July 15 — Events of the last days reveal, once again, the desperation of defenders of the collapsing Trans-Atlantic system to prevent a successful outcome when U.S. President Trump meets with Russia President Putin in Helsinki.  Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate allegations of Russian meddling and Trump collusion in the 2016 presidential election, announced on July 13 — three days before the Trump-Putin summit — the indictment of 12 Russians for allegedly hacking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and various Clinton campaign websites.  The twelve were identified as members of the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, which the indictment claims engaged in a systemic effort to disrupt the election.

The indictment appears to confirm the initial charges made by U.S. intelligence agencies, in their infamous report of January 7, 2017, asserting “high confidence” in their assessment of Russian interference.  The new indictments have led to an outcry against the Trump-Putin summit, with some, such as Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, and Republican Senator John McCain, demanding that either Trump aggressively confront Putin with this new “evidence”, or cancel the summit.

The Mueller team’s findings were countered by former NSA Technical Director William Binney, who described the evidence in the indictment as “a fabrication.”  Binney, who conducted on behalf of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) the only forensic evaluation of the “hacking” — which concluded the leaked emails resulted from an “inside job”, not hacking — reiterated that the FBI “never even bothered to examine the DNC computers, relying instead on the DNC and Atlantic Council cyber contractor Crowd Strike for its evidence.”   Crowd Strike is run by Dmitri Alperovitch, a notorious Putin-hater, and its conclusions in other cyber investigations have been challenged.

Binney further identified the possibility that “the CIA’s Vault 7 Cyber weapons arsenal enabling false attribution and ‘tell-tale’ signs in Cyrillic and other ‘obfuscation’ may be at work in a least some of this.”  He stated his belief that the continuing effort to blame Russia for the leaks comes from the anti-Russian views of former Obama officials John Brennan (CIA) and James Clapper (Director of National Intelligence), the two individuals who worked with counterparts in British intelligence to concoct the story of Russian interference. Binney added that despite the investigation that he and his VIPS colleagues conducted, they were never contacted by Mueller’s team.

The Rosenstein announcement coincides with a full offensive against the Trump-Putin summit coming from those who have used the Russiagate narrative to postpone, until now, a meeting between the two leaders.  In the face of Trump’s repeated insistence that he believes cooperative relations with Russia would be good for the world, his detractors have responded with unsubstantiated charges against Putin and Russia, asserting a summit would aid Putin’s alleged intention to divide the west.  Typical of this is the following NBC-News characterization of the Russian leader, which calls him “a spymaster Russian president [who] has ambitions to reclaim the glory of the Soviet empire, a penchant for tampering with the internal politics of western democracies and a reputation for poisoning enemies.”

These kinds of attacks on the summit cohere with the ongoing effort of Obama’s intelligence operatives to portray any criticism of their efforts as part of Putin’s masterplan.  When leading FBI anti-Trumper Peter Strzok, whose bias was excoriated in an internal Justice Department report, was confronted at a Congressional hearing on July 12, he responded by attacking the investigation of FBI/intelligence community fraud as putting “a victory notch in Putin’s belt.”

Asked by British interviewer Piers Morgan why he is meeting with “ruthless dictators” such as Kim Jong-un and Putin, Trump responded “I’d like to see peace…we’re getting rid of wars.  We’re actually getting out of wars.”

It is this sentiment which is driving the neocons and geopoliticians mad.