Framing Trump as a Russian agent always let Democrats off the hook
Special counsel John Durham concludes FBI never should have launched full Trump-Russia probe
Special counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, according to a report compiled over three years by the Trump-administration appointee and released on Monday.
Durham’s 300-plus page report also states that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” to launch the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia but used a different standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The problem for the Democrats is that they still don’t know why they lost to Trump.
Democrats liked to point to the ‘Russian interference’ of the 2016 election to explain Trump winning, but I think blaming Russia for ‘hacking’ the US Election is was always deeply counter productive.
Firstly, it’s just outrageous that the Americans who have committed coups, electoral fraud and mass deceptions on 81 other nations over the years are in any position to lecture or complain about interfering in other peoples elections!
Secondly, it allows the Democrats off the hook. Instead of acknowledging they ran a terrible candidate in Hilary and fielded neoliberal policies that hurt the very workers they had simply assumed would vote for them, the Democrats can avoid scrutiny of their own rigged primary process, the manner in which Bernie Sanders was unfairly treated and their hollow policies by blaming it all on Russia.
Newsflash to the Democrats – Trump didn’t win because of Russia, he won because you failed to appreciate how your embrace of neoliberal globalisation hurt the very voters you needed the most.
One estimate puts the budget of Russian interference in the election via social media advertising at $250 000. With all due respect for American Democracy, if you can influence an election with a mere $250 000, you have way bigger problems than Putin.
We can scream racist and sexist as much as we like at Trump voters, but when Trump wooed Union families, women and the working poor in such huge numbers, something else needs to be examined as the reason this malignant orange tumour of a human being has been forced upon us all.
The free market globalisation that the Democrats embraced has robbed the domestic working classes of their dignity and economic ability to survive. We’ve seen this working class cultural backlash in BREXIT, Scott Morrison’s win and Corbyn’s loss. Bernie Sanders understood this which is why he would have been able to woo those voters Trump needed back to the Democrats and beat Trump, but the vile corruption within the Democrats (who played to the elites within the Party) robbed Sanders of his nomination in a rigged system set up to prevent a populist left winger ever winning the candidacy.
More than any other Political President before him, Donald Trump has understood, harnessed and manipulated cultural political resentment in a manner that has tapped into deep seated economic anxieties caused by free market globalisation.
This union members who voted Barack twice and then voted in Trump aren’t racist, they’re the working classes who feel burnt by the Democrats for embracing neoliberalism.
Trump gave them hope that someone, even a racist sex offender, might hear their economic pain.
Trump is a master of negative populism and plays to the worst angels of our nature, THAT’S why he won, not because the fucking Russians hacked the election!
The Democrats are still in denial about why they lost to Trump and that denial makes it all more likely he’ll win next year.
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Это был не я
Reminds me of our Winston…
And Laboor are too wedded to neoliberalism for our own good.
Tax the fucking rich.
If Bernie wasn’t cheated out of the nomination by Wasserman Schultz & Co., there would have been a near-identical hoax used to try and bring down his administration also.
He was just a sheepherder, his loyalty tied more towards the Dems than to the people. A humongous disappointment.
The Durham Report also states that both Obama and Biden knew Hillary was falsely smearing Trump with this nonsense (with the help of the FBI). The entire Democrat Party, the Department of Justice, and the FBI need to be dismantled in the face of this damning report (that FBI acknowledges as factually correct BTW). All those involved, especially Hillary and the then FBI Director, should be facing criminal charges. Biden should be impeached.
I believe Putin when he said that once you’re elected president you’re lead into a back room with men in black suits who actually run America. This whole Russia gate proved that the FBI and CIA actively revolt against the President of the United States and how untouchable the deep state truely is. We got to start firing these unelected spooks here in NZ.
You must be an idiot if you believe anything that Putin, or Trump, says!
Very true. I doubt there’s more than ten people in the GCSB and SIS who are loyal to this nation.
It goes much further Nitrium!
Following on from the fake dossier provided by the Democrats to the FBI for the FISA warrant, FBI and CIA operatives were embedded in the main social media platforms to block, shadow ban and demonetize Republican voices in the run-up to the 2020 election, to the extent that even the sitting president had his accounts shut down. The same deep state players also managed to get dozens of intelligence officials to sign up to a document claiming the Hunter Biden laptop data was fake. The result? A stolen 2020 election. The same corrupt FBI is now slow-walking the investigation into the Biden family’s corruption, which includes millions in bribes received from China and others plus a raft of other illegality.
But what REALLY grinds my gears is our local mainstream media refusing to even mention the Durham report now that all their previous polemic has proven to be false. These cretins have no shame.
Trump has been convicted of sexual misdemeanours. Says more about your values than anything Andrew.
Biden has been cleared, Trump has not been and more to come. The worst part, Republicans seem to agree with sexual misconduct.
Yes, sexual misdemeanours are so much worse than outright corruption, money laundering, using govt agencies to smear the opposition! I mean remember January 6th where a group of unarmed people “stormed” (i.e. let in) the Capitol? That was an “attack on democracy”! This is just low-level stuff. Oh wait.
It’s not a damning report.
It is a toothless temper tantrum produced to justify the existence of the investigation itself, an investigation designed to distract from and smear judicial and law enforcement investigation of Trump. It was multi-year long investigation chasing right wing fantasies and misinformation-generated talking points. It ultimately produced nothing of substance and exposed no criminal or ethical wrongdoing by those it targeted.
As expected, it was critical, it was always going to be, it was designed to be. It produced predictably pure partisan opinion.
The fact that nothing like this has happened and that most people are none the wiser about all this crap, just shows how crooked politics has become, ditto the mainstream media machine that allows this crap to flourish. And yet it was only yesterday that more people than ever before trusted politicians and the mainstream media machine. As such, mainstream media is thee single greatest threat to humanity today because they are serving crooks rather than holding them to account!
Against the background of you comments remember, the “Democrats” didn’t launch investigations into the Trump campaign. The FBI and DOJ did.
The Mueller probe resulted in multiple convictions and it detailed law breaking by Donald Trump himself, who escaped accountability by virtue of his position as POTUS and questionable maneuvering by a less than candid AG.
The Russia investigations were only a fraction of the attempted pushbacks against Trump administration’s transgressions which included: attacks on medical, science, educational and judicial institutions, rolling back action on climate, encouragement of racism and white supremacism, draconian immigration action, billions wasted on a useless wall, blowing out the deficit for tax cuts for the wealthy, attacks on welfare, criminal dereliction of duty to protect the public from COVID, facilitating the packing of the Supreme Court with dishonest candidates selected by ultra-rightwing christian activists and on it goes. Any social democrat’s nightmare.
USA bought into the neo libertarianism (a better designation than neoliberalism imo) several decades before, and adopted twisted moral panics against their definitions of socialism and communism decades before that. The US public remain partisan and immersed in religious superstition, their tribal two party system and “American exceptionalism”, they’ll never find a way out, short of catastrophe.
They still think their idiotic Second Amendment is a good idea.
Agreed Richard. It may be hard to prove but Trump had dodgy connections with Russia particularly over a projected Trump Tower to be built in Moscow. And Putin has kompromat on Trump’s nefarious activities in Russia
Americans would be well advised to steer clear and hold their noses with Trump.
Wow, so you’re saying that Trump was almost as bad on economics as…. every single NZ ‘labour’ government since the 80s? Perish the thought.
Thanks for covering this Martyn, in contrast to the Mueller report, the Durham report appears to have had minimal coverage. Ask most DNC or left leaning voters if the Trump campaign colluded with Russia I suspect most will say yes. This is despite left leaning journalists who have integrity like Glen Greenwald carefully pointing out the absurdity of this claim for years (the same Glen Greenwald who blew the whistle on judicial and political corruption in Brazil, that led to the release of Lula from prison).
Trump and his family are throughly corrupt and self serving, but so are the Clintons and Bidens. The main sin of Trump is to be open about it in ways unacceptable to DC polite society. Trump is not an aberration (except in rhetoric), he is a symptom.
His negative populism is virtue signalling to the (mainly white) working class. He’ll say the quiet part out loud (mixed with a lot of BS) but do nothing about it. Rhetoric aside, domestically he governed like a standard issue republican. In foreign policy the Trump doctrine has largely been retained by the Biden administration and ramped up with a neocon agenda.
Russiagate and other narratives around Hillary’s loss, not only allowed the DNC to avoid any introspection, in parallel with MAGA it polarised the political landscape, gave legacy media corporations years of increased advertiser revenue, embedded the partisan outrage business model (originated by Fox) into MSNBC and CNN and other outlets, made a few people like Rachel Maddow very wealthy, primed hostility to Russia and arguably launched or helped launch the identitarian (woke) culture wars into the western mainstream.
That’s a lot of collateral damage just because Hillary and the DNC establishment couldn’t admit they lost to such a terrible candidate.
Well said.
None because their brains aren’t corrupted.