Originally published Mar 13, 2018

The conclusions of the Republicans controlling the House Intelligence Committee regarding Trump campaign “collusion” with Russian “election interference” strike me as incoherent in key respects.

To the surprise of no one not afflicted with a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Republicans announced that their Committee has failed to uncover any evidence that the Trump campaign promised to reward the Russian state for covertly interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, or aided them in such interference. After nearly two years of investigation, we have seen no evidence emerge publicly supporting this paranoid fantasy; if such evidence exists, it almost surely would have leaked by now in the sieve-like DC environment.

We can expect strong push back from the Democrats on the committee, as they had hoped to extend this charade of an investigation up until the coming election, to keep a dark cloud of suspicion over the Trump administration in the public’s eyes. Nonetheless, they will be given their opportunity to present the “evidence” which, in their view, does support “collusion” — good luck with that. They will complain that many people with tangential connections to the Trump campaign were never subpoenaed, and depict the Republican conclusions as sheer partisanship (despite the fact that many Republicans would be happier with Pence as President than Trump). And they will note that the Mueller investigation is still ongoing; apparently, Mueller is still actively considering indicting Trump for obstruction of injustice.

(Yes, I mean “injustice”, because there does not appear to have been any underlying crime that Trump was trying to cover up; the investigation itself appears to have been rooted in fanciful lies and paranoid fantasies that Clinton associates and Deep State Trump haters played a key role in crafting, and sustained by grave violations of the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of Trump associates. Look for investigations of these shenanigans to produce huge blowback in the future.)

Somewhat more surprisingly, the Republicans have concluded that Putin was not attempting to aid Trump’s election. How they reached this judgement remains to be seen. On its face, this assertion seems to drive a stake into the very heart of Russiagate. And it could help explain why Trump is convinced that Putin is convinced that the Russian government did not have a program to help Trump.

And yet the Republicans maintain that, nonetheless, Russia did “interfere” with “active measures” that “sowed chaos”. I presume they maintain this latter point so that they can: A. castigate Obama for doing nothing to counter these “active measures”, and B. Continue to bash Russia, in accord with Deep State mandate.

But if the Russian government did not attempt to aid Trump’s election, what was the point of their “election interference”?

We know that a privately-owned Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, employed 80–90 trolls to generate ad revenue in the US by creating a chaotic array of websites on all sides of controversial issues, and then placing ads and making social posts to drive people to the sites. An analysis of this effort does not show any clear pattern to favor Trump’s election, as the VP of advertising at Facebook states — and the majority of the Facebook ads placed by the trolls appeared after the election. The claim that these trolls were further motivated to “sow chaos” is simply a Russophobic meme invented by the Deep State and relentlessly parroted by their stenographers in the MSM; we haven’t been told about any intercepted messages in which troll farm directors were exhorting their minions to “create chaos” or “destroy the faith of the American people in their democracy”. (These ridiculous claims emerged only after examination of the troll postings failed to show a clear pattern favoring Trump.) Moreover, no evidence has been presented that these trolls were acting at the direction of Putin or the Russian government. Nonetheless, MSM coverage, including that of Fox, refers to Putin as the mastermind behind these “active measures”.

As to the claims that Russian intelligence tried to hack voter registrars — I would wager that the attribution of these attacks to the Russian state is dubious at best. The most common sense explanation of what actually occurred — in the few instances in which the hackers were successful, personal info was extracted, but the data bases weren’t altered — was that cybercriminals just wanted saleable personal info. Whether or not Russians were involved in these hacks, it’s hardly likely that the Russian state would want such info.

As to whether the Republican report will have anything to say about the alleged role of Russian hackers in the WikiLeaks releases, we don’t know. But why would the Russian state want to humiliate Hillary with release of these emails unless they were attempting to achieve Trump’s election? Just more “sowing chaos”? Of course, we have strong reason to suspect that leaks, not hacks, were the source of the DNC/Podesta emails that Wikileaks released.

So the Republican conclusions regarding Russian “active measures” strike me as incoherent, and reflective of partisan hackery. Gosh, what a surprise.

In any case, stay tuned for the next round of lies, deceptions, and obfuscations, as the Russiagate farce lumbers ever onward.