{"id":347985,"date":"2018-02-13T00:33:58","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T23:33:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=347985"},"modified":"2018-02-13T00:39:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T23:39:37","slug":"washington-posts-shoddy-defense-russiagate-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/washington-posts-shoddy-defense-russiagate-investigation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Washington Post\u2019s Shoddy Defense of the Russiagate Investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

An editorial in the February 2nd Washington Post<\/i> headlined \u201cThe Nunes memo shows the opposite of what Trump hoped it would prove\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span>, and its first argument was that \u201cthe memo reveals that there were preexisting [i.e., prior to the FBI\u2019s investigation into the DNC’s infamous Steele dossier, which even Steele himself acknowledged was probably 10% to 30% false<\/span><\/a>] grounds to investigate, based on information about a different Trump associate. So the president cannot construe this memo as offering evidence that the Russia probe began corruptly.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

However, the Nunes Memo wasn\u2019t alleging \u201cthat the Russia probe began corruptly.\u201d<\/b> It instead argued that when the FBI\u2019s follow-on<\/i> investigation reached the point where they would need permission from the FISA (or \u201cFISC\u201d<\/span><\/a>) court in order to obtain evidence that might possibly implicate U.S. President Trump in impeachable offenses, the FBI resorted to an ilegal tactic to win the court\u2019s okay: hiding crucial material information from the FISA court. That\u2019s the case the Nunes Memo actually<\/i> summarizes<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The FBI began its investigation into the Steele dossier after it had already begun its investigation \u2014 based upon then-credible grounds to investigate \u2014 regarding George Papadopoulos (a supporter of Trump and aspirant for a position in his Administration if Trump would win). <\/span><\/p>\n

There is no question that the initial FBI investigation began in July 2016 and had nothing to do with the Steele dossier; this is acknowledged even by National Review<\/i>, a Republican publication that seeks Trump\u2019s impeachment and replacement by Mike Pence<\/span><\/a>. NR<\/i> notes that, \u201cThe investigation isn\u2019t the fruit of the poisonous dossier (though the dossier did play a role); it existed before the dossier.\u201d But the Nunes Memo doesn\u2019t deny this<\/i>, either.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, unlike the Washington Post<\/i>, even NR<\/i> had the journalistic integrity to make clear that \u201cif the evidence upon which the investigation was opened is sound, then the investigation is appropriate.\u201d The Washington Post<\/i>, obviously, did not. The Post<\/i> simply started with the false assumption that the Nunes Memo argues \u201cthat the Russia probe began corruptly.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Then, NR<\/i> says, \u201cIronically enough, the memo in fact confirms the necessity of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller,\u201d and NR<\/i> then ignores the legal conditions under which a Special Counsel may legally be appointed to remove a given investigation from the domain of the U.S. Justice Department. These legal reuirements<\/span><\/a> are extremely vague, but they do include \u201c\u2022(b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.\u201d President Trump\u2019s Attorney General Jeff Sessions yielded to political pressures \u2014 both from Democrats and from far-right Republicans (reminiscent of the close bonds that had existed in the 1950s between the far-right Republican Joe McCarthy and his strong Democratic supporters Henry \u2019Scoop\u2019 Jackson and Bobby Kennedy<\/span><\/a>) \u2014 to start the anti-Russia and anti-Trump process; and there would likely have been considerable flak from those same political quarters if Sessions had not yielded to them on this matter, but there was no requirement for Sessions to do so. If he had not done so, then their attempt to replace Trump by Pence would have proceeded more slowly. The Nunes Memo alleges that even the possibility of the appointment of a Special Counsel wouldn\u2019t have existed if the FISA court had not (unknowingly) allowed U.S. national-security and intelligence-gathering laws to be broken.<\/span><\/p>\n

On 21 October 2016, the Obama Justice Department and its FBI sought from the FISA court a probable-cause to get its approval to obtaining all information that the Obama Administration (including its CIA, NSA, etc.) had acquired regarding contacts between Russia on the one hand and Trump and his team on the other \u2014 the court\u2019s permission for the sitting President to gather this information against the man who was then running against that sitting President\u2019s chosen heir-apparent. It was at this time that the Steele dossier became \u2018evidence\u2019 for the court \u2014 and the court was blocked from seeing the evidence that should have excluded the court from accepting Steele\u2019s document as being evidence in this matter. After all, if even the Steele dossier\u2019s author admitted publicly that his document was somewhere between 10% and 30% false<\/span><\/a>, then to accept it as constituting \u2018evidence\u2019, is to accept what even the document\u2019s author admits contains that much falsehood; and, to impeach a President on grounds like that would be an atrocity.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is what the Nunes Memo is actually about. It\u2019s about legal and illegal process.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, the Washington Post<\/i> says, \u201cSecond, the memo indicates that the Justice Department sought its warrant against Mr. Page in October 2016 \u2014 after Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign. So the president\u2019s campaign was not the intended target.\u201d That\u2019s a non-sequitor; the possibility exists that both \u201cMr. Page had left the Trump campaign\u201d and \u201cthe president\u2019s campaign was \u2026 the intended target.\u201d In order to explore whether or not that was actually the case would require the type of investigation that the Nunes Memo purports to be summarizing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Post\u2019<\/i>s third argument was that the FISA court wouldn\u2019t have renewed the approval three times if its initial grant of Obama\u2019s spying against Trump hadn\u2019t been legally and soundly based \u2014 including all the information that the Nunes Memo summarizes, and which had been hidden from that court.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Post\u2019<\/i>s fourth and final argument (but followed by lots of subordinate and un-numbered points) was:<\/span><\/p>\n

For the conspiracy narrative to hold any water, one would have to believe that officials appointed by a Republican president, including one confirmed by a Republican Senate, were part of a plot to bring down that same Republican president, and that they successfully hoodwinked FISA judges selected by the Republican-appointed chief justice of the United States. This hoodwinking would have continued after the nature of the dossier had been widely publicized and Mr. Page\u2019s Russian connections publicly scrutinized. This is beyond improbable.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBeyond Improbable\u201d though the people who hire and fire at the Washington Post<\/i> are obviously claiming it to be, the Nunes Memo cites and alleges powerful evidence that much of that did, in fact, happen. The Memo’s allegations and evidence will be seriously considered by all of America\u2019s journalistic institutions, even if (as at the Washington Post<\/i>) ignored by a great many of America’s propaganda institutions (the ones that prefer a President Pence to President Trump, which include all Democratic Party outlets, and many Republican Party ones as well).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On February 3rd, the brilliant intelligence analyst W. Patrick Lang<\/span><\/a> boldly attempted an analysis of what very possibly might<\/i> explain all of this, though he presented it under the unfortunately obscure heading of “Habakkuk on \u2018longtime\u2019 sources:\u201d<\/span><\/a> and I consider it stunning.<\/span><\/p>\n

In any case: anyone who believes \u2018news\u2019media only because they\u2019re famous (and despite the considerable evidence that they\u2019re not to be trusted<\/span><\/a>) is going to be a happy gull of either Democratic Party billionaires or Republican Party billionaires; and a country with a majority like that won\u2019t be any democracy<\/span><\/a> at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

To boil this all down: the Nunes Memo summarizes a case that the campaign to replace Trump by Pence has used tactics which are illegal in the United States, and which should<\/i> be illegal in any<\/i> democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The best summary that I have seen of the Nunes Memo is this (which also happens to be from Pat Lang)<\/span><\/a>, which also links directly to the best online source for the document itself (so, if after seeing that summary, you wish to see the document that\u2019s being summarized, both are right there).<\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, the Washington Post<\/i>, from the top on down, is propaganda. Their \u2018news\u2019 is heavily colored because that\u2019s what the owner requires; it\u2019s one reason why reporters are hired and fired: to promote war against Russia. They get this from their bosses, the people who hire, fire, promote and demote, them.<\/span><\/p>\n

They\u2019ll do anything to pump Russiagate, regardless of what the actual facts are. It\u2019s what they are paid to do. The failing doesn\u2019t come only from the reporters. They\u2019re hired and retained in order to fail in the way that the owner wants \u2014 to pump up military spending as much as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Trump has evidently decided to capitulate, instead of to resist; he\u2019s now as much of a neocon as his electoral opponent Hillary Clinton had been promising to be (perhaps doing this so as not<\/i> for him to be quickly impeached); and, as a result, the march toward the nuclear precipice continues, and military spending soars while all other federal departments get cut back, and $1.5 trillion gets added to the federal debt over the next ten years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Good job, military-industrial complex!<\/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>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org An editorial in the February 2nd Washington Post headlined \u201cThe Nunes memo shows the opposite of what Trump hoped it would prove\u201d, and its first argument was that \u201cthe memo reveals that there were preexisting [i.e., prior to the FBI\u2019s investigation into the DNC’s infamous Steele dossier, which even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":347987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,519],"tags":[115,30,96,3604,535,698,59,804,524],"class_list":{"0":"post-347985","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-newswire","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-donald-trump","13":"tag-global-news","14":"tag-hillary-clinton","15":"tag-military","16":"tag-politics-2","17":"tag-russia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}