Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
On November 1st, The Intercept headlined\u00a0“HERE\u2019S THE PROBLEM WITH THE STORY\u00a0CONNECTING RUSSIA TO DONALD TRUMP\u2019S\u00a0EMAIL SERVER\u201d<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0and the reporting team of Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee, and Morgan Marquis-Boire, revealed that:<\/span><\/p>\n “Slate\u2019s Franklin Foer published a story\u00a0that\u2019s been\u00a0circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime,\u00a0an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server\u00a0to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an\u00a0explosive night of\u00a0Twitter confusion and misinformation. The gist of the Slate article is dramatic \u2014 incredible, even: Cybersecurity\u00a0researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured\u00a0to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia\u2019s largest commercial bank.\u00a0This is a story that any reporter\u00a0in our election cycle would drool over, and\u00a0drool Foer did.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The Intercept team concluded their detailed analysis of the evidence by saying:<\/span><\/p>\n “Could it be that Donald Trump used one of his shoddy empire\u2019s spam\u00a0marketing machines, one with his last name built right into the domain name,\u00a0to secretly collaborate with a Moscow bank? Sure. At this moment, there\u2019s\u00a0literally no way to disprove that. But\u00a0there\u2019s also literally no way to prove it,\u00a0and such a grand claim carries a high burden of proof. Without more evidence it would be safer (and saner) to assume that this is\u00a0exactly what it looks like:\u00a0A company that Trump has used since 2007 to\u00a0outsource his hotel spam\u00a0is doing exactly that. Otherwise, we\u2019re all making the\u00a0exact same speculation about the\u00a0unknown that\u2019s caused untold millions of\u00a0voters to believe Hillary\u2019s deleted emails\u00a0might have\u00a0contained Benghazi\u00a0cover-up PDFs. Given equal evidence for both, go with the less wacky story.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n However, they failed to dig deeper to explain what could have motivated this smear of Trump: was it just sloppiness on the part of Slate, and of Foer? Hardly \u2014 it was anything but unintentional:<\/span><\/p>\n A core part of the Democratic Party\u2019s campaign for Hillary Clinton consists of her claim that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian agent. This is an updated version of the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy\u2019s campaign to \u201croot communists out of the federal government,\u201d and of the John Birch Society\u2019s accusation even against the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that, “With regard to … Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.”<\/span><\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n Neoconservatives \u2014 in both Parties \u2014 are the heirs of the Republican Party\u2019s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. Neoconservatism has emerged as today\u2019s Republican Party\u2019s Establishment, and (like with the Democratic Party\u2019s original neocon, U.S. Senator Henry \u201cScoop\u201d Jackson, the \u201cSenator from Boeing\u201d) they\u2019ve always viewed Russia to be America\u2019s chief enemy, and they have favored the overthrow of any nation\u2019s leader who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Bashar al-Assad. Hatred and demonization of Russia is the common core of neoconservatism \u2014 the post-Cold-War extension of Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society.<\/span><\/p>\n Both Slate and especially Foer have long pedigrees as Democratic Party neoconservatives \u2014 champions of U.S. invasions, otherwise called PR agents (\u2018journalists\u2019) promoting the products and services that a few giant and exclusive military corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dyncorp, and the Carlyle Group, offer to the U.S. federal government. I\u2019ll deal here only with Foer, not with his latest employer (in a string, all of which are neocon Democratic \u2018news\u2019 media).<\/span><\/p>\n Foer wrote in The New York Times<\/i>, on 10 October 2004, against \u2018isolationist\u2019 Republicans, who regretted having supported George W. Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq, and he headlined about them there, \u201cOnce Again, America First\u201d<\/span><\/a>, equating non<\/i>-neoconservative Republicans with, essentially, the pro-fascist isolationists of the 1930s. He concluded that they would come to regret their regret: \u201cConservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley’s steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts.\u201d That\u2019s how far-right Franklin Foer is: he\u2019s to the right of those Republicans.<\/span><\/p>\n On 7 June 2004, Foer, in a tediously long, badly written and argued, article in New York Magazine<\/i>, \u201cThe Source of the Trouble\u201d<\/span><\/a>, described the downfall of The New York Times\u2019s leading stenographer for George W. Bush\u2019s lies<\/span><\/a> to invade Iraq, their reporter Judith Miller. He closed by concluding that \u201cthe source of the trouble\u201d was that Miller was simply too earnest and tried too hard \u2014 not that she was a stenographer to power: <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cPeople like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what\u2019s what.<\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n (She was anything but \u201ctrying to get at the truth of what\u2019s what.\u201d She was the opposite: a mere stenographer to George W. Bush and to the Administration\u2019s chosen mouthpieces, such as the anti-Saddam exiled Iraqi Ahmad Chalaby.) <\/span><\/p>\n On 20 December 2004, when the question of whether to bomb Iran was being debated by neoconservatives, Foer, who then was the Editor of the leading Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, The New Republic<\/i>, headlined in his magazine, \u201cIdentity Crisis: Neocon v. Neocon on Iran\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he introduced a supposed non-neocon from the supposedly non-neocon Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, to comment upon the conflict among (the other Party\u2019s<\/i>) neocons: <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIn part, the lack of neocon consensus <\/i>[on whether to, as John McCain was to so poetically put it, \u2018Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran\u2019<\/span><\/a>] can be attributed to the nature of the problem. Nobody \u2014 not the Council on Foreign Relations, not John Kerry\u2019s brain trust \u2014 has designed a plausible policy to walk Iran back from the nuclear brink. Or, as Kenneth M. Pollack concludes in his new book, The Persian Puzzle, this is a \u2018problem from Hell\u2019 with no good solution.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n But, actually, both Pollack and Brookings are Democratic Party neocons themselves; and among the leading proponents of invading Iraq had been not only Pollack<\/span><\/a> but Brookings\u2019s Michael O\u2019Hanlon<\/span><\/a>. Brookings had no prominent opponent of invading Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n (Brookings has a long history of neoconservatism<\/span><\/a>, and routinely leads the Democratic Party\u2019s contingent of neocon thinking, even urging a Democratic administration to have its stooge-regimes violate international laws<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n The real reason why neocons (being the heirs of the far-right extremists\u2019 Cold-War demonization of Russia, even after communism is gone) wanted to conquer both Iraq and Iran, was that both countries\u2019 leaders were friendly towards Russia, and were opposed by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, which family quietly worked not only with the U.S. government but with Israel\u2019s government, against both Iraq and Iran, as well as against Syria \u2014 those three nations (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) all being friendly toward Russia, which both the Saudi aristocracy, and not only the U.S. aristocracy, hate.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the conservative \u2018news\u2019 media that are neoconservative now. The so-called \u2018liberal\u2019 media are so neoconservative that, for example, Salon can condemn Donald Trump for his having condemned Hillary and Obama\u2019s bombing of Libya. Salon condemned<\/span><\/a> Trump\u2019s having said \u201cWe would be so much better off if Qaddafi were in charge right now\u201d \u2014 as if Trump weren\u2019t correct, and as if what happened after our overthrow and killing of Qaddafi weren\u2019t far worse for both Libyans and the world than what now exists in Libya is. (But, of course, for Lockheed Martin etc., it is<\/i> far better). CBS News<\/span><\/a> and Mother Jones<\/i><\/span><\/a> condemned the Trilateralist Joseph Nye for having veered temporarily away from his normal neoconservatism. Then, Nye wrote in the neocon Huffington Post<\/span><\/a> saying that David Corn of Mother Jones<\/i> and Franklin Foer of The New Republic<\/i> had misrepresented what he had said, and that he was actually a good neocon after all. Nye closed: \u201cIn any case, I have never supported Gaddafi and am on record wishing him gone, and also on record supporting Obama\u2019s actions in recent weeks. We now know that Gaddafi\u2019s departure is the only change that will work in Libya.\u201d Sure, it did. Oh, really? It\u2019s Trump who is crazy here?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n More recently, Foer headlined at Slate, \u201cPutin\u2019s Puppet:<\/span><\/a> If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests \u2014 and advance his own \u2014 he\u2019d look a lot like Donald Trump.\u201d Foer proceeded to present the view of Trump that subsequently became parroted by the Hillary Clinton campaign (that Trump=traitor). Wikipedia has a 450-person \u201dList of Republicans opposing Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016″<\/span><\/a>, and it\u2019s almost entirely comprised of well-known neoconservatives \u2014 the farthest-right of all Republicans, the people closest to Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Foer cited many neoconservative sources that are not commonly thought of as Republican, such as Buzzfeed; and he even had the gall to blame the Russian government for having made public its best evidence<\/span><\/a> behind its charge (which was true<\/span><\/a>) that the overthrow of Ukraine\u2019s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was no authentic \u2018democratic revolution\u2019 such as the U.S. government and its \u2018news\u2019 media said, but was instead a very bloody U.S. coup d\u2019etat in Ukraine<\/span><\/a>, which was organized from the U.S. Embassy there, starting by no later than 1 March 2013<\/span><\/a>, a year beforehand. Foer wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe Russians have made an art of publicizing the material they have filched to injure their adversaries. The locus classicus of this method was a\u00a0recording\u00a0of a blunt call between State Department official Toria<\/i> [that\u2019s actually \u2018Victoria\u2019] Nuland [a close friend of both Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney] and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The Russians allegedly\u00a0planted\u00a0the recording on YouTube and then tweeted a link to it \u2014 and from there it became international news. Though they never claimed credit for the leak,\u00a0few\u00a0doubted the White House\u2019s contention that Russia was the source.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n To a neoconservative, even defensive measures (such as Russia\u2019s there exposing the lies that America uses to \u2018justify\u2019 economic sanctions and other hostile acts against Russia) \u2014 indeed, anything that Russia does against America\u2019s aggressions against Russia, and against Russia\u2019s allies (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych) \u2014 anything that Russia does, is somehow evil and blameworthy. And, of course, America\u2019s aggressions are not.<\/span><\/p>\n The U.S. government and its neocon propagandists are outraged that some people are trying to expose \u2014 instead of to spread \u2014 their lies. The American government isn\u2019t yet neocon enough, in the view of such liars.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse On November 1st, The Intercept headlined\u00a0“HERE\u2019S THE PROBLEM WITH THE STORY\u00a0CONNECTING RUSSIA TO DONALD TRUMP\u2019S\u00a0EMAIL SERVER\u201d,\u00a0and the reporting team of Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee, and Morgan Marquis-Boire, revealed that: “Slate\u2019s Franklin Foer published a story\u00a0that\u2019s been\u00a0circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime,\u00a0an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":276199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,18],"tags":[115,30,1036,32,96,535,698,38,524,754,6257,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-276861","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-latest-news","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-cia","13":"tag-cover-up","14":"tag-global-news","15":"tag-hillary-clinton","16":"tag-iraq","17":"tag-russia","18":"tag-syria","19":"tag-trump","20":"tag-ukraine","21":"tag-usa-news","22":"tag-warfare","23":"tag-white-house","24":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}