So Durham showing proof that the Steele dossier was fake should put the end to Russia Gate right? Not so much. Here’s a bunch of articles showing that it was still Russian disinformation.

The fact that it was a fake was further proof that it was Kremlin-managed.

The “report that asserts that Russian president Vladimir Putin has been ‘cultivating assisting and supporting Trump’ for years and that the Russians have compromising information (kompromat) on him is, I believe, a deliberate Russian provocation,” Satter wrote in 2017. He further claimed that Steele’s sources “employed the standard techniques of Russian propaganda and manipulation,” and that “Steele was being used by the Russians.”

Satter told the Daily Caller, “there should not have been any doubt right from the beginning” that Russia was involved. What the Danchenko case shows, Satter said, is that the primary source of the allegations were “shadowy Soviet contacts, who are the perfect vehicle for conveying disinformation.”

“When Danchenko said … that he got this information from drinking buddies, this too is absolutely typical of Russian intelligence mode of operation,” Satter continued.

“The results of the Durham investigation … when it’s done [coming out] we’ll see a picture of … the Hillary Clinton campaign hungry for discrediting information, indifferent to the truth, and therefore ready to be played by the Russians for their own purposes,” Satter concluded. This is “possibly the most successful Russian active measure undertaken in the post-war period,” and done to create division in America in general, not targeting any particular political party.

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Some of the confused responses to this very uncomplicated and uncontroversial statement reflect just how much damage Trump's lies have done to the American psyche. Tragic that so many of you fell for them.

Buy a mirror, Anne.

One reply:

Thank you. Exactly on point. Still, I'm not sure the Steele dossier IS wrong! Nothing in it has been DISPROVEN either.

This article posts a bunch of propaganda that was debunked long ago. I’ll just post the highlights and you can read the rest at the source.

It wasn’t a hoax!

On high-subscription Substacks, on popular podcasts, even from within prestige media institutions, people with scant illusions about Trump the man and president are nonetheless volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.

1- Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering.
2- More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.

3- In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

4- Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.

5- Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.

7- WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”

8- Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.

11- At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.

The confirmed record may not add up to a criminal conspiracy either, not as that concept is defined by U.S. law. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team stated that they could not prove any such conspiracy. But the confirmed record suggests an impressive record of cooperation toward a common aim—even if the terms of the cooperation were not directly communicated by one party to the other.

Christopher Steele was a former British intelligence officer working for a firm that was hired first by anti-Trump Republicans, then by Democrats, to collect opposition research on Trump’s Russia connections. As his dossier circulated behind the scenes, experts on Russian disinformation warned of its dubious reliability. But it found an audience anyway within parts of the U.S. government and U.S. law enforcement, and in January 2017, BuzzFeed published it.

That decision was strenuously criticized by many. As our David Graham wrote then, “the reporter’s job is not to simply dump as much information as possible into the public domain … It is to gather information, sift through it, and determine what is true and what is not.” The veteran Russia correspondent David Satter warned in National Review that the dossier’s more lurid allegations reminded him of “the work of the ‘novelists’ in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) whose job it is to come up with stories to discredit individuals without much regard for plausibility.” (Satter wrote the definitive account of FSB involvement in the 2000 apartment bombings that helped bring to power Vladimir Putin, and was booted from Russia in 2014 by the Putin regime for his reporting.)

The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question “What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?” The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the FBI investigation gave the Steele dossier “unjustified credence.” But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.

It was to silence that question that the outgoing Trump administration appointed a special counsel of its own to investigate its investigators. John Durham has now issued three indictments, all for lying to the FBI about various aspects of the Steele dossier. None of these indictments vindicates Trump’s claims in any way. It remains fact that Russian hackers and spies helped his campaign. It remains fact that the Trump campaign welcomed the help. It remains fact that Trump’s campaign chairman sought to share proprietary campaign information with a person whom the Senate report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It remains fact that Trump hoped to score a huge payday in Russia even as he ran for president. It remains fact that Trump and those around him lied, and lied, and lied again about their connections to Russia.

So by all means, follow the trail on Steele. But be mindful that much of that trail was prepared by people who want to misdirect and mislead. Take care how far you step along that trail. Be alert to how the twists of the trail block your view of the surrounding landscape. Otherwise, you may discover too late that you have also been misdirected and misled, and that in setting out to explore a small truth, you have become a participant in the selling of a greater lie.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic

Russiagate Was Not a Hoax

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed what the Mueller report could not.

Rereading the Mueller report more than a year after its publication is an exercise in disappointment. One gets the feeling that Robert Mueller didn’t press his inquiry to its end. Instead of settling the questions that haunt the 2016 campaign, he left them dangling, publishing a stilted document riddled with insinuation and lacunae. He rushed his work, closing up shop before finishing his assignment.
(Mueller had 16 months to find that Trump did not collude with Russia. -sd)

While Mueller received all the hype, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence kept its head down. Yesterday, having avoided cable speculation almost entirely, the SSCI released the fifth and final volume of a report on Russia’s attempt to sway the last election in Donald Trump’s favor. It finally delivered what Mueller either could not or would not: a comprehensive presentation of the evidence in the matter of “collusion.” The report confirms that Russiagate is no hoax. Whether or not the Trump campaign illegally coordinated with the Kremlin, Trump has no grounds for proclaiming vindication, much less that he’s the victim of a witch hunt.

The thousand-page fifth volume doesn’t definitively settle the question, in part because the SSCI was unable to procure a full record of events. The White House engaged in gamesmanship, invoking executive privilege to deny witnesses and block access to a paper trail.

When Mueller’s prosecutors appeared in court, in February 2019, they implied that the most troubling evidence they had uncovered implicated Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman. This wasn’t a surprising admission. Throughout their filings, Mueller’s team referred to Manafort’s Kyiv-based aide-de-camp, Konstantin Kilimnik, as an active Russian agent. Manafort had clearly spoken with Kilimnik during the campaign, and had even passed confidential campaign information to him, with the understanding that the documents would ultimately arrive in the hands of oligarchs close to the Kremlin.
(The information was released weeks before and could be found on many websites. -sd)

Mueller did not fully explain why Manafort’s relationship with his Ukraine-based adviser so bothered his prosecutors. Why had Manafort passed along the documents? And what did the oligarchs want with them?

The committee fills in the gaps somewhat. It reports that Manafort and Kilimnik talked almost daily during the campaign. They communicated through encrypted technologies set to automatically erase their correspondence; they spoke using code words and shared access to an email account. It’s worth pausing on these facts: The chairman of the Trump campaign was in daily contact with a Russian agent, constantly sharing confidential information with him. That alone makes for one of the worst scandals in American political history.

The significant revelation of the document is that Kilimnik was likely a participant in the Kremlin scheme to hack and leak Clinton campaign emails.** Furthermore, Kilimnik kept in close contact with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a former client of Manafort’s. The report also indicates that Deripaska was connected to his government’s hacking efforts. This fact is especially suggestive: Deripaska had accused Manafort of stealing money from him, and Manafort hoped to repair his relationship with the oligarch. Was Manafort passing information to him, through Kilimnik, for the sake of currying favor with an old patron?
(** Crowdstrike's CEO admitted to congress in 2017 that he never saw evidence that the information on the DNC computer ever left the server. -sd)

The committee has referred five Trump aides and supporters to the Justice Department for possibly providing false testimony. By undermining investigators, Trump’s cronies rendered Mueller’s report a hash lacking a firm conclusion. They helped detonate the charge of collusion, letting it fizzle well ahead of the 2020 election.

The SSCI report does an honorable job of showing which strands of speculation deserve to be buried—Carter Page, for instance, was just a grifter who never got close to the heart of the Trump campaign. **
(**Carter Page had been a CIA asset working for them in Russia, but that was never told to the FISA court when the FBI got its 1st warrant to wiretap Trump’s campaign. No warrant and the investigation could never have happened. -sd)

So many aspects of Trump-campaign behavior were suspicious—and designed to evade detection—that the truth remains elusive, even after a careful Senate investigation. The publication of this admirable report should not mark the end of the quest to uncover what really happened.

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic

The Atlantic is the mouthpiece for the Atlantic Council that is made up of government employees who are active in government and out of it. Plus many NATO members and some people from Saudi Arabia and other countries. It helps set our foreign policies.

No matter how much information is revealed to show that Russia Gate was a fake story made up by Hillary to keep people from focusing on her loss and her email server scandal people will probably go to their grave thinking that Trump was a Russian asset and that Hillary lost because Russia interfered with the election. I don’t know what else will get them to open their eyes to one of the biggest mind fck’s in history.