Originally published May 24, 2018

If you’re a Republican — or if you’ve simply made an intelligent effort to follow the news and truly believe in “the rule of law” — you’ve woken up to the fact that the whole Russiagate “Trump colluded” investigation, that has now been in progress for over two years, has in fact been a Deep State vendetta — as Trump calls it, a witch hunt — intended first, to harm Trump’s campaign, and, second, if he were nonetheless elected, to cripple his presidency and, if possible, achieve his impeachment and removal from office. This whole investigation was justified by nothing more than idiotic and paranoid suspicions, which is why it was kept secret from Congress and the American people for as long as possible. And it was motivated by a real fear that Trump might throw a monkey wrench into key Deep State foreign policy priorities, and possibly expose the Constitution-shredding skullduggery that the Deep State has been up to since at least 9/11. Whereas they knew that Hillary could be trusted to be their willing tool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoeJeWfoSpQ

The traitors who were the chief driving force behind this vendetta — yes, I say traitors, because “treason” can be defined as an illegal attempt to depose a sovereign — were John Brennan and James Clapper. They are both notoriously, almost psychotically Russophobic. Indeed, it is mind-bending that the President who ridiculed Mitt Romney by stating that “the 1980s want their foreign policy back” would put two such unreconstructed Cold Warriors into the top positions in our intelligence community. This is the sort of policy incoherence that one would expect from Trump — though apparently most Democrats didn’t notice, or affected not to.

Moreover, both Brennan and have Clapper overtly perjured themselves in Congressional testimony.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-director-john-...

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/lawmakers-resume-calls-f...

In order to make a case that Trump had “colluded in Russian interference”, it was first essential to establish the predicate that “Russia interfered”. The official government pronouncement that the Russian government had indeed had a policy of interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf was the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) published on Jan. 6th, 2017. Despite Hillary’s flagrantly bogus assertion that “all 17 US intelligence agencies” concurred in this judgement — a lie that our MSM repeated ad nauseum for many months — the ICA was written by a couple of dozen people drawn from just the CIA, FBI, and NSA. And they were hand-picked by Brennan and Clapper.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/06/01/hillary-clintons-deceptive-blame-s...

So what an incredible surprise that the chief drivers of the anti-Trump intelligence vendetta were also the ones who arranged for the “intelligence community” to conclude that “Russia interfered in the election on Trump’s behalf”.

And the MSM has been faithfully parroting this conclusion at every opportunity for over a year. This view has been so omnipresent that those expressing doubt about it have been considered “conspiracy theory” cranks by most people, and have almost immediately been attacked as “Putin puppets”.

Here a few things you should know about that ICA:

The unclassified version contained no evidence whatever justifying its assertions. Even the NYT commented on this at the time of its release.

The authors referred to their conclusions as “assessments”. As Ray McGovern has pointed out, “assess” is spyspeak for “guess”. And the ICA itself contains a disclaimer that “assessments” should not necessarily be confused with proven facts.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/05/23/new-cracks-in-russia-gate-assessment/

It is now known that the Steele dossier — that farrago of unverifiable fantasies defaming Trump and Russia that was commissioned and paid for by Hillary acolytes, yet passed off by Brennan as an “intelligence product” because a former British spook (who hated Trump) had assembled it — a stew so inherently laughable that it claimed Putin had been grooming Trump for 5 years as a Manchurian candidate — was a key informational basis for the ICA. Indeed, Paul Sperry has noted that the language in the ICA often tracks with that in the Steele dossier. And note that the Steele dossier was included as an appendix to the classified version of the ICA.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/14/2_colleagues...

The ICA’s assertions that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC servers were based on the claims of Crowdstrike, a private company that had been commissioned by the DNC. The founding CEO of Crowdstrike, Shawn Henry, is a made member of the Deep State, as he used to serve as the FBI’s director of counterintelligence under Bob Mueller. Efforts by Comey’s FBI to examine the servers themselves were rebuffed, and Comey apparently was cool with that. Crowdstrike established the “fact” of Russian hacking by noting that certain hacking tools found on the server had allegedly been used by Russian intelligence in the past. They simply ignored the fact that these tools are now widely available to the worldwide community of hackers. (“The victim was shot with a gun. The Mafia kills with guns. Therefore the victim was killed by the Mafia”. That sounds ridiculous to anyone with an ounce of common sense. But if you use the same logic while employing arcane computer jargon, the MSM will swallow this “logic” in a heartbeat.) Furthermore, NSA veteran Bill Binney asserts that, if Russian intelligence had indeed hacked the DNC, the NSA should be able to determine precisely when the hack occurred and the origin of the hacker — yet we have heard crickets from the NSA in this regard.

https://medium.com/@jeffreyscarr/fbi-dhs-joint-analysis-report-a-fatally...

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/06/the-dubious-case-on-russian-hacking/

The ICA asserts that the persona who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian agent who hacked the DNC and provided his booty to Wikileaks — because Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be the Wikileaks source (while purposely strewing about clues that he was a Russian). In fact, cybersleuths have determined through careful logical analysis that Guccifer 2.0 is most likely to be an associate of the DNC, with thumbdrive access to the DNC servers, who was attempting to depict Assange as a tool of the nefarious Russians, so as to distract MSM attention from the incriminating content of the emails which Wikileaks released. There are reasonable suspicions that Guccifer 2.0 is a creation of Crowdstrike — bear in mind that Shawn Henry is a master of counterintelligence.

http://g-2.space/

Aside from citing the “say so” of the very dubious Guccifer 2.0, the ICA provides no further evidence that Assange got the DNC emails from Russian hackers. Assange — who has made his reputation by revealing inconvenient truths — asserts unequivocally that neither Russia nor any other state actor was his source for his DNC releases. His close associate Craig Murray — a whistle blower who sacrificed his diplomatic career to blow the whistle on torture in Uzbekistan — asserts no less strenuously that the Wikileaks DNC and Podesta releases stemmed from internal leaks, not hacks. The last DNC email released by Wikileaks was dated May 25th, 2016–3 weeks AFTER Crowdstrike had installed their state-of-the-art Falcon anti-hacking tool on the DNC servers; that should have prevented hacks, BUT NOT LEAKS. And, shortly before leaving office, Obama had publicly admitted that the intelligence agencies didn’t have firm evidence that Wikileaks got their material from Russian hackers. Furthermore, the great journalist Sy Hersh has a source inside the FBI, said by Hersh to be reliable, who told him that the FBI had evidence that DNC employee Seth Rich had transmitted the DNC emails to Wikileaks via drop box, in exchange for payment.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/03/julian-assange...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-W...
https://climateaudit.org/2017/09/02/email-dates-in-the-wikileaks-dnc-arc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYzB96_EK7s

The ICA also makes reference to Russian efforts to interfere in the election via social media efforts. In fact, the “Russian trolls” indicted by Mueller, claimed to be attempting to sway the election to Trump, or “create chaos” in American democracy, were in fact just employees of the private Internet Research Agency, whose aim was to earn internet ad revenue by driving viewers to websites they had created covering a diverse range of interests; they accomplished this by placing click-bait ads on social media, most of which appeared after the election, and that did not clearly favor one candidate over the other (which is why the proponents of Russiagate have had to come up with the idiotic “sowing chaos” line.)
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-in...

Since the ICA came out, we also have been treated to claims that Russian intelligence attempted to hack state voter rolls. In fact, there are strong reasons to suspect that these hackers were in fact criminals attempting to acquire saleable personal info. And these claims are likely rooted in the same kind of laughable “logic” that Crowstrike employed to blame Russian intelligence for the alleged hacking of the DNC. Other claims that Russian intelligence hackers have been behind alleged attempts to meddle in elections around the world have likewise been debunked.

http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2017/07/03/foisting-blame-cyber-hacki...

https://caucus99percent.com/content/what%E2%80%99s-left-russiagate%E2%80...

Once you’ve digested all this, ask yourself — are you willing to accept the evidence-free “assessments” of career Russophobes who were out to destroy Trump, and needed to first incriminate the Russians to achieve this?

And note that they achieved a “two-fer” with this ploy, since demonizing Russia to feather the nest of the military-industrial complex at the expense of all American taxpayers is one of their primary goals. The fact that Trump’s common sense told him that getting along with the Russians was a smart way to “put America first” put a bull’s eye on his back.

Do you remember the time that Trump asserted that he really believed that Putin really believed that the Russian government did not interfere in the 2016 election? Well, on this occasion, Trump’s common sense was right on target, because Putin knows that THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT DID NOT INTERFERE IN THE ELECTION.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-i-really-believe-putin-when-he-tel...

I’ll confess that I’m a Berniecrat, not a Republican or Trump supporter. But I’m willing to make common cause with anyone who earnestly seeks the truth, and who recognizes that the Deep State vendetta against both Trump and Russia is a grave threat to our democracy, to world peace, and to our nation’s fiscal sobriety.