Vladimir Putin. (photo: Middle East Observer)
For America's Sake, We Need Answers About
Russia. Now.
By
Michael Winship, Moyers & Company
14
February 17
Donald
Trump's embrace of Russia and Vladimir Putin and that country's interference
with our election could drag democracy to an early grave.
(Note: I hardly had finished writing the
following piece when Michael Flynn resigned, requiring a small revision. With
this new development, the plot thickens, and getting to the truth about Russia
and the Trump White House becomes even more important. And it raises the famous
questions that so bedeviled Richard Nixon: What did Donald Trump know and when
did he know it? mw)
These
first weeks of the Trump White House have felt like one of those tennis ball
machines run amok, volley after volley shooting at us in such rapid fire that
often the only reaction is to grimace and duck. Outrage after outrage, imperial
pronouncement after pronouncement, lie after lie; it’s just one damned, fast
and furious, flawed thing after another.
All of this is confusing and distracting
and of course, that’s precisely what they want. As the old saying goes, if you
can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. It easily
distracts us from the real issues, diverting our eyes from those important
things that have to be closely examined and resolved if we’re to continue
trying, at least, to behave like a free nation.
One of those burning issues is Russia,
which largely seemed
to go off the scope in the days immediately before and after
Trump’s mini-inauguration, even though around the election and in the weeks
after we heard a great deal about Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National
Committee and the release of emails aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton —
allegations that were backed by the US intelligence community. With the FBI,
those spy agencies also have been investigating intercepted communications from
Russian intelligence. And then there’s that infamous “dossier,” compiled by
ex-British spy Christopher Steele, filled with thus far unverified
allegations about President Trump’s business dealings
with Russia as well as certain salacious tales of his purported extracurricular
activities there.
But with the resignation of Trump national
security advisor Michael Flynn, in the wake of news reports about his December
phone calls with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and word that US
intelligence has confirmed some of the information in the Steele dossier,
interest in Russia has rekindled, and a good thing, too.
On Thursday night, The
Washington Post released
the story that Flynn “privately discussed U.S.
sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States
during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public
assertions by Trump officials, current and former U.S. officials said.”
This was followed by Monday night’s breaking
news from the Post: “The acting attorney general informed
the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had
misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications
with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national
security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and
former U.S. officials said.” Within hours, Flynn was out.
What’s more, at week’s end, as the Flynn
story was beginning to unfold, CNN
reported that investigators have now corroborated
some of the less personal information in the Steele dossier, conversations
among Russian officials: “The corroboration,” the network reported, “has given
US intelligence and law enforcement ‘greater confidence’ in the credibility of
some aspects of the dossier… Some of the individuals involved in the
intercepted communications were known to the US intelligence community as
‘heavily involved’ in collecting information damaging to Hillary Clinton and
helpful to Donald Trump, two of the officials tell CNN.”
These latest developments came on the
heels of Trump’s
astonishing remarks to Bill O’Reilly, in
an interview pre-taped for Super Bowl Sunday, when Trump said he respected
Putin and O’Reilly noted that the Russian leader is a killer: “There are a lot
of killers,” Trump replied, sounding more like a two-bit Al Capone than the
leader of the free world. “We have a lot of killers. You think our country is
so innocent?”
This is way beyond troubling, so it merits
noting some of the other news about Russia that has transpired in the last few
weeks, news that might have flown under your radar while Trump’s fusillade of
executive orders and tantrums was bombarding your every waking moment.
All of it is serious business,
specifically when it comes to figuring out just why Trump is so deeply enamored
of Vladimir Putin and how much Russia interfered with our election, and more
broadly for what it says about Trump and his chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s
vision, God help us, of a world divided and dominated by white nationalists.
For one, and speaking of killers, there’s
the matter of the missing Russian intelligence men, all of whom may be
connected to the Trump affair. Amy Knight, former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and
author of Orders From Above: The Putin Regime and Political Murder, writes
in The New York Review of Books, “…
Since the US election, there has been an unprecedented, and perhaps still
continuing shakeup of top officials in Putin’s main security agency, the FSB,
and that a top former intelligence official in Putin’s entourage died recently
in suspicious circumstances.”
She’s worth quoting at length:
“It appears that the Kremlin has been
conducting an intensive hunt for moles within its security apparatus who might
have leaked information about Russian efforts to influence the US presidential
election. In mid-December 2016, following public assertions by leading US
intelligence officials that Russia had intervened in the election, two
high-level FSB officers, Sergei Mikhailov, deputy chief of the FSB’s Center for
Information Security, which oversees cyberintelligence, and his subordinate,
Dmitry Dokuchayev, were arrested. (Russian authorities reportedly took
Mikhailov away from a meeting of the FSB top brass after placing a black bag on
his head.) The two men — along with Ruslan Stoyanov, who headed the Kaspersky
Lab, a private company that assists the FSB in internet security — were charged
with state treason. Russian independent media reported that the men had been
responsible for leaks to Western sources, including US intelligence, about
Russian cyber attacks against the US and also about Russian covert efforts to
blackmail Donald Trump…
“Also, the authoritative independent
Russian business daily Kommersant reported two
weeks ago that Andrei Gerasimov, chief of the FSB’s cyberintelligence
department, and Mikhailov’s boss, would be fired, although Gerasimov’s
dismissal has yet to be officially confirmed. According to Russian security
expert Andrei Soldatov, the upheaval in the FSB amounts to a purge of the
entire Russian state security team dealing with cyberintelligence and
cybersecurity.”
Then there’s a former KGB and FSB general,
Oleg Erovinkin, found dead in the back of his car in Moscow on Dec. 26,
officially from a heart attack, but as Agatha Christie would say, foul play is
suspected. The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports:
“Erovinkin
was a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister. He has been
described as a key liaison between Sechin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Now head of the state-owned oil company Rosneft, Sechin is repeatedly named in
the so-called
Trump dossier… [Christopher] Steele wrote in the
dossier, which was dated July 19, 2016, that much of the information it
contained was provided by a source close to Sechin. That source was Erovinkin,
according to Russia expert Christo Grozev of Risk Management Lab, a think-tank
based in Bulgaria.”
Through their mutual love of
petrochemicals and profits, Igor Sechin and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,
former CEO of ExxonMobil are pals, and in fact Sechin
complained that US sanctions against Russia kept him
from coming to America to “ride the roads…on motorcycles with Tillerson.”
In December, Russia announced the sale of
a 19.5 percent share of Rosneft, that massive government oil company run by
Igor Sechin. He and Putin appeared on television to announce the deal, and Reuters
reported that Putin “called it a sign of
international faith in Russia, despite US and EU financial sanctions on Russian
firms including Rosneft.”
Supposedly the transaction is a fairly
straightforward joint venture between Qatar and Glencore, a Swiss firm, but as
Reuters noted,
“Like
many large deals, the Rosneft privatization uses a structure of shell companies
owning shell companies, commonly referred to in Russia as a ‘matryoshka’, after
the wooden nesting dolls that open to reveal a smaller doll inside. Following
the trail of ownership leads to a Glencore UK subsidiary and a company that
shares addresses with the Qatari Investment Authority, but also to a firm
registered in the Cayman Islands, which does not require companies to record
publicly who owns them.”
So who’s really behind the deal? Its
convolutions may have the potential for a John Le Carre novel or Bourne movie.
Some have even noted, as Amy Knight does, that coincidentally, “The Steele
dossier… mentions that Carter Page, a member of Trump’s foreign policy team
during his campaign, had a secret meeting with Sechin in Moscow in July 2016,
in which the two reportedly discussed the possible lifting [of] US sanctions against
Russia, in exchange for a 19 percent stake in Rosneft (It is not clear
from the memo who would get the stake, but apparently it would have been the
Trump campaign)” [Italics mine. mw]. She speculates that this, too, may have
been another leak by the now-deceased Oleg Erovinkin.
A 19 percent stake in Rosneft, versus a
19.5 percent stake… admittedly, it’s a stretch, and probably nothing more than
an odd coincidence, yet stranger things have happened, especially given the
Bizarro World we now inhabit. But what’s not a stretch is that beyond the
particulars, beyond whatever reasons, blackmail or otherwise, that Trump is so
under Vladimir Putin’s spell, there is a global agenda both men share that’s
the real danger.
Urged on by his American Rasputin, the ineffable
Bannon, for all intents and purposes Trump is promoting white nationalism and
what many call “traditionalism,” a worldview shared by Putin. It’s no
coincidence that the Russian kleptocrat and his government also are supporting
and being embraced by far-right political parties and leaders throughout
Europe, including Marine LePen’s National Front in France, Germany’s
Alternative for Germany (AfD), Golden Dawn in Greece, the Ataka Party in
Bulgaria and Hungary’s Jobbik Party.
In a
2013 speech at the Valdai conference in Russia,
Putin warned, “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually
rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis
of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional
identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are
implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief
in God with the belief in Satan.”
And here’s Trump consigliere Steve Bannon
on the dangers of what he calls “jihadist Islamic fascism.” In 2014
he told a conference at the Vatican: “I
believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis…
There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global… Every day that we
refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the
viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.”
Asked about support for Putin and Russia
from France’s National Front and Britain’s United Kingdom Independent Party
(UKIP), Bannon replied, “One of the reasons is that they believe that at least
Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in
a form of nationalism — and I think that people, particularly in certain
countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see
nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European
Union or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United
States.”
Putin’s
motives are pragmatic as well as ideological;
distracting his people as he cracks down dissent at home while seeking
destabilization in the West and hoping to prevent further expansion of the
European Union and NATO. Bannon’s motives seem more messianic and, the greater
the influence he exerts on Trump’s thinking (such as it is), dangerous.
In the
current issue of The Atlantic,
journalist Franklin Foer concludes:
“There
is little empirical basis for the charge of civilizational rot. It speaks to an
emotional state, one we should do our best to understand and even empathize
with. But we know from history that premonitions of imminent barbarism serve to
justify extreme countermeasures. These are the anxieties from which dictators
rise. Admiring strongmen from a distance is the window-shopping that can end in
the purchase of authoritarianism.”
And so it may go here in America. From a
window-shopping distance, Trump admires Putin and his authoritarianism. This
blind love, plus the lust that drove Trump to want the White House — and yes,
perhaps extortion as well — may have allowed Russia not only to subvert our
election but also to infiltrate Trump’s administration and erode if not destroy
American democracy.
John R.
Schindler at the Observer (the newspaper until recently owned by
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner) writes, “Our Intelligence Community is so
worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration — not only do
senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging
questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump — that it is beginning to
withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.”
Democrats and even some Republicans are demanding answers, several
congressional committees have announced probes, individual members like New
York’s Jerry Nadler are searching for various maneuvers that
will force Trump and the evidence of Russian intrusions into our government and
politics out into the open. But the crisis still cries out for a
bipartisan independent investigation.
The bottom line is that Putin is far
shrewder than Trump and capable of playing him like a balalaika. And
despite the departure of security risk Michael Flynn, with the likes of
foolhardy Bannon, dangerous professional twerp and presidential advisor Stephen
Miller and others still egging Trump on — obsessed with a nightmarish
hallucination about America and the world’s future — we live at one of the most
dangerous moment in our republic’s history.
Unlike those days 50 years ago when Russia
posed a different kind of ideological threat, one that had us building fallout
shelters and teaching kids to duck and cover, this is not a drill.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore
Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph:
410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the
wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had
all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to
gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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