The so-called "Steele Dossier" has largely been discredited. But, Max Boot writes, that doesn't mean that Donald Trump wasn't collaborating with the Russians to get elected:
Simply read the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s election interference. The committee, then led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), issued last year its fifth and final volume detailing even more extensive links between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign than had previously been known. (Lawfare has a helpful summary.)
The report notes that campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was working for Trump for free, was in debt to a previous employer, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, on whose behalf he had done “influence work for the Russian government.” While managing the campaign, Manafort remained in close touch with his business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a “Russian intelligence officer” who may have been “connected to the GRU [Russian military intelligence] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” Manafort shared with Kilimnik internal campaign polling data that could have been useful to the Russians in their disinformation campaign.
That noise about stolen emails was very interesting:
The report also sheds further light on the connections between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which was used by Russian intelligence to release stolen Democratic emails. The report concludes: “The Trump Campaign took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails…; created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release; and encouraged further theft of information and continued leaks.”
The key campaign middleman was Roger Stone, who refused to cooperate with investigators and was later pardoned, along with Manafort, by Trump. The report cites extensive evidence that, despite Trump’s denials, Stone kept Trump informed of his contacts with WikiLeaks.
Trump and his crew cannot claim they did not know where this stolen information was coming from. The report notes that “Trump and the Campaign continued to promote and disseminate the hacked WikiLeaks documents” even after the intelligence community publicly attributed the documents to a Russian operation. Rather than working with the FBI to protect U.S. security, the committee writes, “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”-
Then there was that meeting to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton:
The meeting was arranged by Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his son Emin Agalarov, Trump’s business partners in a lucrative 2013 beauty pageant in Moscow. (At least it was lucrative for Trump; the Agalarovs, according to the Senate report, apparently lost $10 million.) According to the report, the Agalarovs “have significant ties to Russian organized crime,” and the elder Agalarov has "significant ties to the Russian government, including to individuals involved in influence operations targeting the 2016 U.S. election.”
From the beginning of Donald Trump's mad quest for power until its end in the capital riot, it's easy to connect the dots. Trump's model for the exercise of political power is rooted in Russia.
Image: NBC News
9 comments:
Max Boot is a pro-war thinker. Therefore he was and is viscerally opposed to Trump's casually held anti-interventionist philosophy. Which is why he babble continuously about a discredited conspiracy theory. "Russiagate" is the only conspiracy theory that explains something that doesn't exist. Trump was in many respects more bellicose towards Russia than Obama was. If Putin had any leverage over Trump he certainly didn't seem to use it.
Did Putin prefer Trump over Hillary Clinton? Did Putin prefer the candidate who wondered why we shouldn't work with the guy destroying ISIS in Syria over the maniac who was threatening to shoot Russian planes out of the sky there? Of course he preferred Trump. But he didn't do much (if anything) about it. There have been no proven ties found between Wikileaks and the Russian government.
Roger Stone had NO connections with Wikileaks. THAT is what he was trying to cover up. Because Roger Stone is an idiot. Wikileaks put out press releases and THOSE were what Stone conveyed to Trump.
Everything said about Konstantin Kilimnik is false. Mueller claimed Kilimnik came to the USA on a diplomatic visa in 1997. Kilimnik produced his passport showing he came on a regular visa. How many lies and innuendos can Mueller and Adam Schiff tell before they lose their credibility?
The Steele Dossier was garbage. Mueller indicts Russians but when one Russian asks for his day in court Mueller runs for the hills.
For the love of god Owen, STOP wasting your time on this nonsense. Because if you study it honestly, you'll find that it's garbage from start to finish and the longer liberals talk about it the more fuel it gives to Trump's movement.
Wow, Max Boot never gives up.
Personally I am of the opinion that the US-Russia link first started with the notorious American diplomat and womanizer Ben Franklin and Princess princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, the Empress Catherine the Great's close confident.
The USA has been infiltrated by Russia for a long time. What else could account for the Russian navel presence in New York and San Francisco during the US civil war?
[I may being a bit sarcastic here but I think my theory is better than Boot's.]
One thing is abundantly clear, thwap. Trump was a useful idiot. And Putin took advantage of his idiocy.
The American fascination with Russia goes back a long way, jrk. Unfortunately, the Americans still really don't understand Russia.
The American fascination with Russia goes back a long way, jrk.
Other than buying Alaska, which, now that I think of it, may have been in the nature of a thank-you to tho Czar for the help during the US civil war, I doubt that most US citizens, including their politicians, ever gave Russia even a passing thought.
The Soviet Union was a bit of a different matter. There were good profits to be made there in the 1930's. At the same time the threat of Godless, Bolshevik, Communism made a good excuse to hammer the socialists and trade unions in the USA.
Americans have a hard time understanding their enemies, jrk. That was certainly the case with the Russians and the Vietnamese.
And the Japanese and the Iraqis and the Iranians and the Filipinos and the Cubans and ....
And this does not just cover their enemies. In general, I think that the US is so parochial that they really have a problem understanding any other country or people. They really expect everyone else to see things as they do and they wear some funny spectacles.
The most consequential problem for Americans is that they don't understand why the rest of the world thinks differently than they do, jrk.
The most consequential problem for Americans is that they don't understand why the rest of the world thinks differently than they do
Added to my collection of quotes
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