There has been a lot of talk about Trump and his possible connections to Russia. Some have said they are wholly true, others wholly false, and very little otherwise middle ground.
Now, according to a recent report from the Justice Department Inspector General, he has found that the allegations against Trump and the Trump campaign about Russian interference were not politically motivated, and were justified.
The FBI mishandled parts of its application to monitor a Trump campaign aide as it was probing possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, but the overall investigation was justified, according to a long-awaited report by the Justice Department’s watchdog that rebuts the president’s depiction of a politically biased plot against him.
The 434-page report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI and the Justice Department launched their investigation into the 2016 campaign not for political reasons, but because of evidence the Russian government was using cutouts to reach out to the Trump campaign as part of its efforts to influence the election.
The inspector general said he examined more than a million documents and interviewed more than 100 witnesses.
Horowitz found that political bias did not taint the actions of former FBI leaders who have frequently been the subject of presidential attacks on Twitter, including former Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok.
“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” to open investigations into four Trump campaign aides, the report says. (source)
I do not fundamentally care if Trump actually had some involvement, ties, contacts- call them what one wants -with the Russians. There is a lot of political hysteria that has been generated over this, and much of it seemingly without sense.
However, I have to ask in the context of all of this, could there be something to this? And I must say, that it is entirely possible.
There is a quote attributed to former CIA director William Casey, which is said to have read “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false”. Whether or not he said this or not, this is not the question, but rather the principle behind it, which is that due to the precipitous amount of disinformation, people really do not know what to believe about news anymore because it is very difficult to sort through the mass of lies in the contemporary chaos.
However, it can be done. In order to briefly survey this, one may want to put the current history of “Russiagate” into the context of Trump’s past connections to the former Soviet bloc.
Trump was under scrutiny for ties to Russia going back as early as 1977, when it was reported that Czech spies followed Trump and then-wife Ivana in Manhattan and during trips to Czechoslovakia in the time after they got married. While one certainly cannot say that being spied upon by the USSR is tantamount to collusion with them, this seems to have been the earliest known mention of any public overlap between Trump and foreign intelligence agencies.
In 1986, as the Soviet Union was approaching her final days, Trump met with the daughter of now-former Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubini, Natalia and Irina, to forge a business partnership. Through a series of meetings, this lead to a major invitation from the USSR in 1987. Trump even recounts the ordeal in his book, The Art of the Deal:
“In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow…One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.” (source)
According to Politico, which reported the story, the tourist agency that Trump came through has been reported to be directly tied to the KGB, which used it to attract wealthy western investors to the USSR with the hopes of enticing them to work for KGB projects or to blackmail them as part of a long-term strategy in the future.
One may recall the infamous “pee tape” allegations, which are said to have Donald Trump on recording in a sex orgy involving urine consumption with Russian whores. While this may not be true, the question of the existence of a possible blackmail tape involving Trump and the USSR should not be excluded. Trump has a long history of philandering, and there is no evidence to suggest that Trump has changed from his ways as a younger man, except just now he is physically older. This is not to say that a or any tape exists, but since it is known that the parties which Trump attended seem to have been funded by people with close or direct connections to the KGB, and how they were lavish and involved young women, and how blackmail has been historically used by the KGB to further their operations, it would not be correct to rule out the possibility of this.
Are there other business contacts that developed during this time? We do not know. Likewise we do not know as of yet what Trump’s future interaction with persons from the USSR and later, Russia would have been. However, as Trump is a man of power and influence, any interaction with any major power is certainly something that should be looked into, as this would apply to anybody.
The 2016 election cycle naturally opened up public inquiry into all aspects of Trump’s life. This is where most of the interest in his contacts with Russia come from.
Now to put this all into context, one may recall that starting around 2014, there was a lot of fascination with President Putin and Russia, who was contrasted against Obama as a sort of “savior” in comparison to the “degenerate” Obama. One may recall that 2014 was the year of the Euromaidan which started the revolution in Ukraine that resulted in the Russian seizure of Crimea for geopolitical purposes as well as the war in eastern Ukraine in Lugansk and Donetsk, both of which provide access to the Volga basin, including the oil sands of Baku by pipeline, and is on a direct transportation route to the key city of Volgograd, in which 2 million people died during World War II as it was arguably the battle which decided the fate of the war.
This war, which Shoebat.com has written about, seems to be directly connected to the struggle for superiority in Europe by way of seeing which nation will ally with Germany. A Ukrainian victory over Russian attempts to promote separatist nationalism could lead to the formation of a US-German confederation that would likely be the undoing of Russia permanently. However, if Russia is able to make peace in Ukraine, it could lead to enhanced economic and political ties between Germany and Russia that could result in a revival of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement as well as a revived Brest-Litovsk Pact that would split the nations of Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia and create a peace between the powers that could lead to the formation of a united European military. If this were to happen, the US could likely defend herself from invasion, but she could not wage war aggressively against either nation and would have to sit out any conflict in Europe.
This seems to be the true nature of the fight taking place right now that began in 2014, of which the “based Putin” propaganda promoted by “vatniks” (pro-Russian nationalists who support Putin’s policies) came from. But in spite of the propaganda, all of that melted in the US when Obama prepared to leave office and Trump came around as the official nomination for the Republicans.
Trump represented a new hope for the Republicans as well as a new zeal for the future. “Make America Great Again”, which promoted the idea of American nationalism, became a rallying cry for people throughout the nation, and his open collaboration with Steven Bannon and his nationalistic, isolationist, and “anti-globalism” ideas combined with anti-Islamic and anti-immigration rhetoric propelled Trump to victory and more importantly, made him a start of nationalist movements around the world, especially in Europe.
This is where the Russian collusion part comes in, but it should not be said to be exclusively Russian. Nationalist groups such as the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the AfD in German to nationalists in Serbia, Ukraine, Spain, Italy, and Russia supported Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric.
Why would they support such language? Because for all of the faults of “globalism”, one of the concepts of globalism would be to unite people of different backgrounds from around the world and theoretically, to have them work with each other in some way. Nationalism, by contrast, while one cannot say that differences are bad because they are not, is not so much about attempting to destroy distinctions but rather the opposite of the subversion of globalism, which is to promote tribalism to the point of justifying racism, division, and eventually war. This is an issue in the US, but is a huge problem for Europe and always has been, for underneath the veneer of civilization are serious cultural, language, and social differences between people that frequently lead to violence. While the USA and EU are about the same size, the difference is that there is a general union between the different states, while each European nation is not only separate, but willing to go to war against other nations, all of which are about the size of US states.
Can one imagine New York going to war against Ohio, or North Carolina against South Carolina, or Texas versus a “midwest confederation” of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico? This is what Europe is like and always has been, and it has been the Catholic Church who has attempted to keep control over this tendency towards tribalism and war. Indeed, there is arguably more cultural, linguistic, and social similarity as well as overall harmony between a poor black man in rural southern Mississippi, a Scot-Irish “survivalist” living in the badlands of Montana, and a Puerto Rican from south Bronx than there is from region-to-region in just Italy, let along other nations in Europe.
America is a world leader, and Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric serves the interests of all nationalist movements in Europe because his language helps to justify their political voice as being legitimate. From this view alone, taking the sole perspective of a German or Russian nationalist, they have an interest in supporting Trump because it allows them to support Germanic or Russian nationalism, which is also happening right now.
We know that there has been an ongoing investigation by the Executive Branch of government concerning Trump and some of Trump’s campaign members, business partners, administration nominees, and family members for potential Russian influence,, and it is true that a number of them had various types of links to or contacts in some way with officials, business people, banks, and intelligence agencies tied to Russia since July 2016, and in February 2017 the NY Times reported that Trump associates and members of the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with senior Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign.
One of these people was Paul Manafort, which documents revealed that the Russians believed that he could be used to influence Trump for their interests. He even met with the suspected Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik while serving as Trump campaign chairman. Senior Trump Campaign member Rick Gates was forced to resign after charges arose from consulting work which he did for pro-Russian government interests in Ukraine promoting the Russian-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovich. Former Trump Campaign Foreign Policy adviser Carter Page was arrested and charged by authorities for participating in a “spy ring” with Russia after he provided documents on the US energy to Russian officials. Trump’s own son, Trump Jr., has come under suspicion for his meetings with Russian Central Bank governor Aleksandr Torshin. This does not even include his associate.
So far, there have been no direct connections to publicly implicate Trump in a criminal case. However, this does not mean that he did not work with, in some way, a foreign intelligence agency As David Graham from the New Yorker magazine noted in January 2018,
The release of the full dossier shifted the focus, away from Russia’s role narrowly and toward whether Trump’s campaign was working with Russia, culminating in an FBI investigation into that question, since handed off to special counsel Robert Mueller. It’s no wonder Trump is upset about the dossier, but his mantra that “there was no collusion [and] everybody including the Dems knows there was no collusion” rings false these days. While there’s not yet any public evidence to indicate a crime was committed, or that Trump was involved, it is clear that the Trump campaign and later transition were eager to work with Russia, and to keep that secret. (source)
We also know for a fact that the FBI informed Trump in July 2016- when the first investigations opened into potential collaboration with the Trump campaign and Russia -that the Russians were looking to attempt to influence US elections.
The briefings were led by counterintelligence specialists from the FBI, the sources said. They were timed to occur around the period when the candidates began receiving classified intelligence, the officials said, which put them at greater risk for being targeted by foreign spies. Trump’s first intelligence briefing as Republican nominee was Aug. 17, 2016, sources told NBC News at the time.
Trump was “briefed and warned” at the session about potential espionage threats from Russia, two former law enforcement officials familiar with the sessions told NBC News. A source close to the White House said their position is that Trump was unaware of the contacts between his campaign and Russians. (source)
This pattern is not new, and not necessarily with Trump.
Remember that before the Boston Marathon Bombings in 2013, Russian intelligence had warned the US about the Tsarnayev brothers and their ties to terrorism, but the US did nothing and the event happened.
During the shootup of the sodomite den of moral perversion in 2016 by Omar Mateen, it came out that the FBI had investigated him for ten months prior to the shooting, but still seemingly allowed him to go through with his plans.
During the 2016 Brussels terrorist bombings, it later came out that Belgian intelligence knew all about the terrorist who did the acts and had investigated him, but refused to do anything.
Now, regardless of one likes Trump or not, does one really believe that the entire FBI and a bunch of people in government were just lying to President Trump about “Russian interference” because they are part of the “deep state”- an unspecified blob for which the problems of government and Trump’s abysmal failures as a leader are blamed yet nobody will give clarity as to how any sort of “leadership” works -or that possibly they may be telling the truth?
It cannot be denied that people lie, and that disinformation is common, but not all of these agencies just lie, for there must be some truth in something. If it has come out repeatedly that intelligence agencies knew about various terrorists attacks and did not do anything, or that some agencies informed other agencies about certain potential for violence from certain individuals yet nothing was done, then we can conclude that there is a strong chance that a lot more was going on behind the scenes.
We do not know exactly what happened with Trump and Russia. However, what we can say is that the claims of “Trump did NOTHING” wrong to “Trump did EVERYTHING” are both incorrect, and the truth seems, at the current time, to be somewhere between these two extremes, for while Trump in a technical sense does not seem to have had direct personal involvement based on current evidence with Russian contacts, there is a strong contact between his campaign that seems to overlap, combined with the fact that supporting Trump’s nationalist rhetoric is in the interest of Russian nationalism, and said allegations have been supported now by another report from the government herself.
Something is going on with Trump and Russia, likely as it pertains to nationalism. The truth is obscured right now by political mania, which casts Trump as either the “best” or “worst” president that ever was and without regard to balance.
In addition to Russia, it would be of great interest to see what links exist potentially between the Trump campaign and nationalists in Germany and Italy, especially as how after Steve Bannon left Trump’s side, he went directly to Italy to work with openly training “right wing” Italian Nationalists.
Right now is likely a bad time because passion in the moment blinds other from seeing things clearly. However, it would not be in a surprise if in a decade from now, at least some of the allegations brought against Trump are demonstrated to have merit. That said, while one should not jump to conclusions, one should be open minded to the possibility that such accusations about Trump and Russia are at least partially true.