The Digger

"Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier 2020 campaign issue" On Sunday,  Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress , summarizing the findings of Special Counsel  Robert Mueller ’s  Russia  investigation. The most telling section, quoted directly from Mueller’s report,  read : “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” That one sentence should end a roughly  33-month  national ordeal (the first Russiagate stories date back to July 2016) in which the public was encouraged, both by officials and the press, to believe  Donald Trump  was a compromised foreign agent. After the 2016 election, the storyline instantly became that Trump was an illegitimate president, a foreign operative who’d cheated his way into office and would therefore need to be removed ahead of schedule. There were...

I've been hanging out on Twitter a bit where the narcissist Joshua Frank, co-editor at Counterpunch, has been sounding off quasi-centrist fumes while Russiavapping. Link:   To Celebrate or to Not? The Mueller Question Finally, it’s over. Well, sort of, anyway. Late Sunday afternoon, Attorney General Bill Barr released his much-anticipated  summary  of Bob Mueller’s Russia investigation. The big news, of course, was that nobody in Trump’s orbit “knowingly” coordinated with Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. Trump won’t be charged with obstruction of justice and not a single American was indicted for conspiracy. To the delight of Russiagate skeptics, it was a complete vindication. To the dismay of the liberal establishment and MSDNC — who all cashed in on the chaos — it was an enormous letdown. Much of the celebration, however, took on a twisted form. Matt Taibbi was the most contorted, writing in a  column  that, “WMD was a pimple compared t...

Excerpts: " Russiagate—allegations that President Trump is strongly influenced by or even under the sway of the Kremlin, for which there remains no actual evidence—continued to escalate as a dangerous and unprecedented factor in the new Cold War. What began as suggestions that the Kremlin had  “meddled”  in the 2016 US presidential election grew into mainstream insinuations, even assertions, that the Kremlin put Trump in the White House. The result has been to all but shackle Trump as a crisis-negotiator with Russian President Putin. Thus, for attending a July summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki—during which Trump defended the legitimacy of his own presidency—he was widely denounced by mainstream US media and politicians as having committed  “treason.”  And twice subsequently Trump was compelled to cancel scheduled meetings with Putin. Americans may reasonably ask whether the politicians, journalists, and organizations that assail Trump for the same kind of summi...

" The new Cold War is not a mere replica of its 40-year predecessor, which the world survived. In vital ways, it is more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, as illustrated by events in 2018" Excerpt: "In large part due to such media malpractice, and despite the escalating dangers in US-Russian relations, in 2018 there continued to be no significant anti–Cold War opposition anywhere in mainstream American political life—not in Congress, the major political parties, think tanks, or on college campuses, only a very few individual dissenters. Accordingly, the policy of détente with Russia, or what Trump has repeatedly called  “cooperation with Russia,”  still found no significant supporters in mainstream politics, even though it was the policy of other Republican presidents, notably Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Trump has tried, but he has been thwarted, repeatedly again in 2018. Meanwhile, the charge that Russia  “attacked American democracy”  and con...

Link:  ‘Full Extent’ of Russian Meddling on Google in 2016? $4,700 Spent on Ads (VIDEO) "Whenever Russiagate peddlers are confronted w/ the actual facts, it doesn't go so well. Here's @ RepJerryNadler asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai about "the full extent" of Russian meddling activity on its platforms in 2016. The answer: Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on ads." — Aaron Maté

Link:  War With Russia?   by Stephen Cohen. Excerpt: " The New Cold War is more dangerous than the one the world survived. To restate that theme: The new US-Russian Cold War is more dangerous than was its 40-year predecessor that the world survived. The chances are even greater that this one could result, inadvertently or intentionally, in actual war between the two nuclear superpowers. Herein lies another ominous indication. During the preceding Cold War, the possibility of nuclear catastrophe was in the forefront of American mainstream political and media discussion, and of policy-making. During the new one, it rarely seems to be even a concern. In the latter months of 2018, the facts and the mounting crises they document grow worse, especially in the US political-media establishment, where, as I have argued, the new Cold War originated and has been repeatedly escalated. Consider a few examples, some of them not unlike political and media developments during th...