#grahamgrassley

Feb. 18 (EIRNS)--In the first two weeks of February, things looked really bad for the coup being run against the President of the United States. Congress, in the form of the House Intelligence Committee, announced that it would be publishing a series of three memos exposing how the coup was fomented. If the first memo, published on Feb. 2nd concerning a deliberate fraud on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney Sally Yates, and others, is any guide, criminal investigation of the Obama White House is on the agenda.

The House Intelligence Committee, backed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has announced that two upcoming memos will expose the role of key State Department personnel and Obama's intelligence chiefs, respectively, in the coup. The track being followed by Congressional investigators is centered on the use of a very dirty dossier about Donald Trump produced by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele as part of a full spectrum British/Obama information warfare operation designed to defeat Trump in the 2016 election. Failing that, the British and Obama set out to poison Trump's presidency and impeach him.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham had already referred Steele to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. Something, clearly, had to be done to turn the tables or, at least, slow the charge. Something had to be done to take the focus away from the actual British criminals and their U.S. co-conspirators and refurbish the increasingly discredited Russiagate myth. Enter the ever dutiful Robert Mueller III and his flimsy Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies which allegedly conspired to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. A few things are of note just on the surface of this case. The indictment, written and formulated like a press release rather than a legal document, will never have its factual basis challenged in court. Mueller knows this. The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Russia, and the Russian Constitution bars extradition of Russian citizens. According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Russians fooled the Trump campaign by pretending to be Americans, based on stolen identities. There is no allegation of "collusion" with the Trump campaign. There is no claim that this operation affected the vote in the Presidential election, nor could there be, as the expenditures alleged for this amateurish hit-or-miss social media operation were completely dwarfed, by huge orders of magnitude, compared to the expenditures made by Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders, and associated PACS and organizations.        

But, oh those evil Russian "bad actors" who "meddled" in an American election, as even the President initially tweeted. As we have repeatedly warned, the strategic context of the coup against Trump is an all out effort to preserve the Anglo-American order against what is perceived to be the rising power of China, now allied with Russia. China has constantly and persistently invited the United States to join its One Belt, One Road initiative, the largest infrastructure development project ever undertaken in history. Trump's reasoned approach to both Russia and China is seen as an existential threat to the continued Anglo-American partnership which has dominated the world since Franklin Roosevelt's death.

Russiagate's initial narrative, that Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta's email accounts to damage the Clinton campaign and elect Trump, has been discredited by the work of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. William Binney, a former technical director of the NSA, states that if such Russian hacking occurred, the NSA would have the evidence of it and would have found a way to produce it [the strange story claiming that the Dutch counterpart to the NSA of all the NATO member intelligence agencies supposedly caught the Russians in the act doesn't count as proof -- JWS].

The VIPS also conducted a scientific experiment demonstrating that the source of the WikiLeaks DNC emails was a leak [most likely by a disgruntled 'Bernie bro' either Seth Rich or known to the murdered staffer-- JWS], not a hack. Now, the emphasis has shifted to another claim in the January 2017, evidence-free "assessment," of supposed Russian interference by three of Obama's intelligence chiefs--this one the claim that the Russians ran a social media campaign designed to support Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and later to roil the existing divisions in American society. This social media campaign was run from an entity called the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to the 2017 Obama intelligence assessment and Mueller's indictment.         Mueller claims that from 2014 forward the Internet Research Agency, financed by two companies owned by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, planned and implemented a campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections as part of a project named "translator." According to Mueller, the campaign involved phony Facebook groups, and phony Twitter, Instagram, and email accounts, all run by Russians from the IRA who had stolen six U.S. identities to facilitate the operation. They used Facebook's paid advertising feature to boost their posts; two IRA employees visited the U.S. under false pretenses to gather intelligence; contacts were made with the Trump campaign's state offices and field organizations to coordinate social media and set up rallies in Washington, D.C., New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Allegedly, the IRA sought to suppress the black vote by bogus social media posts and also claimed that the election was "rigged" on Clinton's behalf. After the election, the IRA engaged in the same social media and rally activities to support both Trump and the "Resist" movement seeking Trump's impeachment.

I will leave it to others to document the obvious U.S. hypocrisy concerning the premise of Russiagate. The United States has intervened in elections all over the world, repeatedly, and, as former CIA director James Woolsey recently said on Fox News, for the "good of those nations." When someone is elected who we don't like, like Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, we simply launch a coup using such native assets as neo-Nazi shock troops (Ukraine) or Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists (Syria). Obama's White House, in the form of the National Security Council's Ben Rhodes, claimed that it conducted information warfare operations with finesse, setting up, for example, a media echo-chamber to sell the Iran nuclear deal based on the fact that most reporters were "27-year-old kids who knew nothing."

The indictment's own overblown allegations should subject it to ridicule. How do we know that Yevgeniy Prigozhin is the boss of this operation? [Indeed as the Russian Analyst asks, where does Prigozhin find the time to run his restaurants, meal programs for Russian public schools and military bases, plus this troll farm operation AND the reputed Russian version of Blackwater, 'Wagner'? -- JWS] According to Mueller, an IRA employee took a picture of himself in front of the White House on Prigozhin's birthday with the sign, "Happy Birthday, Boss." The amazing Russian sleuths found out the amazing fact from one their American social media contacts that they should concentrate on "purple states [such as Florida]."

The indictment contains an email from one of the allegedly savvy conspirators stating, "We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with colleagues.... I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people." [Such 'confessions' by alleged operatives scream either amateurism or false flagging for future use when the fake operation is 'exposed' -- JWS]. Despite the IRA's allegedly broad mandate to disrupt American politics, the only U.S. political campaign they attempted to directly contact and compromise appears to be the campaign of Donald Trump.

Rewarmed British Gruel Behind the Indictment The story of how the IRA came to be an infamous "Putin-controlled troll farm" in the narratives of Western intelligence is an old and long one. We can say, definitively, that it is rewarmed British gruel, a British lie as poisonous as Christopher Steele's dirty dossier.         At the beginning of 2014, an anti-Russian group of hackers, initially called "The Anonymous International," and later, "Shaltay-Boltay" claimed that the building at St. Petersburg, Savushkina 55, housed a troll farm run by the Kremlin. Since then, this building has been photographed and highlighted endlessly by MI6, all of the British press and tabloids, the CIA, the FBI, NATO, the BBC, the State Department's propaganda departments and NGOs, CNN and most of the rest of the mainstream American media. Infiltration operations have been run and publicized by the same people. Actions against the alleged IRA have been filed by infiltrators in the Russian courts.

Any intelligent observer would ask the first obvious question: Why, if this building and the alleged company occupying it has been so repeatedly targeted by Western intelligence and highlighted in the press, would Putin be stupid enough to run his grand influence operation from that location targeting the 2016 elections? [A similar logic applies to claims peripheral Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, who'd previously interacted with the FBI regarding two Russian spies efforts to recruit him in New York, would be trusted by Putin's no. 2 Igor Sechin no less to serve as a go between for collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians -- JWS] The answer should be obvious; he did not.   The allegation made by "Anonymous International" was immediately picked up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the anti-Putin oligarch who collaborates in multiple ways with both British and U.S. intelligence. His Institute for Modern Russia [which formerly employed suspected PropOrNot sock puppet operation manager and later Daily Beast/CNN analyst Michael D. Weiss -- JWS] is a major conduit of U.S. information warfare operations into Russia. The "Anonymous International" allegations were also immediately leaked to BuzzFeed, the same website used to make the dirty British Steele dossier against Donald Trump a very public document. A major escalation of British and U.S. information warfare operations against Russia occurred in 2014. According to Politico Magazine, Hillary Clinton freaked out at that time about the inadequacy of Anglo-American operations selling the Ukraine coup. The British, Obama and his CIA and State Department, and their Kiev regime allies, were equally adamant about the necessity to go to war on this front. The joint British-Obama Administration NATO initiative known as the Strategic Communications Service, based in Latvia, was activated to "counter" any Russian version of events. The St. Petersburg social media troll farm, at the center of Mueller's indictment, has been a staple, endlessly photographed, infiltrated [likely impersonated], and written about by Western Information Warriors from 2014 forward.

A huge and well-funded anti-Putin "information warfare" industry now operates in Washington, D.C., featuring the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, where none other than Dmitri Alperovitch (author of the "Russia hacked the DNC" hoax) is a fellow; the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy; the German Marshall Fund [which supports the crackpot ex-FBI agent Clint Watts and Internet Haganah troll Aron Weisburd behind 'Hamilton68', a project that blames 'Russian trolls' for spreading pro-Trump or anti-deep state hash tags like #MAGA or #ReleasetheMemo]; the Information Warfare Initiative of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA); the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); and the State Department's propaganda arms, now detached from the former Broadcasting Board of Governors, Radio Free Liberty and Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL). Generous funding has been provided by the likes of Khodorkovsky and George Soros. As the result of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by Obama in 2016, millions of dollars are now flowing into this U.S. information warfare initiative [with some of that money trickling down to groups like Bellingcat or Ukraine's Stopfake -- JWS]. All of these entities have been integral to the coup against President Trump. According to The Saker blog's Russian account of the IRA, the company itself does not exist. It is a fiction created by Shaltay-Boltay, the successor to "Anonymous International" in conjunction with Western intelligence agencies. Shaltay-Boltay, Russian for "Humpty-Dumpty," conducted a systematic campaign of hacking, leaking, and extortion against Russian officials, according to accounts of its own activities published in The Guardian. Members of Shaltay-Boltay were arrested in November 2016 together with rogue Russian FSB officers said to control their activities. All were charged with treason by the Russian government, specifically alleging some form of collaboration with the CIA. The British account of this affair, produced in The Guardian of Feb. 9, 2017, claims that the treason charges were based on the hackers and rogue FSB officials having confessed their trolling crimes to the CIA. According to a November 2017, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) article, the FSB "cyber" division where the arrested officers worked had been in collaboration with U.S. law enforcement agencies for years. So-Called Democrats Impose U.S. Censorship

The final ironic twist I will cite about Mueller's indictment is the fact that the pre-packaged information it has imported from British intelligence, has been and is being used to support wholesale censorship in the United States. On Nov. 30, 2016, an anonymous group called "PropOrNot" in conjunction with The Washington Post, published a list of U.S. publications it accused of being Russian propaganda fronts. The list included practically any publication which had doubted the "official" version of events concerning September 11, 2001, the ensuing Iraq War, or the Russiagate myth created by the Clinton Campaign and the Obama Administration. PropOrNot is traceable to the same Information War specialists behind the Russian troll farm story at the center of Mueller's indictment. Facebook, Twitter, and all the social media platforms, are now on the lookout to censor dissenting views right out of their platforms, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States be damned.