Great summary of Russia-Gate by Mollie Hemingway

Accurate, concise statement of what happened...https://t.co/XrrMCvJ4PQ

— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 15, 2020

When Russiagate Conveniently Vanishes

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was at the red-hot center of the Robert Mueller probe into the phantom menace of Donald Trump’s collusion with the Russians. He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 3.

You may not know that happened. ABC, CBS and NBC ignored it that night. PBS gave the story 55 seconds. NPR gave it 4 minutes, but those minutes sounded bizarre.

Anchor Mary Louise Kelly said: “May I start with an observation? Does this seem a little out of left field? With everything going on in the country right now, senators are focused today on the Russia investigation?”

Reporter Philip Ewing replied, “The short answer for that is, politics.”....

A politicized "air of criminality" still wafts over the Trump administration, thanks to the "objective" media. But they offer no apologies, no retractions, no admissions of fault on the overall Russia mess. Their drumbeat of collusion "news" turned out to be ... "fake news."

Tucker Carlson Blasts Schiff, Slams Him For Spending Years Pushing Russian Collusion Theories

Are the riots a cover-up for RussiaGate?

Just as the Justice Department investigation of RussiaGate begins to zero in on the Obama Administration crooks who tried to hijack an election, riots are breaking out ... nationwide. 

And the media which sold the story that Trump was a Russain agent focuses like a laser beam on marches and riots.

There have been too many "coincidences" for this to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.  The entire Trump administration has been the focus of a conspiracy to overturn an election. 

And the Democrats are getting Russian and Chinese help;

When Russiagate Conveniently Vanishes

Rod Rosenstein – the former Deputy Attorney General at the red hot center of the Robert Mueller probe into the phantom menace of Trump collusion with the Russians – testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 3.

You may not know that happened. ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored it that night. PBS gave it 55 seconds. NPR gave it four minutes, but this part sounded bizarre.

Mary Louise Kelly, anchor: “May I start with an observation? Does this seem a little out of left field? With everything going on in the country right now, senators are focused today on the Russia investigation?”

Philip Ewing, reporter: “The short answer for that is, politics.”

The ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts devoted 2,202 minutes of coverage to the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory from January 21, 2017 to February 10, 2019. When the Senate Intelligence Committee announced its conclusion on February 12 that there was no collusion? Zero on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The short answer for that? Politics.

.Adam Schiff may be the biggest loser of Russia probe declassification

Schiff Report Claim: “FBI and DOJ officials did not abuse the FISA process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign. … DOJ met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA’s probable cause requirement.”

Declassified Facts: Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 11, 2019, “I do not think the Department of Justice fairly treated these FISAs.” His report went even further in describing how the FBI violated its own rules in submitting four FISA applications with a total of 51 pieces of unverified, inaccurate or false information. “FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate,’” he wrote. “We identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation.” The FISAs were so flawed in fact that DOJ has formally withdrawn two of the applications from the court in their entirety because they were incontrovertibly inaccurate.

Schiff Report Claim: DOJ and FBI officials “made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016.”

Declassified Facts: Horowitz directly contradicted this claim, concluding the dossier “played a central and essential role” in the FISA application. “The FISA request form drew almost entirely from Steele’s reporting in describing the factual basis to establish probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power,” the IG wrote.

Schiff Report Claim: “DOJ provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”

Declassified Facts: “We found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications,” Horowitz reported in December....

“Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.”

Cohen asks, how did Russiagate begin? His preferred explanation:

The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.

Glenn Greenwald on Twitter and the Russia Hoax.

Good morning. The NYT didn't even try to caveat the truth to make the medicine go down a bit more smoothly for their readers.

 


In sum: if you have a cable show and refuse to put people on who do anything but nod their head madly at everything you say until they risk a sprained neck - all while excluding skepticism & dissent from your primary narrative - you're likely to end up spreading deceit & scams:

 

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD

It's long but worth it. Read the whole thing.

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it.

The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

It’s hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.

Is This It?: A Trump-Hater’s Guide to Mueller Skepticism

Vanity Fair starting to worry that there's no Russian conspiracy.

T.A. Frank:

We see the familiar cycle of hype, and there’s no use fighting it, but, once heart rates have slowed, the same old question remains: so what? Some of the news, such as a Guardian story that Manafort met three times with Julian Assange, seems to be based on nothing at all. But even the solid news turns out to be generally non-earth-shattering. As the journalist Aaron Maté has been pointing out, we already knew the timeline of Cohen’s Moscow efforts, because BuzzFeed had already detailed them in May, painting a picture of a bumbling duo getting high on their own supply. (As for the latest revelations, did Sater and Cohen really think a president of Russia would move into a free $50 million penthouse provided by a U.S. presidential candidate? You have to wonder if they were hitting each other on the head with bricks.) Those who hope that Mueller reveals a shambolic operation with a lot of rascals engaged in sleazy and embarrassing behavior will be happy with the fruits of his labors. But those who hope for an unveiling of indictments linking Putin and Trump in a grand conspiracy have no more reason to celebrate than they did a week or a month ago.

Certainly, Trump’s ethical standards are low, but if sleaziness were a crime then many more people from our ruling class would be in jail. It is sleazy, but not criminal, to try to find out in advance what WikiLeaks has on Hillary Clinton. It is sleazy, but not criminal, to take a meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer promising a dossier of dirt on Clinton. (Just as, it should be mentioned, it is sleazy, but not criminal, to pay a guy to go to Russia to put together a dossier of dirt on Trump. This is one reason why the Clinton campaign lied about its connection to the Steele dossier, albeit without the disadvantage of being under oath.) It is sleazy, but not criminal, to pursue a business deal while you’re running for president. Mueller has nailed people for trying to prevaricate about their sleaze, so we already have a couple of guilty pleas over perjury, with more believed to be on the way. But the purpose of the investigation was to address suspicions of underlying conspiracy—that is, a plan by Trump staffers to get Russian help on a criminal effort. Despite countless man-hours of digging, this conspiracy theory, the one that’s been paying the bills at Maddow for a couple of years now, has come no closer to being borne out.

Not to pick too many nits, but there are quite a few questions about what's sleazy and what's not.  Is it really sleazy to take meeting with people who say they have "dirt" on your political opponent?   Do you think that anyone running for public office would say "go away, I don't want to know?"  Is it really sleazy to find out what WikiLeaks has on Hillary?  Is it sleazy to run your business while also running for office?  Feel free to elaborate.

Gowdy: If There Was Evidence That President Trump Committed Any Crime, "Adam Schiff Would Have Leaked It"

This FISA Passage Points to the Heart of Mueller’s Collusion Case Against Trump?

Summary:

Carter Page wanted better relations with Russia.  He had no effect on the Republican Platform with regard to Russia.  Trump sold weapons to Ukraine which Obama refused to do..

Trump wnats to improve relations with Russia just like Obama tried and just like Hillary tried.

For this he's branded a traitor by the Communist head of the CIA under Obama.

Explaining Russian Meddling

The Russians did the bad things during the Obama era. Obama KNEW they were doing the bad stuff, and yet did nothing about it. Obama argued that we should put the past behind us and try to cooperate in the future…

The Democrats felt sorry for Bob Mueller so they found a job for him that he could really enjoy.