The duration of the Trump administration has been consumed with discussion over whether or not Trump “colluded” with Russia in his election. According to a recent report from the FBI as narrated on radio by the liberal-leaning outlet NPR, it was found, not surprisingly at all, that nothing of the sort happened:
AG Bill Barr sent a letter to leaders of the House and Judiciary Committees about the Mueller report. The investigation did not find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This is Special Coverage of the Mueller report from NPR’s ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I’m Michel Martin. Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report to the Justice Department on Friday. And after a day-and-a-half of review, the attorney general, William Barr, has drafted a four-page letter to Congress describing what he says are Mueller’s conclusions. We are going to spend the next hour digging into that letter.
We’ll be joined for this hour in studio by Phil Ewing, our national security correspondent. Carrie Johnson, our national justice correspondent, has been at the Justice Department all weekend awaiting these findings. They’re both here with us now. Welcome to you both. Thank you both so much for being here.
PHIL EWING, BYLINE: Thank you.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Happy to be here.
MARTIN: It’s been a long two years and a long couple of days for both of you. So I’m going to start with Phil Ewing. I’m going to ask him to remind us what essential questions was the special counsel asked to answer?
EWING: There were basically three big ones. First, did the Russian government interfere in the presidential election in 2016? Did President Trump or his campaign have anything to do with that interference? Did it take part? Were there any links or coordination between Trump’s people and the Russians as the special counsel’s mandate phrased it? And or did the president commit the crime of obstruction of justice by trying to frustrate investigators looking into the first or second of those questions?
We’ve had a lot of speculation about this. There’s been a lot of anticipation about what Mueller would find. And now today, we have a summary from the Justice Department of what he did find.
MARTIN: And we are going to take those questions one-by-one throughout the hour. And we’re going to start by asking Carrie Johnson to start with the question of collusion.
JOHNSON: First of all, I want to clarify, Michel, that this is a letter from the Justice Department from the attorney general, Bill Barr, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, not from the Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller was not at Justice over the weekend. He was not consulted or briefed on this letter. So I read this letter carefully to look for explicit quotes from Bob Mueller’s report. One of them is this investigation did not establish members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
So yes, the Russian government interfered. The Russian government did attack the 2016 election. But there was not enough or insufficient evidence to suggest that President Trump, anybody affiliated with his campaign here in the United States, was knowingly coordinating with those Russians. We know that Mueller did charge a lot of Russians in the course of this investigation. No Americans have been charged explicitly with that conspiracy.
MARTIN: Is there any supporting evidence that we can see? As we know that this is – this is the only document that we have had access to so far. Is there any suggestion that we’re going to get to see any more about this point?
JOHNSON: We are…
MARTIN: …Because we heard so much about the meeting at Trump Tower. And it’s been sort of an ongoing story. Are we going to hear any more? Are we going to see anymore?
JOHNSON: We know that the Mueller report he sent to Justice is comprehensive. We don’t know how long it is. We know also that the attorney general is going to be scrubbing that report for grand jury information, classified information and for information that can implicate ongoing investigations. We’re not going to see any more of that Mueller report until it’s been scrubbed for those three kinds of things. And that said, Michel, we do know from court filings and public reporting that there was a meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 among Donald Trump Jr. Jared Kushner, the president’s adviser, Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, and various Russians.
We also know that various people linked to Russia reached out to Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman. And Roger Stone also appears to have had contacts with Russians. But the issue is whether they could prove he knowingly communicated or conspired with Russians. Stone has not been charged with any kind of crime like that.
MARTIN: I’m going to go to our White House correspondent in just a minute. And as we, I think all – everybody knows who’s been following this story, President Trump has had a very great deal to say about this for the last two years. But, Phil Ewing, is there anything else you would like to add about what gives rise to the concern that there was this collusion which the special counsel, at least according to the attorney general’s rendering of it, has concluded didn’t occur, at least that there was no coordination between those campaigns? Could you just amplify why it is that there was this concern that needed to be investigated?
EWING: What we learned from official investigators in the Justice Department and Congress since the inauguration was that there were a number of contacts – you talked about some of them, Carrie talked about some of them – between people in President Trump’s orbit and Russians in 2016. There was the meeting. But there were more than that. There were overtures by Russian or other agents to people in Trump’s campaign, foreign policy advisers. There was travel made by people in the campaign. There was contact between Trump’s son-in-law and a Russian banker. And there were big negotiations taking place in real time in 2016 between Trump’s business and powerful real estate and other interests in Moscow about a big hotel that might be built there.
And this gave rise to a lot of the questioning and speculation before this letter from Barr to the Congress about whether there might have been more there and whether these apparent links or this apparent type of distant connection might have had something more substantive that was taking place behind the scenes. (source, source)
So even the “liberals” admit there was no collusion.
I’m not impressed in the least by anything.
I wrote about this in August 2018, but Trump’s presidency has been a reality television show. Call it the “Oval Office,” “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” or perhaps “The President,” but Trump has done what he has done for years, which is to surround himself with “controversies” or other things that people like to watch such as fighting, arguing, and division, and then to show himself through all of it as the “big guy” who is still in charge.
Nothing of this, by the way, is meant to be a personal attack on him, but a simple observation of past behavior, which is frequently a consistent metric by which to gauge future actions.
The “Russiagate” investigation was nothing because, as most people could figure out from the beginning based on a simple reading of the evidence, was based on nothing at all. It has been an almost three-year-long replay of the ridiculous debacle that was the 2000 election with “hanging chads,” “pregnant chads,” “fat chads,” and dimpled chads” that went on for months.
Many people on both sides were consumed by this spectacle that involved a slew of lawyers, judges, porn whores, and an entire motley case of individuals known to the general public. There was even the entire “Q Anonymous” foolishness that went on and continues to, in spite of the fact that as Shoebat.com has demonstrated, there is considerable evidence that Q is nothing more than a CIA operation whose purpose it is has been to continue the ongoing circus.
It was an impressive show.
In the meantime, Trump has shown himself to be a President who is in his essence little different than Obama. To Obama’s credit, however, he at least did not bend over to Israel’s cries for creating further condition for starting a war with Iran, a country that while she possesses interests different than those of the USA has so far shown her only crime to be her existence in having an opinion as a sovereign nation different from the geopolitical aims of the US and Israel.
Trump did not “build the wall” as he promised. Instead, he tore down prototypes of “the wall.”
Trump did not help the people of this country in terms of addressing root causes of the constant “dead cat bounce” economic decline that has persisted since the administration of Bush II. Instead, he has riled up nationalism and calls for foreign militarism.
Trump did not address the national debt, something that people accused, and rightly so, Obama of worsening. Instead, he continued to make it worse.
Some could say that “it was the Democrats” who stopped Trump. If this was so, then one must say that Obama was not the real reason his administration had problems, but rather because “it was the Republicans” who stopped him. The logic of finger-pointing is irrelevant because neither Trump nor Obama nor another president is simply and absolutely bound by those who came before him. Trump should know this of all, for he emphasized that he ran as an “outsider” during his campaign.
Now, considering all of this, look at the last several days of news events.
Trump signs an accord with Israel to “recognize” Israel’s claims on the Golan Heights in Syria. Around the same time, ISIS is “defeated” in Syria.
Let’s remember too that ISIS has been proven many times to be a direct creation of the CIA working what what appears to be the Saudi’s and Israeli’s. This directly parallels the CIA’s Operation Cyclone plan, in which the three nations with Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan created the Taliban and then trained, trafficked weapons, and provided logistics to them. ISIS is for today what the Taliban was in the 1980s.
The US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel jointly created a monster, a monster which directly committed genocide against the Christians of the Levant more effective in fourteen years than Islam ever was in fourteen centuries, and all for the purpose of sparking nationalism for militarism. Trump, remember, promised that he would help the Christians, and not only has he done nothing for them, but has actively helped to persecute them in the US.
Why else would ISIS disappear co-incidentally and so quickly?
Likewise, suddenly the Pentagon is going to allocate $1 Billion for “the wall.”
Does anybody believe this is nothing more than just a ploy? Trump knocked down the prototypes and has blamed the “Democrats” for what is his failure to do what he promised.
People can allocate money for anything. The question is whether or not they will actually build what they say then intend to with it. That is an entirely different matter.
But most importantly, the above story about “Russiagate” happens. As one commentator pointed out on Zero Hedge, the obvious “fake news,” by “proving” it now and “humiliating the left,” Trump can now claim indignation and persecution, saying all along “I was framed” and “it really was the fault of the left”:
So that’s it then. The central and foundational claim of the Russiagate conspiracy theory has been found to have been completely baseless. The report asserts that Russia hacked and distributed Democratic Party emails (a claim that the public has still yet to see any hard evidence for), and “did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other” whether Trump committed obstruction of justice in the investigation of baseless collusion allegations, but the central and foundational Russiagate claim that Trump and the Kremlin conspired to steal the 2016 election has been killed. Finito. Case closed. Debate over.
And Trump is loving every second of it.
“No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” tweeted America’s reality TV star president exactly as you would expect him to, taking some creative license with the actual contents of Barr’s letter.
This is your life for the next 594 days, America. You can expect to hear over and over and over again, from today until November 2020, that the president was victimized for over two years by a “WITCH HUNT” which was “COMPLETE and TOTAL FAKE NEWS!” All Trump will have to do to get re-elected is keep his economy narrative going and repeat the claim that he’s been unjustly persecuted by the establishment “swamp”.
And it will work, because that claim will not be unfounded. As much of a corrupt establishment crony as Trump has proven himself to be, he does indeed have all the facts he needs to successfully sell the narrative that the political/media class has spent over two years pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and he can indeed claim persecution and victimization in the process. He can easily leverage this into sympathy and support in his reelection campaign, and can use it to reinforce his tarnished image as an enemy of the beltway swamp. Those who’ve been selling the Russiagate narrative handed him this weapon. (source)
It’s the best gift that Trump could get because this will be the means by which he will be re-elected. It’s the same kind of gift that Trump gave to Germany when he “talked tough” to her, or when he encouraged economic war with Turkey, or when he said that America needs to give Japan nuclear capabilities.
It’s his “golden ticket” to another term. And Trump is already capitalizing on it.
Most likely, Trump is going to win the 2020 election. Andrew Yang has been the most interesting of the candidates, as he is openly advocating for socialism, and the new nationalist movement has fully supported him because of his embrace of socialism. But make no mistake, the Democrat party is not in disarray.
In fact, the 2020 election and Trump’s second term will be as relevant as the entire “Russian collusion” investigation, which is all about nothing for no purpose, save to advance and stir interests in nationalism and socialism, something which the Democrats will capitalize on.
The election of 2024 is going to be the interesting one because it will most likely be a Democrat victory. For all of the people who believe that Trump will act “differently” this time, I do not recommend becoming too hopeful, as past behavior is the biggest indicator of future actions.
In the last election, the Democrats wanted a woman, and as I have warned since they also are open about their love of Sodom, it would not be a surprise if they attempted to get both of them in a single candidate:
People legitimately are concerned about a loss of potential freedoms and rights under a Democrat presidency, and this is real. However, this is also happening because the Republicans want it too, just without being as direct.
So expect another show as last time, and be ready for potential 2000-ish type shenanigans at the ballot boxes. Expect a likely Trump victory but do not expect any serious changes or improvements. Prepare for a Democrat 2024 presidential victory, and the consequences that this means.
The table is turned, the game is rigged, and for the most part, save local elections, the voting and elections are a show meant to keep people distracted.
Remember the warnings of Fatima, and specifically of the year 2029, or after one term under whoever is elected in 2024.
Perhaps it is better to, instead of spending time in political discussions, to focus on learning about gardening, raising chickens, rabbits, and learning how to live a simpler life while paying off debt and obligations.
Remember the lesson of the grasshopper and the ant.
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