The year 2023 was a banner year for change, underscoring the reality of a world transforming away from American hegemony toward the uncertainty of a yet-to-be-defined multilateral reality. This transformation was marked by many events – here are the five most important ones.
The failed Ukrainian counteroffensive
Perhaps the most-hyped event of the year, Ukraine’s much-anticipated spring/summer counteroffensive was NATO’s version of the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944 – a last-gasp effort to throw all remaining reserves into a desperate attempt to score a knock-out blow against an opponent who had seized the strategic initiative. Any sound military analyst could have predicted the inevitability of a Ukrainian defeat – one cannot responsibly speak of launching a frontal assault on a heavily defended, well-prepared defensive position using forces who are neither equipped, organized, or trained for the task.
The amount of delusion surrounding Ukrainian and NATO expectations only underscores the desperation that underpinned their cause – the West’s support of Ukraine was always of a superficial nature, where domestic politics trumped global reality. The ignorance of those who believed Ukraine could pierce the Russian defenses was easily matched by those who thought that a Moscow Maidan movement could be created through the combined impact of economic sanctions and a forever war against Ukraine.
The counteroffensive is the manifestation of the Russophobia that has gripped the collective West, where ignorance trumps fact, and delusion supersedes reality. The failed NATO/Ukrainian counteroffensive, far from weakening Russia, proved to be the incubator for the birth of a more powerful, confident, and resilient Russia that will no longer allow itself to be classified as a second-class citizen in the world community.
On October 6, 2023, Israel was sitting on top of the world. It had cowed the administration of US President Joe Biden into forgetting about a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Instead, it embraced the vision of a greater Israel, which glossed over the continued theft of Palestinian land through unchecked support for illegal Israeli settlements by focusing on the broader geopolitical benefits of normalized relations between Israel and the Gulf Arab states. The Israel Defense Forces were the best military in the region, backed by an intelligence and security establishment possessing a legendary reputation for knowing everything about all potential enemies.
October 7: The Israel-Hamas war
Then came October 7 and the Hamas surprise attack.
All talk of Israeli-Arab normalization is finished. The IDF is being embarrassed by Hamas and defeated by Hezbollah. The Israeli intelligence service has been exposed as an empty shell whose greatest accomplishment is an AI-assisted targeting system that facilitates the killing of Palestinian civilians.
The new reality of the Middle East is now shaped by two related issues – the necessity of a Palestinian state and the inevitability of a strategic Israeli defeat. The paths toward resolving each of these issues will not be easy ones to follow, and they may unfold over the span of years rather than months, but one thing is certain – this new geopolitical reality would not have been possible without the events of October 7.
Africa: The Sahel revolt
In the span of three years, Françafrique, or the post-colonial French-dominated sphere of influence in the Sahel region of Africa, has gone from serving as the springboard for the projection of French-led American and EU efforts to project military power in an attempt to defeat the forces of Islamic insurgency, to being humiliated and defeated at the hands of nationalists who overthrew traditional pro-French governments and replacing them with anti-French military juntas. Starting with Mali in 2021, then Burkina Faso in 2022, and finally Niger in 2023, the collapse of the Sahel component of Françafrique has been as dramatic as it has been decisive. There was seemingly nothing France nor its supporters could do to reverse the tide of anti-French sentiment in the region. In the end, the threat of outside military intervention to change the July 2023 coup in Niger collapsed in the face of a unified collective defense posture taken by the three former French colonies.
The dramatic eviction of France from the region was matched by the emergence of a new regional power – Russia. The rise of the new tripartite regional alliance between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger coincided with a more assertive Russian foreign policy, which looked to form common cause with an Africa still straining from the bonds of post-colonial existence manifested in geopolitical relationships like those formed under Françafrique. The Russian approach was borne out in the success of last summer’s Russian-African Summit, held in St. Petersburg, and the growing economic and security relationships between Russia and many African states – including Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, that have emerged since. The Russian tricolor flag, it seems, has replaced that of France as the most influential symbol of foreign involvement in that region.
BRICS
In 2022, China hosted the 14th Summit of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South African economic forum best known by the acronym formed from the first letters of its five-nation membership – BRICS. At that summit, BRICS aspired to greatness but was unable to accomplish anything more than talk about the creation of a so-called “currency basket” designed to challenge the global supremacy of the US dollar and speak wistfully about the possibility of opening its membership to other nations.
Then came the 15th BRICS Summit, held in South Africa. From a forum possessing unrealized potential, BRICS exploded upon the international scene as a multi-lateral competitor to the American singularity, a viable challenger to the US-imposed “rules-based international order” that had dominated global geopolitical discourse since the end of the Second World War. The events that helped propel BRICS front and center on the stage of global relevance represented a perfect storm, so to speak, of geopolitical calamity – the defeat of the collective West at the hands of Russia in Ukraine, the collapse of Françafrique in the Sahel, and the increasing dominance of China on the global economic reality.
The South African-hosted BRICS Summit proved to be the perfect counterpoint to the combined pathos of the G-7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, and the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. In Japan and Lithuania, western impotence was on full display for the world to see. In sharp contrast, the virility of the BRICS phenomenon provided a multilateral alternative that proved to be attractive to many nations, including the six that were accepted into BRICS as part of its expansion strategy (Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, although Argentina withdrew its membership package following the election of Javier Milei as president in December 2023), and the fourteen other nations who have formally submitted applications to join in 2024, when Russia takes over the chairmanship. BRICS has surpassed the G7 in terms of collective economic clout, and the geopolitical influence of its collective membership is such that it will exceed both the G7 and NATO forums in terms of overall international relevance in the years to come.
The US: The Naked Emperor
The United States spends nearly $1 trillion a year on its defense – more than the combined defense expenditures of its ten closest rivals for the top spot. This money funds the strategic nuclear deterrence force and the conventional military power projection potential of the US. Given the enormous sums involved, one would anticipate that the dominance of US military power worldwide would be unmatched. Curiously, this is not the case.
By spending a fraction of what the US does for similar services, Russia has overtaken the United States when it comes to strategic nuclear forces. The US needs a major upgrade to its nuclear triad – the land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and manned bombers – that comprise its nuclear strike capabilities. While replacement systems are in the works, it will take more than a decade to get these systems online, and the cost of doing this will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars – or more, given the history of US defense industry inefficiencies and cost overruns.
Russia, meanwhile, has begun putting advanced missiles into service – missiles designed to defeat US missile defenses, along with new submarines and manned bombers. Traditional venues used by the US to offset Russian strategic advances, such as arms control, are no longer available due to short-sighted US policies that rejected arms control for the potential of achieving a strategic nuclear advantage. The script, so to speak, has been flipped, and it’s now the US that finds itself on the short end of the atomic power equation. This disadvantageous position will be even further exacerbated by the growth of China’s strategic nuclear force, which is in the process of expanding from possessing some 400 nuclear weapons to matching the US and Russia’s 1,500 deployed warheads.
The US used to maintain a conventional military force structure capable of fighting two-and-one-half wars simultaneously – one in Europe, one in Asia, and a holding action in the Middle East until victory was achieved in one of the first two theaters, and forces could be redeployed. Today, the US, by trying to maintain a global presence that mirrors that of the Cold War, is unable to fight and win a single major conflict. It has maxed out its conventional potential in Europe, deploying some 100,000 troops in support of NATO, which has allowed its combined military combat potential to atrophy to the point that no NATO nation has a viable military capability. The collective impotence of NATO is on display in Ukraine, where a Russian army is in the process of defeating a NATO-trained and equipped Ukrainian military.
In the Pacific, the US is facing the fact that it lacks sufficient military power to defend Taiwan in the face of any potential Chinese military operation. There have been advances in the accuracy and lethality of Chinese stand-off weapons, including new advanced hypersonic missiles, which, in theory at least, could overcome US air defense systems that protect the centerpiece of American power projection – the aircraft carrier battlegroup. This weakness is not just limited to any potential conflict with China—the US Navy has deployed carrier battlegroups off the coast of Lebanon, in the Persian Gulf, and to the Red Sea, where they have been prevented from engaging in any decisive military intervention out of fear that missiles fired by Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthi of Yemen could damage or sink the most visible symbol of American military power today.
With a budget of nearly $1 trillion, one would expect the US to be parading itself worldwide via a military second to none in terms of capabilities and lethality. Instead, the US has been exposed as an emperor with no clothes whose nakedness is a source of embarrassment on a global stage that had grown accustomed to the finery and pageantry of American military power. The humiliation of the US Navy at the hands of the Houthi is but the most recent manifestation of a trend exposing US military weakness. This trend will only expand in 2024.
This documentary removes the mystery from international terrorism. Written, produced, and hosted by G. Edward Griffin in 1982, this film is every bit as relevant today as it was then.
On the surface, terrorism appears to be irrational and counter-productive. But when the long-range strategy and tactics are understood, it becomes recognizable as part of a larger plan to weaken and destroy target governments. It is but one phase of the Marxist-Leninist dogma of so-called Wars of National Liberation.
The terrorists themselves are dispensable players in this deadly game because, when the target governments are finally toppled, it will not be the terrorists who come to power, but the international Marxist apparatus that trained and supplied them.
Here are the documented facts that show the detailed operation of this network. The program is built upon sound research and offers powerful visual images and amazing historical footage.
This content is also the intellectual basis for the newly released film by Micki Willis the Great Awakening. Source: Reality Zone & YouTube
The UN is sending more observers to Zaporozhye after the Kakhovka dam disasterIAEA issues warning about Europe’s largest nuclear plant.
It is “critical” for the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant to have continued access to water in order to prevent a reactor meltdown, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday.
Europe’s largest atomic power station relies on the Kakhovka reservoir for water to cool its six reactors. However, the water levels have dropped by 2.8 meters since the Kakhovka dam broke early on Tuesday. Once the water level is below 12.7 meters, the ZNPP will no longer be able to pump water from the reservoir, Grossi warned.
“As the full extent of the dam’s damage remains unknown, it is not possible to predict if and when this might happen,” the IAEA director said, but at the current rate of 5-7 centimeters per hour, that could be “within the next two days.”
ZNPP is building up water reserves while it still can, Grossi noted, citing reports from the IAEA experts who are on site. He intends to visit ZNPP next week and bring additional observers to strengthen the agency’s presence at the facility.
“Now more than ever, the IAEA’s reinforced presence at the [ZNPP] is of vital importance to help prevent the danger of a nuclear accident and its potential consequences for the people and the environment at a time of increased military activity in the region,” Grossi said.
The possible loss of the plant’s main source of cooling water further complicates an already extremely difficult and challenging nuclear safety and security situation.
The Zaporozhye NPP is Europe’s largest atomic power station, with six reactor cores capable of generating a gigawatt of electricity each. Russian troops have controlled it since March last year. The region in which it is located voted to join Russia in September 2022, though Ukraine claims it is illegally occupied.
Russia has accused Ukraine of destroying the Kakhovka dam and causing widespread flooding in Kherson Region. President Vladimir Putin called it a “barbaric act”amounting to terrorism. Moscow says that Kiev is trying to secure the flank of its forces so it can bring up reserves after a series of failed assaults on the Zaporozhye front.
The IAEA deployed an observer mission at the ZNPP in September 2022. Prior to that, the station and its environs had been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian artillery, which Kiev admitted at one point. Just before the IAEA mission arrived, Ukrainian commandos also attempted to seize the facility but were driven back. Russia has provided evidence of Ukrainian attacks to the UN, which has stubbornly avoided assigning blame.
In part due to the Ukrainian artillery activity, five of the six reactors at ZNPP have been shut down, with one continuing to operate at a low level to maintain power to the facility. They all require continued cooling to prevent a fuel meltdown and possible radioactive release.
It’s been rightly said that “he who holds the gold makes the rules.”
After World War 2, the US had the largest gold reserves in the world, by far. Along with winning the war, this let the US reconstruct the global monetary system around the dollar.
The new system, created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, tied the currencies of virtually every country in the world to the US dollar through a fixed exchange rate. It also tied the US dollar to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce.
The dollar was said to be “as good as gold.”
The Bretton Woods system made the US dollar the world’s premier reserve currency. It compelled other countries to store dollars for international trade or to exchange them with the US government for gold at the promised price.
However, it was doomed to fail.
Runaway spending on warfare and welfare caused the US government to print more dollars than it could back with gold at the promised price.
By 1967, the number of dollars circulating had drastically increased relative to the amount of gold backing them. This encouraged foreign countries to exchange their dollars for gold, draining the US gold supply at an alarming rate and collapsing the London Gold Pool. At this point, it was clear this system was breaking down.
On Sunday night, August 15, 1971, President Nixon interrupted the scheduled TV programs and made a surprise announcement to the nation—and the world. He announced the unilateral end of the Bretton Woods system and severed the dollar’s last tie to gold.
The end of the dollar’s gold backing had profound geopolitical consequences.
Most critically, it eliminated the main reason foreign countries stored large amounts of US dollars and used the US dollar for international trade. As a result, oil-producing countries began to demand payment in gold instead of rapidly depreciating dollars.
It was clear the US would have to create a new monetary system to stabilize the dollar. So it concocted a new scheme… and chose Saudi Arabia as its accomplice. This agreement came to be known as the “petrodollar system.”
The US handpicked Saudi Arabia because of its vast petroleum reserves and dominant position in the global oil market.
In essence, the petrodollar system was an agreement that the US would guarantee the House of Saud’s survival. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would do three things.
First, it would use its dominant position in OPEC to ensure that all oil transactions would only happen in US dollars.
Second, it would recycle hundreds of billions of US dollars from annual oil revenue into US Treasuries. This lets the US issue more debt and finance previously unimaginable budget deficits.
Third, it would guarantee the price of oil within limits acceptable to the US and prevent another oil embargo.
The petrodollar system gave foreign countries another compelling reason to hold and use the dollar. And it preserved the dollar’s unique status as the world’s top reserve currency.
But… why oil?
Oil is the largest and most strategic commodity market in the world.
As you can see in the chart below, it dwarfs all other major commodity markets combined. The annual production value of the oil market is ten times bigger than the gold market, for example.
Every country needs oil. And if foreign countries need US dollars to buy oil, they have a compelling reason to hold US dollars even if they are not backed by a promise to redeem them in gold.
Think about it… If France wants to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, it must purchase US dollars on the foreign exchange market to pay for the oil first.
This creates a huge artificial market for US dollars and differentiates the US dollar from a purely local currency, like the Mexican peso.
The dollar is just a middleman. It’s used in countless transactions, amounting to trillions of dollars that have nothing to do with US products or services.
Since the oil market is enormous, it acts as a benchmark for international trade. If foreign countries are already using dollars for oil, it’s easier to use the dollar for other international trade.
In addition to nearly all oil sales, the US dollar is used for about 80% of all international transactions.
Ultimately, the petrodollar boosts the US dollar’s purchasing power by enticing foreigners to soak up dollars.
The petrodollar system has helped create a deeper, more liquid market for the dollar and US Treasuries. It has also helped the US keep interest rates lower than they would otherwise be, allowing the US government to finance enormous deficits it otherwise would be unable to.
Multi-trillion deficits would otherwise be impossible without destroying the currency through money printing.
It’s hard to overstate how much the petrodollar system benefits the US. It’s the bedrock of the US financial system and has underpinned the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency since the 1970s.
That’s why the US government protects it so fiercely. It needs the system to survive.
World leaders who have challenged the petrodollar have ended up dead.
Take Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, for example. Each led a large oil-producing country—Iraq and Libya, respectively. And both tried to sell their oil for something other than US dollars before US military interventions led to their deaths.
Of course, there were other reasons the US toppled Saddam and Gaddafi. But protecting the petrodollar was a serious consideration, at the very least.
When countries like Iraq and Libya challenge the petrodollar system, it’s one thing. The US military can dispatch them with ease.
However, it’s a whole other dynamic when China (and Russia) undermine the petrodollar system… which is happening in a big way right now.
China and Russia are the only countries with sophisticated enough nuclear arsenals to go toe-to-toe with the US up to the top of the military escalation ladder.
In other words, the US military can’t attack Russia and China with impunity because they can match each move up to all-out nuclear war—the very top of the military escalation ladder.
For this reason, the US is deterred from entering a direct military conflict with China and Russia—even though they are about to strike a fatal blow to the petrodollar system.
US Sanctions Accelerate Demise of Petrodollar
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government launched its most aggressive sanctions campaign ever.
Exceeding even Iran and North Korea, Russia is now the most sanctioned nation in the world.
“This is financial nuclear war and the largest sanctions event in history,” said a former US Treasury Department official.
He said, “Russia went from being part of the global economy to the single largest target of global sanctions and a financial pariah in less than two weeks.”
As part of this, the US government seized the US dollar reserves of the Russian central bank—the accumulated savings of the nation. (Washington did the same to Afghanistan’s dollar reserves after the Taliban took Kabul.)
It was a stunning illustration of the dollar’s political risk. The US government can seize another sovereign country’s dollar reserves at the flip of a switch.
The Wall Street Journal, in an article titled “If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Really Money, the World Is in for a Shock,” noted:
“Sanctions have shown that currency reserves accumulated by central banks can be taken away. With China taking note, this may reshape geopolitics, economic management and even the international role of the U.S. dollar.”
The head of the Russian Parliament recently called the US dollar a “candy wrapper” but not the candy itself. In other words, the dollar has the outward appearance of money but is not real money.
It’s important to remember some simple facts.
#1: Russia is the world’s largest energy producer.
#2: China is the world’s largest energy importer.
#3: Russia is China’s largest oil supplier.
And now that the US has banned Russia from the dollar system, there is an urgent need for a credible system capable of handling hundreds of billions worth of oil sales outside the US dollar and financial system.
The Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) is that system. The maturation of China’s alternative to the petrodollar is a big reason why the massive amount of energy trade between Russia and China occurs in yuan, not US dollars.
Further, Washington has threatened to sanction China similarly for years.
These threats against China may be a bluff, but if the US government carried them out—as it recently did against Russia—it would be like dropping a financial nuclear bomb on Beijing. Without access to dollars, China would have previously struggled to import oil and engage in international trade. As a result, its economy would come to a grinding halt, an intolerable threat to the stability of the Chinese government.
China would rather not depend on an adversary like this. It’s one of the main reasons it created an alternative to the petrodollar system. The INE allows oil producers to sell their products for yuan (and gold indirectly) while bypassing the US dollar, sanctions, and financial system.
Other countries on Washington’s sanctions list are enthusiastically signing up.
According to Credit Suisse, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela own 40% of the proven oil reserves of OPEC+ members. These countries are under strict US sanctions, which makes accepting US dollars and transacting globally challenging. So it’s no surprise that these sanctioned oil producers are happy to accept yuan as payment and support the petroyuan system.
But it’s not just sanctioned oil producers that benefit from the petroyuan…
Think about it. Any oil-producing country has two choices:
Option #1 – The Petrodollar
The dismal financial situation of the US guarantees the dollar will lose significant purchasing power.
Plus, there’s enormous political risk. Oil producers are exposed to the whims of the US government, which can confiscate their money whenever it wants, as it recently did to Russia.
Option #2 – Shanghai International Energy Exchange
Here, an oil producer can participate in the world’s largest market and try to capture more market share.
It can also easily convert and repatriate its proceeds into physical gold, an international form of money with no political or counterparty risk.
From the perspective of an oil producer, the choice is a no-brainer.
Even though most people have not realized it yet, we are at the end of the petrodollar system and on the cusp of a new monetary era.
There’s an excellent chance more financial turmoil is coming soon.
The bloc could help end the conflict, at any time, by addressing the issues around its plans for further expansion.
The Western public, like others, are justly appalled by the human suffering and the horrors of the Ukrainian war. Empathy is one of the great virtues of humanity, which in this instance translates into the demand for helping Ukrainians. Yet, propaganda commonly weaponizes the best in human nature, such as compassion, to bring out the worst. As sympathy and the desire to assist the displaced are used to mobilize public support for confrontation and war with Russia, it is necessary to ask if the Western public and Ukrainians are being manipulated to support a proxy war.
Is NATO helping Ukraine to fight Russia or is NATO using Ukraine to fight Russia?
The organization as a passive actor?
The US-led military bloc commonly depicts itself as an innocent third party that merely responds to the overwhelming desire of the Ukrainian people to join its ranks. Yet, for years NATO has attempted to absorb a reluctant Ukraine into its orbit. A NATO publication from 2011 acknowledged that “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support for it at is less than 20%”.
In 2014, this problem was resolved by supporting what Statfor’s George Friedman labelled “the most blatant coup in history” as there were no efforts to conceal Western meddling. Regime change was justified as helping Ukrainians with their “democratic revolution”. Yet, it involved the unconstitutional removal of the elected government as a result of an uprising that even the BBC acknowledged did not have majority support amongst the general public. The authorities elected by the Ukrainian people were replaced by individuals handpicked by Washington. An infamous leaked phone call between State Department apparatchik Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that Washington had chosen exactly who would be in the new government several weeks before they had even removed president Yanukovich from power.
Donbass predictably rejected and resisted the legitimacy of the new regime in Kiev with the support of Russia. Instead of calling for a “unity government”, a plan for which Western European states had signed as guarantors, NATO countries quietly supported an “anti-terrorist operation” against eastern Ukrainians, resulting in at least 14,000 deaths.
The Minsk-2 peace agreement of February 2015 produced a path for peace, yet the US and UK sabotaged it for the next 7 years. Furthermore, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande recently admitted that both Germany and France considered the deal an opportunity to buy time for Ukraine to arm itself and prepare for war.
In the 2019 election, millions of Ukrainians were disenfranchised, including those living in Russia. Nevertheless, the result was a landslide with 73% of Ukrainians voting for Vladimir Zelensky’s peace platform based on implementing the Minsk-2 agreement, negotiating with Donbass, protecting the Russian language, and restoring peace with Moscow. However, the far-right militias that were armed and trained by the US effectively laid down a veto by threatening Zelensky and defying him on the front line when he demanded to pull back heavy weapons. Pressured also by the US, Zelensky eventually reversed the entire peace platform the Ukrainians had voted for. Instead, opposition media and political parties were purged, and the main opposition leader, Viktor Medvedchuk was arrested. Subverting the wishes of Ukrainians in order to steer the country towards confrontation with Russia was yet again referred to as “helping”Ukraine.
Towards proxy war
In 2019, the Rand Corporation published a 325-page report ordered by the US Army titled “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground”. In the language of a proxy war, the report advocated arming Ukraine to bleed Moscow stating, “Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it”. The US Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, similarly explained in 2020 the strategy of arming Ukraine claiming, “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here”.
In December 2021, the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA warned that the Kremlin was under growing pressure to invade to prevent Washington from further building up its military presence on its borders, which included modernising Ukrainian ports to fit US warships. “That relationship [US-Ukraine] will be far stronger and deeper, and the United States military will be more firmly entrenched inside Ukraine two to three years from now. So inaction on [the Kremlin’s] part is risky,” George Beebe explained. Yet, despite being convinced that Russia would invade, Washington refused to give any reasonable security guarantees to Moscow.
Kiev agreed to enter into negotiations merely three days into the Russian invasion, which resulted in a peace agreement outline a few weeks later. Former intelligence official Fiona Hill and Angela Stent later penned an article acknowledging that “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbass region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries”.
However, after a visit by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Kiev suddenly withdrew from the peace negotiations. Reports in the Ukrainian and American media have suggested that London and Washington had pressured Kiev to abandon negotiations and instead seek victory on the battlefield with NATO weapons.
Johnson gave multiple speeches warning against a “bad peace,” while German General Harald Kujat, a former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, confirmed that Johnson had sabotaged the peace negotiationsin order to fight a proxy war with Russia: “His reasoning was that the West was not ready for an end to the war”.
The American objectives also had seemingly little to do with “helping” Ukraine. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated US goals in Ukraine as the weakening of a strategic rival: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”. President Biden argued for regime change in Moscow as Putin “cannot remain in power”, which was repeated by Boris Johnson’s op-ed stating that “The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat”.
US Congressman Dan Crenshaw advocated for a proxy war by supplying weapons to Ukraine as “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea”. Similarly, Senator Lindsey Graham argued the US should fight Russia to the last Ukrainian: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person”. The rhetoric is eerily similar to that of Hungarian billionaire George Soros, who argued that NATO could dominate if it could use Eastern European soldiers as they accept more deaths than their Western peers: “the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act”.
Following NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s recent Orwellian statement that “weapons are the way to peace”, it is worth assessing if NATO is helping Ukraine or using Ukraine. NATO powers have stated that they are supplying Ukraine with weapons to have a stronger position at the negotiating table, yet one year into the war, no major Western leaders have called for peace talks. NATO has a powerful bargaining chip that would actually help Ukraine, which would be an agreement to end NATO expansion toward Russian borders. However, whitewashing the bloc’s direct contribution to the war prevents a negotiated settlement.
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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.
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So, now it is out in the open. The German Foreign Minister has stated that we are at war with Russia.
The mainstream media was too concerned with the usual dross to notice, but this means that World War III has officially started.
On the day that Germany announced WWIII, the leading section of the BBC’s news site carried no mention of the German Foreign Minister’s announcement but managed to find space for the following headlines: ‘Homeowner’s fury over sofa wedged in stairs’ and ‘BBC News Presenter gets emotional in last ever sign off’.
And once again, for the third time, a world war was officially started by Germany.
This is no big surprise. I mentioned many months ago that German citizens were hearing Air Raid Warning signals being tested.
And, of course, many months ago, the UK and the US pulled out of peace talks and abandoned any attempt to negotiate a settlement with Russia.
US President Biden and European Ministers and the UK are all sending tanks to Ukraine (one of the most corrupt countries in the world) to fight Russia. (Biden, of course, has financial links with the Ukraine.)
The odd thing is that the Ukraine has over 1,000 tanks already. So the few dozen the West is sending – and which will take months to arrive – will not make a great deal of difference. This is a tactical donation. Military experts claim that some of the promised arms will take nearly three years to arrive in the Ukraine. Is that a sign of how long the West is hoping this war will last?
And, of course, those tanks will need trained soldiers. You can’t just hand over tanks and expect the Ukrainians to know how to use them. Apart from anything else, Ukraine has very few soldiers left. Around 150,000 Ukranian soldiers have been killed and several hundred thousand have been wounded. (In comparison, of the 600,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine, between 16,000 to 25,000 have died.)
But the tanks aren’t enough for Ukraine.
Ukraine, which is losing its war, now wants warships, submarines and planes.
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According to reliable sources, an American torpedo was found at the explosion site of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. It was the torpedo type carried by the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Ignatius (DDG 117) – RGM-84 harpoon missile. The Harpoon has been the primary anti-ship weapon in the United States Navy, it has a range of 300 km and is known as a “ship-killer”.
The U.S. provided Ukrainian forces with the Harpoon anti-ship missiles at the end of May this year, and then the Ukraine used Harpoon missiles to sink the Russian Navy’s Vasiliy Bekh tugboat around June 17. Actually, the U.S. Navy tested the destructive power of Harpoon missiles on the battlefield in Ukraine. Around the same time, the U.S. Sixth Fleet began collecting accurate mapping of the vicinity of the Nord Stream pipeline in order to perform remote sabotage.
All about Blowing up the NS! U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet carried out the sabotage
From Obama to Biden administrations, they all charged that the NS pipelines will deepen the extensive dependence of Germany and other portions of democratic Europe on Russian energy supplies, Biden has even threatened to “put an end” to the Nord Stream 2. Since 2022, the U.S. Navy has been making intensive displays of its military presence in the Baltic region, ostensibly dictated by the international situation and the new phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the following timeline shows that the U.S. Navy’s “use of force” against the Nord Stream pipeline was deliberate.
First, quietly deploy commander familiar with underwater fast attacks
The U.S. Navy made a low-key personnel transfer on May 20, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced that Navy Rear Adm. Thomas E. Ishee for appointment to the grade of vice admiral, and assignment as commander, 6th Fleet. Thomas Ishee is well versed in underwater fast attack, and he commanded fast attack submarines and oversaw the operations of torpedo retrievers, floating dry dock and the Navy’s submarine rescue systems.
Second, by taking advantage of the military exercise, collect detailed data on the intended attack location in advance
The Baltic Operations (BALTOPS 22), led by U.S. Sixth Fleet, took place from June 5 to 17, the important scenarios include anti-submarine, mine clearance operations, unmanned underwater vehicles, explosive ordnance disposal, etc. Significantly, in period BALTOPS U.S. Navy 6th Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers, training an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit near Bornholm island, Denmark (very close to the NS gas pipeline explosion sites), and collecting over 200 hours of undersea data – data which included precision mapping of the exact location of the Nord Stream pipelines that was sufficiently precise for remote sabotage.
USS Paul Ignatius (DDG 117) quickly left the Baltic Sea after completing its mission.
Sept. 15, USS Paul Ignatius arrived in Riga, Latvia for a scheduled port visit. Sept. 26, this destroyer docked in the port Gdynia, Poland after completing its “mission”, on the same day, explosions occurred at Nord Stream pipelines. After that, Paul Ignatius was immediately sent back to the Naval Station Rota, Spain to escape the accident site.
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!
Western hegemony should be replaced with an actual order respectful of all, the Russian leader said.
The world is entering a decade of tumult as the pursuit of a more just world order clashes with the arbitrary hegemony of the collective West, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, addressing the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.
Putin’s speech ranged from biodiversity to “cancel culture,” the nature of what the West has to offer and Russia’s response, followed by hours of answering audience questions. Here are six key points from his opening remarks.
The West stokes conflict to preserve hegemony
From inciting conflict in Ukraine and provocations around Taiwan to destabilizing the world food and energy markets, the US and its allies have been escalating tensions around the globe in recent years and especially in recent months, Putin said.
“Ruling the world is what the so-called West has staked in this game, which is certainly dangerous, bloody and – I would say – dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and disregards any interests of other states,” the Russian president explained. In their so-called “rules-based world order,” only those making the “rules” have any agency, while everyone else must simply obey.
However, the West has “no constructive ideas and positive development, they simply have nothing to offer the world except the preservation of their dominance.”
Rules for thee but not for me
The West insists its culture and worldview should be universal, Putin said. While not saying it outright, they behave as if these values must be unconditionally accepted by everyone else.
Yet when some other countries, notably China, began benefiting from globalization, the West “immediately changed or completely canceled” many of the rules it long insisted were set in stone and sacred, Putin said, with free trade, economic openness, fair competition and even property rights “suddenly forgotten at once, completely.”
“As soon as something becomes profitable for themselves, they change the rules immediately, on the go, in the course of the game.”
“Cancel culture” and canceling culture
Believing themselves infallible, the rulers of the West desire to destroy – or “cancel” – those they dislike. Where Nazis burned books, the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” now ban Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky, Putin said. Liberal democracy has transformed into something unrecognizable, declaring any alternative viewpoint as propaganda or a threat, he added. The so-called “cancel culture” destroys anything that is alive and creative, preventing any freedom of thought in culture, economics or politics alike.
“History, of course, will put everything in its place,” Putin said, adding that the the self-conceit of those who seek to cancel them is off the charts, “but no one will even remember their names in a few years, while Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and Pushkin will endure.”
Russia does not seek domination
Russia is an “independent, original civilization” and “has never considered itself an enemy of the West,”Putin said. Since antiquity, it has had ties with the West of traditional Christian and Muslim values, freedom, patriotism, and a rich culture. There is another West, however – “an aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonialist, acting as a tool of neoliberal elites,” Putin said, “whose dictates Russia will never accept.”
Even so, Russia is not throwing a gauntlet to the elites of that West, but “simply defends its right to exist and develop freely. At the same time, we ourselves are not seeking to become some kind of new hegemon,” Putin said.
Western hegemony is ending
“We are standing at a historic milestone, ahead of what is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II. The West is not able to single-handedly manage humanity, but is desperately trying to do it, and most of the peoples of the world no longer want to put up with it,” Putin said.
Conflicts arising from this tumult are threatening the entire humanity, and constructively resolving them is the principal challenge ahead, according to the Russian leader.
No one can sit out the coming storm, which has acquired a global character, Putin said. Humanity has two choices, “either to continue to accumulate a burden of problems that will inevitably crush us all, or to try together to find solutions, albeit imperfect, but working, capable of making our world safer and more stable.”
What multipolar world should look like
In a truly democratic multipolar world, any society, culture and civilization should have the right to choose its own path and socio-political system. If the US and Europe have that right, so should everyone else. Russia also has it, “and no one will ever be able to dictate to our people what kind of society we should build and on what principles.”
The biggest threat to the political, economic, and ideological monopoly of the West is that alternative social models may arise in the world – and would be more effective and more attractive.
“Above all, we believe that the new world order should be based on law and justice, be free, authentic and fair,” the Russian president said.
“The future world order is being formed before our eyes. And in this world order, we must listen to everyone, take into account every point of view, every nation, society, culture, every system of worldviews, ideas and religious beliefs, without imposing a single truth on anyone, and only on this basis, understanding our responsibility for the fate of our peoples and the planet, to build a symphony of human civilization.”
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!
The former Italian PM reportedly blamed Kiev for inciting conflict with Russia, putting the would-be ruling coalition in doubt.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has reportedly claimed that Kiev triggered a conflict with Russia by reneging on a peace plan for eastern Ukraine, a tape provided to the media suggests. In an apparent response to the leak, Giorgia Meloni, who has been tasked with forming a new Italian government, stated that people who do not share a pro-NATO stance would have no place in her coalition.
Speaking to members of his Forza Italia party on Tuesday, Berlusconi reportedly offered a viewpoint about the origin of the Ukraine crisis that clashed with the NATO-favored narrative of unprovoked Russian aggression against its neighbor.
Italy is an important member of the US-led alliance and anyone who disagrees with this position will be excluded from government, Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy party, pledged on Wednesday evening, as quoted by the newspaper La Repubblica.
In the audio clip, Berlusconi can be heard accusing Kiev of failing for years to uphold a peace deal with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. When Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky came to power in 2019, he “tripled down” on attacking the regions, the politician stated.
Donetsk and Lugansk asked for Moscow’s protection, he continued. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in the hope that Zelensky would be overthrown and replaced with “good people of common sense” within a couple of weeks, Berlusconi claimed. The wording resembles what he told the Italian public broadcaster RAI after the September election.
During this week’s meeting, Berlusconi allegedly suggested that the conflict in Ukraine could last for over “200 years,”after the country unexpectedly resisted Russia and received money and arms from Western nations to continue the fighting.
In another part of the recording, which was published by the LaPresse news agency, Berlusconi claimed to have received a crate of vodka and a “nice letter” from Putin for his birthday. He added that he responded by sending Lambrusco wine to the Russian leader. After the clip was released, the former prime minister’s party claimed he had been referring to historical contacts with Putin and not recent events.
Berlusconi, a three-time former leader of the Italian government, has a long record of friendly relations with Putin, which stretched beyond his tenure as prime minister. His participation in the right-wing coalition has resulted in claims that the country could make a foreign policy U-turn and oppose the US-led anti-Russian campaign under Meloni. She repeatedly pledged her support for the EU and NATO after winning the election.
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!
Liberty International News 