July 10, 2017
Exclusive: The new Russia-gate
furor is over Donald Trump Jr. meeting a Russian who claimed to have dirt on
Hillary Clinton, but the Clinton team’s Russian cash-for-trash search against
Trump Sr. is all but forgotten, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Yes, I realize that the
editors of The New York Times long ago cast aside any journalistic
professionalism to become charter members of the #Resistance against Donald
Trump. But the latest frenzy over a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a
Russian lawyer who was dangling the possibility of information about the
Democrats receiving money from Russians represents one of the more remarkable
moments of the entire Russia-gate hysteria.
Essentially, Trump’s oldest
son is being accused of taking a meeting with a foreign national who claimed to
have knowledge of potentially illegal activities by Trump’s Democratic rivals,
although the promised information apparently turned out to be a dud.
Yet, on Monday, the Times led
its newspaper with a story about this meeting – and commentators on MSNBC and
elsewhere are labeling Trump Jr. a criminal if not a traitor for hearing out
this lawyer.
Yet, no one seems to remember
that Hillary Clinton supporters paid large sums of money, reportedly about $1
million, to have ex-British spy Christopher Steele use his Russian connections
to dig up dirt on Trump inside Russia, resulting in a salacious dossier that
Clinton backers eagerly hawked to the news media.
Also, the two events – Trump
Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer and the Clinton camp’s commissioning of
Steele’s Russia dossier – both occurred in June 2016, so you might have thought
it would be a journalistic imperative to incorporate a reference or two to the
dossier.
But the closest the Times came
to that was noting: “Political campaigns collect opposition research from many
quarters but rarely from sources linked to foreign governments.” That would
have been an opportune point to slide in a paragraph about the Steele dossier,
but nothing.
The Times doesn’t seem to have
much historical memory either. There actually have been a number of cases in
which American presidential campaigns have ventured overseas to seek out
“opposition research” about rivals.
For instance, in 1992,
President George H.W. Bush took a personal role in trying to obtain derogatory
information about Bill Clinton’s 1970 student trip to Eastern Europe, including
to Moscow.
That effort started out by
having senior State Department officials rifle through the passport files of
Clinton and his mother, looking for a purported letter in which some Republican
operatives thought Clinton might have renounced his U.S. citizenship.
Bush and his team were called
out on that caper, which became known as “Passport-gate.” During the Oct. 11,
1992 debate, Clinton even compared Bush’s tactics to Joe McCarthy’s during the
1950s Red Scare. But the Bush campaign didn’t let the issue entirely go.
Czech-ing on Bill
In the days after the debate,
phone records revealed a flurry of calls from Bush’s campaign headquarters to
Czechoslovakia, another stop on Clinton’s student tour. There were also fax
transmissions on Oct. 14 and 15, 1992, according to a later official
investigation.
On Oct. 16, what appears to
have been a return call was placed from the U.S. Embassy in Prague to the
office of ad man Sig Rogich, who was handling anti-Clinton themes for the Bush
campaign.
Following those exchanges,
stories about Clinton’s Prague trip began popping up in Czech newspapers. On
Oct. 24, 1992, three Czech newspapers ran similar stories about Clinton’s Czech
hosts. The Cesky Denik story had an especially nasty headline: “Bill Was With
Communists.”
The Czech articles soon blew
back to the United States. Reuters distributed a summary, and The Washington
Times, over three consecutive days, ran articles about Clinton’s Czech trip.
The Clinton campaign responded that Clinton had entered Czechoslovakia under
normal procedures for a student and stayed with the family of an Oxford friend.
Despite those last-minute
efforts to revive Clinton’s loyalty issue, the Democrat held on to defeat Bush
in a three-way race (with Ross Perot).
You also could go back to Republican
contacts with South Vietnamese officials to sabotage President Lyndon
Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and similar meetings with Iranian
emissaries to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s Iran hostage negotiations in
1980, including a
curious meeting involving senior Ronald Reagan campaign aides at the
L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C.
But the Steele dossier is a
more immediate and direct example of close Hillary Clinton supporters going
outside the United States for dirt on Trump and collaborating with foreign
nationals to dig it up – allegedly from Kremlin insiders. Although it is still
not clear exactly who footed the bill for the Steele dossier and how much money
was spread around to the Russian contacts, it is clear that Clinton supporters paid
for the opposition research and then flacked the material to American
journalists.
The Mystery Dossier
As I wrote on March 29, “An
irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp’s contacts with Russians
is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that
supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that
political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with
American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral
advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump’s; it was Hillary Clinton’s.
“And, awareness of this
activity doesn’t require you to spin conspiracy theories about what may or may
not have been said during some seemingly innocuous conversation. In this case,
you have open admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin claims were used.
“Indeed, you have the words of
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence
Committee, in his opening
statement at [a] public hearing on so-called ‘Russia-gate.’ Schiff’s
seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign’s alleged collaboration with
Russia followed the script prepared by former British intelligence officer
Christopher Steele who was hired as an opposition researcher last June [2016]
to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.
“Steele, who had worked for
Britain’s MI-6 in Russia, said he tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources
inside Russia, including leadership figures in the Kremlin, to piece together a
series of sensational reports that became the basis of the current
congressional and FBI investigations into Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.
“Since he was not able to go
to Russia himself, Steele based his reports mostly on multiple hearsay from
anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their
government contacts before passing it on to Steele’s associates who then gave
it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into ‘raw’
intelligence reports.
“Besides the anonymous
sourcing and the sources’ financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele’s reports
had numerous other problems, including the inability of a variety of
investigators to confirm key elements, such as the salacious claim that several
years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having
prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed in Moscow’s
Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
“That tantalizing tidbit was
included in Steele’s opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016.
Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton’s
mysterious benefactors who were financing Steele’s dirt digging and who have
kept their identities (and the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first report
were the basic outlines of what has become the scandal that is now threatening
the survival of Trump’s embattled presidency.”
The Trump Jr. Meeting
So, compare that with what we
know about the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York City, which
Donald J. Trump Jr. says he agreed to because someone was claiming knowledge
about Russian payments helping Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. said Russian lawyer
Natalie Veselnitskaya “stated that she had information that individuals
connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and
supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no
sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It
quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
According to Trump Jr.’s
account, Veselnitskaya then turned the conversation to President Vladimir
Putin’s cancellation of an adoption program which had sent Russian children to
American parents, a move he took in reaction to the so-called Magnitsky Act, a
2012 punitive law passed by the U.S. Congress in retaliation for the 2009 death
of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian jail.
The death became a Western
cause célèbre with Magnitsky, the accountant for hedge-fund executive William
Browder, hailed as a martyr in the cause of whistleblowing against a profoundly
corrupt Russian government. After Magnitsky’s death from a heart attack,
Browder claimed that his “lawyer” Magnitsky had been tortured and murdered to
cover up official complicity in a $230 million tax-fraud scheme involving
companies ostensibly under Browder’s control.
Because of Browder’s wealth
and political influence, he succeeded in getting the European Parliament and
the U.S. Congress to buy into his narrative and move to punish the
presumed villains in the tax fraud and in Magnitsky’s death. The U.S.-enacted
Magnitsky Act in 2012 was an opening salvo in what has become a new Cold War
between Washington and Moscow.
Only One Side Heard
The Magnitsky narrative has
now become so engrained in Western geopolitical mythology that the storyline apparently
can no longer be questioned or challenged. The New York Times reports Browder’s
narrative as flat fact, and The Washington Post took pleasure in denouncing a
2016 documentary that turned Browder’s version of events on its head.
The documentary was
essentially blocked for distribution in the West, with the European Parliament
pulling the plug on its planned premiere in Brussels shortly before it was
scheduled for showing.
When the documentary got a
single showing at the Newseum in Washington, a
Washington Post editorial branded the documentary Russian “agit-prop.”
The Post sought to discredit
the filmmaker, Andrei Nekrasov, without addressing his avalanche of documented
examples of Browder’s misrepresenting both big and small facts in the
case. Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov of using “facts highly
selectively” and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin’s
“campaign to discredit Mr. Browder and the Magnitsky Act.”
The Post concluded smugly:
“The film won’t grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the
Kremlin’s increasingly sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and
mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television
networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the
accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky’s family.
“We don’t worry that
Mr. Nekrasov’s film was screened here, in an open society. But it is
important that such slick spin be fully exposed for its twisted story and sly
deceptions.”
Given the fact that virtually
no one in the West was allowed to see the film, the Post’s gleeful editorial
had the feel of something you might read in a totalitarian society where the
public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce
some almost unknown person for saying something that almost no one heard.
What the Post didn’t want you
to know was that Nekrasov started off his project with the goal of producing a
docu-drama that accepted Browder’s self-serving narrative. However, during the
research, Nekrasov uncovered evidence that revealed that Magnitsky was neither
a “lawyer” nor a whistleblower; that the scam involving Browder’s companies had
been exposed by a woman employee; and that Magnitsky, an accountant for
Browder, was arrested as a conspirator in the fraud.
As the documentary unfolds,
you see Nekrasov struggling with his dilemma as Browder grows increasingly
abusive toward his erstwhile ally. Nekrasov painfully concludes that Browder
had deceived him.
But, don’t worry, as a citizen
in the Free World, you probably will never have to worry about viewing this
documentary, since it has been effectively flushed down the memory hole.
Official references to Magnitsky are back in the proper form, treating him as a
Martyr for Truth and a victim of the Evil Russians.
Plus, if you rely on The New
York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN and the rest of the U.S. mainstream
media for your news, you won’t have to think about the far more substantive
case of the Steele Dossier in which Hillary Clinton’s allies spent gobs of
money seeking out sources in Russia to serve up dirt on Donald Trump.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
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