Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As the increasingly-bizarre “Russiagate” scandal continues to refuse to unfold, the leftist Mainstream Media hasn’t let the lack of a story stop it from covering the hell out of the issue since Nov. 9 of last year. Fortunately, there are a few actual journalists left scattered around the media landscape and they occasionally do really good journalistic work – even if they’re forced to do it on a topic as absurd as this one.
Amanda Becker complied for Reuters a timeline of “Russiagate” as a review of the idiocy many of us have been consumed with for six months that serves to remind us how much nothing this ado is all about. Another nice thing about this little refresher is that it reminded me that there has ALREADY been a probe into “Russiagate;” ordered by then-president Barack Obama and to be delivered before he left office.
“The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency concluded in a report declassified in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign not just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system but to affect the outcome.
The agencies said Putin and the Russian government had a ‘clear preference’ for Trump to win the White House. Putin’s associates hacked information, paid social media ‘trolls’ and backed efforts by Russian government agencies and state-funded media to sway public opinion, the agencies said.
The report stopped short of assessing whether Russia succeeded in swaying the election result,”
Really? THIS is what we’re talking about? The fact Putin had an opinion on which other foreign leader he’d rather deal with? So, he supposedly hacked the DNC’s servers at the behest of a long-shot U.S. presidential candidate, even though there is still zero proof Russia was the source of the emails leaked to WikiLeaks? And, we’re to believe a former KGB head decided that paying Facebook trolls was the best way to pursue his geopolitical strategies.
Typically, when the United States wants to influence who ends up the head of a foreign state, they do so by killing their guy’s rival. But, we’re wasting resources because Putin might have paid people to say things on Facebook that somehow made Americans vote for Trump. Gotcha, seems legit. The last sentence in the above quote says it all; of course the report “stopped short,” it would have been asinine to say Russia succeeded in changing the election’s outcome.
Of course, if one probe doesn’t turn up the answer you want, launch another, and another, and another. So, right now our government is wasting money on probes being conducted by the House, Senate, FBI and now a Justice Department probe being headed up by former FBI director Robert Mueller.
And again, let’s all try to remember that all this activity is in an effort to find the democrats a scapegoat for Hillary’s loss while ignoring Occam’s razor.
To believe the Left’s hypothesis, we have to assume that Vladimir Putin directed his cyber-warfare assets to hack the DNC’s servers while assuming they’ll strike gold and find something really damning – like collusion to scuttle Bernie Sanders’ campaign – and then give that information to WikiLeaks, assuming Assange will put it out there in a timely fashion so as to steer the election toward Donald Trump, because Bernie supporters would presumably to turn out for Trump when they found out the fix was in for Clinton.
That’s a lot of assumptions, most of them large, the last one being insanely so.
The other prevailing theory is that an economically illiterate staffer at the DNC – maybe called Seth Rich, maybe not – liked Bernie a more than the inherently unlikable Clinton and was really angry when he or she found out that the DNC was actively working to torpedo Bernie’s candidacy. So, said staffer decided to expose the DNC’s malfeasance by leaking emails to WikiLeaks.
That’s like, one, maybe two assumptions; small ones at that.
The disgusting irony of all this is that while the Left obsesses over finding whatever spurious connection it can between Russia and Trump – again to make them feel better about Clinton losing – they ignore the fact that there are and were some rather huge connections between the Clintons and Russia that go back more than a decade when Bill Clinton helped his good friend Frank Giustra acquire stakes in three state-run uranium mines in Kazakhstan. All Bill Clinton did was undercut US policy and support the Kazak dictator, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev in his bid to head an international elections monitoring group. Within three days of that recommendation, Giustra had his stakes in those three Kazak mines approved by Nazarbayev. Several months after that, Guistra donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation. Totally a coincidence.
According to a lengthy and detailed article by The New York Times, an awful lot of money flowed into the Clinton Foundation from an awful lot of people connected to Giustra and the uranium mining companies he bought and merged to eventually create Uranium One, which he sold his stake in in 2007.
Before too long, Uranium One controlled mines all over the world, including within the United States. Then, the company began to struggle and Russian-based Rosatom looked to merge with it. In 2009, one of Rosatom’s subsidiaries bought 17 percent of Uranium One, and the Russian government soon began pressing for a larger stake in the company.
Because uranium is a strategic asset, before Rosatom could purchase 51 percent of the company, they needed approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is made up of cabinet members, including the Secretary of State, then Hillary Clinton. The Clinton Foundation was still receiving massive donations from people connected to Uranium One, many of which went undisclosed despite the fact Hillary Clinton signed a memorandum of understanding that was supposed to compel her to publicly disclose all contributors to the Clinton Foundation.
Despite unease in Washington at the prospect of a Russian company controlling uranium mines in the United States, the deal that gave Rosatom 51 percent of Uranium One, and therefore majority ownership of American uranium mines, was approved in 2010. The same month that approval came, Bill Clinton accepted $500,000 to speak at Moscow-based bank Renaissance Capital, which had been talking up Uranium One’s stock and giving it a “buy” rating. Totally a coincidence.
Side by side, these two “scandals” don’t even compare. Our current national obsession is a fool’s errand. In Hillary’s case, we have a money trail leading from Russia to a uranium mining company through a State Department controlled by a woman busily accepting donations hustled for by her husband from the Russian-backed company for her “foundation.” In the first instance, there’s not even smoke, forget about fire. In the latter case, we’ve a towering mushroom cloud that the Left and therefore the media, and therefore the American people, are content to ignore.
And yes, I know, it sounds a lot like I am, again, defending Donald Trump. I’m not. Nor am I fallaciously arguing that because of the Clintons’ malfeasance, Trump should be excused should any of the probes actually manage to turn up anything like damning evidence against him. Far from it.
My interest here is, as it often is, on the way the media portrays the things they bother to tell us about. Even at its height, the obvious and icky collusion between the Clintons and Russia that allowed for a foreign – and often hostile – country to control majority stakes in mines that produce a geostrategic resource barely registered a blip on the national consciousness. Today, I’m finding myself perusing sports articles I don’t even care about only because I’m pretty sure those at least won’t mention “Russiagate.”
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