Mueller probe was an astutely crafted set-up by powers that be to keep newly inaugurated Trump admin, considered Washington outsiders, under the thumb. The frivolous investigation consumed almost the entire duration of first Trump presidency and Trump admin had to run from pillar to post simply to dispel the perception of fictitious ties between Trump campaign and Russia.
President Trump’s first attorney general Jeff Sessions was an establishment Republican, who served as senator from Alabama for two decades, from 1997 to 2017, and was well aware of nitty gritty of Beltway politics.
Figuratively, Morpheus gave Neo a choice between taking the red pill or the blue pill. Red pill implied Neo would have to oversee investigation of Trump campaign’s alleged links with Russia himself, whereas blue pill meant that he could recuse himself on flimsy pretext and let his deputy take up the probe.
Red pill would certainly have ended Neo’s political career instantly, therefore Neo opted for blue pill that proved nothing more than slow poison, ending his political career a few years later after losing 2020 Senate primary of Alabama.
After Sessions’ recusal, the responsibility to prosecute Trump campaign fell on the shoulders of his deputy Rod Rosenstein. Ironically, however, it was the same Rosenstein on the basis of whose memorandum, Mr. Trump had sacked FBI Director James Comey. Unlike Sessions, Rosenstein was a career DOJ official who didn’t have any political ambitions, therefore he pulled no punches and caught the bull by the horns.
As the plot unfolded, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation into illicit ties between Trump campaign and Russia. In order to fathom implications of the appointment, a brief biographical account of Mueller won’t be out of place.
Neocon President George W. Bush nominated Mueller for the position of FBI director in July 2000, months before 9/11 terror attack that happened on Mueller’s watch, a testimony to Mueller’s competence as intel czar.
During Mueller’s tenure as FBI director, James Comey served as deputy attorney general. Whereas Comey’s replacement as FBI director Christopher Wray served as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division in George W. Bush's administration, and was Assistant Attorney General from 2003 to 2005, working under Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
Thus, Mueller, Comey and Wray were peas in a pod looking after each other’s interests and taking dictates from the hand that fed them. They are “untouchable protected persons” who can’t be prosecuted, not even on instructions of president, as long as they toe the line, as is obvious from recent acquittal of Comey.
The plot thickens as informants infiltrate Trump campaign:
Besides the collusion of DOJ officials, security establishment inserted two moles into Trump campaign in order to incriminate it for having clandestine contacts with Russia. It wasn’t a coincidence that both George Papadopoulos and Carter Page were hired by Trump campaign as purported foreign policy advisers in March 2016 and sacked in August and September, respectively. Carter Page wasn’t charged by Mueller probe whereas Papadopoulos merely received a slap on the wrist for insidious role he played in entrapment of his former employer.
Carter Page graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the United States Naval Academy in 1993. He served in the US Navy for five years, including a tour in western Morocco as an intelligence officer for a United Nations peacekeeping mission, and attained the rank of lieutenant.
In 2000, he ostensibly began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm's London office. Then he was a vice president in the company's Moscow office. In June 2017, during a dispute over FISA warrant, FBI received written confirmation from the CIA that Page was an “operational contact” of the CIA from 2008 to 2013. Clearly, CIA conveniently confessed only the half-truth, because Carter Page was an undercover agent passing on information to the agency while serving as vice president of Merrill Lynch in the Moscow office.
Unlike Carter Page who was a professionally trained secret agent, George Papadopoulos was merely an unwitting accomplice who got into trouble due to nasty habit of compulsive bragging. He even confessed in his 2019 book “Deep State Target” that he was entrapped by people in intelligence agencies in order to justify FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign.
At a breakfast meeting at the Andaz London Liverpool Street hotel on April 26, 2016, Joseph Mifsud, a British MI6 agent masquerading as Maltese professor, told Papadopoulos that he had information that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. On May 10, at London's Kensington Wine Rooms, Papadopoulos allegedly told the same to the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer.
On July 26, after WikiLeaks released the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails, the Australian government advised American authorities of the encounter between Downer and Papadopoulos. Receipt of this information allegedly spurred the FBI's launch of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31.
After receiving thunderous applause of audience for the role in Shakespearean theater of absurd, all the world’s a stage and we’re merely players, one of the central characters of the espionage burlesque Joseph Mifsud vanished into thin air. His passport and wallet were found on 5 August 2017, in Câmara de Lobos, Portugal. Mifsud reappeared in an October 2017 photo with then British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, while attending a Brexit event at the London School of Diplomacy.
Another twist in the tale as a professional lobbyist joins Trump campaign:
In this section, I’m going to describe how another infiltrator of deep state, Paul Manafort, was tasked to sabotage Trump campaign, a covert mission in which he abysmally failed and consequently had to pay the price for the aborted fiasco.
Manafort was one of the leading campaign consultants in Washington and had the distinction of serving as adviser to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole. In 1980, he co-founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort and Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr. and Roger Stone.
Among the partners of the consultancy, Roger Stone was an attention-seeking buffoon fabled for his flamboyant style, bombastic speech and unsavory tactics. He briefly served on Trump campaign as adviser but was promptly sacked due to ineptitude and incompetence.
Charles Black and Paul Manafort, on the other hand, were professional lobbyists, loyally serving foreign policy objectives of Washington establishment from Latin America and Africa to Middle East and Eurasia regions over a period of several decades, although they received hefty monetary remuneration to the tune of millions of dollars for services rendered.
Mainstream media now has the luxury of castigating them for lobbying on behalf of “brutal dictators,” particularly after liberal media outlets developed a prejudice against Manafort for the stint leading Trump campaign, Black and Manafort as skilled lobbyists enmeshed with security objectives of Washington establishment were at forefront of the Cold War during the Reagan era, and even subsequently after the dissolution of Soviet Union when United States was pursuing the policy of incorporating East European states, formerly under Russian sphere of influence, into EU and NATO.
In neo-McCarthyite era, beginning after Mr. Trump’s inauguration as president, corporate media has whipped up such Russophobic hysteria that merely hearing a Russian name engenders a paranoid specter of treacherous plot to undermine Western democracy in impressionable minds of gullible audience. In such atmosphere of scaremongering, it wouldn’t be surprising if establishment media dubs Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as covert intelligence operatives working for KGB, FSB and GRU to interfere in Western politics.
Manafort's involvement in Ukraine can be traced to 2003, when Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska hired Bob Dole, Manafort's prior campaign candidate, to lobby the State Department for a waiver of his visa ban. He received a multiple-entry visa in United States in 2005 because of assiduous efforts of Dole’s firm, though he was subsequently sanctioned by US after relations between Russia and United States deteriorated.
Deripaska was a protégé of Boris Yeltsin, former president of Russia credited by Western historians for breakup of Soviet Union and introducing democracy in Russia. Deripaska was married to Polina Yumasheva, the daughter of Boris Yeltsin's top adviser Valentin Yumashev and stepdaughter of Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana. While Yeltsin was president, Deripaska's close ties put him in Yeltsin's inner circle, dubbed “The Family.”
He was once Russia's richest man, but lost a substantial part of his fortune during the 2008 financial crisis. Although Deripaska has managed to coexist with Russian president Vladimir Putin, their relationship became visibly strained amidst Deripaska's financial struggles in 2009. In 2017, Deripaska obtained a Cypriot citizenship through the country's 'golden visa' program.
Estrangement between Deripaska and Putin was further exacerbated after Yeltsin’s family publicly criticized Russian intervention in Ukraine in February 2022. As early as 2022, Deripaska was one of a handful Russian businessmen to openly denounce the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After adopting antiwar stance, he faced pressure from the Kremlin, leading to the seizure of a major asset he owned, valued at USD 1 billion.
In early August 2024, he characterized the invasion as "madness" and called for it to be stopped immediately. Deripaska made the comment in an interview with Nikkei Asia in Japan on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Business Advisory Council meeting, where he officially represented Russia. He came under fire from the pro-Putin camp in Russia for his statements, notably from the ultranationalist Alexander Dugin.
Nonetheless, through Deripaska, Manafort met Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov who in turn introduced him to Viktor Yanukovych in 2004. Although mainstream media has made much of Manafort’s relationship with Ukraine’s disgraced president, he was cultivating ties with Yanukovych on behalf of United States security establishment.
In the aftermath of Orange Revolution of 2004, United States gov’t was working with all political leaders to lure Ukraine into Western sphere of influence and had sent lobbyists to cultivate ties with Ukrainian ruling and opposition alliances.
Although Manafort was an experienced campaign consultant, he couldn’t possibly have advised Yanukovych on matters of domestic politics of Ukraine because he was utterly unaware of political culture of Eurasian country. Instead, the task entrusted to Manafort was to burnish Yanukovych’s democratic credentials in Western capitals, particularly in Washington.
Yanukovych was prime minister of Ukraine from August 2006 to December 2007 and then the president from February 2010 to 2014. During his tenure, in May 2011, Yanukovych affirmed that he would strive for Ukraine to join the European Union. Thus, his policy regarding Ukraine’s aspirations to be included as member of EU to reap financial benefits was no different from his predecessor Yushchenko and successor Petro Poroshenko.
In an April 2016 interview with ABC News, his former political adviser Manafort also stated that the aim of his activities in Ukraine had been to lead the country "closer to Europe." Thus, the responsibility entrusted to Manafort by United States gov’t was to draw Ukraine into Western sphere of influence.
United States relationship with Ukrainian President Yanukovych deteriorated only after EU leaders cavalierly rejected Ukraine’s loan demand in 2013, a political blunder for which Obama admin severely castigated European allies, and consequently Yanukovych accepted $15 billion loan from Russia to sustain Ukraine’s nearly bankrupt economy. Shortly thereafter, Euromaidan protests were organized against Yanukovych and he had to resign in February 2014.
Leaving aside the tragic fate that befell Yanukovych and Ukraine, Manafort had abysmally failed in the clandestine mission to lure Yanukovych into Western sphere of influence. Consequently, Manafort fell from grace and FBI began a criminal investigation into Manafort’s illicit activities in Ukraine in 2014.
CNN revealed in a subsequently retracted exclusive report in September 2017 that Manafort was wiretapped by the FBI "before and after the election ... including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump."
The report notes: “A secret order authorized by the court that handles the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) began after Manafort became the subject of an FBI investigation that began in 2014. It centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine’s former ruling party.”
Thus, Manafort was on FBI’s radar in 2014 after losing the protection of his patrons in security establishment. The deep state offered him a Faustian pact to infiltrate Trump campaign in order to save his skin. He didn’t have a choice. Consequently, he approached Trump campaign in February 2016 and offered to work without salary.
Manafort joined the campaign in late March 2016 and helped lead it through 18 nominating contests and the Republican National Convention. On June 20, 2016, Trump fired amateur campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and promoted Manafort to the position.
But on August 17, 2016, Mr. Trump received his first security briefing. The same day, Mr. Trump shook up his campaign organization in a way that appeared to minimize Manafort's role. Two days later, Mr. Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign.
Ostensibly, a New York Times report in August, accusing Manafort of receiving millions of dollars from Yanukovych, became the reason for his downfall, but that was simply a pretext because Mr. Trump was least bothered by frivolous allegations of secretive ties with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.
In fact, the covert task entrusted to Manafort was to infiltrate Trump campaign and align its political manifesto with strategic objectives of deep state. Once Mr. Trump realized that Manafort’s pro-establishment agenda was diametrically opposite to reformist agenda of the campaign, he promptly sacked him as campaign manager.
In July 2016, despite then-campaign manager Manafort’s protestations, Trump’s campaign gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for the US to provide “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion. The Trump campaign convinced the platform committee to change proposal. It went from calling on the US to provide Ukraine "lethal defensive weapons" to the more benign phrase "appropriate assistance."
In addition, Mr. Trump also raised eyebrows in concerned quarters when he said during the electoral campaign that he would consider recognizing Russia's annexation of Crimea. Clearly, Manafort’s goose was cooked, and Mueller came after him like a berserk hangman, awarding him the harshest punishment among all the accused persons of the Russiagate probe. But he was graciously pardoned by Mr. Trump at the end of first presidency despite the treacherous double game he played during the presidential campaign.
Masterclass in spycraft: scapegoating FBI agent to win trust of Mr. Trump
Mueller investigation lasted from May 2017 to March 2019. In early days of the probe as Mueller’s team of investigators was getting more intrusive into private communications of advisers of Trump campaign, President Trump’s close confidants were raising alarm bells and Mr. Trump himself was getting suspicious regarding ulterior motives of investigators.
It’s noteworthy that President Trump could’ve sacked Mueller as special counsel in initial phase of the probe while it was getting little media attention. But with the passage of time, it became almost impossible to sack him in later phase of investigation as Mueller probe opened up a Pandora’s box and startling discoveries of alleged illicit ties between advisers of Trump campaign and Russia were making sensational headlines on American national media.
Therefore, as President Trump was contemplating sacking not only Mueller but also Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for hatching the treacherous plot to undermine Trump presidency, the plotters of nefarious scheme devised a cunning stratagem to win over Mr. Trump’s trust and confidence. They made an FBI agent, namely Peter Strzok, a scapegoat in order to reassure President Trump that Mueller was sympathetic to Republican admin and would conduct an impartial investigation without engendering needless political controversies.
Accordingly, Peter Strzok was summarily removed from the investigation by Mueller and Rosenstein in July 2017 in initial phase of the probe after partisan text message exchanges between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page were revealed, although the explosive scoop was released to the media months later in December. After the removal of Strzok from investigation, President Trump lowered his guard and decided to let the controversial probe proceed, naively assuming Mueller and Rosenstein were trustworthy officials who’d conduct a nonpartisan investigation.
Although extolled by legacy media as highly competent counterintelligence expert who acted as No. 2 official in the previous investigation of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server controversy in the run-up to presidential elections of November 2016, Strzok was a rogue agent with mediocre abilities who violated professional ethics by having extramarital affair with a DOJ colleague and was letting the flirt cloud his judgment during the investigation.
In order to underscore Strzok’s partisan affiliation with Democratic Party and consequent logical inference of Mueller investigation’s impartiality and credibility, the establishment media published another dubious report during the scandal that Strzok led a team of a dozen investigators during the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server for official communications and assisted in the drafting of public statements for then-FBI Director James Comey.
Strzok allegedly changed the description of Clinton's actions from “grossly negligent,” which could be a criminal offense, to “extremely careless.” But the implausibility of the dubious claim was apparent, as James Comey wasn’t a toddler learning the legal jargon after spending decades in law profession. He was a career DOJ official, serving in top-most official positions as deputy attorney general and director FBI. How is it conceivable that he wasn’t aware of the distinction between two legal phrases and criminal implications of being “grossly negligent”?
Clearly, the sinister motive for publishing the fake news reports was to exonerate Comey from wrongdoing and shifting blame on the scapegoat that was destined to be slaughtered anyway. Apparently, Strzok had an altercation with overlords of security establishment during the investigation of Clinton’s email server controversy, as he didn’t obey the instructions to the satisfaction of puppeteers. That’s when it was decided to make him a scapegoat in subsequent Russiagate probe.
The DOJ Inspector General's investigation examined thousands of text messages exchanged using FBI-issued cell phones between Strzok and Lisa Page. But the text messages were carefully selected and only those 7,000 texts were made public that were sent between August 15, 2015 and December 1, 2016, before the inauguration of Mr. Trump as president.
In 2018, President Trump claimed that 19,000 text messages between Strzok and Page “were purposely and illegally deleted,” and that those text messages “would have explained the whole hoax.” Texts in question that might have contained sensitive national security information after Mr. Trump was inaugurated as president were sent between mid-December 2016 and mid-May 2017, and were illegally expunged from record by DOJ officials on instructions of resourceful superiors.
By December 2017, as Mueller’s intrusive probe had implicated almost the entire Trump campaign, excluding the president and his immediate family, for having illicit contacts with Russia, Mr. Trump was publicly exploring the possibility of sacking Mueller. But by then, it was too late to turn the clock back, as Mueller’s team had made startling discoveries and sensational news headlines had fixated the American nation on the outcome of momentous investigation.
In December 2017, another controversy engulfed American politics after a lawyer for the Trump transition team accused a federal agency of illegally turning over thousands of emails to the Special Counsel's Office. Specifically, the General Services Administration (GSA) turned over emails written during the transition — the period between Election Day 2016 and Inauguration Day 2017 — and the Trump campaign claimed in a letter that the decision to do so violated the law.
In the seven-page letter, which was sent to congressional committee leaders, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, Kory Langhofer, wrote that Mueller investigation requested, in a pair of August 2017 letters, "the emails, laptops, cell phones, and other materials" for nine transition team members working on “national security and policy matters,” including four senior transition team members.
The letter also made a specific claim about communication between the government and the campaign — that Richard Beckler, then the general counsel of the GSA, "acknowledged unequivocally to the Trump campaign's legal counsel" in a June 15 discussion that the Trump campaign "owned and controlled" emails, and that "any requests for the production of Presidential Transition Team records would therefore be routed to legal counsel for the Trump campaign."
Langhofer put much of the blame for handing over the record without authorization on a career government employee, GSA Deputy Counsel Lenny Loewentritt, who he said was present for those aforementioned assurances, while Beckler was appointed as GSA General Counsel in May, "was hospitalized and incapacitated" in August, and had since died in September 2017.
It’s regrettable that Richard Beckler died during the controversy and took many secrets to the grave. He was an acclaimed attorney, representing a number of prominent clients including CIA Director William J. Casey and Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter.
Nonetheless, Langhofer wrote in the letter: "Career GSA staff, working with Mr. Loewentritt and at the direction of the FBI, immediately produced all the materials requested by the Special Counsel’s Office — without notifying Trump for America or filtering or redacting privileged material."
After the controversy, while the news of removal of Peter Strzok from Mueller investigation was also belatedly revealed to the media in December 2017, President Trump’s political rivals were apprehensive that Mr. Trump might sack Mueller for violating the law with impunity during the course of the probe and Democratic Congressmen wanted assurances from Trump admin that president wasn’t contemplating firing special counsel.
Consequently, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reassured the Congressmen that he didn’t have any reason to believe President Donald Trump would fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Then-White House special counsel Ty Cobb echoed Mnuchin’s remarks in an official statement that there were no plans to fire Mueller. “As the White House has consistently said for months, there is no consideration of firing the special counsel,” Cobb said.
Instead, duplicitous traitors in the benighted land were generously rewarded for surreptitiously undermining the first Trump presidency. Rosenstein and Mueller were hailed as saviors by lamestream media, whereas rogue FBI agent Peter Strzok wrote a best-selling book and claimed damages from DOJ for wrongful dismissal. He was awarded $1.2 million while his sweetheart Lisa Page received $800K for intrusion into privacy after a settlement with DOJ during Sleepy Joe’s presidency.
Impeachment of Mr. Trump in backdrop of New Cold War with Russia:
Quite similar to Mueller probe of Russiagate hoax, both impeachment proceedings against President Trump were also sham witch hunts. The Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives in the November 2018 midterm elections with the help of deep state, and Mr. Trump’s arch-foe Nancy Pelosi took office as Speaker.
Consequently, multiple House committees launched investigations into various purportedly illegal actions by Mr. Trump and some of his cabinet members, including the first impeachment proceedings that lasted from September 2019 until February 2020 when Senate honorably acquitted President Trump of alleged wrongdoing.
Instead of initiating criminal proceedings against Sleazy Joe and his cocaine-junkie son Hunter Biden for extorting millions of dollars in illicit financial kickbacks from Ukrainian oligarchs while Biden was Obama’s vice president, partisan Democratic lawmakers implicated President Trump in a scandal that he asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to begin a corruption investigation against Biden family in return for receiving economic assistance from United States.
Without getting into frivolous nitty gritty of malicious prosecution, including “conscientious whistleblower complaint” made by a paid thug of deep state in August 2019 and legal jargon of “quid pro quo” while $400 million aid package was granted to Ukraine the same month, the real reason impeachment proceedings were initiated against President Trump by Democratic Congressmen in collusion with deep state was that he was adamantly refusing to sign off on a covert military program for training and arming terrorist groups in Ukraine.
In order to fathom the significance of this military program from standpoint of security establishment, grasping the backdrop of beginning of New Cold War between Russia and United States in 2014 is essential. United States relationship with former Ukrainian President Yanukovych deteriorated after EU leaders cavalierly rejected Ukraine’s loan demand in 2013, a political blunder for which Obama admin publicly castigated European allies, and consequently Yanukovych accepted $15 billion loan from Russia to sustain Ukraine’s nearly bankrupt economy.
Shortly thereafter, Euromaidan protests were organized against Yanukovych and he had to resign in February 2014. Mindful that Ukraine had fallen into NATO’s sphere of influence, Russia annexed Crimean peninsula and a proxy war between pro-Russia separatists and Ukrainian irregular forces and allied neo-Nazi militant groups began in Donbas region of east Ukraine.
New Cold War between Russia and NATO reached the climax in 2018, which was incidentally the same year when Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives in the November 2018 midterm elections with the help of deep state and subsequently impeachment proceedings were initiated against President Trump in September 2019.
On March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.
In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted assassinations without a shred of evidence and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, Novichok, although Russian spokesperson Maria Zakharova sarcastically quipped it was a false flag op by MI6 and Skripals were in fact poisoned by British nerve agent, Brexitoxin.
Anyhow, Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.
In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018, the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats and Washington ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle. In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American consulate in Saint Petersburg.
The number of American diplomatic personnel stationed in Russia drastically dropped from 1,200 before the escalation to 120, and the relations between Moscow and Western powers reached the lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in December 1991.
In this backdrop, war hawks were urging pacifist President Trump to sign off on clandestine military program for training and arming Ukrainian paramilitary forces and allied neo-Nazi terrorists but Mr. Trump was reluctant to cross the Rubicon lest the escalation reached point of no return.
In January 2022, a month before Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zach Dorfman reported for Yahoo News that CIA was overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. The program, which started in 2015 during Obama admin’s tenure, was based at an undisclosed facility in the southern United States.
“The covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama admin after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Biden admin. By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there.”
A person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program had taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.” The program did not require, or receive, a new presidential finding, which was used to authorize covert action, and was run under previously existing authorities.
“If the Russians invade, those graduates of the CIA programs are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” said a former senior intelligence official. “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”
This covert military program commenced during Obama presidency and was expanded during Biden admin while President Trump scaled it back in first presidency, as he did not want to spoil otherwise cordial relationship with Russian President Putin. The subversive military program was cited as one of central rationales for Ukraine intervention by Russian policymakers. On more than one occasions, President Putin has candidly acknowledged Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had Mr. Trump been at the helm in February 2022.
Nonetheless, after President Trump repeatedly shunned the request to escalate conflict with Russia, deep state in collusion with Democratic Congressmen turned on him and implicated Mr. Trump in countless politically damaging scandals and criminal investigations. Mueller investigation lasted from May 2017 to March 2019, thus the sword of Russiagate hoax kept hanging over Mr. Trump’s head for almost entire duration of first presidency.
Soon afterwards, impeachment proceedings began against President Trump after Dems gained control of House in midterms of November 2018 and a mole in Trump admin made a mountain out of molehill by filing a whistleblower complaint in August 2019. Deep state wields the kind of petrifying clout and persuasive instruments of coercion at its disposal that could make a person’s closest confidants turn on him and spill the beans.
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen became an approver against him and even went to the extent of handing over recorded telephonic conversations between himself and Mr. Trump to FBI investigators during the Mueller probe. Similarly, Ambassador to EU Gordon Sondland and Chargé d’Affaires to Ukraine Bill Taylor, both appointees of Trump admin, testified against Mr. Trump before the Congress during the impeachment hoax.
Ironically, one of the charges in the House Intelligence Committee report published in December 2019 included that President Trump withheld “critical U.S. military assistance to fight Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine.” This Freudian slip is thought-provoking whether security establishment and its Democratic allies were defending Ukraine or inciting Russia to invade the neighbor, as it did after repeated provocations during Sleepy Joe’s presidency in February 2022.
A legal executioner was entrusted the task to convict Mr. Trump
Although Mueller’s intrusive probe implicated almost the entire Trump campaign, excluding the president and his immediate family, for having illicit contacts with Russia, Mueller investigation was merely a shot across the bow, as he wasn’t mandated by shadowy bosses of the deep state to convict or disqualify President Trump.
He was simply entrusted with the task to keep hanging the sword of Russiagate hoax over the head of President Trump for almost the entire duration of first Trump presidency in order to intimidate and browbeat the rookie president and political maverick to toe the security establishment’s agenda, lest he too would’ve been implicated in the politically damaging scandal of Russia’s alleged interference in American presidential elections of 2016.
The task to convict and consequently make Mr. Trump ineligible for holding presidential office was entrusted to a legal executioner on the payroll of deep state, Jack Smith, who was appointed special counsel by then-AG Merrick Garland in November 2022, only three days after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign.
Biden admin’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was a mediocre legal practitioner who was publicly criticized for the slow pace of the prosecution of political rivals even by Democratic colleagues. Jack Smith, on the other hand, was known by nom de guerre of Agent Smith of Matrix fame. He was the consigliere of Cosa Nostra serving only one client Don Corleone. Being an internationally acclaimed triathlete, Agent Smith literally pursued preys to the grave, instead of wasting time in tedious office work.
Mr. Trump’s political career was serendipitously salvaged from the sword of legal hangman, who was entrusted with the ominous task to take Mr. Trump to the gallows, by divine intervention and a geostrategic gambit played by Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Russian President Putin in the run-up to presidential elections slated for November 2024. But I’ll describe this momentous episode later in the post, first a brief introduction of Agent Smith is essential to keep informed readers abreast of recent political developments.
As Chief of the Public Integrity Section of DOJ from 2010 to 2015, one of Jack Smith’s preys was a CIA colleague who had dared to ruffle the feathers of shadowy bosses of the deep state. CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was convicted in 2015 of disclosing national defense information to journalist James Risen. But the real reason for initiating malicious prosecution against him was that he had filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the CIA that infuriated overlords of security establishment.
He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and sentenced to three-and-a-half-year imprisonment for revealing details about Operation Merlin, a covert operation conceived during the Clinton admin to supply Iran with flawed nuclear warhead blueprints in order to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
During stint as Chief of the Public Integrity Section, Smith led a team of more than 30 highly competent and vetted prosecutors who handled public corruption and election crimes cases across the United States, and the legal hitman’s high-profile victims included former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, former Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards and New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
Smith’s professional accomplishments weren’t limited to domestic American politics. From 2008 to 2010, he served as Investigation Coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands. In that capacity, he supervised sensitive investigations of foreign government officials and militias for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Furthermore, from 2018 to 2022, Smith served as the Chief Prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague where he investigated war crimes in Kosovo. During the stint as the chief prosecutor, Smith indicted the sitting President of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, accused of committing war crimes during the Kosovo War in 1998-99. Thaçi resigned from the presidency in 2020, was arrested and his trial remains ongoing at The Hague.
Thaçi was a prominent leader of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a guerrilla movement during Kosovo War against Serbian forces, and several commanders of KLA have subsequently been accused not only for committing war crimes but also for having illicit ties with drug traffickers and organized crime.
But few people are aware that KLA was NATO’s proxy force and all of prominent leaders of KLA, including Thaçi, were assets of Western intelligence agencies who servilely toed NATO’s diktats and raised funds from organized crime and drug trafficking which were then spent on buying weapons from Eastern Europe’s black market in order to sustain proxy war against Serbian forces.
To give the readers a brief backdrop of Yugoslav Wars in the nineties, Russia’s key ally in Eastern Europe former Yugoslavia was disintegrating. As usual, US-led NATO was waging a proxy war by training and arming Bosnian and Kosovar Muslim militant groups against Serb forces to expedite the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
In August 1995, on the pretext of Serb forces orchestrating massacres of Bosnian Muslims, NATO mounted Operation Deliberate Force, a sustained air campaign, in concert with ground operations, to undermine the military capability of Serb forces. The advances on the ground along with NATO airstrikes put pressure on the Bosnian Serbs to come to the negotiating table and surrender. The war ended with the signing of the Dayton Agreement on 14 December 1995.
But in the meantime, NATO was nurturing another proxy force against Serb forces dubbed Kosovo Liberation Army. After the conflict escalated in 1998, NATO decided that it could only be settled by introducing a military peacekeeping force.
After Serbia refused to sign the Rambouillet Accords, which called for deployment 30,000 NATO peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, NATO decided to mount a ferocious bombing campaign against Serb forces under the command of General Wesley Clark. Hostilities ended in June 1999 with the signing of Kumanovo Agreement, placing Kosovo under UN control.
It’s noteworthy that NATO launched its bombing campaign in Serbia from March to June 1999, called Operation Allied Force, without UN's approval. The relentless bombing killed about 1,000 members of Serb security forces in addition to over 500 civilians. It destroyed or damaged strategic targets across Serbia, such as bridges, industrial and power plants, barracks and military installations, using long-range cruise missiles to hit heavily defended targets in Belgrade and across Serbia. Tons of depleted uranium was also dropped in Serbia.
Hashim Thaçi and his KLA colleagues were assets of Western intelligence agencies during the Kosovo War of 1998-99 but fell out of favor after a power struggle ensued between overlords of NATO and EU on the one hand and native Kosovar politicians on the other following unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo in 2008.
Bosnia and Kosovo are only nominally independent states but they are in fact governed by American and European viceroys. Since purported independence, Bosnia was placed under the tutelage of High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina whereas Kosovo is the dominion of Special Representative of the Secretary General for Kosovo.
After Hashim Thaçi and rest of KLA leadership tried to assert their authority, The Kosovo Specialist Chambers was established at The Hague, Netherlands, in 2016, and a highly professional team of legal henchmen associated with Western intelligence agencies was promptly dispatched to prosecute KLA’s militant commanders for allegedly committing war crimes during the proxy war and for having illicit ties with drug traffickers and organized crime.
Jack Smith was one of the leading members of the legal team and the Chief Prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague from 2018 to 2022 before being appointed special counsel by then-AG Merrick Garland in November 2022 to prosecute Mr. Trump for alleged mishandling of classified documents and for inciting Capitol protests in January 2021.
Smith was clearly entrusted with the task to convict and consequently make Mr. Trump ineligible for holding presidential office. The documents case resulted in a 37-count indictment of Mr. Trump in June 2023 while election subversion case resulted in an indictment on four charges in August.
While writing on the wall for Mr. Trump was clear, an extraordinary event happened a year later that turned the tide. The classified documents case was “miraculously dismissed” by judge Aileen Cannon in July 2024, while election subversion case was similarly dismissed by judge Tanya Chutkan in November 2024.
Evidently, Mr. Trump’s political career was serendipitously redeemed by a geostrategic gambit played by Mr. Trump’s longtime friend Russian President Putin in June 2024 in the run-up to presidential elections slated for November.
On June 12, 2024, a Russian naval fleet comprising a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, on June 13, a U.S. Navy submarine arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.
U.S. Southern Command announced the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba. A Canadian Navy patrol ship also docked in Havana. Ottawa said the ship arrived on June 14 to signal the "capable and deployable" nature of the Canadian military.
The Russian naval fleet left Cuba on June 17 after a five-day stay but Mr. Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The security establishment favored a much forceful response to Russia’s provocation amidst Ukraine’s proxy war but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to a nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.
Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It seemed quite “a coincidence” that Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, only six weeks after Russian naval fleet made a port call to Havana on June 12. After the deep state decided that Joe Biden had become a liability as president and needed to be replaced, he was literally blackmailed by the deep state to quit the presidential race or face the consequences.
Furthermore, the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump at a
Pennsylvania rally on July 13 was also meant as a psy-ops tactic to send a
spine-chilling warning to Biden that the deep state was willing to go to any
extent to achieve its objectives, even if it had to assassinate sitting
American presidents, such as the brutal murders of the Kennedy brothers
following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Unsurprisingly, panic-stricken Biden
decided a week after Mr. Trump’s brush with death to leave the White House and
left the field open for Mr. Trump to be elected president.
