Muellers ‘troll farm’ verhaal ronduit waanzinnig………
Het is werkelijk om schijtziek van te
worden: de pogingen in de VS (en de rest van het westen) om Rusland te demoniseren en het verlies
van de presidentsverkiezingen door hare kwaadaardigheid Clinton te
wijten aan Russische manipulaties.
Voor al die claims is nul komma nada
bewijs, maar de VS en haar hielenlikkende oorlogshonden van de NAVO
houden deze leugens in de lucht, dit gesteund door de reguliere
media, die NB bijna dagelijks schrijven over ‘fake news’, terwijl
deze media verreweg de grootste leveranciers van dit nepnieuws
zijn…….
De vooralsnog laatste bladzijde in de
wrange komedie werd geschreven door oud-FBI directeur Robert
Mueller…….
Lees hoe David Stockman uitgebreid
gehakt maakt van het ‘troll farm verhaal’. (let op, sommige delen zijn dusdanig komisch dat je op moet passen er niet in te blijven):
Mueller’s
Comic Book Indictment: How to Prosecute A Great Big Nothingburger
By
David Stockman
February
21, 2018 “Information
Clearing House” – We have always heard that a
determined government prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, and now
we know it’s true. After 38 years in the prosecution racket, Robert
Mueller just made his biggest score ever—that is, he nailed
a great big Nothingburger.
But
he also did a lot more than that. Mueller’s 37-page comic book
indictment actually unmasks—inadvertently to be
sure—the distinctly
un-terrifying essence of
the whole Russian meddling narrative. In fact, the crude social media
emissions (ads and posts) of the so-called troll farm were
generally lame, often laughable and sometimes downright
ludicrous as per this gem cited by Mueller:
a.
On or about October 16, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators
used the ORGANIZATION-controlled Instagram account “Woke Blacks”
to post the following message: “[A]
particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and
forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two
devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”
Notwithstanding
the grave nomenclature of BLOCK CAPITALS, endless sinister “on
or about” events and 99 numbered paragraphs of
particulars, the true bill (charging document) is actually just a
random catalogue of social media trivia like the above “Woke
Blacks” post.
Most
of the cited gleanings amounted to crude word bombs, often in
broken English, that presumably even Kim Kardashian’s 59 million
Twitter followers could see through.
“Hillary
is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved
just how evil she is”
The
lion’s share of these postings and ads probably disappeared into
cyberspace like the sound of a falling tree in an empty
forest, anyway. According to Facebook itself, the seemingly
ubiquitous social media ad campaign despicted in the indictment
was nothing of the kind. It actually amounted to
just 3,000 placements
at a cost of $100,000—more
than half of which were purchased after the election,
and 25% of
which ended-up in its dead letter office (unread).
Likewise, the
handful of efforts to actually stimulate pro-Trump rallies in
Florida and elsewhere were abject failures. As we document
below, the Russians had absolutely no “ground game” in the
US and any third-rate campaign consultant will tell you that ads
alone do not produce crowds. In fact, there is virtually no evidence
that anyone showed up at the rallies cited by Mueller.
Besides,
the overwhelming share of the pro-Trump social media postings
uncovered by Mueller’s sleuths amounted to “copy and paste”
relays of current partisan talking points. Thus, the
indictment cites such slogans as:
“Vote
Republican, vote Trump, and support the Second Amendment!”.
“Trump
is our only hope for a better future!”
“Donald
wants to defeat terrorism… Hillary wants to sponsor it”
Really?
It
took a clandestine nest of Russkie imposters and subversives to
pollute the social media with this kind of tripe?
In
fact, RNC, Fox News and the Trump campaign were
already saturating the internet with these messages,
anyway—-along with millions of pro-Trump social medi activists. The 80 Russian operatives
cited by Mueller didn’t add one damn bit to the massive social media
messaging that was already out there.
So
here’s the joker in the whole deck. It seems that the
nefarious”troll farm” in St. Petersburg that comprises
nearly the totality of Mueller’s case is not a Russian
intelligence agency operation at all.
Instead,
it’s the relatively harmless Hobby Farm of a fanatical
Russian oligarch and ultra-nationalist, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who
has a great big beef against Imperial Washington’s demonization
of Russia and Vlad Putin. Apparently, the farm was (it’s
apparently being disbanded) the vehicle through which he gave
Washington the middle finger and buttered up his patron.
Prigozhin
is otherwise known as “Putin’s Cook” because he made his
fortune in St. Petersburg restaurants that Putin favored and via
state funded food service operations at Russian schools and military
installations. Like most Russian oligarchs not in jail, he
apparently tithes in gratitude to the Kremlin: In this
case, by bankrolling the rinky-dink operation at 55
Savushkina Street in St Petersburg that is the object of Mueller’s
pretentious foray into the flotsam and jetsam of social media
low life.
Prigozhin’s
trolling farm is grandly called the Internet Research Agency
(IRA), but what it actually does is hire (apparently) unemployed
20-somethings at $4-8 per hour to pound out
ham-handed political messaging on social media sites like
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube etc. They bang away twelve
hours at a shift on a quota-driven
paint-by-the-internet-numbers basis where their output is rated for
engagements, likes, retweets etc.
Whatever
these keyboard drones might be, they are not professional Russian
intel operators. And
the collection of broken English postings strewn throughout the
indictment are not one bit scary.
Indeed,
the utterly stupid naiveté of the whole St.
Petersburg operation is crystalized by this episode when the
farm purportedly garnered some startling political insight from
an unwitting Trump campaign official in Texas:
80.
On or about August 19, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators
used the false U.S. persona “Matt Skiber” account to write
to the real U.S. person affiliated with a Texas-based grassroots
organization who previously had advised the false persona to focus
on “purple
states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida.”
Defendants and their co-conspirators told that U.S. person, “We
were thinking about your recommendation to focus on purple states and
this is what we’re organizing in FL.”
Jez
Louise and goodness gracious, too. Who coulda thunk as early
as August that Colorado, Virginia and Florida would be swing
states!
In
any event, even Mueller’s indictment proves that the farm was
strictly amateurville. None of the other 12 Russians charged
has an intelligence background, either.
Thus,
the CEO is a retired St. Petersburg police officer. The
executive director is a 31-year old website developer and
internet PR promoter who previously had garnered small beans
contracts ($4k-20k each) from St. Petersburg agencies to publish
municipal newspapers, make video reports about their activities or
promote local programs such as one on “tolerance and
prevention of drug addiction”.
Likewise,
two more of the operatives were graduates students in IT and
advertising at St. Petersburg universities.
Then
there is the husband/wife duo, Maria and Robert Bovda, who were
the original heads of the US focused “translator project”.
Both were recent graduates in psychology from local
universities, where Robert’s 2011 thesis had been on
“The Effects of Social-Support Conditions On
Loneliness As Experienced By the Elderly”.
We can’t
help but think they had not yet become hardened spies when
the joined IRA in November 2013 and apparently left
in October 2014. Whatever
they did during their tenure at the farm, cooking up ways to
help Donald Trump’s not yet announced campaign was surely
not among them, but still apparently enough to help fill out
Mueller’s indictment roster.
Another
was Dzheykhun Aslanov, who was head of the “American department”
and had graduated in 2012 from the Russian State Hydrometeorological
University in St. Petersburg. He had studied economics
and wildlife
management!
Likewise,
nowhere in the entire 37 pages is there even a clause linking
Prigozhin’s Hobby Farm to the SVR (foreign intelligence service), the
FSB (counter-intelligence and anti-terrorism), the GRU (military
intelligence service), any other agency of the Russian State—-or
even some purported Kremlin back channel to Putin.
Yet
there is every reason to believe that the entire Russian meddling
narrative cooked up by the partisan hacks in Obama’s inner
circle—-John Brennan, Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes—-was based on the
amateurish machinations originating in the nondescript building
pictured below.
As
we will show, the Hobby Farm was no Russian state secret
or clandestine vehicle of its intelligence community. To the
contrary, it had been fully covered in the Russian press for
years as one of numerous such oligarch funded projects designed
to glorify the Putin regime and vilify the Russian opposition.
It
had also been the subject of a lengthy expose in The
Guardian of
London, as well as other western media. Even Radio Free Europe
had done a lengthy profile.
All
of this had happened long before Prigozhin’s Hobby Farm
had turned its attentions to US politics. Indeed, the IRA’s
pivot to the US in April 2014 occurred well before Trump’s
candidacy was gleam in anyone’s eye except his own, but after a
seminal event had occurred which Mueller’s comic book
narrative completely ignores.
To
wit, what apparently riled up Prigozhin was Washington’s
heavy-handed meddling in the politics of Ukraine during the US
funded and enabled coup on the streets of Kiev in February 2014.
Never
mind that the incumbent pro-Russian government had come to power in
an honest election and had chosen to take a more
attractive economic deal from Moscow than was being offered
by the West.
Also ignore that fact that Ukraine was Russia’s
next door neighbor and had been an essential element of Greater
Russia—sometimes a full fledged constituent state—for more
than 700 years.
Likewise,
when Crimea elected by 90% referendum vote to “rejoin”
Russia, it didn’t happen at gunpoint. Crimea is 85% Russian and
had been an integral part of the Russian state ever since it
was purchased from the Turks by Catherine the Great for
good money in 1783.
Thereafter,
its major port city of Sevastopol had functioned as the homeport
for Russia’s Black Sea fleet under Czars and Commissars alike.
The only real reason it needed to “rejoin” Russia in March
2014 was because the Ukrainian tyrant who ruled the Soviet Union in
the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev, had gifted it to his
Ukrainian compatriots during a drunken celebration of his
victory over two deadly rivals who also claimed Stalin’s succession.
Indeed,
when Obama’s neocon Assistant Secretary for European Affairs,
Victoria Nuland, was caught telling the American ambassador in Kiev
that “Yats is the guy” with respect to the new Washington
designated leader of the post-coup government and joined a
chorus of Washington-based vilification of Putin and the Russian
government, the die was cast.
Russian
nationalists like Prigozhin were not going to take it lying down. As
we document below, then and there he began to shift some of the
activities of his trolling farm toward the US.
It amounted
to a tit-for-tat response to the anti-Russian propaganda emanating
from the Washington funded NGOs in Kiev; and also from outright
government agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy
and Radio Free Europe, as well as the Deep State
subservient operations of CNN and its print media imitators.
That
shift was described as the “translator project” by
Mueller’s historically ignorant lawyers. The implication was that out
of sheer aggression the Kremlin had unilaterally decided to
attack America’s democratic process through the IRA.
In
fact, the overwhelming likelihood is that an arriviste
Russian billionaire got a bee in his bonnet after Washington’s
Ukrainian coup–and then went to town on America with his trolling
farm exactly as he and many others had been doing in internal
Russian politics for years.
From
the point of view of US/Russian relations and world peace, however,
the re-direction of activity at Prigozhin’s Hobby Farm could
not have come at a worse time. Its wholly open and widely known
operations permitted Obama’s hatchet-people to quickly seize
on the IRA’s new theatre of focus as evidence of a
massive Russian attack on America’s election process, thereby turning
a molehill into a mountain.
At
length, the partisan leaders of Obama’s national security team,
led by the detestable John Brennan at the
CIA, selectively coopted and abused the resources and
credibility of the vast US intelligence apparatus to put the
imprimatur of a national security threat upon what was in fact
a scary bedtime story of no real significance. That effort
culminated in the phony intelligence assessment published
by four US intel agencies in January 2017 based on the work
of Brennan’s “hand-picked” accomplices.
In
what is surely a fabulous irony, therefore, the Internet
Research Agency amounts to a reverse Potemkin Village. It wasn’t
much to look at and was nothing to worry about until Obama’s
national security posse falsely embellished it’s innocuous
façade into a mortal threat to American democracy and national
security.
And
then Robert Mueller brought in his gang of copywriters and
illustrators to turn this entire tall tale into CNN-ready “news”.
We
will demonstrate below that what happened in this building was a
complete farce and posed no threat to the security and liberty of the
American people whatsoever; nor did it even remotely impact the 2016
election process.
But
with his comic book indictment, Robert Mueller has actually made
himself a mortal threat to America’s democracy and national security.
That’s because his indictment is unleashing a rabid
anti-Russian mania in the Democratic party and turning flaming
liberals and leftwing progressives, who used to form the backbone of
the peace party in America, into outright war-mongers.
The
Donald tweeted over the weekend about Moscow “laughing its ass
off” about the Mueller indictment, but we think he
missed the mark. It is the Deep State on the banks of the Potomac
that is bursting with glee—literally licking its collective
chops— about the endless budget boondoggles now assured to be
coming its way.
The
neocons and military/industrial complex had already
taken control of the GOP lock, stock and barrel. Then,
his campaign rhetoric about “America First”
notwithstanding, Trump abdicated to his empire-minded generals
in order to concentrate on his Twitter account. And now in the
wake of the RussiaGate hysteria being given a powerful new
boost from Mueller’s comic book, the Dems are lining up to say
we will see your $700
billion budget
and crank it up from there.
The
truth is, there is a screaming fiscal crisis coming hard upon
Imperial Washington. That’s owing to the $15
trillion of
new deficits that are now built-in for the next decade—at the very
time when the Fed has shut down is massive bond-buying
experiment and the Baby Boom is hitting the social security and
medicare rolls in droves.
Absent
the RussiaGate hoax and the Dems descent into mindless, anti-Putin
hysteria, there would have been a moment of maximum danger for
the Deep State’s hideously inflated military, intelligence and
surveillance operations. In the coming battle against fiscal
collapse, they surely would have been on the fiscal chopping
block like at no time since the aftermath of Vietnam in the 1970s.
But rescue
is now at hand. The Dems have been shell-shocked ever
since the evening of November 8, 2016, and have worked
themselves into deliriums about how it was all a big mistake
enabled by Russian meddling and collusion with the Trump
campaign.
To
a substantial degree, however, those narratives were on their last
legs until the Mueller indictment came along. For anyone who takes
the trouble to read it, of course, it’s just a potpourri of
nonsense, marginalia and irrelevance.
But
the Dems had already gone brain dead on the RussiaGate matter—so
they are now greeting it as a “blockbuster”, as
are the talking heads of CNN and the mainstream media. Consequently,
the drivel that came out of the building pictured below is being
taken as evidence of a far-reaching attack on America that
even rivals Pearl Harbor. As Pat Buchanan noted:
This
Russian troll farm is “the equivalent (of) Pearl Harbor,”
says Cong. Jerrold Nadler, who would head up the House Judiciary
Committee, handling any impeachment, if Democrats retake the House.
When
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pressed, Nadler doubled down: The Russians “are
destroying our democratic process.” While the Russian trolling
may not equal Pearl Harbor in its violence, said Nadler, in its
“seriousness, it is very much on a par” with Japan’s
surprise attack.
That’s
right. But unlike the vast Japanese naval armada that stealthily
steamed toward Hawaii in early December 1941, the Facebook
cyber-missiles that allegedly hit America in 2016 came out of
this little joint hiding in plain sight:
So
let’s return to the fact that Prigozhin’s troll farm
doesn’t really look much different than countless others that dot the
Russian internet landscape, and which mushroomed after 2011 in
support of the Putin-ified Russian state and the crony
capitalist economy it shepherds.
A New
Yorker piece
published by journalist Adrian Chen, no fan of Donald Trump, in
late July 2016 explains about as well as any where the Internet
Research Agency came from:
The
(Internet Research Agency) has been widely reported in Russian
media to be the brainchild of Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and ally
of Vladimir Putin. At the time, it employed hundreds of Russians in a
nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, where they produced
blog posts, comments, infographics, and viral videos that pushed the
Kremlin’s narrative on both the Russian and English Internet.
The
agency is what is known in Russia as a “troll farm,” a nickname
given to outfits that operate armies of sock-puppet social-media
accounts, in order to create the illusion of a rabid grass-roots
movement. Trolling has become a key tool in a comprehensive effort by
Russian authorities to rein in a previously freewheeling Internet
culture, after huge anti-Putin protests in 2011 were organized
largely over social media. It is used by Kremlin apparatchiks at
every level of government in Russia; wherever politics are discussed
online, one can expect a flood of comments from paid trolls.
The
real effect, the Russian activists told me, was not to brainwash
readers but to overwhelm social media with a flood of fake
content, seeding
doubt and paranoia, and destroying the possibility of using the
Internet as a democratic space…..
…….toward
the end of last year (2015) I noticed something interesting:
many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying
themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of
Donald Trump. Exposure to even small amounts of Russian politics can
induce severe bouts of paranoia and conspiracy-minded thinking, and
it seemed logical to me that this new pro-Trump bent might well be an
attempt by the agency to undermine the U.S. by helping to elect a
racist reality-show star as our Commander-in-Chief. At the time, I
found it funny. The
agency was a well-funded but often hapless operation—it created a
cartoon character that was a giant buttocks to spread anti-Obama
propaganda, for example—and this seemed like another of its
far-fetched schemes to poison the Internet.
In
fact, it was. How it became a fearsome Russian intel operation was
entirely due to what happened in Washington DC, not St. Petersburg
or the Kremlin, for that matter.
That
is, in the summer of 2016, when the Obama inner circle and the
Deep State national security establishment alike suddenly were
confronted with the theretofore unthinkable prospect that Donald
Trump might actually be elected US President, they literally
transformed the Hobby Farm of a second tier
Russian oligarch into monumental threat to American
democracy.
And
that took some doing because Prigozhin was essentially a nobody
in the great scheme of national security. Unlike Putin, who cut
his eyeteeth in the old Soviet era KGB, Prigozhin had fancied himself
a ski racer as a privileged young man in a Soviet boarding school.
Failing to make the grade on the slopes, however, he had
subsequently pursued various petty criminal schemes that
landed him nine years in a Soviet prison during the latter’s
dying days.
But
timing is everything—-so when he opened a hot dog stand from
his mother’s kitchen in newly liberated St. Petersburg in the
early 1990s his entprenurial talents in the culinary field
self-evidently flourished. Soon he branched into
convenience stores and then in 1996 into a swank restaurant
(Staraya Tamozhnya or “The Old Customs House”) that
catered to newly monied Russian who were looking for “more than
cutlets with Vodka”.
At
length, a strategic $400k investment in a rusting harbor boat
was turned into a floating hot spot called “The New Island
Restaurant”. From there flowed catering contracts
for lavish state banquets after he gained the
gastronomical favor of the post-Soviet St. Petersburg
political operative, who became prime minister of Russia.
Putin held lavish
state dinners on Prigozhin’s floating emporium, where
he played host to world leaders like George W. Bush and Jacques
Chirac. He also apparently heaped business into Prigozhin’s budding
empire with a $177 million catering contract with Moscow’s schools,
and then the real jackpot: A two year contract in 2012 worth
more than $1.6
billion to
supply 90% of all food orders to Russian soldiers.
Folks,
that’s where the troll factory came from. It opened the
next year in 2013 as the kind of token of appreciation expected
from oligarchs favored by the Russian state.
Still,
it wasn’t the KGB incarnate—just a tweet-by-the-numbers body
shop designed to flood Russian media and internet
forums with messages extolling Russian greatness, the iniquities and
hypocrisies of the morally corrupt West and the glorious
works of Vlad Putin.
At
this stage the troll farm was involved in strictly Russian
business—-the handiwork of an oligarch who had thrived on Russia’s
particular brand of crony capitalism and was more than happy to shill
for his patron in the Kremlin.
Here
is how the previously referenced Guardian
article from mid-2015 described the farm before some of its
modest resources were later shifted to the “American
Department” in 2016:
Just
after 9pm each day, a long line of workers files out of 55 Savushkina
Street, a modern four- storey office complex with a small sign outside
that reads “Business centre”. Having spent 12 hours in the
building, the workers are replaced by another large group, who will
work through the night.
They
painted a picture of a work environment that was humourless and
draconian, with fines for being a few minutes late or not reaching
the required number of posts each day. Trolls worked in rooms of
about 20 people, each controlled by three editors, who would check
posts and impose fines if they found the words had been cut and
pasted, or were ideologically deviant.
The
LiveJournal blogger, who spent two months working at the centre until
mid-March, said she was paid 45,000 roubles ($790) a month, to run a
number of accounts on the site.
“We
had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making
cakes or music tracks we
liked, but then every now and then throw in a political
post about
how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” she
said.
Scrolling
through one of the LiveJournal accounts she ran, the pattern is
clear. There are posts about “Europe’s 20 most beautiful castles”
and “signs that show you are dating the wrong girl”, interspersed
with political posts about Ukraine or
suggesting that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is
corrupt.
The
desired conclusion of one reads: “The majority of experts agree
that the US is deliberately trying to weaken Russia, and Ukraine is
being used only as a way to achieve this goal. If the Ukrainian
people had not panicked and backed a coup, the west would have found
another way to pressure Russia. But our country is not going to go
ahead with the US plans, and we will fight for our sovereignty on the
international stage.”
To
add colour to their posts, websites have been set up to aid the troll
army. One features thousands
of pasteable images,
mainly of European leaders in humiliating photoshopped incidents or
with captions pointing out their weakness and stupidity, or showing
Putin making hilarious wisecracks and winning the day.
When
I got the job there in 2013 it was a small building, I was working in
the basement, and it was clear they didn’t have enough space,”
said Andrei Soshnikov, a St Petersburg journalist who infiltrated the
company two years ago and has continued to cover it. He
linked the move to a much bigger office with increased online
activity around the Ukraine crisis….
As
we explained above, it was only after Washington massively
intervened in the domestic politics of Ukraine in February 2104 that
Prigozhin’s Hobby Farm branched into external operations
focused on Russian adversaries like the new anti-Russian Ukrainian
government and the United States.
Even
then, however, the main stream media headline writers, who
have been intellectually lobotomized by a constant diet of
anti-Russian mania, cannot seem to grasp that their hyperbolic
headlines are in no way, shape or form supported by the actual
written words in Mueller’s indictment.
In
a word, eighty twenty-somethings
sitting cheek-by-jowl at banks of computer screens and banging out
social media tripe in English as a (third) language did not
impact anything in America, let alone the 2016 election outcome.
That
is to say, what in the world is so hard to understand about the fact
that the pathetic output of this group could not have amounted
to 0.000001% of
the content that rumbled through these social media channels
during 2016?
Yet
here is Mueller—writing in indictment black and
white—admitting that the troll farm had deployed precious few
trolls to the American department:
“spread
(ing) distrust towards the candidates and the political
system in general…..By approximately July 2016, more
than eighty
ORGANIZATION employees were
assigned to the translator project”.
Besides
the infinitesimal volume and generally crude and unoriginal nature of
the troll farm’s output, this tiny 80-person contingent points to
another huge flaw in the entire Mueller narrative—especially
as it has been embellished and exaggerated by the main stream media
since last Friday afternoon. To wit, all of these posts were destined
to get lost in the vast sea of cyberspace without a ground
game in
the US.
Yet
the indictment is clear on that crucial point as well.
The Russian meddlers had “no ground game”
whatsoever aside from a 22 day visit in June 2014 by two
operatives who were not trained spies and who had apparently
never even been to America previously.
Yet
they visited nine states during that brief interval and
thereby “cased-out” the entirety of the American
electoral scene:
Only
KRYLOVA and BOGACHEVA received visas, and from approximately June 4,
2014 through June 26, 2014, KRYLOVA and BOGACHEVA traveled in and
around the United States, including stops in Nevada, California, New
Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Louisiana, Texas, and New York
to gather intelligence. After the trip, KRYLOVA and BURCHIK exchanged
an intelligence report regarding the trip.
The
above paragraph is itself a smoking bratwurst!
Aside
from sleeping, passing through countless airports, checking into a
dozen or more hotels and
perhaps visiting the chamber of Commerce in
Dallas or Denver, what possibly could these two travelers have done
to lay the groundwork for “influencing” 133
million voters two years hence?
Mueller
doesn’t say and the talking heads jabber on about this trip as
if it were some kind of invasion, not the
pointless needle-in-the-haystack type of undertaking that it
actually was.
And
that gets us to the ballyhooed efforts to organize and promote Trump
rallies in Florida, Washington DC, New York City and elsewhere. Once
again, however, Mueller spills large amounts of ink citing the emails
and social media posts that describe the aims of these long-distance
media trolls. But there is not a shred of evidence presented
about what actually happened on the ground.
We
would be so bold as to suggest that we know why Mueller didn’t
document this core element of the alleged meddling campaign.
Namely, because nobody came to the rallies and flash mob events
called for by the keyboard jockeys in St. Petersburg.
Take
the case of the “Florida Goes Trump” rallies on August 20,
which the indictment dwells on at length. So doing, it purports to
explain how real Trump supporters in the state were duped into
cooperating, how bloggers back in Russia used social media posts to
promote 13 rallies across the state of Florida and bought ads to the
same end on Facebook.
In
fact, compared to fleeting references with respect to similar rallies
allegedly staged in Washington DC and New York City, the Florida
rallies take up far more ink in the indictment and come across as
exhibit #1 on Russia ground game in the US election
process.
Indeed,
the liberal hatch-people at Politico made
the singular importance of the Florida meddling operation
abundantly clear:
But
the document makes clear that the operation in Florida, the nation’s
largest swing state, was in a class by itself. The indictment is
packed with details of how Russian nationals duped Donald Trump
campaign volunteers and grass-roots organizations in Florida into
holding rallies they organized and helped fund with foreign cash.
Here’s
the problem. There seems to be scant evidence that these rallies
actually happened or that anyone showed up to the ones that did
occur. For instance, here is a photo of one in St. Petersburg
(Florida) posted on social media at the time.
We
doubt whether Vlad got his money’s worth on this one:
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Then
there’s the case of Jim Frishe of Clearwater, Florida. He was a
real estate development consultant and candidate for county
office, who organized a sign-waving event in response to the Russian
entreaties that attracted barely a dozen people:
Frishe,
68, said he was called by someone identifying themselves as with a
group called “Florida for Trump” and asked to organize a
sign-waving rally. He said between 15 and 18 people showed up and
that he didn’t receive any signs or money or other support. He never heard from them again.
“I
was going to do what I was going to do anyway. I was a Trump
supporter, they didn’t convince me”.
Then
there is the case of the “Hillary in stripes” caper
allegedly promoted by the Russians. According to the indictment:
“For
example, defendants and their co-conspirators asked one U.S. person
to build a cage on on a flatbed truck … and another U.S. person to
wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform,”
The
thing is, the main evidence for that is that the “cage”
appeared about a month later as the handiwork of a Trump supporter,
Gary Howd, who did it all on his own–without any prompting,
encouragement or money from the Russians.
Even
the Politico account of the purported Florida invasion by the
Russians let that much slip out:
The
caged Clinton stunt was a hit among Trump supporters. On Sept. 23,
for instance, NBC2 reported
that a Cape Coral man erected a caged Clinton display in his front yard.
“I
feel like I’m doing my little part at least in my little neck of the
woods,” homeowner Gary Howd said.
As
it happened, even the Washington
Post admits
that the “Florida Goes Trump” rallies didn’t amount to
much.
The
efforts in Florida that August day did not turn out to be
particularly impressive. No people showed up to at least one of the
proposed rallies, and online photos of some of the other events reveal ragtag groups with Trump signs staking out patches of grass or
traffic medians.
As
to the “Down With Hillary” demonstration on July 23, 2016,
to take another example, here is what you get from Google on this
particular element of the indictment:
No
results found for “Down
with Hillary” rally in New York City on July 23, 2016.
Finally,
and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm
looks like. Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort
Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT spies and technicians work
for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The
US actually spends $75
billion per
year—more than Russia’s entire $69
billion defense
budget—spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually
every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access
Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does
nothing put troll the global internet and does so
with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per
hour keyboard jockeys.
Indeed,
the cafeterias in the NSA buildings pictured below cost far
more per year to operate than did Prigozhin’s troll farm during it
entire short lived existence (its apparently now being closed down
with two of the 3.5 floors already dark).
In
that context, Charles Hugh Smith cogently reminds that the real
farce in the Mueller comic book is that it is the ultimate case of
the pot-calling-the-kettle black:
America’s
foreign policy is one of absolute entitlement to influence the
domestic affairs and politics of every nation of interest, which to a
truly global empire includes every nation on the planet to the degree
every nation is a market and/or a potential threat to U.S. interests.
Assassination
of elected leaders–no problem. Funding the emergence of new
U.S.-directed political parties–just another day at the office.
Inciting dissent and discord to destabilize regimes–it’s what we do,
folks. Funding outright propaganda–one of our enduring specialties.
Finally,
as Pat Buchanan further observed in his post on the Mueller
indictment, political and election meddling is what Imperial
Washington does. And now we are surprised that others do the
same—-even that pathetic efforts of a Russian oligarch laid out in
Mueller’s ham sandwich indictment:
Are
the CIA and National Endowment for Democracy under orders not to try
to influence the outcome of elections in nations in whose ruling
regimes we believe we have a stake?
“Have
we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Laura
Ingraham asked former CIA Director James Woolsey this weekend.
With
a grin, Woolsey replied, “Oh, probably.”
“We
don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We
don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”
“Well,”
Woolsey said with a smile. “Only for a very good cause.”
Indeed,
what is the National Endowment for Democracy all about, if not aiding
the pro-American side in foreign nations and their elections?
Did
America have no active role in the “color-coded revolutions”
that have changed regimes from Serbia to Ukraine to Georgia?
When
Republicans discuss Iran on Capitol Hill, the phrase “regime
change” is frequently heard. When the “Green Revolution”
took to the streets of Tehran to protest massively the re-election of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, Republicans denounced
President Obama for not intervening more energetically to alter the
outcome.
When
China, Russia and Egypt expel NGOs, are their suspicions that some
have been seeded with U.S. agents merely marks of paranoia?
David
Stockman’s Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions
and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance
and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and
rebuked.http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com
=========================
Zie ook:
‘Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump‘ (artikel in Nederlands; zie ook de links in dat bericht)
‘De Russiagate samenzweringstheorie dient de machthebbers………‘
