RUSSIAGATE BATTLE INTENSIFIES, AS TRUMP CALLS HIS OPPONENTS “TREASONOUS”

January 12, 2018 in News by RBN Staff

 

By Harley Schlanger

January 12 — “The single greatest Witch Hunt in American history continues. There was no collusion, everybody including the Dems knows there was no collusion, & yet on and on it goes. Russia & the world is laughing at the stupidity they are witnessing….”
This tweet, from Donald Trump, was sent out on Wednesday, January 10, 2018, nearly a year after his inauguration as President of the United States.  Trump’s frustration, evident in this tweet, is legitimate.  For more than a year, the major media in the U.S. have echoed the line of former President Obama’s intelligence officials, who claimed, with no evidence to back them up, that Russia’s President Putin “meddled” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, and that Trump “colluded” with Putin, to gain his victory.  A special counsel, Robert Mueller, was appointed, indictments unrelated to meddling and collusion have been handed down, and now the special counsel is hinting that he wants to interview the President directly, hoping that he can set him up, as they did Michael Flynn, to convict him of lying.  Democrats in the House of Representatives have already filed a bill of impeachment — which was defeated resoundingly — but say there will be many more, until their goal, of removing Trump, is achieved.
As the Mueller investigation has been rocked by exposures of fraud and prosecutorial corruption, a faked book was published attacking the President, by a writer known for making up quotes, which has fueled allegations that the President is mentally and emotionally incapable of being president, that “his mental powers were slipping.”  The book, by Michael Wolff, “Fire and Fury”, is shaping this narrative of imminent danger, being pushed by the anti-Trumpers who are demanding the removal of Trump under the 25th Amendment.  The Amendment states that the Vice President will take over if a majority of the cabinet finds that the President is deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”   This narrative is being fed by a group of self-appointed presidential psychiatrists which has produced their own book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” proclaiming they have a “Duty to Warn” that the president is “going to unravel….”  Edited by Yale University professor Dr. Bandy Lee, it is noteworthy that none of the twenty-seven health care professionals who submitted essays for this book has ever conducted a session with Trump, thus violating ethical standards, which reject making diagnoses without an examination.
As the President tweeted, “on and on it goes….”
TRUMP CALLS IT “TREASON”
The first serious cracks in the “Russia did it/Trump collaborated” mantra began late last summer, with the efforts of the LaRouche movement, which exposed special counsel Robert Mueller as a hit man for the British and U.S. intelligence agencies, who honed his prosecutorial repertoire as a leading operative in the “Get LaRouche” Task Force in the 1980s; and as a result of the devastating report by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which proved there was no Russian hacking.  The VIPS have teamed up with the LaRouche movement for several events in New York City, the most recent in collaboration with Barbara Boyd, the author of the special report, “Robert Mueller is an amoral legal assassin” ********(see related article — i.e., article on event with Boyd, Binney and McGovern).
In particular, it was associates of Lyndon LaRouche who pointed to the role of British intelligence in targeting Trump, beginning with an investigation by the GCHQ in the late spring of 2015, attempting to prove that Trump was a de facto puppet of Vladimir Putin.  This investigation opened the door for a U.S. “opposition research” firm, Fusion GPS, to hire an “ex”-MI6 official, Christopher Steele, to write a salacious — and discredited — dossier against Trump.  What the investigation of “Russiagate” by LaRouche associates has proven is that there WAS meddling and collusion in the 2016 election: NOT by Russia, but meddling by the British, and collusion between Hillary Clinton,whose campaign paid for the Fusion GPS-Steele fake dossier, and Obama’s intelligence directors and their agencies (Comey of the FBI, Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, and Brennan of the CIA) to smear Trump during the campaign, with the intention of defeating him.
A series of explosive revelations subsequently emerged, related to Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier, and of the direct role of key FBI operatives in developing the Russia-Trump narrative, first to try to defeat his campaign, then to remove him once elected.  Among those FBI agents involved are Deputy Director McCabe, top counter-intelligence operative Strzok, his mistress, FBI attorney Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr, formerly a top official of the Justice Department (DOJ), and his wife, who worked for Fusion GPS.  Republicans in Congress have been systematically investigating leads, and have now, finally, become aggressively focused on the role of the Steele dossier in shaping Russiagate.
On January 11, Donald Trump told the {Wall Street Journal} that these latest revelations expose what he called “treason”.  Referring to text messages sent by FBI agent Peter Strzok, to his mistress, from July 2016, which show they were engaged in plotting against his campaign, Trump said, “A man is tweeting to his lover that if [Clinton] loses, we’ll essentially do the insurance policy [i.e., the Russiagate scandal].  We’ll go to phase two and we’ll get this guy out of office.  This is the FBI we’re talking about — that is treason.  That is a treasonous act.  What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act.”  Further, he said, “There was no obstruction — there was no crime.  They make up a crime, and the crime doesn’t exist, and then they say obstruction.”
HOW TO DEFEAT A “COUP D’ETAT”
Meanwhile, key Republican Congressional leaders continue to investigate how the Fusion GPS “dodgy dossier” was used by anti-Trumpers, including its use by FBI agents — possibly by Peter Strzok — to get a warrant from the FISA Court to conduct surveillance against the Trump campaign.  Though they have been repeatedly stonewalled by officials of the DOJ and the FBI, who have withheld documents and refused to allow its operatives to appear before Congress, the wall has now been broken down, with a release of documents in the last days, and promises that officials such as Strzok and his mistress, among others, will be allowed to appear before investigative committees.
A remarkable presentation of the corruption of the perpetrators behind Russiagate was made on Washington D.C.’s largest talk radio station, WMAL on January 8, by former U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Joseph DiGenova.  He called the attacks on Trump “treason,” and predicted there would soon be criminal prosecutions of those involved.  Among those who should be charged, he named Comey, John Brennan, who he called the “most corrupt and politicized CIA Director in U.S. history”, and former Obama officials, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and National Security adviser Susan Rice.  DiGenova reported that National Security Agency director Mike Rogers discovered in early 2016 “illegal surveillance being conducted under [Section] 702 of the FISA Act…[he] ordered an audit, which discovered violations of federal law.  When Clapper and Brennan found out about this, they tried to get him fired.”
Rogers briefed Trump on these findings shortly after the election, leading to Trump’s accurate tweet that the Obama administration had been “wiretapping” him.  At the time, the media mocked him for this tweet.
DiGenova continued: “This was a coup d’etat, an attempt to spy on a President-elect because they didn’t like him.”  To obtain the FISA warrants, they “lied to the FISA Committee”, using the Steele dossier.  He concluded that the “real treason was not by the Trump campaign or Trump-elect presidency, but by people at the DOJ and FBI, who conspired to frame an incoming President of the United States with false crimes.”

DiGenova’s explanation of the intent behind the crime — that they did it “because they didn’t like him” — weakens his overall argument.  As this news service has reported, the real cause is that they oppose Trump’s efforts to break with the continuity of the imperial geopolitical policy of endless wars and regime change, conducted by the two previous administrations, and move instead into constructive collaboration with Russia and China, the targets of the anti-Trump neocons, including Hillary Clinton.  Nevertheless, the thrust of DiGenova’s report, and the ongoing investigation by Congressional Republicans, offer the potential to not only derail the coup, and punish the coup plotters, but free Trump to bring the U.S. into the new, anti-unilateral realignment of global cooperation, which his enemies so desperately wish to prevent.