After the release of the bombshell revelations from the declassification of the Brennan notes
we recommend this new report by our friends at the Capitol Research Center to guide you through the perpetrators of the Russiagate hoax.
This new and comprehensive profile at InfluenceWatch lays out the gory history of the Trump-Russia Collusion Claims (“Russiagate”) and why the world’s only superpower credulously fell for it.
As Ken Braun explained, a major objective of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the subsequent probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was to find out “whether individual(s) associated with the Trump campaign are witting of and/or coordinating activities with the Government of Russia.”
The answer was a definitive “no” concluded Ken Braun. Four years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars failed to uncover even a single person who collaborated with the Russian government while working on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. However, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General did discover “serious performance failures” by federal law enforcement in the conduct of the investigation.
A sample of the information available in the InfluenceWatch profile is Braun’s ranking of the nastiest hoax promoters. This information is also being posted in a CRC archive of the who’s who of Russiagate.
We will share two brief samples of the great material on the Russiagate hoaxers and urge CHQ readers to go to the complete report and keep it handy as the hoax is now starting to unwind.
First, Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine:
A contributor to both New York magazine and MSNBC, Jonathan Chait went all-in on the most outlandish of the salacious collusion rumors. One debunked fairy tale dished up in the discredited Steele dossier was a puerile bit of bad pornography too tawdry for most respectable journalists to touch. But not Chait, who thought it made for a clever headline: “I’m a Peeliever and You Should Be, Too.”
A July 2018 issue of New York featured a long Chait essay fleshing out an unhinged espionage-collusion conspiracy theory that held that Russian agents had been cultivating and compromising Donald Trump as an asset since 1987. MSNBC gave Chait a platform to repeat the claim to a TV audience.
Chait stuck to the low road on social media as well, such as a February 2018 Twitter outburst wherein he implied Trump campaign aide Carter Page had “passed documents to Russian spies.” The DOJ inspector general would later reveal that far from a Russian asset, Page had been a willing source for the CIA, helping the agency obtain information about the Russians.
Nobody given a modestly respectable public platform could boast of a hoax game as comprehensive and credulous as Chait, reported Mr. Braun.
Second, Rick Wilson, Lincoln Project
Like Hillary Clinton, wrote Mr. Braun, political consultant Rick Wilson provided a unique contribution to the hoax promotion breed. In his case, he came at it from a supposedly Republican perspective.
He is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a super PAC cooked up from a fusion of disgruntled Republican consultants and left-wing money with the aim of electing Democratic nominee Joe Biden president. On the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, the Lincoln Project Twitter account posted a message to the delegates: “We go low so you don’t have to. #DNC2020.” The message appears to have been removed within days, perhaps because the low-going consultants claiming Honest Abe’s reputation belatedly recognized that nasty political hackery is not what put him on Mt. Rushmore.
But when promoting the collusion hoax, Rick Wilson pushed himself even lower. In a December 2019 Rolling Stone commentary, Wilson said President Trump had been guilty of “grotesque subservience to the Russian leader who helped elect him” and referred to Trump allies and supporters as “traitors” repeating “Kremlin-approved propaganda messages.” The Republican turncoat Wilson wrote in a November 2017 screed for the Daily Beast that former Trump advisor Carter Page “didn’t just talk the pro-Russian talk; he threw himself into the eager arms of SVR [Russian intelligence] operatives.”
The inspector general later found that Page threw himself into the eager arms of American intelligence operatives, who sought his advice on what Russian intelligence was up to. An FBI lawyer who hid that truth found himself on the business end of a federal prosecution. Good thing for Wilson he is just a hack with a hoax.
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