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.