investigating a handful of honest opinions by one FBI agent, shouldn’t we be looking at the likely much larger number of anti-Hillary emails sent around inside the deeply anti-Hillary FBI in the run up to the election?

The week before the 2016 election SLATE reported that the FBI's NY office had a deep hatred of Hillary

The Guardian reported this on November 3, 2016:

"Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent."

Business Insider backed up the Guardian story, saying:

"Clinton is "the Antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel," they said. "The reason why they're leaking is they're pro-Trump."

This hatred for Hillary Clinton inside the FBI was the message we got via unreliable news sources like FoxNews. In 2016 Rudy Giuliani was broadcasting his inside dope from his old friends in the FBI’s NY office that all hated Hillary, apparently, and apparently loved Trump as much as Rudy did.

There was also the damning anti-Clinton story that was reported then retracted by FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal that same pre-election week. Both Fox and WSJ are owned by Rupert Murdoch and were not selected by accident to drop this false bombshell. It fed the anti-Hillary feeling that week. Retracted or not, it did its damage. The fuller story about this dirty trick collusion was reported in The Atlantic on Nov 4. The motive of the dirty tricksters was clear: destroy the Clinton presidency before it began. They ended up installing Trump instead.

Everyone blamed Comey for putting his thumb on the scale. Why had he done that? Reuters reported at the time that his hand was forced by the anti-Hillary partisans inside the bureau who planned to accuse Comey of hiding incriminating Clinton emails... which turned out not to be incriminating at all.

Mark Hosenball reported on Comey's dilemma in Reuters “FBI Director James Comey was driven in part by a fear of leaks from within his agency when he decided to tell Congress the FBI was investigating newly discovered emails related to Hillary Clinton, law enforcement sources said on Thursday.” The Atlantic summarized the bizarre twist this way: "There’s a peculiar logic to this course of action—the only way to stop an unauthorized leak interfering with the election is to turn it into an authorized annoucement!—but the suggestion that Comey is running scared is disconcerting."

Let’s see their emails? How biased is the FBI? Which way are they biased? Maybe all that we’re seeing and hearing is that the FBI has finally figured out they were played for chumps last year by the Trump campaign and the Republicans.

And by the Russians, by Putin, and Putin's spy agencies.

Maybe the FBI has discovered evidence of criminality by the Trump campaign and they are simply following it up. It looks like they are being more reticent about Trump than they were last year about Hillary.

*Re the 2016 Crooked Hillary Nothingburger: Because of the “white hot” anti-Hillary feeling in the FBI’s NY office you would expect anything of any substance that was found would have been made public. What they found may have been “irregular” or it may have simply been guarded and fearful of a law enforcement apparatus that disliked her. Perhaps they just didn’t like her attitude of defiance (some men despise that in women) but nothing was found.

In the ensuing year, after they went all out to find anything to nail Hillary with, might some people in the FBI in fact have bent over backwards to avoid nailing Mr. Trump? And mightn’t this bias have emboldened Trump and his officials to defy the law? Their laxity and evasions regarding full and truthful filings and statements seem to indicate a dangerous overconfidence, a sense that they are above the law or immune from it. Maybe the FBI has simply come to dislike the appearance that they are in Trump’s pocket, because they sense that Trump is in Putin’s pocket.

Putin's Plan For US

If a foreign enemy wanted to harm the U.S., wanted to knock us out of our dominant position in the world, what would they do?

The first thing they’d probably do is blind us so we can’t see what is going on in the world.

They’d make us mute so we couldn’t assert ourselves or persuade other nations to find common cause.

That is what has been happening this past year under the Trump presidency.

VOX reports on what Trump is doing to our State Department

Rachel Maddow reporting on the same story

Rachel Maddow has been telling this story for months now. (Her report back in March) Trump’s degradation of our State Dept, our eyes and ears and voice in the world, is exactly what a foreign enemy would want done if they wanted to knock us out of our leadership position in the world, wanted to make us impotent.

Why are so many people becoming a obsessively focused on the Russia story? Because it fits what is happening. It explains what is happening. The puzzling events of this past year make more sense when you acknowledge this unthinkable possibility.

As the Russia connections among Trump appointees multiply you begin to realize this is the kind of administration Putin would appoint––if we let Putin appoint our government…

Politico lays out the web of Trump/Russia connections

CNN describes the cast of characters

The #2 post in the Executive Branch is the Secretary of State. Trump appointed Rex Tillerson, whose most notable accomplishment was his recent mega oil deal with Putin. For which Putin gave him Russia’s most prestigious medal. Tillerson’s oil deal was iced after Putin invaded Ukraine. Is this Tillerson’s main motive for taking the post? If Putin wanted to appoint our Secretary of State I think he would have picked Rex Tillerson. Someone who shares his, Putin’s, interests and goals.

It goes beyond Tillerson. The Secretary of Commerce is Wilbur Ross, co-owner of the Russian oligarchy’s favorite money laundering bank, a business partner with Putin’s son-in-law. Wilbur Ross's Russia connection via the Guardian

Trump’s campaign was run during the key period where he won nomination by Paul Manafort, who earned millions advancing Putin’s interests, including switching a plank in the party platform that armed independent Ukraine with one that didn’t. Manafort earned his Russian millions strategizing for pro-Russians in Ukraine hoping to return Ukraine to the Russian empire.

There are more, officials high and low, some of them pro-Russian, some simply eager to do things the Russians would love to see us do to ourselves. Degrading education, degrading our environment, degrading alliances, breaking agreements, sowing disunity abroad and at home, abandoning key strategies like the ones opposing climate change (our military has called climate change our biggest current and future threat globally.) Putin has to be enormously pleased at all the stupid shit we are doing to ourselves. He must be astonished that our president and his team are happy to oblige.

Did Putin appoint the president and his team?

Why were the Republicans cool with this?

The Ballad of Sam Clovis via NYMagazine

The sorry saga of Jared's Russia complicity from the Atlantic

From MSNBC, the long story of Trump's Russia connections

Russiagate Is Like Rosemary's Baby

The Trump presidency, with all of its bizarre manifestations and plot twists, has made Americans feel like we are watching a familiar movie.

A horror movie.

Appropriately enough, since the president is a sexual predator, it's a horror movie directed by a sexual predator.

It's Rosemary's Baby. We are all living in Rosemary's Baby, all living in creepy apartments at the Dakota, listening for the tiptoeing of witches, or is it Russians?

Here is a useful Who's Who...

The White House is the Dakota Apartment House.

Trump is Guy Woodhouse who sells his wife to Satan for greater fame and financial gain.

Putin is Beelzebub/Satan.

Roman Castevet is either Steve Bannon or Paul Manafort.

Kellyanne Conway is Minnie Castevet, played by Ruth Gordon without the charm.

Jeff Sessions is the absentminded witch played by Patsy Kelly. (Sarah Huckabee Sanders is understudy.)

General Flynn is Dr. Sapirstein.

Sebastian Gorka, Stephen Miller, Omarosa Manigault, Jared Kushner, Melania, Ivanka, Roger Stone, Donald Jr., Carter Page, etc. play all the other devil-worshippers in the room at the end...

Actually the whole Republican Party is in that room. (This new version of Rosemary's Baby really needs to be a cable series, there are so many wonderful parts. I see crowd scenes filled with Nazis carrying tiki torches. And everybody at FoxNews should have cameos. Not sure who should get William Castle's cameo as the guy waiting for the pay phone.)

Ben Carson is Dr. Bombay and is obviously in the wrong story.

Soviet ambassador/spymaster/bullfrog manquée Kislyak is Dr. Shand.

Jeb Bush is Donald Baumgart (the actor who goes blind to advance Guy Woodhouse’s career.)

James Comey is Dr. Hill (the naive "good guy" who unwittingly hands Rosemary back to the Satanists.)

Mr. Nicklas (Elisha Cook Jr.) is played interchangeably by the major network anchors.

Barack Obama is Rosemary's loyal friend Hutch, who the Satanists are determined to rub out.

Hillary is Rosemary’s friend Terry who gets thrown out of an upstairs window (very Russian.)

Neil Gorsuch, as far as I can tell, is the baby. (What have they done to his eyes?)

We are Rosemary.

Follow The Rubles, Follow The Lies

Follow the Money. The key to what the Russians wanted might be found in the firing of Preet Bharara and the quick settlement of the Prevezon case after the firing, on Russia’s terms. (Their words.) The motivation supplied to Trump came in over a decade of many millions of rubles pouring into Trump Inc.

A VOX interview with a Russia Expert who says the answer is in the money that changed hands. Russian money kept Trump from being a business failure.

Follow the Kompramat: apparently much of the Steel Dossier Republicans are trying to discredit has already been corroborated.

The article on SLATE

(By the way, it wasn’t created at the request of or by Democrats. It was commissioned by Republicans, created by a respected former MI6 professional and handed to the FBI by a top Republican, John McCain.)

The Facebook aspect of Russian spying, explained by POLITICO.

Non-Linear Warfare and the Russians:

A short video on Vladislav Surkov, Putin's magician

The inventor of non-linear warfare––Vladislav Surkov, a profile in The Atlantic.

If a foreign enemy wanted to destroy the U.S. this is how they might do it. Worst case scenario laid out in The Atlantic. And in fact, it is a worst case scenario. Install a presidency whose intention is to degrade and destroy all of our democratic systems, all of our safeguards, all of our laws, all of our public trust, all of our global standing. Mission Accomplished!

If Putin or anyone wanted to destroy faith in our president they couldn’t pick a better liar to install than Donald Trump, liar par excellence. He’s been lying for decades about his Russian connections and his Russian money flow.

From David Corn at Mother Jones

"R" Is For Russian. "R" is for Republican

Important reporting from Reuters shows a strategy of coverup by the Republicans

According to the latest reporting by Reuters, Devin Nunes (the recused chair of the House Intel Committee) is still very unrecusedly busy trying to derail any and all investigations into the ways Russia hacked our election. His approach is very Republican: if he can make sure Americans don’t learn about what happened that will mean nothing happened. Nunes’ strategy is to project blame onto officials in the Obama administration who correctly and in line with standing protocols and procedures, asked a special panel for the names of the Americans who were discovered talking with Russian agents during the campaign. They sought to know because it was their job to protect American democracy and they followed the rules in doing so.

Nunes’ theory is simple and simpleminded: Until it becomes known that Americans were colluding with a foreign enemy Nunes believes he can insist no Americans were colluding. Until the colluding Americans are known by name, Nunes can say they don’t exist and the conversations never took place. And how dare these professionals in the Obama administration seek to learn who those people were! In Nunes’ mind it isn’t criminal to collude with a foreign enemy, but it is criminal to investigate that collusion.

The Republican idea is that wrongdoing isn’t the problem, Americans knowing about the wrongdoing is the problem.

What we don’t know can’t hurt them.

Republicans look back at all previous Republican White House scandals in a different way than most of us do: the faked criteria for the Iraq War; the outing of CIA agent because her husband disclosed the truth; Iran Contra, where the Reagan White House illegally traded weapons with Islamic terrorists to arm our own terrorists in Central America; all the way back to Watergate. They all have one main idea: keeping Americans in the dark.

They see Watergate not as a broad criminal conspiracy and a stain on American democracy; Republicans see Watergate as a failed coverup. If it had been properly covered up there would have been no problem. Undiscovered crimes are not crimes just as covering up industrial causes of climate change means that those causes do not exist. Serious problems are not serious or even problems as long as Americans do not know about them. This is called whitewashing. This is coverup pure and simple.

On the day after 9/11 we need to understand that America is again under attack. Not by terrorists in airliners but by Russians and their American proxies trying to destroy our democracy.

Politico describes what's known as the Gerasimov Doctrine, the Russian attack plan which put Trump into the White House.

"In 2013 General Valery Gerasimov—Russia’s chief of the General Staff, comparable to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare—one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. He wrote: “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness. … All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character.””

The Daily Beast explains how Trump's and Russia' Facebook strategy had such a powerful cascading effect on the election.

"On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, revealed that Russia had “likely” used 470 fake accounts to buy about $100,000 worth of advertising promoting “divisive social and political messages” to Americans. It was Facebook’s first public acknowledgment of the role it unwittingly played in the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaign. Stamos’ statement was also conspicuous by what it omitted: Facebook has refused to release the ads. More significant, it hasn’t said what kind of reach Russia attained with its ad buy.
"There may be a reason for that. On the surface, $100,000 is small change in contemporary national politics, and 3,000 ads sounds like a drop in the pond when Facebook boasts 2 billion monthly users. But it turns out $100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times.

"But that average hides a lot of complexity, and the actual rate can range from $1 to $100 for 1,000 impressions on an ad with pinpoint targeting. Virality matters, too. Ads that get more shares, likes, and comments are far cheaper than boring ads that nobody likes, and ads that send users to Facebook posts instead of third-party websites enjoy an additional price break. Finally, there are network effects, which can vastly multiply the number of users who see a promoted Facebook post."


What makes this especially interesting is the striking similarity between Russia’s strategy of relying on Facebook and Trump’s own strategy. Trump’s campaign used ONLY ads on Facebook. Russia and Trump shared that strategic focus.

The question now is: Were Russia’s Facebook attacks guided by Trump’s own intel. Or were they both directed by intel and analysis from another player in the Trump fold? (Was it, perhaps Cambridge Analytica?)

Further analysis from Medium on how the Facebook strategy weaponized social media for the Russians and the Republicans

"There may be some fake news on Facebook, but the power of the Facebook advertising platform to influence voters is very real. This is the story of how the Trump campaign used data to target African Americans and young women with $150 million dollars of Facebook and Instagram advertisements in the final weeks of the election, quietly launching the most successful digital voter suppression operation in American history.

"Throughout the campaign, President-Elect Donald J. Trump shrewdly invested in Facebook advertisements to reach his supporters and raise campaign donations. Facing a short-fall of momentum and voter support in the polls, the Trump campaign deployed its custom database, named Project Alamo, containing detailed identity profiles on 220 million people in America.

“With Project Alamo as ammunition, the Trump digital operations team covertly executed a massive digital last-stand strategy using targeted Facebook ads to ‘discourage’ Hillary Clinton supporters from voting. The Trump campaign poured money and resources into political advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, the Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook data-broker partners."

More analysis from WIRED. Both of these articles came right on the heels of the election when it became clear how the gambit had succeeded but details remained unclear or were undisclosed because they were part of ongoing intelligence investigations.

The Firehose of Falsehood

"Trump’s chronic duplicity may be pathological, as some experts have suggested. But what else might be going on here? In fact, the 45th president’s stream of lies echoes a contemporary form of Russian propaganda known as the 'Firehose of Falsehood.'"

It's got a NAME. Firehose of Falsehood. Start using that phrase. From MotherJones

There are whole armies and battalions of lies being deployed in all directions with the goal of overwhelming our sense of reality. Besides the daily false denials of offenses they perpetrated the day before, there is the all-important counter narrative. (If you are up against a highly qualified opponent accuse that opponent, baselessly, outrageously, of running a child pornography operation out of a mom-and-pop pizza restaurant.)

The new counter narrative they have invented to oppose the Russian collusion story, which is based on evidence, is a bogus story claiming a murdered 23 year old Democrat was behind the election hack. It appears this bogus and offensive counter narrative was cooked up with the full complicity and supervision of the White House.

From the Daily Beast

"The White House and Fox’s motivation to push the false story was to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation, Wheeler claims in the lawsuit.

“One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails and there was no collusion like [T]rump with the Russians,” Butowsky allegedly wrote in emails to Fox News producers and anchors promoting the piece."

False Narratives Are Part Of The FoxNews Brand

Ari Melber's interview with the private investigator who is suing FoxNews reveals key details about how FoxNews and the Trump White House tried to fabricate an alternate narrative to distract from the looming Russia collusion scandal.

This is how the Murdoch companies work. They see political advantage for the Right in distorting and corrupting legitimate investigations and exploiting real tragedies to do this. In this case it appears the goal was to discredit the investigations into Trump collusion with the Russians.

While Trump complains that our legitimate news media fabricates “fake news” the real fake news industry is based at FoxNews and appears to be working under the close direction of this White House.

Bill Moyers lists some of the other false narratives cooked up by the Right to confuse the public.

The Hill reports on Trump's very own news program, loyally and cheerfully and blandly and blondely reported by his blonde daughter-in-law, who is married to his blond son. "Bow! Bow! To the Daughter-In-Law-Elect!" ~The Mikado

A free society with a functioning democracy relies on the existence of a vigorous and honest press to guarantee the public has good information, that the public can trust its information, that the public can trust they are not being tricked or deceived.

But in Trump World honest news is the enemy. They have created what Orwell warned us about: a dictatorship of lies, in which the Truth is called a lie and the regime’s own self-manufactured Big Lies are fed to the public as gospel.

The Murdoch media and the Trump White House see news media as a political tool and a political weapon, divorced from truth and reality. Because truth and reality endanger the Trump regime. Because truth and reality undermine their power.

Because the Trump regime holds this cynical belief they think everyone else does too, that their opponents are just as cynical and dishonest. They cheat because they believe everyone cheats. They lie because they believe everyone lies. Of course every story that embarrasses Trump or the Republicans must be a lie.

Remember, FoxNews was originally dreamed up in the Nixon White House, the brainchild of Roger Ailes, then a Nixon staffer. Dishonest beginnings.

Ailes wanted to call it GOP-TV: a news source where everything was Republican spin and every story was a Republican weapon. When Rupert Murdoch learned about it he loved it. He put it together in the mid-90s as FoxNews and put Ailes in charge. The goal: to discredit and destroy the Clintons and the Clinton presidency.

There is a clear pattern here. The Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory resembles the fixation about Benghazi but ultimately harks back to the never-ending tabloid accusations that the Clintons had murdered their close friend and White House staffer Vince Foster. The story was pushed for years, not in the form of actual facts but with Fox personalities asking leading questions about Vince Foster’s death, substantiating the unfounded speculation, not with any evidence, but by raising their eyebrows and nodding. This was also the method used to charge and prosecute Hillary Clinton in the media for the “murder" of ambassador Chris Stevens. FoxNews kept the false narrative alive and Trey Gowdy and Darryl Issa’s inquisition in Congress kept the viewers glued to FoxNews. This is how the Murdoch press operates, carefully coordinated with the right wing faction in Washington. A poisonous symbiotic relationship.

Meanwhile innocent people are incriminated unfairly and grieving families are victimized.

In the UK, remember, the Murdoch press distorted and corrupted the Scotland Yard investigation of the murder of a young girl, hacking into the dead girl’s phone and preying on the grief of the girl’s parents. Frontline covered the Murdoch phone hacking scandal in detail on PBS.

Russiagate: Do We Follow the Money or Follow the Dead Bodies?

Follow the Money:

From USAToday (middle America's newspaper) there's this story about Trump's fear that his finances will be looked into. It's a rational fear, but it's making him irrational.

"The [Mueller] investigation could shine renewed light on eyebrow-raising deals from Trump’s past, such as his 2008 sale of a South Florida mansion to Russian tycoon Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million or the international financing behind a condo-hotel he developed with foreign partners in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

"It could also pierce the increasing secrecy around who is buying real estate from Trump. A USA TODAY investigation last month revealed that 70% of Trump real estate sales since he won the GOP nomination were to secretive shell companies, compared to 4% in the two years before that. The clear shift to those kinds of purchases, which help obscure the identities of the buyers, raise questions about the source of profits that ultimately flow to the President because he has not fully divested from his companies."

There's also this USAToday story about Trump's financial dealings and the cookie crumbs leading to Moscow.

Follow the Dead Bodies:

From BuzzFeed, there is this story about the latest murder of a witness before he could testify in the Russia investigation.

"Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was murdered in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death.

"Mikhail Lesin’s battered body was discovered in his Dupont Circle hotel room on the morning of Nov. 5, 2015, with blunt-force injuries to the head, neck, and torso. After an almost yearlong "comprehensive investigation," a federal prosecutor announced last October that Lesin died alone in his room due to a series of drunken falls “after days of excessive consumption of alcohol.” His death was ruled an "accident," and prosecutors closed the case.

"But the two FBI agents — as well as a third agent and a serving US intelligence officer — said Lesin was actually bludgeoned to death. None of these officials were directly involved in the government’s investigation, but they said they learned about it from colleagues who were.

"“Lesin was beaten to death,” one of the FBI agents said. “I would implore you to say as much. There seems to be an effort here to cover up that fact for reasons I can't get into.”"

This article from The Atlantic covers the testimony of William Browder regarding the murder-in-custody of his lawyer, which prompted the Magnitsky Act sanctions in the first place.

"There are approximately ten thousand officials in Russia working for Putin who are given instructions to kill, torture, kidnap, extort money from people, and seize their property. Before the Magnitsky Act, Putin could guarantee them impunity and this system of illegal wealth accumulation worked smoothly. However, after the passage of the Magnitsky Act, Putin’s guarantee disappeared. The Magnitsky Act created real consequences outside of Russia and this created a real problem for Putin and his system of kleptocracy.

"For these reasons, Putin has stated publicly that it was among his top foreign policy priorities to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to prevent it from spreading to other countries. Since its passage in 2012, the Putin regime has gone after everybody who has been advocating for the Magnitsky Act.

"One of my main partners in this effort was Boris Nemtsov. Boris testified in front of the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, the Canadian Parliament, and others to make the point that the Magnitsky Act was a “pro-Russian” piece of legislation because it narrowly targeted corrupt officials and not the Russian people. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov was murdered on the bridge in front of the Kremlin.

"Boris Nemtsov’s protégé, Vladimir Kara-Murza, also traveled to law-making bodies around the world to make a similar case. After Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, was added to the Magnitsky List in December of 2016, Vladimir was poisoned. He suffered multiple organ failure, went into a coma and barely survived.

"The lawyer who represented Sergei Magnitsky’s mother, Nikolai Gorokhov, has spent the last six years fighting for justice. This spring, the night before he was due in court to testify about the state cover up of Sergei Magnitsky’s murder, he was thrown off the fourth floor of his apartment building. Thankfully he survived and has carried on in the fight for justice."

And while Putin is whacking witnesses and Trump is trying to kill investigations, the Republican apparatus is busy cooking up bogus stories like the one Seth Rich's family is filing suit over. Any time there is a murder the Right will seek to pin it on Democrats.

Trump admires Putin. Trump envies Putin for his ability to assert power however he wishes. Putin is Trump’s role model. Trump would like to change America to make it more like Russia, more of a brutal autocracy in which the elite loots the nation’s wealth and evades the taxes everyone else pays. So what else is new? We already knew all this. Trump has planned all along to turn the United States into a kleptocracy.

A new piece from VOX about Trump's plans for American kleptocracy.

Putin’s Russia is not a free market economy but a kleptocracy, in which Putin skims billions off of every transaction and every deal, in which nobody has wealth or power without Putin taking his cut. What happens to this massive wealth is not good for Russians because it is parked offshore. A lot of it appears to have been laundered through high end real estate transactions here in the U.S., some of them via Trump and Kushner and their associates. (Trumps Commerce Secretary owned and ran a Cypriot bank that was one of the favorite money-laundries used by Putin’s oligarch cronies.) Think of these helpful real estate tycoons as fences receiving stolen goods, in this case those goods are the wealth of an entire country. You might say this isn’t important to Americans, that it may even be good for Americans because they are parking their billions here. The danger is the corruption of our economy, and the corruption of our democracy if our president is a willing money launderer and a co-conspirator with a global criminal gang.

Is it safe for us to think of all these billions being invested in U.S. real estate as a good thing with no down side? The wealth that the Nazis stole from the Jews of Germany and Europe was rationalized to the German people as a confiscation that would benefit them, but it corrupted them and it murdered six million Jews/liberals/gays/minorities; millions of German gentiles also died in the catastrophe that ensued.

Recommended Viewing: Putin's Gingerbread Cottage

The sweet Russian grandmother says “Come into my gingerbread house. It’s nice inside.” Since this isn’t the age of fairy tales we are less suspicious of gingerbread houses than we should be. If the business looks smart and the brochure is impressive and they do what they say they’ll do in the brochure people eat the gingerbread and don’t worry about it. But aftereffects sometimes take a while to kick in. It now appears possible, even likely, that the Russian hack of our system extends to a ubiquitous security software that millions of Americans and key departments of our government use on their computers.

I recommend watching this hourlong special report from Richard Engel of NBCNews.

Most Americans assume what is available is automatically safe, but lax regulation does let a lot of bad actors loose in our economy. Is Kaspersky Labs a bad actor doing bad things, or are they simply another case of someone within the Putin’s reach who’s been pulled into Putin's global operation. Either way, the results are bad. Suppose Kaspersky is simply a good computer security company with a Russian name. That isn’t reassuring. If you are a Russian who lives in Russia, who has a company in Russia, you are within Putin’s reach. If you are a big success in Russia and are not cooperative when Putin asks you may find yourself thrown from a high window or poisoned or gunned down. Nobody in Russia becomes a big player without Putin having his hand in it. Nobody in Russia crosses Putin or refuses him without suffering for it.

It appears that Trump walked into Russia’s gingerbread cottage a couple of decades ago. They reinflated his deflated and bankrupt companies (and ego.) It was in last year’s election that Trump became weaponized. Consider how many of Trump’s top people were also employed by or financially sustained by Putin or his gang of Russian oligarchs. Consider how many Russians who were in a position to know what happened in the 2016 election hack who are now dead, and how they died. Consider how desperate Trump is to hide his financial information. Consider how obedient Trump and his team were to Russian demands and interests…until Americans were informed about this by the Times and the Post and the Wall Street Journal and CNN and NBC and MSNBC and Reuters and McClatchy News Service and Bloomberg and others.

Putin may have wished for an American puppet president, but he never dreamed he would get one. If Trump has been a puppet he has already done his job for his master. The American government is paralyzed. (With the White House and Congress both in Republican hands you may wonder how many Republicans in Congress are also on the hook to Putin.) Worse, the whole western alliance is paralyzed and thrown into chaos. Putin, via Trump, has decapitated the western world that opposed his intrusions into neighboring states and his many violent repressions at home. The western alliance opposed Russia so Russia hacked elections to change the changeable minds of his opponents. He hacked the Republican Party by making them his stooges. The Democrats were not going to be his stooges so he neutralized their candidates via cyberwarfare, The Republicans were either willing accomplices or (perhaps worse) they were stooges and played along because they saw mutual benefits. The Republican voter should be as angry or angrier than the Democrats because they were used. Their leaders pulled them into a criminal conspiracy that amounts to treason. It’s treason because it violated our democracy by conspiring with a foreign enemy. The Republicans surrendered our autonomy. Their clever operatives surrendered American sovereignty as surely as the Petain Vichy government did in France and the Quisling government did in Norway. The Republican Party gave its official face to the Russian operation and now must cover it up.

A recent Bloomberg article about Kaspersky Labs and the Russian spy agencies.

A Reuters article on the same topic.