Bull’s
eye!
“They
made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now
they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice … You are
witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led
by some very bad and conflicted people!”
The Donald has never spoken truer words but also has never
sunken lower into abject victimhood. Indeed, what is he waiting for—– handcuffs
and a perp walk?
Just to be clear, “he” doesn’t need to be the passive object of
a “WITCH HUNT” by “they”.
If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and
propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian
chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and
made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama’s hit
squad—-John Brennan,
Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett—for illegally unmasking and
leaking classified information.
Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian
interference hysteria in the bud.
At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep
State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for
a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.
Namely,
the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who
could not be counted upon to serve as a “trusty” for the status quo; and whose
naïve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal
threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.
Moreover, from the very beginning, the Russian interference
narrative was rooted in nothing more than standard cyber noise from Moscow that
pales compared to what comes out of Langley (CIA) and Ft. Meade (NSA). And we
do mean irrelevant noise.
After all, it didn’t take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet
days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to
Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete,
that he didn’t want to give lethal aid to the
Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin
on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.
So let’s start with two obvious points. Namely, that there is no
“there, there” and that the president not only has the power to declassify
secret documents at will but in this instance could do so without compromising
intelligence community (IC) “sources and methods” in the slightest.
The latter is the case because after Snowden’s revelations in
June 2013, the whole world was put on notice—and most especially Washington’s
adversaries—–that it collects in raw form every single electronic digit that
passes through the worldwide web and related communications grids. It boils
down to universal and omniscient SIGINT (signals intelligence), and
acknowledgment of that fact by publishing the Russia-Trump intercepts would
provide new knowledge to exactly no one.
Nor would it jeopardize the lives of any American spy or agent
(HUMINT); it would just document the unconstitutional interference in the
election process that had been committed by the US intelligence agencies and
political operatives in the Obama White House.
Yes, we can hear the boxes on the CNN screen harrumphing and
spinning noisily that declassifying the “evidence” would amount to obstruction
of justice! That is to say, since Trump’s “crime” is axiomatic (i.e. his
occupancy of the Oval Office), anything that gets in the way of his conviction
and removal therefrom amounts to “obstruction”.
Given that he is up against a
Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance
of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.
But that’s not happening
because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is
being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has
no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.
That became more than evident—-and more than pathetic, too—-when
earlier this morning he tweeted out an attack on his own Deputy Attorney
General, Rod Rosenstein. At least Nixon fired Elliot Richardson (his Attorney
General) and Bill Ruckelshaus (Deputy AG):
“I am
being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to
fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”
So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and
pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise.
Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they
send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.
Indeed, that’s essentially what Donald’s ostensible GOP allies
on the Hill are actually doing. RussiaGate is self-evidently a witch-hunt like
few others in American political history. Yet as the mainstream cameras and microphones
were thrust at one Congressional Republican after another yesterday afternoon
following Donald’s outburst quoted above, there was nary an echo of the
agreement.
Even Senator John Thune, an ostensible Swamp-hating
conservative, had nothing but praise for Special Counsel Robert Mueller while
effecting an earnest confidence that he would fairly and thoroughly get to the
bottom of the matter.
No he
won’t!
Mueller is a card-carrying
apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today’s
surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the
whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly
exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn’t exist, Russia had
to be demonized into order to keep the game going—-a transition that Mueller
fully subscribed to.
So he will “find” extensive
Russian interference in the 2016 election and bring the hammer down on the
Donald for seeking to prevent it from coming to light. The clock is now ticking
and his investigatory team is being loaded up with prosecutorial killers who
have proven records of thuggery when it comes to finding crimes that make for
the fame and fortune of the prosecutors—-even if the crime itself never
happened.
To wit,
Mueller’s #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of
the department’s Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I.
when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force
behind the Enron task force—the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse
and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.
Meanwhile, as we said the other day, the GOP elders especially
could also not be clearer about what is coming down the pike.
They are not defending Trump with even a modicum of the vigor
and resolve that we recall from the early days of Tricky Dick’s ordeal, and, of
course, he didn’t survive anyway.
Instead, it’s as if Ryan, McConnell, et al. have offered to hold
his coat, while the Donald pummels himself with a 140-character Twitter Knife
that is visible to the entire world.
So there
should be no doubt. A Great Big Coup is on the way. But here’s the irony of the
matter.
Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously
demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still
snickering about Mitt Romney’s silly claim during the 2012 election campaign
that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.
But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in
the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community’s
flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad.
To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the
primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards
of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held
territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few
kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.
In any event, President Obama choose to ignore his own red line
and called off the bombers. That, in turn, paved the way for Vladimir Putin to
step into the breach and persuade Assad to give up all of his chemical
weapons—a commitment he fully complied with over the course of the next year.
Needless to say, in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive
act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It
thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda—-removal of the Assad
government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite
regime of Iran.
So it did not take long for the Deep State to retaliate. While
Putin was basking in the glory of the 2014 winter Olympics at Sochi, the entire
apparatus of Imperial Washington—–the CIA, the National Endowment for
Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded
NGOs—-was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s
constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.
From there, the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea
inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its
leader.
Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the
Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine
and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere—-
including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler
during WWII—– there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially
the case after Washington designated “Yats” , a neo-Nazi sympathizer named
Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time
of the Kiev uprising.
So as it turned out, the War Party could not have planned a more
fortuitous outcome—-especially after Russia moved to protect its legitimate
interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil
war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol
in Crimea. The War
Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of
aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its
European neighbors.
There is
nothing like a demonized enemy to keep the $700 billion national security budget flowing and the
hideous Warfare State opulence of the Imperial City intact. So why not throw in
an allegedly “stolen” US election to garnish the case?
In a word, the Little Putsch in Kiev is now begetting a Great Big
Coup in the Imperial City.
This is a history-shattering development, but don’t tell the
boys and girls and robo-machines on Wall Street.
Pathetically, they still think its game on.
Reprinted
with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
Former
Congressman David A. Stockman was Reagan's OMB director, which he wrote about
in his best-selling book, The Triumph of
Politics. His latest book is The Great
Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. He's the
editor and publisher of the new David Stockman's Contra Corner. He was an
original partner in the Blackstone Group, and reads LRC the first thing every
morning.
Copyright © 2017 David Stockman
