The New York Times Smears the President

written by david stockman

tuesday january 15, 2019

The Donald has been on a red hot twitter rampage, and he's completely justified. Actually, we didn't think the Russian Collusion Hoax could get any stupider until we saw the New York Times' Friday evening bushwhack. 

The trio of authors, apparently self-tortured victims of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, actually had the gall to print a story in the once and former Gray Lady of journalistic rectitude which was nothing more than an ugly smear on the sitting President of the United States—one that would have done Joe McCarthy proud:

In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

It doesn't get lower than that. The only thing that they didn't mention was presidential Treason, but it's hard to say that "working in behalf of Russia against American interests" would constitute anything less. 
So exactly what did the trio of wet behind the ears nincompoops at the New York Times—Adam Goldman, Michael Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos—dig up from the diarrhetic bowels of the FBI that warranted the above characterization? 

Why, it is apparently the following, which is surely a red hot smoking gun. That is, one that condemns the FBI, not Trump; and shows that the NYT, which once courageously published the Pentagon Papers and had earned the above sobriquet for its journalistic stateliness, sense of responsibility and possession of high virtue, has degenerated into a War Party shill—not to say the journalistic equivalent of a comfort woman: Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when...

...he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Well, for crying out loud! 

Any journalist worth his salt would know that Trump's July 2016 shout-out to the Russians was a campaign joke. At best, it was merely an attempt to cleverly state in one more way the running GOP theme about Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. How many times before that had Sean Hannity delivered his riff about Hillary's alleged hammer-smashing of 13 devices and acid-washing with BleachBit of the missing emails? 

More importantly, how in the world of constitutional government, free speech, and contested elections does Trump's refusal to criticize a foreign leader that we we're not at war with constitute something worthy of a counter-intelligence investigation by the FBI? 

Indeed, in the case of the Ukraine resolution at the GOP convention, the issue was about making the GOP's prior pro-Ukraine platform even more hawkish, which Trump thought was a bad idea on policy grounds. 

Besides, the Democratic platform ended up more dovish than the GOP's final wording. And, no, the FBI didn't think to investigate the Dems for being squishy soft on support for the crypto-Nazi's who took control of Ukraine during an illegal, US funded/supported coup on the street of Kiev in 2014. 

What we are saying is that the trio pictured  here—one of whom graduated from Harvard in 2015 and the other two not much older—don't seem to even know that foreign policy is a debatable issue. Or that the American people actually voted into office a candidate who took the other side of Imperial Washington's unwarranted demonization of Putin and made no bones about his desire for a rapprochement with Russia. 

Actually, as to pursuing rapprochement, so did: 

• JFK, after the near catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis; 

• Lyndon Johnson, after the Seven Days War during his meeting with Kosygin at Glassboro NJ; 

• Richard Nixon, with the ABM Treaty, detente and his visit with Brezhnev in Moscow; 

• Jimmy Carter, when he signed the SALT-II agreement; 

• Ronald Reagan, when he went to Moscow to virtually end the Cold War; and 

• Bill Clinton, when he sent a multi-billion IMF aid package to Yeltsin to help him get re-elected in 1996. 
The fact is, all of the above presidential policy initiatives were heatedly debated in Washington during a period when the US and Soviet Union each had roughly 9,000 nuclear warheads pointed at the other. But that did not lead to FBI counter-intelligence investigations of politicians—to say nothing of sitting Presidents—who took the "wrong" side of these thoroughly democratic debates. 

And that includes the outright "peace" candidacies of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. Indeed, shortly thereafter it was the Church Committee in the US Senate that aggressively investigated the CIA and FBI, not the incipient Deep State which investigated the elected politicians of that era. 

Stated differently, Senator Lloyd Bentsen would have to said to the trio pictured below, "I knew Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Seymour Hersh—and you are no Sheehan/Halberstam/Hersh!" 

In that regard, your editor did not know the latter three personally back in the day. But those of us on the anti-war barricades during the Vietnam era read them assiduously; and we did not mistake their honest journalistic coverage of that calamitous foreign policy episode for Robert McNamara's lie-filled talking points and genocidal "body counts". 

Indeed, back in those days mainstream journalists tended to be the nemesis of the Deep State (yes, it has existed ever since WWII), not it's handmaid. 

For instance, in the 1980s Congressman Ed Boland's amendment stopped the effort of neocons in the Reagan Administration to undermine the duly elected "Sandinista" government of Nicaragua. But back then, the press went after the meddlers and interventionists in the national security bureaucracy, not Congressman Boland and the Congressional majority which voted to shackle the Deep State. 

In fact, several of the Reagan meddlers went to prison—not to sinecures at CNN or NBC. 

Moreover, the alleged "communist" threat in those days was on America's doorstep in central America, not thousands of miles away on Russia's doorstep, as in the case of the Ukraine and Crimea. 
Have the three knuckleheads ever read a history book? 

Do they not know, for instance, that there are virtually no Ukrainians in Crimea (the population is mainly Russian, Tartar etc.); that the latter was a integral province of Mother Russia for 171 years after it was purchased from the Ottomans by Catherine the Great in 1783; and that Crimea only was added as a territorial appendage to the Socialist Republic of the Ukraine in 1954 by the order of the Soviet Presidium as a door prize to the comrades in Kiev who had supported their favorite son, Nikita Khrushchev, in the bloody battle for Stalin's succession? 

Has it not occurred to them that when the scourge and historical anomaly of the Soviet Empire finally slithered off the pages of history that untangling the utterly artificial borders that had enslaved 350 million people might be a tad messy, and that the rump-state of Russia had a valid security interest in the manner in which it unfolded? 

Likewise, did they perchance ever read the strident warnings of the father of Soviet containment and NATO, Professor George Kennan, about the foolishness of extending NATO to the very borders of Russia; and especially after Bush the Elder and his Secretary of State, James Baker, had promised Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence to unification of Germany that NATO would not be extended by "a single inch" to the east? 

In fact, have they ever bothered to contemplate why NATO even exists any longer; or the anomaly of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization sending troops to the Hindu Kush to make war upon the Taliban tribesman who had actually defeated the Soviet Empire—and 27 years after the Soviet Union was no more? 

That is to say, in the whole ragged to-and-fro of post-Soviet eastern Europe and Washington's arrogant claim to sole superpower status, is it really so hard to see that there are two sides to the debate; and that dissent from Washington's hegemonic claim to say what can and can't happen in Kiev, the Donbas and Crimea is actually the more rational course, and certainly not tantamount to treason? 
Or consider what happened to Ronald Reagan's misbegotten infatuation with the Star Wars will-o-wisp of a nuclear shield. The latter had the military-industrial complex drooling over the implied trillions (in today's $) of funding, and the Deep State giddy with the thought that the putative Star Wars shield would unleash it from the bonds of MAD (mutual assured destruction) and thereby open the path to US global hegemony. 

Needless to say, the intrepid mainstream journalists of the 1980's still had the Sheehan/Halberstam/Hersh investigative spirit and courage about them. It did not take too many years for their exposes to make Star Wars the laughingstock it actually was, and for their rebukes to the Deep State narrative to embolden the bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill to essentially shut it down. 

At the end of the day, there is no other way to say it. The Goldman/Schmidt/Fandos types of the present era are not journalists at all; they are lazy, intellectually corrupted, mendacious stenographers of Imperial Washington's oppressive group think. 
After all, only a decade or two ago any journalist who typed the words "....whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence" would have suffered tremors and palpitations for the very phrasing of it. 
Don't these kids know them thar words is McCarthyite code for unmasking commie traitors? 
Here's the thing. Until the groupthink of the Imperial City congealed into what amounts to worship of the Warfare State after 9/11, any self-respecting journalist who discovered that the FBI had opened a counter-intelligence investigation of a sitting president for the preposterous reasons outlined in the NYT story would have been all over this insidious affront to constitutional government like a screaming banshee. 
That is, under what imaginable constitutional scheme does a second tier law enforcement agency have the prerogative to investigate the duly elected President because he fired the FBI director for good cause; rejected the prevailing anti-Russia foreign policy for solid reasons of national interest; and knew that the Russian collusion meme was Democrat sour grapes for loosing the election and said so publicly, loudly and frequently, as is his prerogative? 

In the old days, journalists often had the integrity and summoned the courage to speak truth to power. By contrast, the trio of sanctimonious brats pictured above were too lazy, stupid or mendacious to even connect the dots. 

That is, this ballyhooed counter-intelligence investigation was launched the very next day after Comey was fired by two of the most compromised people in the entire Obama Administration posse of anti-Trump election meddlers--if not criminals—led by former CIA director John Brennan. 

We are referring to the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, later fired for leaking to the media and lying about it and his legal council, Lisa Page. After the release of literally tons of anti-Trump SMS messages with her lover-boy, the FBI agent Peter Strzok, over the past 12 months what kind of self-respecting journalists would not see the red flags flying in every direction? 
By now any one who knows how to Google, also knows or should know that Strzok and Page sent text messages that suggest they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Trump even before Comey’s firing. And when it happened, their exchanges left no doubt: 

“And we need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting,” Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey’s ouster. 

So there you have it. McCabe, Strzok and Page are Deep Staters if the term has any meaning at all. Yet here is why Lisa Page thought Trump was such a threat to national security that she and her colleagues were justified in unilaterally suspending the constitution and prosecuting the elected President of the people because they disagreed with his foreign policy positions. 

Indeed, by her own closed door testimony to the House committee (now leaked) it is obvious that Lisa Page is a light-weight numbskull when it comes to thinking about national security. For it turns out, she doesn't even claim that Russia is a military threat to America or that Putin has aggressive intents for territorial conquest. 

No, it seems his sin is that he doesn't embrace Washington's self-conferred role as the Indispensable Nation and may even be in mind of thwarting Washington's noble effort to spread "our democratic ideals" and bring the blessings of Coca-Cola, long pants and the ballot box to the otherwise benighted peoples of the planet. 

You only need a decent regard for the mayhem that the Washington War party has brought to the world—from the jungles of the Mekong Valley, to the Hindu Kush, to Mesopotamia, the Levant, North Africa and Latin America, too—to say are you f*cking kidding?

'In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,' Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times..... 'That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,' she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported in the Epoch Times. 

Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

'With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,' Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

As to the last bolded line, we will not bother to wonder how a pint-sized economy of $1.5 trillion compared to America's $20 trillion and all of NATO's $36 trillion, with a military budget of $61 billion compared to NATO $1.05 trillion, is going to do what Khrushchev failed to do—bury us! 

So we fully appreciate why the Donald is on the rampage, and in this instance, couldn't more wholeheartedly agree.

'Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!' the president tweeted. 
'Funny thing about James Comey,' he continued. 'Everybody wanted him fired, Republican and Democrat alike. After the rigged & botched Crooked Hillary investigation, where she was interviewed on July 4th Weekend, not recorded or sworn in, and where she said she didn’t know anything (a lie).' 

'the FBI was in complete turmoil (see N.Y. Post) because of Comey’s poor leadership and the way he handled the Clinton mess (not to mention his usurpation of powers from the Justice Department). My firing of James Comey was a great day for America.'

"He was a Crooked Cop,” Saturday’s tweetstorm concluded, “who is being totally protected by his best friend, Bob Mueller, & the 13 Angry Democrats – leaking machines who have NO interest in going after the Real Collusion (and much more) by Crooked Hillary Clinton, her Campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. Just Watch!” 

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/january/15/the-new-york-times-smears-the-president/