Tag: VLADIMIR PUTIN

Russia exploited ‘racist, sexist, anti-Semitic’ US to divide people, tweets ‘insane’ Kamala Harris

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A California senator and media-appointed frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination has finally managed to unravel the conundrum of so-called Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 election — it’s so simple you won’t believe it.

Tweeting out her discovery, Kamala Harris explained that Russia was “able to influence” the last presidential election because it “figured out” that “racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel.”

Armed with this top secret information, Russia was “able” to turn Americans against each other in a way never before seen in history (if you conveniently forget most of history, that is).

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Now, you might be thinking, if it was that easy for the Russians to take a glimpse at the various domestic tensions plaguing the US in 2016 and then use the information to (allegedly) throw an election, why didn’t the Kremlin act before now? Surely, if it was so simple, Russia could have been choosing US presidents for decades?

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Harris’s tweet was hailed as “important” and insightful commentary from some of her supporters and Russia-obsessed journalists, but was instantly mocked by more skeptically-minded individuals, some of whom took issue with the premise that Russia had affected the 2016 election at all.

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Others joked that they thought hatred and prejudice had never existed in the US prior to Russia’s “intervention.” Some also suggested that the focus on Russia was a way to distract from the fact that Democrats lost the last election because Hillary Clinton ran a flawed campaign, rather than because of anything to do with Russia.

Somehow Russian influence didn’t matter “until Hillary lost,” another said.

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Some people also took offence, as Harris’s comment appeared to be insulting Americans, implying that they are so “stupid” that “a bunch of Russians” can easily manipulate them on social media.

However, one tweet suggested that the real Achilles Heel was the fact that over 60,000 people read Harris’s tweet and hit the ‘like’ button.

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Mind of Maddow: Fantasizes About Russia Killing U.S. Power Grid During Polar Vortex

By Pam Key

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Wednesday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow pondered what Americans would do if Russia attacked the United States’ power grid during the polar vortex, an event which has resulted in plunging temperatures to historic lows.

Maddow said, “Before that hearing in the Senate yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats put out this report—it’s 42 pages long—it’s the intelligence community’s worldwide threat assessment, and I just want to direct your attention to the real doozy that starts on the bottom of page five: quote, ‘China has the ability to launch cyber attacks that cause localized temporary disruptive effects on American critical infrastructure, such as disruption of a natural gas pipeline for days to weeks in the United States.’ Oh, and it’s not just China. Go to page 6. Quote, ‘Russia has the ability to execute cyber attacks in the United States that generate localized temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure, such as disrupting an electrical distribution network for at least a few hours.’ So China could shut off the natural gas pipelines. Russia can just shut off the electricity. They have that ability now.”

She continued, “There have been rumbles for a while that hostile foreign government hackers had burrowed their way into American critical infrastructure, and particularly, the power networks. The Wall Street Journal has done the best reporting on this front in the country, laying out exactly how that scenario could play out here, how foreign countries have been laying the groundwork to one day flip the off switch on an entire swath of the U.S. power grid if they want to. But the intelligence chief rings a whole new kind of alarm bell. This is no longer just a thing that they might be planning for that could conceivably happen one day. This is the director of national intelligence, telling us all in unclassified form, in black and white, China and Russia can do this now, today, whenever they want to.”

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NELLIE OHR RESEARCHED TRUMP’S KIDS FOR FUSION GPS

By Chuck Ross

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  • Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told Congress in October that she investigated President Donald Trump’s children on behalf of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the Steele dossier.

  • Ohr also testified that during a meeting in July 2016, Christopher Steele passed her husband materials from his infamous dossier.

  • Nellie Ohr, who worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS, looking into Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump’s business dealings and their travel.

The wife of a Justice Department official who worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign told Congress in 2018 that one of her tasks at the opposition research firm was to research President Donald Trump’s children, including their business activities and travel.

Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for Fusion GPS, also told lawmakers during an Oct. 19 deposition that she recalls that Christopher Steele gave her husband, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, materials from the infamous anti-Trump dossier funded by Democrats.

Ohr said during the testimony that Steele, who like her was a contractor for Fusion GPS, hoped that her husband would pass the materials to the FBI.

“My understanding was that Chris Steele was hoping that Bruce could put in a word with the FBI to follow up in some way,” Ohr testified to members of the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees, according to transcripts confirmed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Ohrs met with Steele and an unidentified British associate on July 30, 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Bruce Ohr testified to Congress on Aug. 28 that the meeting covered three main topics. He said Steele claimed that a former official with Russia’s SVR claimed that the Kremlin had Trump “over a barrel.”

Steele also relayed information about Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser who Steele claims in his dossier met with two Kremlin insiders during a trip to Moscow in early July 2016. Page has denied Steele’s allegations, saying he did not meet with the two Kremlin officials.

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Steele, a former MI6 officer who operates out of London, also told Ohr that a lawyer for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was investigating Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort over a business deal gone south. Steele reportedly worked at one point for one of Deripaska’s companies. The link is ironic given that Deripaska is considered a close ally of Vladimir Putin’s.

Nellie Ohr testified that the materials that were handed over were from the dossier but that she did not learn the information was contained in the dossier until much later. She testified that she did not see the complete dossier until it was published by BuzzFeed on Jan. 10, 2017.

“And you hadn’t seen it or its portions during the time that you were employed, correct?” one lawmaker asked.

“If I recall correctly, I may have seen…maybe a page or something of it at the breakfast,” Ohr replied.

Ohr, a trained Russian linguist, also detailed some of the topics she worked on for Fusion GPS, which was hired by the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign and DNC to investigate Trump.

One area of focus was Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s two oldest children.

“But in terms of actually performing research, did you begin to break out President Trump’s family in terms of Melania Trump, all of his children? Were you doing independent research based off of each family member?” one lawmaker asked Ohr.

“I did some,” Ohr said. “As I recall, I did some research on all of them, but not into much depth.”

“How about Donald Trump Jr.? Did you do more in-depth research on Donald Trump Jr. than some of the others?” she was asked.

“I’m afraid it was relatively superficial. It was,” adding that, “I looked into some of his travels and you know not sure how much detail I remember, at this point.”

“Ivanka Trump?”

“I looked into some of her travels,” said Ohr.

The goal was “to see whether they were involved in dealings and transactions with people who had had suspicious pasts.”

Nellie Ohr also testified that she investigated any links between Russian oligarchs and the Trump real estate empire.

It is unclear whether Ohr shared any information that she gathered working for Fusion GPS with her husband, who served as associate deputy attorney general until he was reassigned in December 2017. There is also no indication that Ohr’s research of the Trump children wound up in the dossier, which the FBI used to obtain surveillance warrants against Carter Page.

Bruce Ohr met with Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson prior to the 2016 election. That conflicts with testimony given by Simpson as well as a memo released by Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. (RELATED: Bruce Ohr Testimony Undercuts Adam Schiff’s Defense Of FBI)

Simpson testified to the Intelligence committee on Nov. 14, 2017 that he did not meet with anyone from the Justice Department or FBI until after the election. But Ohr testified that he met Simpson on Aug. 22, 2016.

Democrats on House Intelligence also claimed in a memo released last year that Ohr did not pass information he gleaned from Fusion GPS or Steele until after the election. But Ohr testified that he contacted top FBI officials almost immediately after his July 30, 2016 meeting with Steele.

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Ohr met with then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and his general counsel, Lisa Page. Ohr said that he debriefed the pair on his meeting with Steele.

Ohr met with FBI and Justice Department officials the following month. Involved in one of those meetings was Peter Strzok, the FBI’s lead investigator on the Trump-Russia probe. Strzok was fired in August 2018 over anti-Trump text messages that he exchanged with Page during the same period that he was working on the investigation.

Ohr also met with Justice Department lawyers Andrew Weissmann and Zainab Ahmad, both of whom currently work on the special counsel’s team.

Ohr served as the FBI’s back channel to Steele even after the bureau severed ties with the former spy in early November 2016. The FBI ended its relationship with Steele because he had talked to the press about his investigation of Trump. After Trump’s election win, Strzok and other FBI officials asked Ohr to maintain contact with Steele and report back to investigators.

They met or spoke at least 12 times through May 2017.

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BuzzFeed: Trump Ordered Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About Russia Plans Wanted 1-on-1 Biz Meeting with Putin: ’Make It Happen’

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By Joshua Caplan

BuzzFeed, citing two anonymous sources, alleges that President Donald Trump directed his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to make false statements to Congress regarding a proposal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and wanted to meet with Putin himself about the proposal.

The Thursday report claims that the president “supported a plan” arranged by Cohen to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election to “jump-start” negotiations on the real estate deal, telling his longtime attorney, “make it happen,” according to two federal law enforcement officials. Further, BuzzFeed’s report alleges that President Trump received 10 “personal updates” regarding the proposed project from Cohen, who according to the unnamed sources, requested that his lawyer tell lawmakers that his involvement in the project concluded earlier than it actually did. The sources also claim the president’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, received updates on the proposed tower.

Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, dismissed the report, telling The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker: “If you believe Cohen I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Several Democrats, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), have said they will take action against the president, pending the claims made in BuzzFeed’s report are factual.

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Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) called for the president to resign or face impeachment — again — contingent upon the report being true.

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In an appearance on CNN’s New Day Friday morning, Anthony Cormier, who co-authored BuzzFeed’s report, stood by his story, even though he had “not personally” seen the evidence. Host Alisyn Camerota also pressed Cormier on the “dubious past” of the report’s other author Jason Leopold, who had a story retracted by Salon in 2002 for erroneous reporting. Leopold also wrongly reported in 2006 that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, had been indicted.

In November, Cohen stated in a guilty plea that he lied to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal he pursued on President Trump’s behalf during the heat of the 2016 Republican campaign. He claimed he lied to be consistent with President Trump’s “political messaging.”

Cohen was sentenced December 12 to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to several charges, including campaign finance violations and making false statements to Congress. Prior to his sentencing, Federal prosecutors in Manhattan asked a judge to sentence Cohen to a “substantial term of imprisonment,” arguing that he had been motivated by “personal greed.”

The plea agreement made clear that prosecutors believe that while President Trump insisted repeatedly throughout the campaign that he had no business dealings in Russia, his lawyer was continuing to pursue the Trump Tower Moscow project weeks after his boss had clinched the Republican nomination for president and well beyond the point that had been previously acknowledged.

Cohen said he discussed the proposal with President Trump on multiple occasions and with members of the president’s family, according to documents filed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. Cohen acknowledged considering traveling to Moscow to discuss the project.

However, there is no clear link in the court filings between Cohen’s lies and Mueller’s central question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. And nothing said in court, or in associated court filings, addressed whether Trump or his aides had directed Cohen to mislead Congress.

Reacting to Cohen’s plea, President Trump called Cohen a “weak person” who was lying to get a lighter sentence and stressed that the real estate deal at issue was never a secret and never executed. Giuliani said that Cohen was a “proven liar” and that Trump’s business organization had voluntarily given Mueller the documents cited in the guilty plea “because there was nothing to hide.”

“There would be nothing wrong if I did do it,” the president said of pursuing the project. “I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”

Cohen is slated to testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 7 on his work for President Trump.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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‘When did the Democratic party become neocons?’– Tucker Carlson

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After the mainstream media and establishment Democrats piled on President Trump for even considering pulling the US out of NATO, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked when the doves became cheerleaders for war.

That Republicans love war is an easy assumption to make. President Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton has been howling for regime change in Iran since day one. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is equally hawkish and confrontational towards the Islamic Republic. Further back, George W. Bush’s cabinet was stuffed with war enthusiasts like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and the late Republican Senator John McCain never met a war he didn’t like.

But opposition to President Trump has seen Democrats – once considered the more peace-loving and diplomatic of the two parties – embrace war like never before.

The New York Times, citing its usual anonymous sources, revealed on Monday that current and former Trump administration officials concluded the president must be a Russian agent, because he discussed pulling the US out of NATO.

“This is a huge story,” said Carlson. “Or it would have been huge in 1983 when the Soviet Union still existed, and it was still clear what the point of NATO was. NATO, you’ll remember, was created to keep the Soviets from invading Western Europe…and did a very good job at that.”

Trump’s opposition to NATO is well documented, and the president has excoriated allies like Germany for failing to meet their spending obligations under the organization’s charter. In 2018, the US spent almost $700 billion on defense, over double the expenditure of all 28 other NATO states combined. Moreover, the idea of bankrolling western Europe’s defense needs also clashes with the president’s more transactional view of foreign relations than his predecessor.

“Vladimir Putin runs Russia now,” Carlson continued. “He does not plan to invade Western Europe. He can’t. So why do we still have NATO? Nobody really knows. In Washington you’re definitely not allowed to ask.”

After the New York Times’ article was published, Democrats took their turns thrashing Trump. Former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara stated that Trump should be “promptly impeached, convicted, and removed from office” for daring to question the alliance’s value to America.

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Former US Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns called the mere idea of pulling out of the alliance “madness” that would lead to “one of the greatest strategic catastrophes in American history.”

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“He can’t do that to this country,” Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier added in a news interview. “It would be a ground for some profound effort by our part, whether it’s impeachment or the 25th Amendment.”

“Did you catch that?” Carlson said. “The 25th Amendment. In other words, according to a sitting member of Congress…rethinking membership in NATO isn’t just treasonous and criminal. It’s prima facie evidence of insanity.” The 25th Amendment allows for a president to be removed from office for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office;” in other words, unfitness.

But is the left’s NATO cheerleading a partisan reaction to Trump’s ‘America First’ brand of 21st Century isolationism? After all, the left fact-checks his McDonalds orders and would declare breathing an impeachable offense if Trump came out in favor of air.

Not so. Among the handful of Democratic challengers who have announced presidential bids in recent weeks, Hawaiian Representative Tulsi Gabbard distinguished herself by focusing her campaign on America’s foreign policy. An Iraq war combat veteran, Gabbard has consistently questioned Washington’s bipartisan consensus on foreign wars and intervention, opposing Barack Obama’s air campaign in Syria, calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan “as soon as possible,” and sponsoring legislation to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia and defund the National Security Agency.

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Gabbard was quickly labeled an “Assad sympathizer” for meeting with the Syrian leader in 2017. While Gabbard called Assad a “brutal dictator,” her opposition to military action rubbed the hawks in both parties the wrong way. The left and right piled on, christening Gabbard a “right-wing puppet of the Kremlin,” digging up past homophobic remarks she had made, and calling her a darling of the alt-right, the KKK, and even RT.

“She went, in 2017, Gloria — this is going to be another issue — to visit with Bashar al Assad in Syria,” said CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “This trip has already come back to bite her.”

“I think it makes her a less effective candidate,” contributor Gloria Borger responded. “She can’t position herself against Trump about meeting with dictators when, in fact, she’s done it herself.”

With the Democratic party circling the wagons against Gabbard, Trump, and anyone breaking from the endless war consensus, Carlson asked “whatever happened to the Democratic Party?”

“When did the anti-war people become florid neocons? When did it become the party of Bill Kristol and Max Boot and every other discredited hack still trying to replicate the Iraq disaster in nations around the world? Who knows when that happened? But that’s exactly what the Democratic Party is today.”

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US media intensify pretext for ousting Trump

By Finian Cunningham

It’s no secret that since his election in 2016, powerful elements in the US political and media establishment have been running a non-stop campaign to remove Trump from the White House. Lately, the stakes have been raised.

Spearheading the media effort to defenestrate Trump are the New York Times and Washington Post. Both have been prominent purveyors of the “Russiagate” narrative over the past two years, claiming that Republican candidate colluded with Russian state intelligence, or at least was a beneficiary of alleged Russian interference, to win the presidency against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Congressional investigations and a probe by a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, along with relentless media innuendo, have failed to produce any evidence to support the Russiagate narrative.

Now, the anti-Trump media in alliance with the Democratic leadership, the foreign policy establishment and senior ranks of the state intelligence agencies appear to have come up with a new angle on President Trump – he is a national security risk.

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‘Dirty cops’: Trump slams FBI agents who wanted to investigate him over alleged Russia ties‘Dirty cops’: Trump slams FBI agents who wanted to investigate him over alleged Russia ties

Ingeniously, the latest media effort lessens the burden of proof required against Trump. No longer has it to be proven that he deliberately collaborated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump could have done it “unwittingly,” the media are now claiming, because he is a buffoon and reckless. But the upshot, for them, is he’s still a national security risk. The only conclusion, therefore, is that he should be removed from office. In short, a coup.

Over the past couple of weeks, the supposed media bastions have been full of it against Trump. An op-ed in the New York Times on January 5 by David Leonhardt could not have made more plain the absolute disdain. “He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?”

Follow-up editorials and reports have piled on the pressure. The Times reported how the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the state’s internal security agency – opened a counterintelligence file on Trump back in 2017 out of concern that he was “working for Russia against US interests.”

That unprecedented move was prompted partly because of Trump’s comments during the election campaign in 2016 when he jokingly called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s incriminating emails. Never mind the fact that Russian hackers were not the culprits for Clinton’s email breach.

Then the Washington Post reported former US officials were concerned about what they said was Trump’s “extraordinary lengths” to keep secret his private conversations with Russia’s Putin when the pair met on the sidelines of conferences or during their one-on-one summit in Helsinki last July.

The Post claimed that Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter after one meeting with Putin, allegedly admonishing the aide to not tell other officials in the administration about the notes being sequestered. The inference is Trump was allegedly in cahoots with the Kremlin.

This week, in response to the media speculation, Trump was obliged to strenuously deny such claims, saying: “I have never worked for Russia… it’s a big fat hoax.”

What’s going on here is a staggering abuse of power by the US’ top internal state intelligence agency to fatally undermine a sitting president based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover, the nation’s most prominent news media outlets – supposedly the Fourth Estate defenders of democracy – are complacently giving their assent, indeed encouragement, to this abuse of power.

The Times in the above report admitted, in a buried one-line disclaimer, that there was no evidence linking Trump to Russia.

Nevertheless, the media campaign doubled down to paint Trump as a national security risk.

The Times reported on January 14 about deep “concerns” among Pentagon officials over Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The reporting portrays Trump as incompetent, ignorant of policy details and habitually rude to American allies. His capricious temper tantrums could result in the US walking away from NATO at any time, the newspaper contends.

Such a move would collapse the transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe which has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” claimed the Times.

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Fixated on collusion, Dems seeking (again) to subpoena interpreter present at Trump-Putin meetingFixated on collusion, Dems seeking (again) to subpoena interpreter present at Trump-Putin meeting

The paper quotes US Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, calling Trump’s withdrawal whims “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”

“Even discussing the idea of leaving NATO — let alone actually doing so — would be the gift of the century for Putin,” added Stavridis.

The Times goes on to divulge the media campaign coordination when it editorialized: “Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”

Still another Times report this week reinforced the theme of Trump being a national security risk when it claimed that the president’s Middle East policy of pulling troops out of Syria was “losing leverage” in the region. It again quoted Pentagon officials “voicing deepening fears” that Trump and his hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran”.

That’s a bit hard to stomach: the Pentagon being presented as a voice of sanity and peace, keeping vigilance over a wrecking-ball president and his administration.

READ MORE: Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere

But the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump corporate media have long been extolling the military generals who were formerly in the administration as “the adults in the room.”

Generals H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, and James Mattis, the former defense secretary until he was elbowed out last month by the president, were continually valorized in the US media as being a constraining force on Trump’s infantile and impetuous behavior.

The absence of “the adults” seems to have prompted the US media to intensify their efforts to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

A new House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party has also invigorated calls for impeachment of Trump over a range of unsubstantiated accusations, Russian collusion being prime among them. But any impeachment process promises to be long and uncertain of success, according to several US legal and political authorities.

Such a tactic is fraught with risk of failing, no doubt due to the lack of evidence against Trump’s alleged wrongdoing. A failed impeachment effort could backfire politically, increase his popularity, and return him to the White House in 2020.

Given the uncertainty of impeaching Trump, his political enemies, including large sections of the media establishment, seem to be opting for the tactic of characterizing him as a danger to national security, primarily regarding Russia. Trump doesn’t have to be a proven agent of the Kremlin – a preposterous idea. Repeated portrayal of him as an incompetent unwitting president is calculated to be sufficient grounds for his ouster.

When the Washington Post editorial board urges a state of emergency to be invoked because of “Russian meddling in US elections”, then the national mood is being fomented to accept a coup against Trump. The media’s fawning over the Pentagon and state intelligence agencies as some kind of virtuous bastion of democracy is a sinister signal for a military-police state.

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Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere

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Russiagate disciples are squealing with joy after the New York Times wrote about the FBI apparently probing if Trump was secretly working for the Russians. In fact, the article states there is no evidence to support the theory.

In what appears to be a last-ditch Russiagate Hail Mary, the New York Times breathlessly reported on Friday – of course, citing people ‘familiar with the investigation’ – that the FBI began looking into whether the president was a covert Kremlin agent, after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. According to the Times, “agents and senior FBI officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign,” but were reluctant to launch a formal probe into the matter. This all changed, the Times tells us, after Comey got the boot.

The investigation was quickly handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller, who continues to lead a probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and collusion with Trump’s presidential campaign.

According to the Times, counterintelligence investigators “had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.” Agents were also tasked with determining whether Trump “knowingly work[ed] for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.”

The decision to secretly investigate the president for possibly threatening national security triggered a “vigorous debate” within the Justice Department. The FBI, however, apparently felt vindicated after Trump remarked that Comey’s firing had helped relieve Russia-related political pressure.

Among Russiagate’s devout faithful, the report was treated as an earth-shattering revelation that reinforced their core dogma – i.e., that Donald Trump is a Kremlin agent installed in the White House by Vladimir Putin to destroy democracy.

Unfortunately, even the Times begrudgingly admitted – albeit buried in the ninth paragraph – that “no evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.”

Indeed, Twitter was swamped with indignant comments accusing the paper of cooking up a massive nothingburger. One observant netizen pointed out that in October 2016, the New York Times even ran a headline that stated unequivocally: “Investigating Donald Trump, the FBI sees no clear links to Russia.”

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Trump himself took to Twitter to mock the report.

“Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!” he wrote.

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The White House said in a statement that the notion that Trump was in bed with Russia makes little sense, given the administration’s hardline policies directed at Moscow.
“Unlike President Obama, who let Russia and other foreign adversaries push America around, President Trump has actually been tough on Russia.”

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The report also raises questions about whether Comey was being entirely truthful when he testified to Congress in December that Trump wasn’t among the “four Americans” targeted by the FBI counterintelligence probe into Russian meddling.

As one political pundit observed, the Times’ story raises more questions about the FBI than it does about Trump and his still unproven ties to Russia.

“Is NYT story about Trump, or about FBI malfeasance?” Fox News contributor Byron York asked in a tweet.

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