By Barry Grey
1 December 2018
The latest moves by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation underscore the close
coordination between the former FBI director and dominant factions of the
military/intelligence establishment, which, in alliance with the Democratic
Party, are using the fabricated charges of Russian "meddling" and
alleged Trump campaign collusion to pressure Trump into pursuing an even more
provocative and reckless policy against Russia.
This campaign is increasingly
combined with an effort by Mueller to frame up WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
on espionage or conspiracy charges. The aim is to force Assange from his
enforced refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, so that British
authorities can arrest him and extradite him to the US, where he already faces
federal charges that carry a possible death sentence.
This week's moves by Mueller
also highlight the reactionary substance of the Democratic Party's opposition
to the right-wing Trump administration.
On Thursday morning, Michael
Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer and "fixer," pled guilty in
Manhattan to a charge brought by Mueller of lying to Congress. Cohen has been
cooperating with Mueller's prosecutors since he pled guilty last August to
violations of campaign finance laws in connection with an election-eve payoff
to silence two women who claimed they had had sexual relations with the
then-Republican presidential candidate. Cohen also pled guilty in August to
unrelated charges of financial fraud.
In statements made to the US
district judge and legal filings by the special counsel's office, Cohen
admitted to lying to Congress about negotiations carried out during the 2016
election campaign between the Trump Organization and Russian officials over a
Moscow Trump Tower project. Cohen said he lied to back false statements made by
Trump that the hotel project talks ended in January 2016, prior to the first
Republican primary election, and that Trump had no input into the negotiations
while running for president. Cohen also contradicted claims by Trump that none
of his family members were involved in the talks.
Mueller's prosecutors made a
point of telling the court they believed Cohen was telling the truth in
connection with his plea bargain. This takes on added significance because
Trump's lawyers last week submitted answers to questions from the special counsel's
office, including queries relating to the negotiations over the Moscow Trump
Tower proposal. This raises the possibility of obstruction of justice charges
against Trump or his aides and family members based on discrepancies between
their accounts to Congress or to Mueller's investigators and that of Cohen.
The surprise court filing and
guilty plea were timed to coincide with Trump's departure for the G20 summit in
Buenos Aires, where he was slated to meet with Russian President Vladimir
Putin. It took place in the context of Ukraine's weekend provocation against
Russia, in which the right-wing, US-backed government in Kiev sent ships into
waters off Crimea claimed by Russia. This was seized on by major media outlets
aligned with the CIA and the Democratic Party to demand that Trump cancel the
meeting with Putin.
Thursday morning's court
appearance by Cohen added fuel to this media campaign, and within hours Trump
reversed himself and announced from his plane en route to Argentina that he was
canceling the Putin meeting. This sequence followed last July's pattern, when,
on the eve of Trump's meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Mueller filed criminal
charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers in connection with Moscow's
alleged Russian interference in the presidential election in support of Trump.
That meeting, where Trump
failed to give unqualified backing to US intelligence claims of Russian hacking
of Democratic Party emails, triggered furious condemnations from the Democrats
and media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and
CNN, and charges by former top intelligence officials that Trump was guilty of
treason.
Since then, Trump has
escalated the confrontation with Russia, including by withdrawing from the
US-Russia Intermediate-Range Nuclear Treaty. This, however, is not considered a
sufficient demonstration of Trump's readiness to engage in full-scale
diplomatic, economic and, ultimately, military war with Russia.
Leading Democrats seized on
Cohen's plea bargain to step up their anti-Russia campaign and ratchet up the
pressure on Trump. California Congressman Adam Schiff, who is slated to chair
the intelligence committee when the new, Democratic-controlled House of
Representatives takes office in January, announced that his committee would
launch an investigation into Trump's business dealings abroad.
On Monday, Mueller went to
court to declare that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had breached
his plea deal agreement by lying to special counsel prosecutors, voiding the
agreement and opening up Manafort to additional charges. This move appears to
be linked to Mueller's increasing focus on Assange, suggesting that Manafort
had refused to give testimony implicating Assange in the hacking of Democratic
campaign emails.
One day later, on Tuesday,
the Guardian newspaper published a scurrilous article making
unsubstantiated claims that Manafort had secretly met on several occasions with
Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. This was proclaimed by US cable news
networks CNN and MSNBC as a "bombshell" revelation that definitively
implicated Assange.
Both Manafort and WikiLeaks
immediately denied the allegations and threatened to take libel action against
the newspaper. The Guardian quietly amended the original piece to
make its claims somewhat less categorical, and the media subsequently dropped
the allegations entirely.
For their part, the Democrats
have seized on the Cohen plea filing to escalate their McCarthyite-style
attacks on Russia and denunciations of Trump as a Putin "stooge." This
only underscores the fact that the Democrats' opposition to Trump, to the
extent that it exists, is entirely focused on tactical disagreements over US
imperialist foreign policy, with the Democratic Party attacking the militarist
and semi-fascist Trump from the right on his posture toward Moscow.
When it comes to Trump's
general warmongering, his massive expansion of military spending, his
pro-corporate tax cuts and gutting of business regulations, and his
Gestapo-like pogrom against immigrants, the Democrats are virtually silent.
They have responded to their victory in the midterm elections, including the
retaking of the House with a gain of 40 seats—a pale reflection of the scale of
popular anger and opposition to Trump—by reelecting all of the geriatric
right-wingers who have led the House Democratic caucus for more than a decade
and pledging to cooperate with Trump in pushing through his reactionary
domestic agenda.
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