Just One More Grotesque Week in American History

Just another week of random murder and violence and of a grotesque cocktail of bravado and impotence on display by the USA and its screeching vassals.

Israel

We are now weeks into witnessing hideous mass murder by Israel upon the Palestinians of Gaza, sometimes hundreds of innocents a day, by bombing, shooting, and a deliberate program of starvation, while the now loathsome US-armed and US-encouraged oppressor talks of an “offensive” against the strip, while annexing much of the West Bank, invading, occupying and murdering in Syria and Lebanon.

In the midst of this inferno, Netanyahu and Trump talk of the forced extradition (a war crime in itself, just one more link of an endless chain of the US chain of murderous tyranny) of Palestinians to Libya, a country, once the most prosperous of Africa, that the US through NATO intentionally destroyed in 2011, without legitimate pretext and which is now divided between two factions. Libya is merely one candidate amongst a variety of similarly impoverished, war-strewn and divided nations that is being talked about as a possible trash can for the West to dump its most ennervating problem: the problem of what does it do with the countless victims of its own horrific imperial abuses. No country to my knowledge has yet acceded to Israeli-US requests. And besides, for how much longer can the majority of Palestinians survive the months’ long denial of food and water, bombing and shooting?

Hamas want’s a permanent ceasefire, Israel wont hear of it. Hamas all along has made massive compromises. Any of them might have been sufficient had peace been Israel’s real goal in this conflict, but Israel’s real goal is seizure of Palestinian land and either expulsion or extermination of the Palestinian people. That is crystal clear to any semi-sentient intelligence.

On to this odious conflagration the Yellow Goblin (or is it Troll?), actually bringing himself to acknowledge yesterday that “some” people are starving in Gaza, has thrown some further idiotic but incendiary remarks of a “wouldn’t it be nice if” kind about the US annexation of Gaza so as to turn it into a paradise of “freedom.” This is the Goblin who in the days immediately before was accepting bribes from Arab princes in Qatar (main funder, don’t forget, of the complicit Al Jazeera whose tears over Gaza are belied by the vacuousness of its critiques of Western causality), and indulging in a superficially refreshing but deeply mendacious exposure of the rule of the necons which he himself has enabled in his own appointments and to whose cause he contributed directly.

Iran and Syria

How? Well, how about his destruction in 2018 of the 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran and the murder of Iran’s most illustrious military leader, at that time engaged on a mission of peace; provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine in its build-up in preparation for war (rather than simply implementing the conditions of the Minsk accords), and contributions to the destruction of Syria, this week even embracing the supreme terrorist head-chopper (founder of Al Qaeda in Syria; henchman to ISIS leader Baghdadi) who has with Turkish and Israeli help illegally taken control of Damascus and is currently busy with the mass murder of Syrian minorities.

How is this any better than anything the neocons have done? John Mearsheimer this week seemed to my ears to be arguing that Trump’s embrace of the head-chopper (at least not quite so intimate as that of Starmer’s embrace of Zelenskiy, but getting close) might be “good for the Syrian people,” given its accompanying indication of the lifting of the Caesar sanctions.

Well, I have some doubts about this “realist” posture, all very easy to opine for a former West Point Academy man and from the comfort of the University of Chicago, as I think Alawites might forgo the lifting of sanctions in return for the protection of their lives. I think the right posture is one that fully acknowledges the filth of this “leader’s” background, his terroristic credentials (largely on behalf of the US covert intervention in Syria, I would argue) and that demands generous reparations from the US, Turkey, Israel and Qatar (among others) for the damage they have deliberately inflicted on Syria, and for the oil and agricultural produce that the US over many years has stolen from Syria.

Let’s finish with the half-baked discourse of a “realism” that works best to let the US and its vassal poodles off the hook.

The Kurds

And as I write about Syria let me just add to the details I provided the other day as to the potential revolution that may but may not be happening over the Kurdish question. A spokesman, Zagros Hiwa, of the Kurdistan Communities Union, an umbrella group, has demanded PKK founder Ocalan’s release and the recognition of the Kurds as equal citizens of the Turkish state. He confirms that the PKK has officially declared its dissolution. It is too early to say whether anything will replace the PKK (my guess is that it is absolutely inevitable, and if the Kurds don’t do it, some mischief maker surely will), or whether there may be some form of recognized Kurdish autonomy in northern Kurdistan (Iraq). In the meantime, Turkey is still attacking Kurds as though it had nothing else to do - prepare for war with Israel in Syria might be a more useful project now.

Supreme Court Hurdles to Fascism

But back to the Goblin: his words are of no account. He doesn’t know a sufficient number of words to make enduring sense. And the words he uses in any one hour are as ephemeral as steam in a hammam bath. Only a fool will rely on Trump’s words. Far more important are his actions. If we look at his actions what should most of all stand out is his disregard for democracy and procedure. This is still to some extent constrained by a judiciary.

That the Supreme Court has upheld the decision of a lower court against Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport Venezuelans - on the timid grounds only that the detainees were given insufficient time and resources to challenge their deportations - provides only the most modest of comfort upon reflection of the overall right-wing character of the Court.

More important will be the outcome of the Supreme Court’s deliberations on birthright citizenship. Here, the argument is currently to the legitimacy not of constitutionally-protect birthright citizenship but of nationwide injunctions. If the ultimate result is a weakening of the constitutional protection of citizenship then Trump’s own words in the past can assure us that further egregious attacks on the unviolability of citizenship will follow.

As I argued in my previous post, the US is well on the road to fascism; no matter that Trump may speak a limited truth to unelected monarchs and princes in Saudi Arabia about neocon interventionism, the road to fascism domestically is deeply integrated with militarism abroad and the struggle to maintain US hegemony.

Neocon Heavy and Light

If you sincerely want to talk about the evils of interventionism, you dont talk about it with the friends who have helped your country intervene throughout the Middle East.

What you just might want to do is to talk about how you will build a military coalition with Arab powers to scorch the nuclear threat, not of Iran (which has not a single nuclear warhead), but of Israel (which has 250).

Oh, and, by the way, you would instruct Marco Rubio not, on the same day, to present himself in Istanbul in the company of arch-neocon Senator Lyndsey Graham whose possible monetary connections with Ukraine were floated yesterday by Larry Johnson in interview with Judge Napolitano and Ray McGovern. What worth is your claim to be anti-neocon is you surround yourself with neocons?

And it is that, not Iran, that is the real problem. But of course the Goblin, resolute in his impotence to stop the genocide in Gaza even though all he has to do is stop the flow of arms to Israel, has nothing useful to say about Israel and a whole lot of useless garbage to say about Iran.

At no time in the past ten years has there been any challenge whatsoever to securing a deal with Iran that will remove the slightest trace of any real nuclear “threat” it may be said to impose. The JCPOA involved Russia in taking custody of stocks of highly enriched uranium and Iran is clearly open to some comparable measure today. There is an opening to Trump that may allow him to be seen to have “solved” the non-problem of Iran, namely by having Iran agree to permanently guarantee that it will not acquire nuclear weapons whereas the JCPOA was limited to ten years.

The fact that Iran has renewed its strategic partnership with Russia, is a member of the BRICS, and has mended fences with Saudi Arabia (always fearful of its own Shia minority) provides Iran with sufficient security to make such a deal. If Trump persists in trying to wean Iran off its peaceful nuclear energy program or give up its own means of conventional defense in the form of missiles, whether they are supersonic or not, will be a deal breaker leading to a war for which the Goblin and his Zionist sponors will be wholly responsible.

National Intelligence Council

The firings by Tulsi Gabbard of two top officials of the National Intelligence Council reportedly followed the release of a declassified memo from the Council that found no coordination between Venezuela’s government and the Tren de Aragua gang. The Trump administration had given this as reasoning for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting Venezuelan immigrants. The intelligence assessment was released in response to an open records request. Although I know that many of my friends badly want to believe that the Zionist Gabbard is actually good news for those who want to depoliticise the business of intelligence, I don’t find this latest news comforting, as its main impact might seem to be to discourage anyone from the release of findings that challenge what is at best a highly suspicious White House generated narrative that has led to insufficiently justified deportations of a somewhat fascist character.

Ukraine

After the theatrics of last week, there is nothing much I want to add to the farce of the “direct negotiations” between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul other than to note that when we put to one side the stupidity of the processes that got the parties to Istanbul (and Ankara, for those without a strong sense of direction), there is some satisfaction to be gained from the knowledge that they occurred at all, that there was a meeting without bloodshed, and that there were some agreements of relatively minor importance. As it is often said about negotiations, you don’t know where they will take you, but if you don’t start them, then for sure they wont take you anywhere. I will note the threat from the Russian side that if Ukraine does not agree now to give up Crimea and the four oblasts of Eastern Ukraine, it may ultimately end up losing others, including Kharkiv and Sumy. I was surprised to hear no mention of Odessa.

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The Russiagate Hoax Revisited

Against all of that James Comey’s 8647 embarrassment may not add up to a whole heap of beans, but it serves as a useful reminder of the Democratic Party cooption of its law enforcement services to concoct the Russiagate hoax of 2016 and the role of this hoax in further unhinging the already-unhinged mind and personality of Donald Trump. A year ago I updated an earlier analysis of this episode that may be of interest to some of my readers here.

Russiagate as Big Lie Construction (BLC)

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Introduction

The events commonly described as Russiagate invite invocation of the concept of the “Big Lie,” a lie so staggering in its magnitude and in its consequences that it is less unsettling to believe that it is true than that it is false. In this chapter, I explore the events commonly described as RussiagGate to examine some principal features of big lie construction (BLC). The claims that a US presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was in some form or another a dupe of Russia, serving Russian interests, and that his election victory in 2016 was the result of Russian meddling in the US election process, were of staggering, preposterous dimensions. Yet they gathered considerable traction across mainstream media and publics globally. The reports of several reputable investigative journalists, academic studies, judicial inquiries, and the statements of many who were directly involved in the events of Russiagate, have provided strong evidence that the foundational claims were false. In this chapter I examine some of the processes that help explain why this ‘Big Lie” worked for as long as it did.

The term “big lie” was used by Adolf Hitler in his manifesto., Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1925) and techniques associated with it have been identified regularly in academic studies of propaganda (Sproule, 1997; Jowett and O’Donnell, 2018). The concept of “Big Lie” is closely associated with the false Nazi claims about the Jewish people that formed the pretext for the Holocaust, 1941-1945. The term is closely associated with all-immersive propaganda of the kind pursued by the CIA in the early years of the Cold War through its programs for Congress for Cultural Freedom (Harris, 2016) and Operation Mockingbird (McManus, 2021), and whose stated aim in the words of a former CIA Director is a world in which everything the American public believes to be true is false (William Casey, 1981). To disbelieve the “Big Lie” is to abandon trust in society’s most august authorities. “Big Lie” theory suggests that for many people it is easier to believe the lie than it is to pull the rug out from beneath their deepest values and presumptions as to how the world works.

There are numerous examples in recent US history. Most notoriously they include the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US (principally) and NATO allies on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction (WMD)” (that he didn’t) that he was very likely to use against the West (which of course he could not, as he did not have them). The lie was bolstered by a campaign of insinuation that Saddam Hussein was at least in part responsible for the events of 9/11 (he was not, and there is no compelling evidence to support this claim).

The absence of evidence for the WMD claim was apparent to some experts even before the invasion (Ritter, 2006), and the deception is now broadly accepted as such across the political spectrum of the USA and of most countries. Widespread skepticism as to pretexts for war is insufficient, however, to prevent wars being fought on false pretext, particularly when the mass of the people places their trust in the pretexts they are provided by governmental and other established authorities, and which are given further weight by uncritical mainstream media coverage. Sometimes the truth will emerge, often a long time after the events in question. The Dutch Davids report (Board of Editors, 2010), and the British Chilcot report (Gov.UK, 2011), the only major state-level inquiriesy into the circumstances leading to the invasion of Iraq, confirmed that the pretext could not be supported by evidence and that the invasion was illegal under international law. This example of BLC is important precisely because of the breadth of later recognition that it was indeed a falsehood. Many other examples of BLC are supported by strong evidence but lack the same degree of consensus as to how far the interpretation of evidence points in the direction of fabrication, whether deliberate or otherwise.

Methodology

This chapter draws on the comprehensive analysis of Russiagate in his book Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War by Richard Sakwa (Russia expert at the University of Canterbury) (Sakwa, 2022), and on my own previously published work, RussiaGate and Propaganda (Boyd-Barrett, 2019), and on judicial disclosures and other evidence that surfaced during the course of a number of special counsel, US House and Senate, and Department of Justice investigations. The latest of these at the time of writing was the investigation of special counsel John Durham into the FBI’s prior investigation of alleged ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. From several indictments, Durham secured only one conviction. But the evidence that he uncovered through disclosure is the more important consideration in this analysis. The analysis is supplemented by the findings of investigative journalists whose publications the author monitored over the course of several years, one of the most outstanding of which was the critical work of Aaron Maté in 2021 and 2022.

The methodology for the present chapter, therefore, is based on close readings of these studies, guided by a singular research question: Given that many, if not most or even all allegations of collaboration between the 2016 Trump campaign and the government of Russia have ultimately proven either weak or false, how can we explain the wide media dissemination of these falsehoods (in their totality, the “Big Lie”) and the absence for over four or more years, of robust pushback in western mainstream media?

One outstanding feature that I had begun to unpack in my 2019 study and further ample evidence of which I identified through my close reading of Sakwa’s 2022 book (already cited), is evidence of networks of individuals or small groups across different institutional domains - legislative commissions of inquiry, political parties, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and media - that principles of the separation of powers, objectivity, impartiality, and judicial process, generally lead one to presuppose remain separate. Drawing on the sources that I have cited above, and for the purposes of this chapter, I identify and discuss the principal networks for which there is evidence.

A Context Primed for Lies

Deception on the scale of Russiagate very likely depended on the careful nurture in western news and entertainment media over time of a popular view of Russia that was extremely negative. This in turn drew from several decades of Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union. Hostility to Russia may be traced back at least as far as the disintegration of the “Vienna System” established by Russia, Austria, Britain, and Prussia, following defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (Tsygankov, 2019). Britain later undermined Russia by seeking stronger relations with Russia’s enemy, the Ottoman empire. Such tensions led to the Crimean War of 1853-56 which Russia lost to an alliance of France, the Ottoman Empire, Britain, and Sardinia. The succeeding world order established at the Paris Congress of 1856 essentially excluded Russian participation in European affairs as a major power. Russian defeat of Turkey in 1877-8 notwithstanding, few of its war gains were recognized at the Berlin Conference of 1878. Relations improved with the formation of the Triple Entente at the turn of the century. This united Russia, Britain, and France, and helped bring about the defeat of Germany in World War One. The international order initiated by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 soon disintegrated in the wake of Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, and the Soviet Union’s failure to secure sufficient support from France and Britain to ensure the repulsion of Hitler. This ultimately persuaded Stalin to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, soon voided when Germany invaded Russia in 1941. Russia’s switch of allegiance to the Allies survived the remainder of World War 2 and was critical to the defeat of Germany. Russia sacrificed many more lives (I have seen estimates vary between 18 to 27 million) than any one of its partners or opponents (next highest death total appears to be Poland, which lost close to six million) (For for one well informed discussion see Britannica, 2023).

Despite the Yalta agreement of 1945, recognizing much of eastern Europe as falling within the sphere of Soviet influence, relations between Russia and the USA deteriorated rapidly, particularly after formation of the CIA in 1947. Western hostility to the Soviet Union and, later, to Russia, owes much to an existential rivalry between opposing ideologies concerning the production and ownership of wealth. But that ideological confrontation might have provided propagandistic cover for both Soviet and US corporate and political expansionism in the so-called developing world, while serving the US as a pretext for permanent war, ostensibly to stave off the possibility of another “Great Depression” of the severity of 1929. This anchored a ballooning military-industrial complex as a form of military Keynsianism (Sussmann, 2020) but became, sui generis, a seemingly insurmountable incubus on US culture, politics, and economics generally.

Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the USA at first adopted a conciliatory tone to its erstwhile enemy. It supported Russia’s inclusion in the G7 in July 1992 and offered Russia membership of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1994. That the Warsaw Pact was disbanded while NATO persisted was nonetheless iconic of US Cold War victory. The US increasingly treated Russia like a vanquished state. Former Soviet satellite states and even parts of the former Soviet Union itself were encouraged to apply for membership of NATO. US/NATO interventions (variously taking the form of subsidies for local dissidence, the toppling of incumbent regimes, and direct or proxy invasions) in countries that were previously allies of Moscow reduced Russia’s international status. US President George W. Bush undermined global nuclear security when his administration unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia in June 2001 so as to pave the way towards a US global system of missile defense in collaboration with European nations but not with Russia. The Trump administration followed this up in early 2019 by pulling out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The USA sought to obstruct the expansion of Russian oil and gas interests and bitterly opposed Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline whose construction began in 2011, was completed in 2021, and blown up in October 2022 during the Russian-Ukraine war. Prior to the beginning of the war, President Joseph Biden and his assistant secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, had both warned that Nord Stream would be ended in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, even though the pipelines represent considerable German as well as Russian investment (C-Span, 2022). Inquiries by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh determined that the US Navy, in collaboration with Norway, were principally responsible (although this is naturally contested by the USA) (Hersh, 2023).

In Ukraine, the USA actively supported the 2013-2014 coup d’état against the democratically elected administration of President Viktor Yanukovych, whom the West misleadingly represented as quintessentially pro-Russian. The USA and its allies bitterly protested Russia’s annexation, at Crimea’s request, of Crimea – the predictable response of a largely pro-Russian population, whose livelihoods were intertwined with the Russian port of Sevastopol, to the aggressive anti-Russian sentiments of Kiev’s coup regime. Formation in 2014 of the self-declared republics of Ukraine’s eastern Donbass (Donetsk and Luhansk) intensified the rift. While these largely pro-Russian populations welcomed the sympathy of Russia, their primary objective, underwritten in 2014 by the Minsk agreements between Russia, Ukraine, and Europe’s Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), was greater autonomy within Ukraine, something that Ukraine has been unable to deliver without provoking violent neo-Nazi reaction. Subsequent statements by both former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelenskiy indicate that these parties regarded the Minsk agreements merely as a way of buying time for Ukraine to rearm (TASS, 2022).

Monopolizing Who Hears What

Successful propaganda strategy establishes control over related messaging. This is achieved primarily by ensuring that the principal message – e.g., that Donald Trump colluded with the nation’s enemies - is stated with high drama and visibility, from as many apparently different sources and across as many different channels, to as many targeted viewers, listeners, and readers, as possible. The founding source of propaganda in this instance has proven to be the Democratic National Campaign (DNC) working for the Democratic Party presidential candidate in 2016, Hillary Clinton, with the proactive involvement of its legal representatives Perkins Coie, agents for whom hired two principal fountains of the claims on which much of Russiagate discourse was based, namely CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS. The basic interests at work were the DNC’s opposition to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and the US “liberal establishment,” which feared the consequences of key Trump policies on such things as climate change, fossil fuel, deregulation, and Russia. In this author’s judgment, some of these fears were highly rational concerns. The choice of a disinformation propaganda campaign (Russiagate) to respond to them, however, likely distracted public attention away from the real interests that were represented by Donald Trump’s policies and towards phantom goblins.

BLC in the case of Russiagate involved sensational claims about a major political figure and celebrity, and the performance on the part of many journalists working for many different media, national and international, talking to a wide range of sources, to ensure that these sensational claims nonetheless possessed prima facie credibility (that they did not, in fact, deserve). The performance was aided and abetted by a sequence of theatrical, diverse, high-level inquiries involving the FBI, House and Senate Intelligence committees, and special counsel Robert Mueller. The fundamental, enabling fraud of BLC (exploiting a two centuries’ old western culture of Russophobia) was the creation of an appearance of diversity, volume, and quantity, that disguised a reality in which a relatively small number of actors across a few prestigious institutions collaborated and, most likely, colluded, in partnership with a small coterie of persistent journalists, to perpetuate a fiction that the President of the USA had colluded with Russia to achieve power. These actors shared a goal, initially, of making Trump unelectable and, when that failed, to make it difficult for him to govern as he might otherwise have done, and to win a second term.

Cross-Contamination of Aligned Prestigious Sources

The expression “cross-contamination of aligned prestigious sources” is intended to invoke the idea of informal, sometimes potentially illicit, links between elite actors and agencies who would normally be considered separate from one another and whose collaboration or networking raises concerns as to presumptions of independence, impartiality, and good faith that the public invests in them. The Russiagate saga is replete with such instances of cross-contamination. I provide a fuller investigation elsewhere (see Boyd-Barrett, 2023). Here I will examine three major instances.

US-UK Intelligence and the DNC

Cross-contamination of such sources as I have indicated worked more effectively as a tool for BLC because it seemed to distance Russiagate investigators (e.g.e.g., the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team set up in July 2016 to investigate Russian links to the Trump campaign) – ostensibly public servants dedicated to the public good - from the political realm. Such sources buttressed this generous perception by downplaying their actual links to critical political interests. The Steele dossier, compiled in 2016 and published in January 2017, was opposition research commissioned for the DNC: its fundamental purpose was to dig up dirt that would incriminate one presidential candidate (Trump) and favorfavour his opponent (Clinton). It received later support from many other sources, some sensationalist, including one (Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win) by the Guardian’s former Russia correspondent, Luke Harding, thought by detractors to be close to MI6 (Sputnik, 2022, citing Craig Murray). All fell short on hard proof. The Steele dossier was significantly discredited in April 2019, when it became clear that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents were unable to find evidence in support of any of its more sensational claims.

Additional Russiagate prompts to the FBI included pro-Clinton British and Australian diplomatic and intelligence sources. Earliest intelligence pit-stop on the Russiagate track was Britain’s GCHQ which told CIA Director John Brennan in late 2015 that it was monitoring communications between Trump associates and Russia. There was a briefing by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) for US intelligence representatives in summer 2016. NSA Director Mike Rogers - later considered a Russiagate skeptic – was not present. Brennan set up an interagency task force in August. Because the CIA’s brief for domestic interventions was limited, the FBI assumed the role of driving investigatory force of Russiagate from that point. Prominent pushers of the Russiagate narrative in 2016, including the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, had also been enthusiasts for the claims that Iraq had WMD that it was likely to use, which had led to the illegal invasion in 2003 and subsequent 17-year US occupation of that country (Hosenball, 2010; Heine, 2019).

The cross-contamination of intelligence-related key sources in 2016 embraced both the supposedly independent former FBI Director (Robert Mueller) - principal investigator of potential wrong-doing, appointed on May 16, 2017; James Comey, Director of the FBI, and a friend of Mueller who had immediately preceded him as Director; the Director of the CIA, John Brennon, head of the nation’s foremost icon of intelligence and national security; and the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Although the office of the attorney general and the FBI are accountable to the Department of Justice, a supposedly impartial and independent investigator (Mueller) was appointed who had very close relations at numerous levels with the FBI, itself a major contributor to Russiagate claims. The most notable voice in the US intelligence community that might have taken a contrary position, Director of the National Security Agency, Mike Rogers, was missing at these early stages. It is notable that Mueller had been officially appointed by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein had been appointed to office only one month prior, in April 2017, and had recommended to his boss, attorney general Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice, that Comey be fired because the "“FBI's reputation and credibility” had "“suffered substantial damage."

Steele, the DNC, Perkins Coie and FBI

Author of the Steele dossier was former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, whose company Orbis had been contracted by Fusion GPS. Fusion, in turn, was commissioned by an international law firm, Perkins Coie, that represented the DNC. In testimony to a UK court in 2020, in the context of a defamation lawsuit between Alfa Bank and Fusion GPS, Orbis certified that when Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in June of 2016, it did so with the expectation that Fusion GPS would provide information that Perkins Coie, acting for the DNC, would need if it had to challenge the validity of the 2016 election on the basis of charges of Russian interference (Beanz, 2020). This agreement took place one month prior to the beginning of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and five months ahead of the election.

Steele was not only a contracted political agent, presumably chosen because of his former, Russia-related MI6 experience, but he was also an FBI informant, February to October 2016. He reported directly to the same agency that, even during the period of his employment with it, had initiated an investigation into the same events that Steele himself was investigating on behalf of a presidential candidate. Further, Steele’s reports were used by the FBI to justify 4 FISA applications to spy on Trump Campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, even before the FBI had verified the Steele dossier – a process that FBI Director James Comey later said was still in process when Comey left office in May 2017 – or had otherwise completed due diligence procedures to ensure that Steele’s alleged expertise could be trusted. The FBI was likely fully aware of the limitations of the Steele dossier even as it continued to use it in support of its FISA applications. Not only was Steele a contaminated pro-Clinton source, but this contamination was obscured in the FBIs communications with FISA. (All of these details may be found in Sakwa, 2022, especially Chapter 8).

More significantly, as mentioned, Steele’s work for Fusion GPS was intended not simply as oppositional research about Donald Trump, but about Russian interference with the 2016 election, with a view to providing the basis for contestation of the results of that election. In other words, Russiagate was a post-election strategy from before “Russiagate” was even “a thing” in the public mind, and long before the election itself. This implies a curiously advanced level of contingency planning by the DNC as to what needed to happen if its candidate lost the election (Sakwa 2022, p. 126; Boyd-Barrett, 2019, Chapter 7).

FBI, CrowdStrike and the emails of the DNC and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)

Successful propaganda typically makes a great play at being truthful, which enhances its credibility, while at the same time obfuscating or marginalizing certain information that, were it to be foregrounded, would likely change the public’s evaluation of the propagandist’s principal concerns. The first part of the Mueller report was devoted mainly to allegations of Russian hacking of DNC and DCCC emails. Alternative sources of evidence - largely ignored by Mueller - suggested that the emails may have either been leaked by an insider rather than hacked or, that they were both leaked and hacked, though not necessarily by Russians (McGovern, 2019). Mueller declined to interview major sources who would have provided evidence against the DNC, FBI, and others’ presumptions as to Russian involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC. These included William Binney, a former high-ranking official of thepf the National Security Agency; Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst working for its Russia division and, with Binney, a founder member of Veterans of Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); Craig Murray, a former British diplomat who claimed knowledge of at least one party involved in a leak; and Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who denied that Russian agencies had been his source, and whose statements indicated he knew who might have been. Hacking allegations invited scepticism in the light of NSA-whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of the leaking of the CIA’s “Vault Seven” toolbox, including “Marble Framework”, that enabled the agency to camouflage hacking by false attribution and masking of the real source.

The DNC emails exposed evidence of DNC favouritism during the primaries for Clinton’s candidacy over that of Bernie Sanders and suggested that Clinton’s message for large corporate backers did not align with her message to the electorate. Neither Mueller nor the FBI conducted their own, independent, forensic examinations of the DNC/DCCC/Podesta servers to establish proof that they had been hacked at all or, more specifically, that they had been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies (SVR and GRU, it was claimed, probably independently of each other), whom the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 17 2016 and the Mueller Report published in May 2019 claimed had fed the emails to fictitious online entities or “cut outs:” Guccifer 2:0 and DC Leaks - the alleged gateways for Wikileaks access. The FBI refused the DNC's offer of full access to the servers, contradicting James Comey’s statement in January 2017 that the DNC had denied access to the FBI. In short, no federal agency subjected the 140 servers in question to forensic analysis. As Senate investigation researcher Kash Patel argued, FBI Director James Comey could have easily subpoenaed CrowdStrike at any time for access to the servers (Mate, 2021c; Sakwa, 2022, Chapter 5).

Instead, the investigation of hacking was assigned to a small private cyber-security company, CrowdStrike, recruited on behalf of the DNC through its attorneys at Perkins Coie (whose Michael Sussmann only days previously had contracted Fusion GPS for what became the Steele dossier). Graham Wilson, a Perkins Coie colleague, told Sussmannn in late April 2016 that the DNC server had been breached. Sussmannn immediately turned to CrowdStrike (Mate, 2020). CrowdStrike was a four-year old startup which in 2016 (according to Leo Goldstein, author of the Science Defies Politics blog) wasn’t even listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the EndpointProtection Platforms, meaning that it trailed well behind the 18 listed vendors (Goldstein, 2018). The company later attracted the favorfavour of the husband of Nancy Pelosi, a leading Democratic who has served twice as House Speaker. Paul Pelosi invested $1 million in CrowdStrike (Maté, 2021g, Oct 9). Within a day of its contract with Perkins Coie, CrowdStrike determined that there had been a hack traceable to Russia. From this point, Sussmannn controlled what the FBI was allowed to see. A meeting with the FBI took place in June 2016 at which Sussmannn and DNC executives encouraged the bureau to publicly endorse CrowdStrike’s findings (Maté, 2021d). While the FBI waited for evidence, the DNC proceeded with its own announcement. The Washington Post broke the news on June 14th.

CrowdStrike produced three reports for the FBI in redacted and draft form. Informants suggested to Senate investigation researcher Kash Patel that these were unimpressive, reading as though CrowdStrike was trying very hard to make a case. CrowdStrike never produced a final report because, apparently, the FBI had never asked for one. The FBI seemed oddly content with Sussmann’s assurances that information the DNC had redacted from the evidence did not concern “the attribution of the attack to Russian actors” (Maté, 2021d). Did this have anything to do with the fact that Shawn Henry, CrowdStrike'’s Chief Security Officer, had previously served as executive assistant director at the FBI under Robert Mueller? CrowdStrike had undertaken other assignments for the FBI. CrowdStrike’s CEO, Dmitry Alperovitch, was a senior fellow of the anti-Russian Atlantic Council. Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, Shawn Henry disclosed that his company “did not have concrete evidence"” that alleged Russian hackers had stolen any data from the servers (House Intelligence Committee, 2017). Congressional Intelligence Committee investigations and the Mueller report subsequently used subtle qualifying language when referring to the CrowdStrike (non) “evidence”. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post, their fomenting of global Russiagate hysteria notwithstanding, reported Henry's explosive admission in timely manner.

Some months after its 2017 admission, CrowdStrike also conceded it lacked concrete evidence to back its claim to have found compromising malware in Ukrainian military servers. In December 2016, CrowdStrike claimed that 80% of Ukrainian howitzers had been destroyed by the Russian military by means of the hacking of an Android application used by Ukrainian artillery units. Ukraine’s military dismissed all such claims. A few weeks later, the International Institute for Strategic Studies rejected claims that it had been the source of the estimate of Ukrainian losses cited by CrowdStrike (Goldstein, 2018).

The FBI and Mueller’s incriminatory evidence against Russia failed to investigate all possible explanations and, as we have seen, was not even sourced directly to their own evidence but relied, instead, on a private and presumably “tried and trusted” entity, which itself was never able to provide conclusive proof of its claims. Once again, the circle of source contamination is widened, with the FBI and Mueller relying on, but never themselves independently checking the conclusions of, a company that had been hired by the very entity – the DNC – that likely originated the Russiagate narrative in the first instance, and that had the most to gain from successful deception.

The Russiagate narrative postulated that the DNC servers had been hacked by Russian intelligence agencies, and their contents then delivered to associated “cut-outs” and, through those conduits, made available to and published by Wikileaks, which was widely alleged or presumed to have friendly links to the Russian sources. Yet a Kremlin link with Wikileaks, Sakwa concluded, was at best circumstantial. No evidence emerged of active collusion between Wikileaks and Russian agents. Julian Assange denied any such link. There is no evidence that Wikileaks even favoredfavoured Russia. It had published tens of thousands of documents critical of the Russian government and had defended opposition Russian activists. In 2017, it published Spy Files Russia, exposing Moscow’s surveillance practices (Sakwa, 2022, p.27).

Worse, a significant proportion of the DNC emails was sent to or received by senior DNC officials after Sakwa records that Crowdstrike had installed new software to impede the hackers. Wikileaks did not use any of the emails it was sent by Gufficer 2:0 (which operated primarily in US time zones) and which admitted that it had been expulsed from DNC by CrowdStrike by June 12, even though VIPS found evidence of an apparent leak weeks later, on July 5 (Sakwa, 2022, p. 68). Credibility of the Russiagate narrative was bolstered by what for Western audiences were two “negatives,” which its authors linked together as in cahoots: Russian intelligence agencies, on the one hand, and the controversial organization Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange, on the other. By this time, Assange had already spent four years holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador in a bid to avoid prosecution by Swedish, British or US authorities.

Scapegoating and Vilification of Russia

The single most important objective of the Russiagate campaign against Trump, and the contributions to it of the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and other agencies who assisted both FBI and Mueller inquiries in making a case, was to smear Trump with the allegation that he worked hand-in-glove with Russia, that Russia supported his election campaign and that Trump shared private business interests with Russian leaders. In this discourse, almost any reference to Russia or to persons who could be described as Russian, was problematic.

The DNC smear campaign obscured the many ways in which the Clinton campaign itself had connections with both Russia and Russians, and with Ukraine and Ukrainians. This kind of projection, directed against the target of a smear campaign, of the negative or controversial characteristics of the instigators themselves, is a common feature of the Russiagate BLC.

Christopher Steele

Christopher Steele himself had many Russia contacts, mostly unsympathetic to the Putin administration, had worked for Russian oligarchs, and helped provide a bridge between them and the FBI (Senate Committee on Intelligence, 2020). He was thought to have been pivotal in inspiring a years’ long anti-Russian FBI investigation of bribery at FIFA, the organization that covers global soccer (Isikoff and & Corn, 2018). Meier argues that Steele acted essentially as an unregistered lobbyist for the oligarch and aluminumaluminium magnate, Oleg Deripaska, and that Steele had hired Fusion GPS in March 2016 to gather material about Paul Manafort (later chair of the Trump campaign from June to August 2016), apparently to aid Deripaska’s lawsuit against the lobbyist (Meier, 2021). Steele worked for many years for a London lawyer that represented Deripaska and had been tasked to identify Manafort’s assets so that they could be seized should the oligarch win a favourable court judgment in his lawsuit. Steele reassured Bruce Ohr in the Justice Department that Deripaska was not a Moscow tool, hoping to secure US sympathy for Deripaska against the threat of confiscation by Ukraine’s post-coup government of an aluminium smelter in Ukraine owned by a Deripaska company. Meier observes that the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence commented on the curiosity that Steele’s dossier made no mention of Deripaska’s efforts over several years to advance the Kremlin’s political objectives, while Manafort, with whom Deripaska had had a long-standing business relationship, was mentioned 20 times. Steele’s counterpart in Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, also neglected to mention Deripaska in his testimony. Simpson had dealings with Bill Browder, founder of the Moscow-based fund, Hermitage Capital, who had become notorious for his self-interested advocacy of US financial sanctions on Russians involved in human rights violations (Meier, 2021; Dunleavy, 2020).

The Clintons, Barak Obama, and Joseph Biden

In other Russia connections, Hillary Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, had made a speech to a major Russian bank in 2010 for a half million-dollar fee (Mosk and & Ross, 2015). The public relations firm of Charles Dolan, informant to Danchenko, had undertaken work on global communication for the Russian government (Ross, 2021). And in addition to links with Russia, the Democratic Party had equally compromising links to Ukraine. The Obama administration had been deeply involved, courtesy of the involvement of US assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Victoria Nuland, in the US-supported coup d’état staged against democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych (Madden, 2021). Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had accepted an appointment on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, shortly after the coup (Ivanova et al., 2019). It was under Obama’s watch that US Secretary of State John Kerry assured the world almost immediately after the downing of MH17 flight over Donbass on July 17, 2014, that the US knew that Russia or its allies in the Donbass was culpable, even though the US has to this day refused to provide US satellite evidence that would confirm this assertion (Parry, 2016).

Igor Danchenko

Key source for the Steele report was a former Russian, Igor Danchenko (who has said he did not know how Steele would use his information) first publicly identified in the 2019 Horowitz report. Danchenko was indicted (but was acquitted on all charges in October 2022) for allegedly lying to the FBI by the Durham investigation in 2021. Danchenko claimed that one of his sources for Steele was Olga Galkina, a Russian living in Cyprus - who later denied she was a source for the dossier - who had allegedly provided material about Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen’s likely fictitious trip to Prague in 2016 (Sakwa, 2022, p. 130l). In August 2020, the Director of National Intelligence under President Donald Trump, John Ratcliffe, determined that at best the FBI had established only limited corroboration of Steele’s allegations, including the publicly critical non-verification of the existence of video tapes of “alleged unorthodox sexual activity,” on the part of President Trump (Sakwa 2022, pp.128-135). These conclusions were the outcome of the 2019 Horowitz reports. Michael Horowitz had been sworn in as the Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice on April 16, 2012. He announced in January 2017 that his office would examine evidence related to "allegations of misconduct" regarding FBI Director James B. Comey's handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email practices and whether Justice Department employees leaked information improperly during the run-up to the 2016 election. The report was published in June 2018.

Russian connections surfaced among persons associated with both the Trump and Clinton campaigns with agencies, interests or personnel who sometimes just happened to be Russian. It also surfaced in false presumptions by one party that another party had Russian connections and in manifestations of unreasonable anti-Russian bias among some of the key investigators, as exposed in both the Horowitz and Durham investigations.

Carter Page

Another investigation was launched by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz in March 2018. This targeted possible abuse in the FBI and Justice Department's filing of four FISA applications to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. A redacted version of the report of the investigation was released December 9, 2019 (Office of the Inspector General, 2019). Horowitz cited several ways the FBI botched its applications and ways it could improve the process. Carter Page, far from being a potential Russian asset, the report established, was a US intelligence informant whose links to Russians had been approved for operational contract by the CIA, something that FBI investigators curiously failed to mention when seekingseek FISA permission to spy on him.

Horowitz found evidence of performance failures in maintenance of political neutrality among FBI agents with implications both in favour of, and against, Donald Trump. The 2019 report exposed a problematic pattern of communications between FBI officials indicating a strident anti-Russian animus. In this connection Senior FBI investigator Peter Strzok was removed from the Mueller inquiry in July 2017 and dismissed from the FBI in August 2018. He has subsequently taken legal action to achieve reinstatement and back pay.

Kevin Clinesmith

A deeper narrative, replete with Russian and anti-Russian dimensions, surfaced in an interview for the Grayzone by Aaron Maté with author Barry Meier in November 2021 (Maté, 2021). In November 2021, John Durham, assigned by the Trump Administration in April 2019 to investigate the origins of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, was appointed Special Counsel for the Department of Justice on those matters in October 2020. He indicted former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith who was later sentenced to probation for having falsified a claim that was used to maintain surveillance of Carter Page (see above). Page’s value to the FBI was that under the “two hop” rule, the FBI could, with FISA clearance, extend surveillance two hops from its primary target. The falsification took the form of failure to disclose that the party in question was a US, not a Russian agent (Romano, 2019).

Michael Sussmann

In Durham’s second indictment, September 2021, then-Perkins Coie (and DNC related) law firm partner Michael Sussmann was indicted (and later acquitted) for allegedly lying to the FBI when he offered a tip in 2016 about the possible secret electronic channel between Trump’s company and a Russian bank (Agfa). Sussmann had also met with a CIA official to promote the Alfa Bank narrative. He had given FBI attorney Jim Baker documents and data that purported to show that computer servers associated with both the Trump campaign and with Agfa bank were in regular contact (Dunleavy, 2021).

The theory of a backchannel was concocted by an unnamed technology executive then positioning himself for a top cybersecurity job in what was anticipated would be the Clinton administration. The executive, a client of Sussmann’s, took advantage of his ownership of several companies to access public and non-public internet data, and tasked several people to assist him, some of whom expressed misgivings (in one case amounting to “continued doubt”). At one point the executive admitted that the Trump/Alfa Bank traffic was not a secret channel but in fact a “red herring.” The email server at issue was now owned or operated by the Trump Organization but had been administered by a mass marketing email company that distributed advertisements for Trump hotels and other clients. Alfa Bank filed suit against the computer researchers involved, accusing them of a deliberate smear campaign. Alfa suspected that “threat actors may have artificially created NNS activity.” Stories about the alleged secret channel between Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization appeared in Slate and the New York Times in October 2016, just before the election. The Durham indictment alleged that Slate’s reporter, Franklin Foer, had been advised by Fusion GPS the day before publication “to hurry.” Foer had shared the first 2500 words of his article with Fusion GPS and never disclosed that the story had originated with the DNC. Sussmann was charged (but later acquitted) with failing to disclose to the FBI that he was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and was billing the campaign for his time spent on the Alfa case (Dunleavy, 2021, Matée, 2021f).

Michael Sussmann, who had hired Fusion GPS for opposition research on candidate Donald Trump (something that did not become public until Perkins Coie was subpoenaed by the GOP-dominated House Intelligence Committee in October 2017) also hired the cyber security firm CrowdStrike to investigate alleged hacking of DNC and DNCC servers. In the case of both the concoction of the “backchannel” theory, implicating Alfa Bank on dubious grounds, and with respect to the contract with Fusion GPS, Sussmannn had coordinated with Mark Elias, the top Perkins Coie lawyer for the Democratic campaign (House Intelligence Committee, 2017).

In Durham’s third indictment, in November 2021, Igor Danchenko - a key source, as already indicated, for Christopher Steele’s dossier and the product of the Perkins Coie contract with Fusion GPS - was charged in a grand jury indictment with five counts of making false statements to the FBI about the so-called Steele dossier during interviews with agents in 2017, charges which he contested and of which he was later acquitted. Maté notes that by hiring both CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, “the Perkins Coie lawyers helped define the Trump-Russia narrative and impact the flow of information to the highest reaches of U.S. intelligence agencies” (Maté, 2021c).

Charles Dolan

The FBI was itself at fault for failing to disclose the DNC connection to the Steele report in its FISA applications to keep Carter Page and his circle under surveillance. Durham’s indictment of Danchenko claimed that Danchenko had lied about the people he had used as his sub-sources (Danchenko was acquitted of lying) (Kalmbacher, 2021). Sub-sources included Charles Dolan, a public relations consultant who had been a senior vice-president at Ketchum, had a public relations job at KGlobal and who later undertook work on behalf of a Russian internet agency (he had many contacts with Russian officials, including the Kremlin’s press office leadership), as well as being a high-level Democratic Party and Clinton operative. Dolan’s Democratic Party credentials included service on campaigns for both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and as executive director of the Democratic Governors’ Association. He was appointed by former President Bill Clinton to two four-year terms as the vice-chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy – a seven-member bipartisan commission that advises the administration on press and information activities of US missions abroad and on the government’s international radio and television operations (Singman, 2021; Chamberlain, 2021)

Some information fed by Dolan to Danchenko was lifted from media reports. Another source identified by Danchenko was Sergey Millian, a Belorussian who was former head of a Russia-US Chamber of Commerce and associated with Donald Trump. The Durham indictment indicated that Danchenko had never spoken with Millian, that Millian had not been a source, but that earlier exoneration of Millian by the FBI would also have exonerated Trump. The “pee-tape story,” came to Dolan’s attention from conversations he had with employees of the Moscow Ritz Carlton. Dolan had also been given information by Olga Galkina, who passed it to Danchenko. Galkina was a Russian public relations executive who may have aspired to a job in the State Department if Hillary Clinton won the presidency (Van Buren, 2021).

Other Dimensions of BLC

Dual Purpose Demonization

The same facts of BLC, of which cross-contamination of aligned, elite sources is possibly the most pervasive and important, may be articulated in alternative ways to emphasize other dimensions of the propaganda process. For example, we can identify the phenomenon of dual-purpose demonization both of a non-culpable or marginally culpable target (Trump) in an effort to support his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and as a pretext for aggression against a foreign rival (Russia), with the ultimate presumed objective of regime-change in Moscow.

Script Coordination

We can appeal to the notion of “script coordination” between powerful institutions that cut across political, military, intelligence, and cultural institutions both national and international. These involved, in this instance the campaign of one of two leading candidates for the US presidency (Hillary Clinton), that candidate’s party machine (DNC), law enforcement (FBI), law enforcement contractors (CrowdStrike), intelligence establishment (DNI and CIA), mainstream “liberal” media (New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC), foreign intelligence agencies (Britain’s MI6, Australia’s ASIO), to name a few. The intentionality of coordination could in at least some instances be described as intense (as between Christopher Steele, Perkins Coie, the DNC, and the FBI).

Politicization of Federal Investigatory Processes

The politicization of federal investigatory processes (including Intelligence Community Assessments; Special Counsel investigations - the Mueller report; FBI's Crossfire Hurricane and FISA warrant applications; Congressional Intelligence Committee investigations; impeachment proceedings) is endemic to Russiagate and, in this author’s judgment, exposes the poor health of US democracy and the high potential for corruption in federal agencies.

Projection

Projection, whereby negative features of the propagandist are attributed to the propagandist’s target, in a manner that legitimates media obsession with the target rather than the propagandist is a common feature of media collaboration with the BLC process. Claims that the Trump administration was colluding with Russia distracted not only from the DNC's machinations to favour Clinton above Sanders (the main purpose), but also from the DNC's own Russia connections and from the Democratic Party’s links to Ukraine and served to obfuscate the pro-Ukraine sympathies of Trump campaign figures such as Paul Manafort who were falsely depicted as pro-Russian. The close involvement of later President Biden and his son Hunter Biden with the Poroshenko (post-2014 coup) regime of Ukraine, and the leadership role of later senior Biden administration foreign policy officials (including under-secretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland) in preparations for that coup, together with the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine against Russia in the Donbass - nuclear conflict a possible outcome - suggest a degree of collusion between the Democratic Party and Ukraine that is more evidentiary and influential than the alleged collusion between the Trump administration and Russia (Adl-Tabatabai, 2022).

Media Saturation

Media saturation in the so-called liberal mainstream media (i.e., outside the then Trump-friendly Murdoch empire) of the dominant propaganda narrative of Trump’s collusion with Russia, based on often carefully crafted disinformation, suggestion, innuendo, and obfuscation of the facts-on-the-ground reality of Trump’s compliance with establishment measures distinctly hostile to Russia, was overwhelming. It was aided and abetted by several media celebrities (e.g., Rachel Maddow), and by media-friendly law enforcement and intelligence leaks (as in the DNI’s leak to CNN of the Comey interview with Trump early January 2016) (Barkan, 2019).

Obstruction and Reversal

Throughout the Russiagate narrative we can find evidence of an obstruction campaign against a President and his administratrion to impede them from adopting policies considered by powerful interests to be inimical to the perceived interests of the military industrial-surveillance complex. Lies, suggestion and innuendo were used to feed public distrust in a President deemed dangerous to these special interests: for example, the pretence that the Steele Report was a robust intelligence document rather than unsound opposition research; that the President's lawyer Michael Cohen had made a deeply compromising visit to Prague during the campaign (he had not); or that Roger Stone had links to WikiLeaks (he did not).

Contrasting GOP and Democratic strategies flirted with two narrative anticipations, quite literal, of the end of the human species: nuclear war under the Democratic Party, at the service of its major patrons, Wall Street and the military-industrial-surveillance complex (plus media, academic, and think tank) complex, on the one hand, and global heating, under the Republican Party, at the service of unregulated, corporate and acquisitive capitalism, on the other.

Conclusion

This chapter identifies a phenomenon of ‘big lie construction (BLC )’ which is a characteristic of many major foreign interventions and political scandals in the recent history of the USA and one that likely has a much longer history. In its contemporary manifestations the role of a largely compliant or complicit mass media is central in ensuring the success of a BLC campaign. The essential features of BLC are as follows. The lie is assumed to be true by prestigious actors in many different, supposedly independent, agencies of the state and other institutions, such as so-called non-government organizations or private intelligence agencies. The lie is assumed to be true, often cited without actual evidence, by wide swathes of the mainstream media. The lie exploits existing public perceptions and fears, which are themselves frequently the product of previous BLC campaigns. The role of intelligence, law enforcement and judicial agencies and proceedings is frequently essential to the success of BLC, partly on account of their perceived power, neutrality, and integrity. Not least, BLC generally involves scapegoating and smearing of those parties that it targets in the pursuit of the interests of those who have colluded with the lie.

A principal enabling feature of BLC propaganda, in this instance, one that rendered public opinion in the USA and its allies very malleable, was a century or more of state hostility towards Russia (and the former Soviet Union). Key phases of this history of Russophobia included, in the nineteenth century, Britain’s successful isolation of Russia after the disintegration of the “Vienna system,” and the Crimean War. With the twentieth century came the collective west’s hostility to Bolshevism, and the Cold War. Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 foreshadowed what became, in the twenty-first century, western disregard for security concerns about NATO’s eastwards expansion as articulated by Russia for over three decades, and military reprisals against Russia for its agreement with the people of Crimea to annex Crimea following the 2014 US-supported coup d’état against a democratically elected government in Kiev. Sustained Russophobia created a climate in which it was relatively easy to stoke public memory in support of the false “Russiagate” narrative. This narrative, in turn, has facilitated pro-western and anti-Russian narratives following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“Big Lie” construction of the Russiagate narrative entailed a significant element of cross-contamination of aligned prestigious sources - informal, sometimes potentially illicit, links between elite actors and agencies who would normally be considered separate from one another and whose collaboration or networking raises concerns as to presumptions of independence, impartiality, and good faith that the public invests in them. Three major instances of this phenomenon include (1) links between Intelligence representatives and other agencies of both the USA and the UK, most notoriously in the recruitment by a US legal company that represented the DNC of a company, Fusion GPS, which outsourced to another company, Orbis, founded by former British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, to undertake opposition research on behalf of the DNC; (2) hiring by a legal company that represented the DNC of firms recruited to produce evidence both of “Russian” hacking (Crowdstrike) and of links between the Trump campaign and Russia (FusionGPS); and (3) links between the FBI, the Mueller investigation, and CrowdStrike, relating among other things to the “hack versus leak” controversy in the matter of DNC/DCCC emails.

Mainstream media Russiagate discourses weaponized the terms “Russia” and “Russian” as smear terms to be deployed against Donald Trump, the Republican Party and critics of US anti-Russian foreign policy, a strategy that required the downplaying of evidence of links between the Democratic Party - or many of the party’s supporters who played a role in these events - and Russia or Russians. A variety of other propaganda tactics to endorse the dominant Russiagate narrative included dual-purpose demonization (to smear both Trump and Russia simultaneously), script-coordination between different western agencies, the politicization of federal investigative processes that are supposed to be neutral, projection on to its opponent of the propagandists’ own negative characteristics, media saturation with a one-sided narrative, and the concretization of propaganda in attempts to obstruct and even reverse the candidate’s behavior.

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