The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.
“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.
Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.
That would prove to be more than an understatement. But neither Baquet nor his successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its coverage before the Iraq War.
In fact, Baquet added, “I think we covered that story better than anyone else” and had the prizes to prove it, according to a tape of the event published by Slate. In a statement to CJR, the Times continued to stand by its reporting, noting not only the prizes it had won but substantiation of the paper’s reporting by various investigations. The paper “thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited, and ultimately produced ground-breaking journalism that has proven true time and again,” the statement said.
But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.) At times, Trump seemed almost to be toying with the press, offering spontaneous answers to questions about Russia that seemed to point to darker narratives. When those storylines were authoritatively undercut, the follow-ups were downplayed or ignored.
Trump and his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm, but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism. The two most inflammatory, and enduring, slogans commandeered by Trump in this conflict were “fake news” and the news media as “the enemy of the American people.” They both grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public. Both relied on anonymous sources.
Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. The phrase “fake news” was limited to a few reporters and a newly organized social media watchdog. The idea that the media were “enemies of the American people” was voiced only once, just before the election on an obscure podcast, and not by Trump, according to a Nexis search.
Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw “fake news” as a “problem,” and 56 percent—mostly Republicans and independents—agreed that the media were “truly the enemy of the American people,” according to Rasmussen Reports.
Trump, years later, can’t stop looking back. In two interviews with CJR, he made it clear he remains furious over what he calls the “witch hunt” or “hoax” and remains obsessed with Mueller. His staff has compiled a short video, made up of what he sees as Mueller’s worst moments from his appearance before Congress, and he played it for me when I first went to interview him, just after Labor Day in 2021, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
During my interview with Trump, he appeared tired as he sat behind his desk. He wore golf attire and his signature red MAGA hat, having just finished eighteen holes. But his energy and level of engagement kicked in when it came to questions about perceived enemies, mainly Mueller and the media.
He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along” with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his job.
“I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”
What follows is the story of Trump, Russia, and the press. Trump’s attacks against media outlets and individual reporters are a well-known theme of his campaigns. But news outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their own Trump-Russia coverage, which includes serious flaws. Bob Woodward, of the Post, told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry ” wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk down the painful road of introspection.”
Over the past two years, I put questions to, and received answers from, Trump, as well as his enemies. The latter include Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called dossier, financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that claimed Trump was in service of the Kremlin, and Peter Strzok, the FBI official who opened and led the inquiry into possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign before he was fired. I also sought interviews, often unsuccessfully, with scores of journalists—print, broadcast, and online—hoping they would cooperate with the same scrutiny they applied to Trump. And I pored through countless official documents, court records, books, and articles, a daunting task given that, over Mueller’s tenure, there were more than half a million news stories concerning Trump and Russia or Mueller.
On the eve of a new era of intense political coverage, this is a look back at what the press got right, and what it got wrong, about the man who once again wants to be president. So far, few news organizations have reckoned seriously with what transpired between the press and the presidency during this period. That failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.
Chapter 1: A narrative takes hold
Trump entered the presidential race on June 16, 2015. In his campaign speech, he offered a rambling analysis of global affairs that briefly touched on Russia and Vladimir Putin, noting “all our problems with Russia” and the need to modernize America’s outdated nuclear arsenal to better deter the Russian leader.
The media covered his inflammatory comments about Mexico and China, and ignored Russia. The next day, Trump gave a long interview to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and Trump supporter and friend, who would go on to become an informal adviser to the president. In the interview, Trump indicated he thought he could have good relations with Russia. Asked if he had any previous “contact” with Putin, Trump answered yes. When pressed by Hannity to elaborate, Trump replied, “I don’t want to say.” Trump, as he acknowledged at a debate in October 2016, didn’t know Putin.
Three days before Trump’s presidential announcement, Hillary Clinton entered the race, and it was she, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over Russia ties. Weeks earlier, the Times had collaborated with the conservative author of a best-selling book to explore various Clinton-Russia links, including a lucrative speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration while Hillary was secretary of state. The Times itself said it had an “exclusive agreement” with the author to “pursue the story lines found in the book” through “its own reporting.” An internal Clinton campaign poll, shared within the campaign the day of Trump’s announcement, showed that the Russia entanglements exposed in the book and the Times were the most worrisome “Clinton negative message,” according to campaign records. Robert Trout, Clinton’s campaign lawyer, declined to comment on the record after an exchange of emails.
By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s “strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia. The media would eventually play a role in all that, but at the outset, reporters viewed Trump and his candidacy as a sideshow. Maggie Haberman of the Times, a longtime Trump chronicler, burst into a boisterous laugh when a fellow panelist on a television news show suggested Trump might succeed at the polls.
Fairly quickly, Trump started to gain traction with voters, and it was clear his candidacy was no longer a joke. His popularity drew large television audiences and online clicks, boosting media organizations’ revenues while generating free publicity for the candidate. The relationship would remain symbiotic throughout the Trump era.
As Trump began to nail down the GOP nomination in 2016, he spoke critically about NATO. He focused mostly on America’s disproportionate share of the financial burden, though he occasionally called the alliance “obsolete” in an era of counterterrorism and voiced his hope to “get along” with Putin, prompting some concerns inside the national-security world.
Those concerns would be supercharged by a small group of former journalists turned private investigators who operated out of a small office near Dupont Circle in Washington under the name Fusion GPS.
In late May 2016, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Fusion cofounder, flew to London to meet Christopher Steele, a former official within MI6, the British spy agency. Steele had his own investigative firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. By then, Fusion had assembled records on Trump’s business dealings and associates, some with Russia ties, from a previous, now terminated engagement. The client for the old job was theWashington Free Beacon, a conservative online publication backed in part by Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire and a Republican Trump critic. Weeks before the trip to London, Fusion GPS signed a new research contract with the law firm representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
Simpson not only had a new client, but Fusion’s mission had changed, from collection of public records to human intelligence gathering related to Russia. Over lasagna at an Italian restaurant at Heathrow Airport, Simpson told Steele about the project, indicating only that his client was a law firm, according to a book co-authored by Simpson. The other author of the 2019 book, Crime in Progress, was Peter Fritsch, also a former WSJ reporter and Fusion’s other cofounder. Soon after the London meeting, Steele agreed to probe Trump’s activities in Russia. Simpson and I exchanged emails over the course of several months. But he ultimately declined to respond to my last message, which had included extensive background and questions about Fusion’s actions.
As that work was underway, in June 2016, the Russia cloud over the election darkened. First, the Washington Post broke the story that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a breach the party’s cyber experts attributed, in the story, to Russia. (The Post reporter, Ellen Nakashima, received “off the record” guidance from FBI cyber experts just prior to publication, according to FBI documents made public in 2022.) Soon, a purported Romanian hacker, Guccifer 2.0, published DNC data, starting with the party’s negative research on Trump, followed by the DNC dossier on its own candidate, Clinton.
The next week, the Post weighed in with a long piece, headlined “Inside Trump’s Financial Ties to Russia and His Unusual Flattery of Vladimir Putin.” It began with Trump’s trip to Moscow in 2013 for his Miss Universe pageant, quickly summarized Trump’s desire for a “new partnership” with Russia, coupled with a possible overhaul of NATO, and delved into a collection of Trump advisers with financial ties to Russia. The piece covered the dependence of Trump’s global real estate empire on wealthy Russians, as well as the “multiple” times Trump himself had tried and failed to do a real estate deal in Moscow.
The lead author of the story, Tom Hamburger, was a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked with Simpson; the two were friends, according to Simpson’s book. By 2022, emails between the two from the summer of 2016 surfaced in court records, showing their frequent interactions on Trump-related matters. Hamburger, who recently retired from the Post, declined to comment. The Post also declined to comment on Hamburger’s ties to Fusion.
By July, Trump was poised to become the GOP nominee at the party’s convention in Cleveland. On July 18, the first day of the gathering, Josh Rogin, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the party’s platform position on Ukraine under the headline “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” The story would turn out to be an overreach. Subsequent investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine-related actions, if warranted, and calling for “additional assistance” for Ukraine. What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama administration hadn’t done.
Rogin’s piece nevertheless caught the attention of other journalists. Within a few days, Paul Krugman, in his Times column, called Trump the “Siberian candidate,” citing the “watering down” of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of TheAtlantic, labeled Trump a “de facto agent” of Putin. He cited the Rogin report and a recent interview Trump gave to the Times where he emphasized the importance of NATO members paying their bills and didn’t answer a question on whether nations in arrears could count on American support if Russia attacked them.
But other journalists saw the Rogin piece differently, introducing a level of skepticism that most of the press would ignore. Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist and harsh Putin critic, writing in the New York Review of Books that month, said labeling Trump a Putin agent was “deeply flawed.” Gessen, in articles then and a few months later, said the accounts of the platform revisions were “slightly misleading” because sanctions, something the “Russians had hoped to see gone,” remained, while the proposal for lethal aid to Ukraine was, at the time, a step too far for most experts and the Obama administration.
Matt Taibbi, who spent time as a journalist in Russia, also grew uneasy about the Trump-Russia coverage. Eventually, he would compare the media’s performance to its failures during the run-up to the Iraq War. “It was a career-changing moment for me,” he said in an interview. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any of us that did not go there. That is crazy.”
Taibbi, as well as Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept, and Aaron Mate, then at The Nation, left their publications and continue to be widely followed, though they are now independent journalists. All were publicly critical of the press’s Trump-Russia narrative. (Taibbi, over the last month, surged back into the spotlight after Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, gave him access to the tech platform’s files.)
At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the committee had favored Hillary.
The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”
Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later.
Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” The quip was picked up everywhere. Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.” The comment became a major exhibit over the next several years for those who believed Trump had an untoward relationship with Russia. Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.
Hope Hicks, Trump’s press aide, later testified to Congress that she told Trump some in the media were taking his statement “quite literally” but that she believed it was “a joke.”
I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the time.
I reviewed the tape. After several minutes of repeated questions about Russia, Trump’s facial demeanor evolved, to what seemed like his TV entertainer mode; that’s when, in response to a final Russia question, he said the widely quoted words. Then, appearing to be playful, he said the leakers “would probably be rewarded mightily by the press” if they found Clinton’s long-lost emails, because they contained “some beauties.” Trump, after talking with Hicks that day in Florida, sought to control the damage by tweeting that whoever had Clinton’s deleted emails “should share them with the FBI.”
That didn’t mute the response. Sullivan immediately jumped in, saying the remarks at Doral encouraged “espionage.”
On another track, Fusion became involved in an effort to promote another unproven conspiracy theory, that Trump’s company was involved in back-channel communications with a Russian bank. Clinton personally supported pitching a reporter to explore the story as the campaign was not “totally confident” of its accuracy, according to 2022 court testimony by Mook. The back-channel theory was pushed to the media and the FBI at the same time, though the campaign did not direct and was not aware of all the various efforts.
Hundreds of emails were exchanged between Fusion employees and reporters for such outlets as ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, the Washington Post, Slate, Reuters, and the Times during the last months of the campaign; they involved sharing of “raw” Trump-related information and hints to contact government and campaign officials to bolster the information’s credibility, according to a federal prosecutor’s court filings in 2022. The lawyer who hired Fusion, Marc Elias, testified, in 2022, that he would brief Sullivan and other Clinton campaign officials about Fusion’s findings, having been updated himself through regular meetings with Simpson and Fritsch. With Elias as the intermediary, the Fusion founders could write in 2019 that “no one in the company has ever met or spoken to” Clinton.
In mid-August, after the Times published an investigation into the Ukrainian business dealings of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman since May, the longtime Republican resigned. Manafort’s ties to business interests and a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine were well known, but the Times obtained a “secret ledger” purporting to show cash payments of almost $13 million to Manafort. Manafort denied he dealt in cash and explained that the payments covered expenses for his whole team, but he nevertheless resigned from his post. (In a 2022 memoir, Manafort wrote that the amounts of money in the ledger were “in the range of what I had been paid” but “the cash angle was clearly wrong.”) Manafort’s finances and his work for Ukraine would eventually lead to his being convicted of multiple crimes, jailed, and then pardoned by Trump. (The Ukraine-related cases were based on banking records and wire transfers, as opposed to cash.) The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the work on Manafort.
In late August, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, wrote a letter to FBI director James Comey, hoping to prod the agency into probing Trump’s Russia ties and Russian election influence efforts. While not naming the Trump aide, Reid’s letter said “questions have been raised” about a volunteer foreign-policy adviser who had business ties in Russia, including their recent meetings with “high-ranking sanctioned individuals” in Russia. That fit the description of a recent, unsubstantiated Fusion/Steele dossier report, about Carter Page, a Trump volunteer with his own business dealings in Russia and previous contacts with Russian officials.
Reid, who died in 2021, never publicly disclosed how he knew about that information, but in an interview for the HBO documentary Agents of Chaos a few years before his death, he said that he first heard about the dossier from two unidentified “men that worked in the press for a long time,” according to a transcript of the interview.
By the time Reid wrote the letter, some reporters, aware of the dossier’s Page allegations, had pursued them, but no one had published the details. Hamburger, of the Washington Post, told Simpson the Page allegations were found to be “bullshit” and “impossible” by the paper’s Moscow correspondent, according to court records.
But not everyone held back. In late September, Michael Isikoff, chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News, published a story about the allegation, confirmed that Reid was referring to Page, and added a new detail that he says was key: a senior law enforcement source said the Page matters were “being looked at.” That was accurate—the FBI was already investigating Steele’s dossier—but it would later emerge that the FBI clandestinely surveilled Page and those he communicated with on the campaign based on seriously flawed applications to the secret surveillance court. The applications not only relied heavily on the unsubstantiated dossier, but they left out exculpatory evidence, including Page’s previous cooperation with the CIA and more recent statements he made to an undercover FBI informant, according to a subsequent Justice Department inquiry. Page would quickly deny the allegations to other reporters and write a letter to Comey denouncing the “completely false media reports” and mentioning his “decades” of having “interacted” with the “FBI and CIA.” But, after the Yahoo piece, he stepped down from his volunteer position with the campaign.
The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the “bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid the researchers who pitched it to Isikoff. In essence, the campaign was boosting, through the press, a story line it had itself engineered.
Isikoff says he first learned about the Page allegations when he met that September with Steele in Washington, a meeting arranged by Fusion. After being the first reporter to go public with Steele’s claims, Isikoff, by late 2018, began publicly casting doubt about their accuracy—earning praise from Trump—and had a falling-out with Simpson, his former friend. In a 2022 interview, Isikoff pointed to his earlier description of the dossier as “third hand stuff” and added that, “in retrospect, it never should have been given the credence it was.”
The 2016 dossier’s conspiracy claim was never corroborated by the media, and the supposed plot involving the Russian bank, Alfa Bank, didn’t fare much better. Still, that fall Fritsch made frantic efforts to persuade reporters from several outlets, including Isikoff, to publish the bank story. Their best hope appeared to be the Times.
The Clinton campaign, in mid-September, was eagerly anticipating a “bombshell” story on “Trump-Russia” from the Times. It was causing a “Trump freak out,” headlined a private September 18 memo by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime close Clinton confidant. His memo circulated among top campaign aides, the two Fusion leaders, Elias, and Michael Sussmann, then a partner in the same firm as Elias. (The memo was made public in 2022.)
Two hours after Sussmann received the memo, he texted the private phone of James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI, seeking a meeting on a “sensitive” matter. They met the next afternoon, where Sussmann briefed him about the back-channel allegations. Sussmann upped the ante with Baker by pointing out that the media—soon understood to be the Times—was about to publish something about the supposed secret Russian communication link.
Sussmann later testified to Congress that he gave the story to a Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau. The reporter and the lawyer had started communicating at the beginning of September, according to emails filed in court. (Sussmann was acquitted in 2022 of a charge that he had lied to Baker about who he was representing when he delivered the Alfa Bank allegations.)
Lichtblau later paired up with Steven Lee Myers, a former Moscow hand for the Times. Whereas Myers, in an interview, said he saw some “red flags” in the Alfa Bank tip, Lichtblau, he added, “believed in the Alfa thing more than I did.”
A few days after Sussmann’s meeting with Baker, Myers and Lichtblau met with the FBI, where officials, including Baker, asked them to hold off on publishing anything until the bureau could further investigate the allegation, according to the journalists and public records. The Times agreed, and the bureau quickly concluded “there was nothing there,” according to Baker’s testimony and other evidence at Sussmann’s trial. Once the Times learned of the dead end, the story went into remission as Baquet told the reporters, “You don’t have it yet,” according to Myers and other current and former Times journalists.
In early October, the intelligence community put out a brief statement concluding that Russia had been behind the recent hacks, a pattern of behavior “not new to Moscow.” But, the report continued, it would be “extremely difficult,” even for a nation-state, to alter voter ballots or election data [Editor’s Note: not true anymore].
The report was quickly lost in a frenzied news cycle. First, the Postpublished a tape recording of Trump bragging, in vulgar terms, about some of his sexual activities. Then WikiLeaks published the first of a weeks-long series of leaked emails from the email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, causing more problems for her campaign. Two weeks later the Times would report that a private security group had concluded that the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency, was behind the Podesta hack. (The Justice Department, in 2018, charged twelve GRU officials for the Podesta and DNC hacks, but the charges have never been litigated.)
As the election entered its final weeks, Lichtblau thought there was a bigger story beyond the FBI rejection of the Alfa Bank theory; the bureau, the paper had learned, was conducting a broader counterintelligence investigation into possible Russian ties to Trump aides. In mid-October, two Times reporters, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, were in California, where they met with a top federal official who cautioned them about the larger FBI inquiry, according to current and former Times reporters. (FBI records show that then–deputy director Andrew McCabe met the two reporters at the Broken Yoke Café in San Diego on October 16, during a conference there. I exchanged emails with McCabe in September, but after I sent him a detailed list of questions, he didn’t respond.)
After Baquet heard the feedback from California, the story stayed on hold, according to current and former Times journalists. Finally, at the end of the month, the languishing story was published. The headline read “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The top of the piece dealt with the FBI’s doubts about the Alfa Bank allegation, and waited until the tenth paragraph to disclose the broader inquiry. It also noted the FBI believed the hacking operation “was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” The piece mentioned a letter to Comey the day before from Senator Reid, who again was trying to spur the FBI to look into what he believed was “explosive information.” The letter, according to Myers, was an impetus for publishing the story. Another factor, Timesjournalists said, was the publication earlier that day of a piece about the Alfa-Trump allegation in Slate, which wrote less critically about the supposed back channel at length, though the title framed it as a question.
That piece’s author, Franklin Foer, worked closely with Fusion, forwarding drafts of his stories to the private investigative firm prior to their publication, according to court records. Foer, now at TheAtlantic, declined to respond to an email seeking comment.
Fusion’s co-founders would later call the Times story “a journalistic travesty.” Baquet, in April 2018, told Erik Wemple, the Post’s media critic, that the story was “not inaccurate based on what we knew at the time,” but, he added, the “headline was off.” A few weeks after Wemple’s column, the Times explained to its readers what Baquet meant: in a piece about the FBI inquiry, the reporters said the headline that October night “gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just beginning” and that “the story significantly played down the case” because unnamed law enforcement officials in 2016 had “cautioned against drawing any conclusions.”
That Halloween night the Clinton campaign, anticipating the imminent publication of the Alfa Bank story, was prepared to “light it up,” Fritsch emailed a reporter that morning. Another story Fusion helped arrange appeared that day, too, in the left-leaning magazine Mother Jones. It said a “veteran spy” had provided the FBI information about an alleged five-year Russian operation to cultivate and coordinate with Trump. That came from Steele’s dossier. Within hours, the FBI contacted Steele, who “confirmed” he had been a source for the article. After working with the bureau for several months as a confidential informant on the Russia inquiry, he was terminated by the FBI, bureau documents show.
Before the election, the author of the article, David Corn, provided a copy of the dossier to Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, a longtime acquaintance. “It was a standard journalistic ploy to try and get information out of them, because I knew they had the dossier,” Corn said in an interview. But, he added, “it didn’t work.”
At 8:36 at night on October 31, the campaign lit up, as Fritsch promised, on Twitter. Hillary tweeted out a statement by Jake Sullivan about “Trump’s secret line of communication to Russia.” Her aide only cited the Slate story on Alfa Bank.
Clinton had also been aware of the Times’ unpublished story. She hoped it “would push the Russia story onto the front burner of the election,” but was “crestfallen” when an aide showed her the headline, according to an account in Merchants of Truth, a 2019 book about the news media by Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of the Times. The story was a closely guarded secret, but campaign operatives had been pushing it with Times reporters and were aware of some internal deliberations, according to the book by Fusion’s founders. Moreover, the candidate herself was aware of efforts to push the Trump-Russia story to the media, according to court testimony.
At the FBI, agents who debunked the Alfa Bank allegations appreciated the Times’ report: “made us look on top of our game,” one agent messaged another, according to court records.
After the election that ushered Trump into office, the Times began to undertake some soul-searching about its Trump-Russia coverage. The intelligence community did its own assessment on Russia, including a new take by the FBI.
Lichtblau left the Times in 2017, but continued to believe in the Alfa Bank story. He wrote a piece for Time magazine in 2019 about the supposed secret channel, even after the FBI, and other investigators, had debunked it.
In December, President Obama secretly ordered a quick assessment by the intelligence community of Russia’s involvement in the election. Instead of the usual group of seventeen agencies, however, it was coordinated by the Director of National Intelligence and produced by the National Security Agency, which gathers electronic intercepts, the CIA, and the FBI.
In mid-December the Post reported that the FBI now backed the CIA view that Russia aimed to help Trump win the election, compared with a broader set of motivations, as the Times had reported on October 31. Strzok, the FBI official running the probe, texted a colleague about the unprecedented wave of leaks: “our sisters have been leaking like mad,” he wrote, referring to intelligence agencies like the CIA. Strzok now believes the leaks originated elsewhere. “I now believe,” he told me in a 2022 interview, “that it is more likely they came not from the CIA but from senior levels of the US government or Congress.”
Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé Nast magazines, and the Times.
Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate relationship with his hometown paper was on display.
At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”
He added, “I hope we can get along.”
A note on disclosure
In 2015–16, I was a senior reporter at ProPublica. There, I reported on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Russian oligarchs, among other subjects. I helped ProPublica decide whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t happen. Another of the projects I worked on, also involving Clinton, was published in the Washington Post in 2016, where I shared a byline. Some of my other Clinton-related work was used in 2016 articles appearing in the New York Times, my employer between 1976 and 2005, but without my byline. Initially, the Times sought my assistance on a story about Hillary’s handling of Bill Clinton’s infidelity. Subsequently I approached the paper on my own about the Clinton family foundation. In both cases, I interacted with reporters and editors but was not involved in the writing or editing of the stories that used my reporting. During the second interaction, I expressed disappointment to one of theTimes reporters about the final result.
I left ProPublica in December 2016. That month I was approached by one of the cofounders of Fusion GPS, who sounded me out about joining a Trump-related project the firm was contemplating. The discussion did not lead to any collaboration. I had previously interacted with Fusion related to my reporting on Russian oligarchs.
In the 2017–18 academic year I was a nonresident fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program, affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. There, one of my projects involved looking into the dossier as part of preliminary research for a 2020 film the Investigative Reporting Program helped produce for HBO on Russian meddling. I was not on the film’s credits.
At CJR, these stories have been edited by Kyle Pope, its editor and publisher. Kyle’s wife, Kate Kelly, is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the New York Times. CJR’s former board chair was Steve Adler, formerly the editor in chief of Reuters; its current board chair is Rebecca Blumenstein, a former deputy managing editor of the Times who recently became president of editorial for NBC News.
Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty (30th Anniversary Edition) (3-Volume Printed, Bound Book or PDF)
A three-volume, 750+ page tome with an extensive update of the renowned underground classic ~ the Global Sovereign’s Handbook. Still after all these years, this is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written. Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course. Available Now!
Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom (3rd Edition) (Printed, Bound Book or PDF)
This comprehensive book, goes far beyond the immediate impact of the “pandemic”, but, along with the reader, imagines how our human world may be altered, both positively and negatively, long into an uncertain future. Available Now!
If you have ever heard talk or been to a seminar about “sovereignty”, then very likely those conversations were influenced by the foundational research of the author and educator.
His research and educational journey reaching millions of people worldwide began in 1992 and culminated in 2022 with the 3-Volume book release – his final word on the subject.
At the turn of the millennium his books and audio courses facilitated in part – a sovereignty and tax-honesty movement that involved millions of Americans.
This 3 Volume series comprises the life’s work of Johnny Liberty filled with comprehensive insights into the last few hundred years of history, law, economics, money, citizenship and governance.
These books show how it is supposed to be done in a constitutional Republic.
How did We the People get to where we are today?
What can we do to reclaim our inherent sovereignty and natural rights?
Many of the answers may be found within these revolutionary pages. Available as a paperback, E-Book (PDF) or an Amazon Kindle format. Thank you for supporting the author.
Sincerely,
With Freedom For All, ~ Johnny Liberty
Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty (30th Anniversary Edition)
A three-volume, 750 page tome with an extensive update of the renowned underground classic ~ the Global Sovereign’s Handbook.
Still after all these years, it is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written.
Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course.
The 3 Volume Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty is textbook material for everyone including educators/teachers, homeschoolers, historians, activists, leaders/politicians, attorneys/judges/law schools, police officers, and state Citizens/Nationals.
Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty (30th Anniversary Edition) (3-Volume Printed, Bound Book or PDF)
A three-volume, 750+ page tome with an extensive update of the renowned underground classic ~ the Global Sovereign’s Handbook. Still after all these years, this is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written. Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course. Available Now!
Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom (3rd Edition) (Printed, Bound Book or PDF)
This comprehensive book, goes far beyond the immediate impact of the “pandemic”, but, along with the reader, imagines how our human world may be altered, both positively and negatively, long into an uncertain future. Available Now!
You know it tells you a lot about the priorities of a ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6th tonight from our moral inferiors, no less. An outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago, but they’ve never stopped talking about it.
In the meantime, in the 18 months since January 6, gas prices have doubled. Drug ODs have reached their highest point ever. The U.S. economy is now careening toward a devastating recession at best and scariest and least noted of all, this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war.
Yet the other networks can’t be bothered to cover any of that tonight. Instead, they’ve interrupted their regularly scheduled programing to bring you yet another extended primetime harangue from Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney about Donald Trump and QAnon. The whole thing is insulting.
In fact, it’s deranged and we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth. We’ve attempted to do that since the day this happened.
We hated seeing vandalism at the U.S. Capitol a year and a half ago, and we said so at the time, but we did not think it was an insurrection because it was not an insurrection. It was not even close to an insurrection. Not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm – some insurrection. In fact, the only person who wound up shot to death was a protester.
She was a 36-year-old military veteran called Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt was just over 5 feet tall. She was unarmed. She posed no conceivable threat to anyone, but Capitol Hill Police shot her in the neck and never explained why that was justified. Those are the facts of January 6, but since the very first hours, they have been distorted beyond recognition, relentlessly culminating with last night.
Last night, CBS Nightly News told its viewers that insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6 “caused the deaths of five police officers.” That is a pure lie. There is nothing true about it, and they know that perfectly well. Here’s reporter Bob Costa, who should be deeply ashamed to say something this dishonest.
ROBERT COSTA, CBS: Thursday’s primetime hearing will take Americans back to January 6, when an estimated 2,000 rioters breached the Capitol building, causing the deaths of five police officers.
It’s hard to believe he said that. Rioters cause the deaths of five police officers. You just heard CBS News tell its viewers that. This must be the big lie theory. The more bewilderingly false a claim is, the more likely you will be to believe it. Apparently, that’s what they’re betting on. In fact, precisely zero police officers were killed by rioters on January 6, not five, none. Not a single one. So, how’d they get to five? Well, CBS is counting the suicides of local police officers that took place after January 6, in some cases, long after January 6.
Suicide, unfortunately, is pretty common among cops. Policing is a tough job, as we’ve noted. But in these specific cases, the ones CBS is referring to, the chief of Washington DC’s police department told The New York Times that actually he had no idea if his officers were driven to kill themselves by January 6. CBS just made that up.
The fifth death that CBS News is referring to is of Capitol Hill police officer Brian Sicknick. You will remember his name. Sicknick’s body lay in state at the Capitol after the media told us he’d been beaten to death by Trump voters with a fire extinguisher. Here’s what they told you.
FREDERICKA WHITFIELD, CNN: Officer Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
CNN REPORTER: Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
ANA CABRERA, CNN: Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the hour-long attack.
NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC: They beat a Capitol Police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Officer Brian Sicknick died after being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher during the fight.
CRAIG MELVIN, MSNBC: He died at the age of 42 after he was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher.
Once again, that’s not true. Everything you just heard was completely fabricated. The D.C. medical examiner performed an autopsy and the autopsy report showed that Officer Brian Sicknick had not suffered any kind of blunt force trauma. He was not beaten to death. He died of a stroke in his office later. No one has been charged in Officer Sicknick’s death because Officer Sicknick wasn’t murdered.
They are lying to you. That is provable. Not a single person you just saw has apologized for lying. Not a single one. And it’s not just the news media. Here’s Congressman Pete Aguilar of California claiming that officers lost their lives on January 6.
PETE AGUILAR: These hearings will be a chance for the country to come together to rally around the truth and unite around the rule of law. We owe it to the officers who lost their lives and the officers who were injured to tell that story and to ensure that this never happens again.
Let’s rally around the truth, he says, as he lies to you. May those words burn your tongue, liar. But what did happen exactly on January 6? What’s the truth of that day? Well, that’s still unknown. From the extensive video we have of January 6, it’s clear that some in the crowd, more than a few, were encouraging protesters to breach the Capitol, to commit felonies. We’re not guessing at that, we’ve showed you the tape.
We have pictures of their faces. In the case of a man called Ray Epps, we know his name, but they’ve never been charged. Ray Epps was standing in exactly the same place that a lot of people who went to jail were standing, but he wasn’t charged. His name was taken off the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Why is that? It doesn’t make any sense at all.
The January 6 committee will not explain that after a year, millions of dollars and a thousand interviews. They won’t tell us, nor will they tell us how many FBI agents and assets were in the crowd that day and what were they doing there. Why can’t we know that? And why are they still hiding thousands of hours of surveillance footage from within the Capitol? If the point of the committee was to get the truth out there, why can’t we see the tape?
Why did authorities open the doors of the Capitol to rioters and let them walk in, usher them in the doors? That’s utterly bizarre. You saw that live. No one’s ever explained it. What’s the explanation for that? And by the way, whatever happened to the mysterious pipe bomber whose bombs we later learned many months later, Kamala Harris’ bodyguards discovered. Kamala Harris told us she was at the Capitol that day, but she wasn’t. She was at the DNC with a pipe bomb outside. Her bodyguards found that bomb, but she lied about that. She hid that. Why?
That’s got to be one of the weirdest stories ever. What does it mean, Liz Cheney? Silence. And of course, above all, they lied about the reason that January 6 happened in the first place and you know what it is. The entire country watched Joe Biden get what they claim was 10 million more votes than Barack Obama himself got. Joe Biden got 10 million more votes than Barack Obama got, and a lot of those votes arrived after the election.
In a lot of places, voting was stopped in the middle of the night. Why? In the biggest states in the country, voter ID was optional. Why is that okay? A lot of the protesters on January 6 were very upset about that and they should have been. All of us should be, but the January 6 Committee ignored all of that completely. Instead, on the basis of zero evidence, no evidence whatsoever, they blamed the entire riot on White supremacy. Here’s Joe Biden.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: We’re confronting the stains of what remains, a deep stain on the soul of the nation, hate and White supremacy. The violent, deadly insurrection on the Capitol nine months ago was about White supremacy, in my view.
What? There’s no evidence for that – none. The people at the Capitol, including the ones who broke the law by entering the Capitol, which is a crime, those people to a person said they were upset because they believed their democracy had been stolen from them and whether all of their claims are true or not, that’s a valid reason to be upset. But rather than reassure the rest of us that actually our democracy is sound, elections are fair and transparent, there’s no cheating and we can prove it, rather than do that, they call half the country names and not just names, the worst thing you can be called, a White supremacist. And then, most bewilderingly of all, virtually no Republican in Washington pushed back against any of that.
In fact, Lindsey Graham, violence worshiper to the end, said that his only regret was that the Capitol Police didn’t shoot more Trump voters in the neck and kill them. “You’ve got guns, use them,” Graham said. So here you have a sitting U.S. senator, a Republican, urging police officers to shoot unarmed Americans, many of whom were ushered into the Capitol building by law enforcement.
How can people talk like that? For more than a year, they justified rhetoric like Lindsey Graham “shoot more” by claiming that January 6 was an insurrection. That’s not a word they were used to describe, say, the monthslong siege of a courthouse in Portland, or the ongoing coordinated effort to intimidate Supreme Court justices at their homes with guns, a story they ignored today. But January 6 was different, they reminded us. It was unique because it was their offices and because it bothered Nancy Pelosi.
ADAM SCHIFF: The president incited an insurrection against Congress to prevent the peaceful transition of power.
CEDRIC RICHMOND: And then he sat back and watched the insurrection.
REP. HALEY STEVENS: Insurrection, a violent mob.
CORI BUSH: A White supremacist president who incited a White supremacist insurrection.
REP. ILHAN OMAR: A insurrection against our government.
REP. ILHAN OMAR: A insurrection against our government.
PELOSI: The insurrection that violated the sanctity of the people’s Capitol.
JIM MCGOVERN: This was not a protest, this was an insurrection.
BIDEN: It’s not protest. It’s insurrection.
We are not defending and would never defend vandalism, violence, rioting. We disapproved of it when it happened. We disapprove of it now, all riots, not just this one. But this was not an insurrection.
But, you know what will get you to insurrection? If you ignore the legitimate concerns of a population, if you brush them aside as if they don’t matter when gas goes to $5 and you say “buy an electric car.” When cities become so filthy and so dangerous that you can’t live there, when the economy becomes so distorted that your own children have no hope of getting married and giving you grandchildren, when you don’t care at all about any of that and all you do is talk about yourself, nonstop – you might get an insurrection if you behave like that, speaking of insurrection.
5G wireless technology has become the source of much controversy, and not just whether or not it interferes with aviation or people’s health concerns.
Tucker Carlson sought to unpack the push for 5G with telecom veteran Jonathan Pelson on Monday night’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News. Pelson is the author of “Wireless Wars, China’s Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We’re Fighting Back.”
“You may have noticed something called 5G is coming to the United States,” Tucker Carlson said. “We were told that it might interfere with airplanes. We just had the most interesting conversation of the year with Jonathan Pelson. He said 5G is not actually about your cell phone at all and it’s controlled by China. This is one of those conversations that we got increasingly wide eyed. You should watch the whole thing but here’s part of it.”
“5G despite the advertisements is not just a faster 4G,” Pelson said. “The real pay-off of 5G is that factories are going to use it to totally interconnect themselves. This thing called ‘the internet of things.’ Their traffic systems. License plate readers. Facial recognition systems. The way farms operate. There are devices now and sensors, wire lessens source on tractors, put sensors in the soil to test moisture levels, all of this will be connected.4-g network can’t handle that. If they can handle a thousand calls in one sector, 5G can handle a hundred thousand, so even though commercials talk about it being a lot faster than 4G…”
Defense Ministry accuses Kiev of trying to frame its soldiers
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed, on Tuesday, that Ukrainian security services have staged more alleged killings of civilians in several towns and villages in order to elicit sympathy by prompting media headlines in the West. Officials believe that Kiev is trying to create a narrative of Moscow being responsible for war crimes.
Moscow insists that the same tactics were used by Kiev to blame Russian forces for atrocities in the town of Bucha last week.
“The troops of the 72nd Ukrainian Main Center for Psychological Operations conducted another staged filming of civilians allegedly killed by violent actions of the Russian armed forces in order for it to be distributed through the Western media,” spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said during a briefing.
According to “confirmed information,” the filming took place in the village of Moschun some 23km northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Monday, he insisted.
Similar false flag operations have been carried out by the Ukrainian side in the cities of Sumy, Konotop and elsewhere, Konashenkov insisted. He didn’t provide direct evidence to support his claims.
On Saturday, Ukraine distributed graphic footage of multiple corpses lying in the streets of Bucha, alleging that they were executed by Russian troops. Again, no unequivocal proof was furnished.
Moscow, which insists that it has not targetted civilians during its operation in Ukraine, has rejected those accusations as a “provocation” and accused Kiev of mounting a false flag operation.
Officials pointed out numerous inconsistencies in the Ukrainian story, including the fact that the video emerged several days after the Russian forces withdrew from Bucha, and that the local mayor didn’t mention any killings in his video address declaring the “liberation” of the city.
Despite this, the West has immediately decided who to blame for the purported atrocities. US President Joe Biden has demanded a “war crimes trial” for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. However, unlike Moscow, Washington doesn’t recognise the International Criminal Court.
Meanwhile, the EU promised to send its experts to aid Ukrainian authorities in collecting evidence at the site.
Moscow launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.
Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two rebel regions by force
The Covid pandemic response beginning in 2020 was one of the most sweeping cases of media propaganda in world history. Governments not only lied to the masses (“15 days to slow the spread,” e.g.) and made dubious claims based on poor evidence (“mask up” to end the pandemic), but it censored even civilians for doubting the mainstream narrative.
Now, a former news executive at international network Sky News, as well as a veteran of ITV, has come forward to reveal what news audiences have only previously been able to surmise: Some news networks must have been ordered to adhere to the government’s pandemic narratives or risk serious consequences (such as losing broadcasting licenses and other reprisals).
Mark Sharman revealed his disturbing insights into the astoundingly coordinated media coverage of the Covid pandemic in a sit-down interview on British channel GBN’s “The Lockdown Inquiry” with host Dan Wootton.
“I know this is quite a big deal for you to come out from behind the camera where you’ve been an executive in the industry for so long,” Wootton began. “But I know you want to do it because you have been so disturbed by the coverage of many of your former colleagues, the organizations that you to work for over the course of the pandemic. So can you just start by explaining this chilling warning that Ofcom gave near the start of the pandemic and how you think that may have impacted the coverage?”
“I, well, I definitely think it impacted, it’s not so much an Ofcom regulation,” Sharman said. “It was advice or a warning actually.’
“Like a little bulletin, wasn’t it?” Wootton said.
“Yeah,” Sharman said. “It was a warning to basically say, ‘do not question the official government line.’ Now to be fair to them, they said, you can have opposition voices on, but you must present as ‘must intervene’ if there’s any danger of harmful or misinformation.”
“So did that essentially turn presenters at the BBC, Sky News into, essentially, representatives of the government?” Wootton asked.
“I think it did,” Sharman answeed. “Not just on-air talent. I think, I think that warning affected all broadcasters. Most of the major broadcasters followed it and actually it was only the one or two little smaller ones who wouldn’t have that backup power who got caught.”
“I mean, a field community radio was censored for putting something out,” he added. “But actually, I think what it’s led to, I think it’s created an environment which will lead to the biggest assault on freedom of speech and democracy I’ve known in my lifetime. I’ve never seen a warning from Ofcom like that. I’ve never seen the broadcasters toe the line and rather than question the government, they became cheerleaders for the government.”
“And why, Mark, why?” Wootton pressed. “That is the question I always ask myself because surely the job of the BBC, ITV News, Sky News to have, you know, the places where you used to work, surely, the first job as a journalist is to question the government and to question the official narrative. So why did they not do that? When it came to lockdown in process.”
“It is the first job,” Sharman responded. “I mean, we’ve all been trained to ask, give both sides of a story and let the viewer decide. But clearly all the way through the pandemic, only one side of the story was given and the media, actually broadcasters and newspapers, picked up the thought that had been created by these behavioral psychologists and created this fear. The broadcasters picked it up with relish and that they really were spreaders of panic and fear.”
“They bought into the propaganda,” Wootton remarked.
“They did, they bought absolutely into the propaganda,” Sharman replied. “And I think it was very dangerous, but I think you have to probably look beyond Ofcom and beyond this country, because as you said this was a worldwide lockstep occurrence. And in parallel with media, you had big tech, new media who were censoring everything.”
In December, scientists who were implemental in spreading Covid hysteria around the globe –nearly as fast as the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself – came forward to express regret for furthering the ‘totalitarian’ agenda.
The members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour, a group of British scientists, confessed that public health authorities were pursuing an agenda to control populations with fear.
“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian’,” the Telegraph reported.
“Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response,” the report noted.
One scientist warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in.”
In the United States, this process may have been different than what was experienced in the U.K. The U.S. government paid millions of dollars to media outlets to run ads that pushed the desired narrative. But the chilling effect on free speech was essentially the same.
The recent appalling Russian invasion of Ukraine must be condemned. It’s yet another atrocious aggression in a long series of violations of international law by several countries including the US, Britain, Russia and Israel. It is terribly disappointing that humanity has failed to advance beyond the use of warfare (military, economic and cyber) to settle problems. Lobbying by the merchants of death, that is, the military-industrial complex, certainly plays a role in this disastrous failure.
US hypocrisy on international law
Many nations and their media, particularly Western nations, have rightly emphasized this horrific violation of the rule of law by Russia. Ironically, it is the US – arguably the nation that has done the most to undermine international law through its widespread military aggressions, support for coups, illegal use of economic warfare (unilateral sanctions), protection of Israel from sanctions, and non-participation with the International Criminal Court (ICC) – that now proclaims most loudly the sanctity of international law.
Selective coverage of attacks
The Western media were less critical of other violations of international law by the US, Britain and Israel. For example, the US and Britain lied about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, they led a coalition of nations in a unspeakable war crime that devastated Iraq, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and led to the destabilization of the Middle East. Iraqis are still suffering horrendous consequences of this years-long war crime. The US media certainly didn’t emphasize that this unprovoked aggression was a violation of international law. In addition, the corporate-dominated US media didn’t call for then President George W. Bush and other members of his administration to be investigated by the ICC for war crimes. This US media hypocrisy seriously undercuts its credibility and shows that it’s a key component of the US propaganda system. In addition, the US media’s failure along with the cowardice of European nations about pointing out US violations have contributed to the undermining of international law.
Lack of context
Returning to today, the media have failed to provide any context for this shameful Russian war crime. The context doesn’t justify Russia’s use of force, but it’s important to understand how we arrived at this awful situation. Unfortunately, this terrible war crime was the predictable result of lies and actions by the US and NATO and their unwillingness to take Russia’s legitimate security concerns seriously.
Promise not to expand eastward
Russia, with documentation from numerous investigations by Western sources, has reminded the world of the 1991 US, German, UK and French promise not to expand NATO one inch to the east in exchange for the Soviet Union allowing the reunification of Germany. Given previous devastating invasions by Western European nations, one can understand why the Soviets might want this promise. For example, during WWII, estimates are that the Soviet Union lost over 26 million people, about 13% of its 1939 population.
George Kennan, architect of the U.S. containment policy towards the Soviet Union, was interviewed by Thomas Friedman in 1998 about NATO’s eastward expansion. Kennan said: ”I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”
Even before there was any expansion, Russia made clear its concern over the expansion to no avail. NATO has since expanded eastward from 16 members to 30 members today. NATO weapons are not far from Russia’s borders, in some areas approximately the same distance as Soviet weapons in Cuba were from the US. The US risked nuclear war to deny Cuba’s sovereignty over having Soviet weapons. Hence Russia’s demands about keeping NATO weapons away from its borders shouldn’t be a surprise
A predicted crisis
In 2008, then US Ambassador to Russia William Burns, now director of the CIA, warned US officials about the danger of holding out the prospect of NATO membership to Ukraine. He warned that it could lead to civil war and present Russia with a crisis on its border in which it could be forced to intervene. Instead of trying to prevent this situation from happening, the US acted in ways that resulted in this predicted crisis occurring.
The predicted civil war then happened in the Donbas area when the new Ukrainian government almost immediately targeted the use of the Russian language. This language policy was quickly overturned, but the damage had already been done. Additional violent acts by neo-Nazi forces led to protests by people in Donbas. In addition, Russia took control of Crimea and the residents of Crimea subsequently overwhelmingly voted to join Russia.
The coup government militarily moved to stop the protests in the Donbas area causing the predicted Russian intervention there. Fighting has been going on in this area at a low level for much of the past 8 years despite the Minsk II accords that were agreed to in 2015 but not implemented.
Negotiations are the key
Unfortunately, this totally unnecessary conflict between Russia and the US turned into a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine when Russia invaded. The people of Ukraine are paying a terribly high price serving as an (unwitting?) proxy for the US. Ordinary Russians, who had no say about the criminal attack, are also facing a much harsher life as a result of this war crime against Ukraine. In order to avoid an escalation into a much broader and more deadly conflict, both sides must quickly make some uncomfortable compromises. Otherwise …
Ron Forthofer is a retired professor of biostatistics, having taught at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. Since retirement in 1991, has been an activist for peace and social justice. He ran for Congress and for governor of Colorado for the Green Party.
Editor’s Note: Before we jump to conclusions about the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its origins, we might wish to learn about Russia and get to know Putin from a different perspective.These informative interviews will illuminate the serious seeker of truth with regards to how this present conflict arose, not in a vacuum, but in relationship to the West’s aggressive regime building in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
PART ONE
Oscar® winning writer-director Oliver Stone conducts a revealing series of interviews with Vladimir Putin, the enigmatic Russian president who has never before spoken at length or in detail to a Western interviewer. Prodded by Stone over the course of two years, Putin confronts a host of critical topics in candid detail, including his long-term grip on power, his personal relationships with Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump, Edward Snowden’s asylum in Moscow, as well as allegations of election meddling and fostering turmoil in Syria. (Part 1 of 4)
PART TWO
Oscar® winning writer-director Oliver Stone conducts a revealing series of interviews with Vladimir Putin, the enigmatic Russian president who has never before spoken at length or in detail to a Western interviewer. Prodded by Stone over the course of two years, Putin confronts a host of critical topics in candid detail, including his long-term grip on power, his personal relationships with Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump, Edward Snowden’s asylum in Moscow, as well as allegations of election meddling and fostering turmoil in Syria. (Part 2 of 4)
PART THREE
Oscar winning writer-director Oliver Stone conducts a revealing series of interviews with Vladimir Putin, the enigmatic Russian president who has never before spoken at length or in detail to a Western interviewer. Prodded by Stone over the course of two years, Putin confronts a host of critical topics in candid detail, including his long-term grip on power, his personal relationships with Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump, Edward Snowden’s asylum in Moscow, as well as allegations of election meddling and fostering turmoil in Syria. (Part 3 of 4)
PART FOUR
Oscar winning writer-director Oliver Stone conducts a revealing series of interviews with Vladimir Putin, the enigmatic Russian president who has never before spoken at length or in detail to a Western interviewer. Prodded by Stone over the course of two years, Putin confronts a host of critical topics in candid detail, including his long-term grip on power, his personal relationships with Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump, Edward Snowden’s asylum in Moscow, as well as allegations of election meddling and fostering turmoil in Syria. (Part 4 of 4)
The “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington D.C. drew thousands of peaceful protesters in support of the common cause of opposing mask and vaccine mandates. Robert Kennedy Jr., founder and Chairman of Children’s Health Defense delivered a speech to the rally attendees was focused on Big Pharma, which has escaped accountability and demands for transparency despite their core responsibilities during the Covid pandemic. His words were so provocative they ignited a media firestorm.
“You cannot sue that company,” he reiterated. “They have a license…”
“These are criminal companies, by the way,” he proclaimed. “These are serial felons.”
“The four companies that make all four of our U.S. vaccines for the children’s program… have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties for hundreds of violations and damages in the last ten years,” he went on.
“These are the companies that gave us the opioid crisis,” he added. “That kills 56,000 children a year. More American kids every year than the Vietnam War killed in twenty years.”
“These are not good citizens,” he emphasized. “These are criminal enterprises.”
“And now you’re taking away any economic or legal incentive for them to behave?” he asked rhetorically. “What do you think they are going to do?”
“Do you think they’ve found Jesus, suddenly?” he went on. “And they’re going to take care of us and our children, they’re suddenly concerned with public health?”
“No,” he said.
“They took away due process rulemaking, they’ve taken away our right to be free of warrantless searches and seizures, this very intrusive track-and-trace surveillance, etcetera,” he went on.
“We are watching something now that I never believed that I would see in my lifetime,” RFK Jr. said. “I have read Orwell and Kafka and Aldous Huxley, this dystopian science fiction novels that someday the United States would be overtaken by fascism.”
“Fascism, incidentally, is defined… Mussolini defined it as the merger of state and corporate power,’” he added.
“And orchestrated by Tony Fauci,” he went on as the crowd booed loudly.
“What we’re seeing today is what I call ‘turnkey totalitarianism,’” he continued. “They are putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control we’ve never seen before.”
“It’s been the ambition of every totalitarian state from the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, of thought, and to obliterate dissent. None of them have been able to do it,” he added.
“They didn’t have the technological capacity,” he noted. “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. I visited in 1962 East Germany with my father. And met people who had climbed the wall and escaped. So, it was possible. Many died, surely. But it was possible.”
“Today, the mechanisms are being put in place,” he warned. “That will make it so that none of us can run, and none of us can hide.”
“Within five years, we are going to see 415,000 low orbit satellites,” he claimed. “Bill Gates and his 65,000 satellites alone will be able to look at every square inch of the planet 24 hours a day. They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from our distance and cut off our food supply. Vaccine passports.”
This part of the speech ignited a media firestorm. They pounced on RFK Jr.’s bit about satellite surveillance and issues with 5G, hardly fringe matters, to lambaste his speech and brandish him a “conspiracy theorist,” which essentially means it is beneath them to address his concerns.
Jake Tapper called him “an ignorant lying menace.” Adam Klasfield of Law Crime News weirdly commented, “The obscene Holocaust invocations and analogies, from RFK Jr. and others at this anti-vaccine rally, sound eerily similar to the rhetoric that appears in legal briefs for indicted Oath Keepers extremists.” Professor Peter Hotez, CNN’s resident vaccine fanatic, opined: “Since June 200,000 unvaccinated Americans lost their lives needlessly to COVID19, victims of antivaccine disinformation, aggression, dog whistles from extremists who compare vaccines to the Holocaust, or promote conspiracies about Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, Me, other US scientists.” Poor guy. It turns out the disinformation has been coming from his side all along.
The reflexive “conspiracy theorist” label was invoked, just as it has countless times in the past before the “theory” actually became the “reality,” such as with “vaccine passports” themselves… which are now being used all over the world to deny people work and access to public spaces.
Even if it is difficult to verify all of RFK Jr.’s claims, the epithet “conspiracy theorist” no longer has the power to unilaterally shut down conversation. It would be remiss not to point out there is no biggest perpetrator of “conspiracy theories” than the mainstream media, which lied for years about Russia collusion, just like it has lied the entire time about the Covid pandemic. We continue.
“You have a series of rights, as flawed as our government is, you can still go out and go to a bar, you can go to a sporting event, you can get on a bus or an airplane and you can travel, you have certain freedoms,” RFK Jr. went on. “You can get educated, etcetera.”
“The minute they hand you that vaccine passport, every right that you have is transformed into a privilege contingent upon your obedience to arbitrary government dictates,” he added.
“It will make you a slave!”
“What do we do?” he asked. “We resist.”
At the end of the day, this is about accountability. It is about accountability for the elected leaders and unelected public health officials who have seized upon a pandemic to wantonly violate every American’s unalienable rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, the right to travel, and the right to bodily autonomy.
RFK Jr. has issued a rousing clarion call for all those who believe that the unlawful vaccine and mask mandates are simply “public health issues.” They are much more than that. They are about rights.
Nothing less than the future of Western civilization is on the line. There are dire implications if we fail to resist the authoritarian state’s escalating violations of human rights. No matter what its pretexts.
Liberty International News 