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    ...Putin certainly had come to believe that the old Soviet system had failed and needed to be replaced by a new Russia based on different principles. His commitment to this goal was not incompatible with either his previous service with the KGB or his legal education and self-identification as a “gosudarstvennik.” In fact, as the years would show, he was fully capable of taking on larger roles. It must be said that, faced with the low-trust environment that is Moscow, Putin has chosen to rely on fellow Petersburgers and, increasingly, former members of the KGB, many identifying simultaneously as both.

    Nothing in Vladimir Putin’s personality or behavior in St. Petersburg marked him in the minds of those who knew him as destined to rise to the pinnacle of power in the Russian Foundation. He was respected by many, no doubt feared by some, but his fortunes took a serious spill in 1996 when he ran the campaign for Mayor Sobchak’s reelection. The mayor was challenged by another one of his deputies, Vladimir Yakovlev, and made some fatal mistakes during the campaign, culminating in a disastrous televised debate. When Sobchak went down to defeat, Putin was left without a position. He managed very narrowly to gain a billet with the Kremlin’s office that dealt with state property, which was mostly being sold off at that point to raise revenue. The rest, one might say, is history, but is certainly beyond my time in St. Petersburg, which ended in 1997.

    Putin did not seek the presidency of Russia. He was visibly surprised to be appointed prime minister in the summer of 1999, and reportedly told Yeltsin he did not feel ready to shoulder the responsibility. His immediate challenge was to wage what came to be known as the Second Chechen War, the first having led to an uneasy standoff. Putin waged the war with ferocity and the effort was a success, but it was preceded by one of the many episodes that have been interpreted in the West as indicating that Putin was little more than a criminal. That was the bombing of two residential apartment buildings in Moscow, which was blamed on the Chechens and inflamed Russian public opinion against them. Western observers in the main seized on the idea that Putin had sacrificed the lives of the apartment dwellers to radicalize public opinion. I came to a different conclusion, which I put into a memorandum to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott.

    The Chechens, Sunni Muslims with a history of fiercely resisting the Russians in the 19th century, under their leader, the Imam Shamil (actually a Dagestani), as the Russian Empire subjugated the Caucasus, were a disturbing presence in European Russia in the 1990s. Chechens ran the Mercedes dealership in Petersburg, where lots of stolen vehicles changed hands, but very few if any new ones. During the first war, they targeted me personally, on account of the position taken by the U.S. Government in support of Russia’s territorial integrity. Right after the bombings of the two apartment buildings, our Defense Attache in Moscow reported that the inhabitants of at least one of the buildings were dependents of military personnel. It seemed to me then, as now, that Vladimir Putin would never had sanctioned the sacrifice of those innocent people in pursuit of political goals. But, in my view, there was one person who just might have, and happened to have a connection to the North Caucasus: Boris Berezovsky, who was then serving as National Security Advisor to Yeltsin, or “the Family,” as Yeltsin’s wife and daughter and son-in-law were then known.

    The Family was concerned by the prospect of parliamentary elections scheduled for December of 1999, and by the potent alliance recently forged between Yevgeniy Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov. They were searching for a way of postponing the elections, and it had occurred to them that the Chechen war and attendant terrorism could provide justification for such a move. In the end, Putin’s campaign proved successful; the Chechens were brought to heel, and Yeltsin abdicated in favor of Putin on New Year’s Eve. We may never know for certain how the apartment bombings (and some strange as yet unexplained KGB activities in another building in Ryazan) came to pass, but I am convinced Putin was not the prime mover.

    In his first term, Putin made a number of gestures to the United States that were friendly: he closed the Soviet-era intelligence-collecting station in Lourdes, Cuba; he shut down the naval facility at Cam Ranh Bay; he permitted the U.S. to operate a Northern supply route through Russian territory to resupply our forces in Afghanistan; and, although he frankly opposed the U.S. “war of choice” in Iraq, he assured President Bush that Russia would not seek to undermine the U.S. effort there. French President Chirac and German Chancellor Schroeder also opposed the U.S. action, but were less frank about it, angering Bush and prompting Condoleezza Rice to say, “punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia.” As the disaster in Iraq deepened, Russian dissatisfaction with the American actions grew; in particular, there was an incident in which a convoy of Russian diplomats exiting Baghdad was inexplicably fired upon by Allied forces, causing several injuries.

    It is common to ascribe America’s growing difficulties with Russia to President Putin personally, but the sources of Russian discontent predate Putin’s presidency. In particular, the bombing of Belgrade on Orthodox Easter Sunday of 1999, which caused then-Foreign Minister Primakov to do a U-turn while over the Atlantic on his way to Washington was taken as a hostile act, in addition to which it was an out-of-area action by the NATO alliance unsanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. The course of events in the former Yugoslavia had some very dangerous moments that could have led to war, and some more encouraging ones, but the end game, in which Serbia was bereft of its ancient Kosovo province, was anathema to Moscow, which has never recognized its legality.

    Perhaps the biggest source of Russian disappointment, even anger, has been NATO’s relentless expansion right up to Russia’s borders. Russians are convinced that President Bush, Secretary Baker and other Western leaders, Chancellor Kohl in particular, in their bid to persuade Gorbachev not to stand in the way of German Reunification, had promised that NATO would not extend its activities “one inch to the East” if Moscow agreed to allow a united Germany to remain in the Alliance. Now there has been a lively debate about this alleged promise, with partisans of NATO saying that there was no such promise, and if there was, it was never written down and anyway it was never officially a consensus of all NATO members. Former President Gorbachev has confirmed that it was never written down, but the historical record is clear: the West made what amounts to a gentlemen’s agreement not to expand, and then went ahead and did so, in two rounds (1999 and 2004).

    Giving membership to the Baltic States, which potentially put NATO forces only eighty miles from St Petersburg, with its memories of the Siege, was risky enough (although understandable; we had never recognized them as part of the USSR), but at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in 2008, the Americans proposed that Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, be brought in. Putin was in Bucharest for a side meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, and inveighed against the move, which was eventually checked by Germany and France, although it continued to be spoken about as an aspiration: “Georgia and Ukraine will become members.” It is still part of the NATO litany, although nearly everyone realizes that “now is not the time.” I will not go into the details here, but the reckless expansion of NATO to the East was very much a factor, not the only one, of course, in both the four-day war with Georgia and the conflict with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.

    I could go on at some length describing the many things that have driven Russia into its present defensive crouch against the West and especially the United States. Our wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya), which have seriously destabilized that region; the “color revolutions” (Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan); and, perhaps most devastating of all, the full-court press to brand Russia as an aggressor nation not included in the new European security architecture – all these things are resented by Russians. And we cannot say we were not warned. George Kennan F. wrote in 1996 that expanding NATO was a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” And Vladimir Putin, in his much-mocked intervention at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, gave voice to Russia’s growing concerns about Washington’s imperious ways.

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    One issue on which President Putin may well have exercised outsized influence, it seems to me, was in reacting to the events in Ukraine, right on the heels of the Sochi Olympics, which Putin had planned as a spectacle confirming Russia’s return to the world stage. Another may have been Georgia, especially the decision to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Putin may have seen as “pay-back” for the dismemberment of Serbia. Of course, all of these (and Crimea) are in the so-called – and so-imagined – Near Abroad, where Moscow claims special rights. While the West disputes this claim, it is not so different from France’s assertion of special responsibility for countries that were previously part of her colonial empire.

    Putin's rise to preeminent power in the Kremlin was a reversion to the norm for Russia, not a step backward on the inevitable trajectory that we in the West had imagined for her. What we need to do now is pull our collective selves together in the Euro-Atlantic community, think afresh about the challenge Russia's alienation from us poses, and set about mending the damage, starting most urgently with Ukraine.

    The election of Volodymyr Zelensky may provide an opening. Almost by definition, given the situation in Washington (and London), European leaders will have to take the lead on this. French president Emmanuel Macron has already staked out a role. We should let them do their best. We must reckon with the fact that Crimea will not return to Ukrainian jurisdiction, and that Ukraine's joining NATO would cross a Russian red line. Amb. Steve Pifer's formula, “not now but not never,” may provide a face-saving way out for all sides. Ukrainians and Russians themselves, with moral support from the rest of us, will have to figure out exactly what they can agree on concerning the Donbass. Is some form of federalization such an improper concept for a country so enormously diverse as Ukraine? It works for Canada, with its historically deep division, and for the United States and the Russian Federation. It ought at least to be considered.

    As for Crimea, we should remember that the process of reaching the “Big Agreement” regarding Crimea was very lengthy and difficult, and it would have expired this year had it not been renounced by Poroshenko. Ukraine leased naval facilities to Russia in return for concessions involving gas; those conditions no longer exist. Ukraine may have the upper hand in terms of international legalities and diplomatic support, but Russia holds the power cards, and physical possession is at least nine-tenths of international law. Moscow will simply refuse to discuss the question of Crimea’s return to Ukrainian jurisdiction, but Russia needs cooperation on such issues as transportation and securing the water supply, while Ukraine needs cooperation on navigation and other matters; thus there is something to talk about. First of all, and most urgently, the armed conflict in the Donbass needs to be ended. Without a plausible diplomatic way forward, it will be hard, if not impossible, to stop the fighting. Even with such a diplomatic process in view, it may still be unattainable. Ukraine and Russia may be estranged for a generation or more.

    In my view, Putin is no demon and that we may have misunderstood him. That does not make him an angel. But imputing evil to Russia – or to any country – on the basis of its leader’s imagined personality is a dangerous game. Russia inherited a formidable military and diplomatic elite, has a well-developed sense of her history and role in the world, and, aside from the street theater that so captivates Western audiences, has real politics and public opinion that must be taken seriously by any leader. Imagining, as some do, that Putin is “the problem,” and that when he leaves the scene all will be well, is a naïve delusion. As the leading Russia scholar and diplomat Tom Graham once put it, “we don’t have a Putin problem, we have a Russia problem.” And it is a problem in part of our own making -- but blaming Putin is so much easier than reckoning with our own shortcomings.

    John Evans was U.S. Consul General in St. Petersburg from 1994 to 1997.
    https://nationalinterest.org/feature...391?page=0%2C2

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  4. The Following User Says Thank You to Minister of Truth For This Post:

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    Quote Originally Posted by Threedee View Post
    Putin makes a pretty mean cocktail, so, I wouldn't say that he is misunderstood or "no demon."
    I heard he rides a Siberian tiger bareback

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    Trump is easily manipulated by appealing to his narcissism .. That's how Zelensky messaged him on the phone call
    to not only get the military aid -but set up yet MORE JAVELIN ( wireless TOW anti-armor shoulder fired missiles).

    Trump craves attention, and he gets it from Erdogan as well, so he is fine with Turkey. ex.

    Damn Shame Putin never got more then a quick sit down with Trump - hopefully Trump invites him to the
    G7 next year. Putin then finally gets a shot to massage Trump

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    If you want to understand Russia today and Putin read stuff below. Masha Gessen's book just below is excellent. Trump kowtows to Putin not for who Putin is but for what he hopes Putin can do for him in real-estate. Trump has been playing president but hoping to grow his wealth. Insecure, weak men never have enough. Trump sees 2020 as a way to benefit his investment properties, he knows term limits exist and realizes should he win he can do even more damage to American democracy, but so long as he benefits, he will play his base with words and constant finger pointing.

    'The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin'

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...without-a-face

    'The Secret Source Of Putin’S Evil'

    http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...of-putins-evil

    'How to Understand Putin’s Russia'

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/lists...-putins-russia

    'Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump' Michael Isikoff, David Corn

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...ssian-roulette

    'How Trump walked into Putin’s web – podcast' and read too.

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/aud...ns-web-podcast

    Read here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...utins-web-luke

    Putin will help Trump in 2020 because of his G& comments.

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/0...-help-in-2020/
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    Former President Gorbachev has confirmed that it was never written down, but the historical record is clear: the West made what amounts to a gentlemen’s agreement not to expand, and then went ahead and did so, in two rounds (1999 and 2004).
    So there was never, ever, under any circumstances a legal, enforceable, or public agreement.

    I can fully understand the Russian motive for wanting a security buffer zone. It is entirely obvious considering the historical and geographic context. No nation has been as repeatedly invaded and occupied as has Russia.

    On the other hand, on balance NATO has been a positive force in the world, and on balance only good things have come out of the existence of NATO. It is the most successful political and military alliance in the world, and has played an outsized share in the stability of the Europe and world since WW2.

    No one put a gun to the head of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, et al and forced them to join NATO. There are sovereign countries that have every right to ask to join NATO of their own free will.

    I am not sure that the eastward expansion of NATO was neccessary or needed. But I am going to come down on the side of the United States and liberal western Democracy every time. The fact that Putin doesn't like the eastward expansion of NATO does not, in an of itself, make me feel obliged to cater to his whims and desires.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    So there was never, ever, under any circumstances a legal, enforceable, or public agreement.

    I can fully understand the Russian motive for wanting a security buffer zone. It is entirely obvious considering the historical and geographic context. No nation has been as repeatedly invaded and occupied as has Russia.

    On the other hand, on balance NATO has been a positive force in the world, and on balance only good things have come out of the existence of NATO. It is the most successful political and military alliance in the world, and has played an outsized share in the stability of the Europe and world since WW2.

    No one put a gun to the head of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, et al and forced them to join NATO. There are sovereign countries that have every right to ask to join NATO of their own free will.

    I am not sure that the eastward expansion of NATO was neccessary or needed. But I am going to come down on the side of the United States and liberal western Democracy every time. The fact that Putin doesn't like the eastward expansion of NATO does not, in an of itself, make me feel obliged to cater to his whims and desires.
    It's been a disaster. It revived the cold war. Cold War 2.0 It was not needed.
    The thought of Putin going after the Baltics is 100% laughable horse shit.

    No it "wasn't written down" - how could you write something down with Gorbachev when the Soviet Union
    was falling apart? It would have no legal meaning

    Beside it was the understanding that we would not expand beyond Germany that made it palpable to Gorbachev
    Geopolitics is much more powerful then a written agreement
    On the other hand, on balance NATO has been a positive force in the world, and on balance only good things have come out of the existence of NATO.
    NATO as designed as a western European security pack was a good thing.
    NATO expansion in to the Black Sea is simply provocative,and risks us getting into the Russian backdoor wars.

    we are already creating a proxy war with Putin by heavily arming the UK militias in Donbass

    Can you imagine if Putin did the same to the west? we went rightfully nuts when the USSR was in Cuba -
    why it is different for us?

    No good can come from a military alliance that impinges on Russian sphere.

    We already saw the damage McCain and Vicky Nuland did at the Euromaidan -
    we are now directly defending Ukraine and driving Putin and China closer and closer together.

    "Nixon's China card" worked well for 40 years until Obama pissed it away, and Trump was unable to repair US/Russian relations because of the Russian hoax by the Deep State

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    Quote Originally Posted by anatta View Post
    It's been a disaster. It revived the cold war. Cold War 2.0 It was not needed.
    The thought of Putin going after the Baltics is 100% laughable horse shit.

    No it "wasn't written down" - how could you write something down with Gorbachev when the Soviet Union
    was falling apart? It would have no legal meaning

    Beside it was the understanding that we would not expand beyond Germany that made it palpable to Gorbachev
    Geopolitics is much more powerful then a written agreement
    NATO as designed as a western European security pack was a good thing.
    NATO expansion in to the Black Sea is simply provocative,and risks us getting into the Russian backdoor wars.

    we are already creating a proxy war with Putin by heavily arming the UK militias in Donbass

    Can you imagine if Putin did the same to the west? we went rightfully nuts when the USSR was in Cuba -
    why it is different for us?

    No good can come from a military alliance that impinges on Russian sphere.

    We already saw the damage McCain and Vicky Nuland did at the Euromaidan -
    we are now directly defending Ukraine and driving Putin and China closer and closer together.

    "Nixon's China card" worked well for 40 years until Obama pissed it away, and Trump was unable to repair US/Russian relations because of the Russian hoax by the Deep State

    You cheered Trump on as he pulled out of an internationally recognized formal nuclear agreement with Iran. An agreement that had support and consesus from USA, Europe and Russia .

    You have zero standing to demand USA honor a 30 year old alleged gentleman's agreement that no one has ever seen and is not in the public domain

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    You cheered Trump on as he pulled out of an internationally recognized formal nuclear agreement with Iran. An agreement that had support and consesus from USA, Europe and Russia .

    You have zero standing to demand USA honor a 30 year old alleged gentleman's agreement that no one has ever seen and is not in the public domain
    The gentlemen's agreement was our word -which doesn't carry international weight when we lie act like that.
    Just like we lied to Libya . It makes dealing with NK even more impossible (ex.)

    NATO expansion has been the demon driving bloated Defense Bugets, dangerous naval flyby of warships,
    seizing Ukraine ship at the Kerch Strait for not notifying Russian (protocol) IMF nukes across Europe and the entire sad ever more militarized "balance of power" madness

    In short NATO expansion has maded Putin dangerous when he lashes out like Crimea.
    He did so only because the Sevastopol access was threatened once again by a Uk president.

    I can give you the particulars if need be, - but the point is our "zero sum" metric to Russia makes us both losers .

    The money and the danger we put ourselves thru by prosecuting Cold War 2.0 is by far the biggest mistake of this century
    We have no real diplomatic contacts, and we are abandoning nuclear proliferation tteaty like the INF in Europe
    Kissinger: “demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.”
    ________

    Cold War 2.0 Russia hysteria is turning people’s brains into guacamole.
    We’ve got to find a way to snap out of the propaganda trance
    ________

    Buddha: "trust the person who seeks truth and mistrust the person who claims he has found it "
    1.2.3.4.5.6.7. All Good Children Go to Heaven

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    Putin is another insecure small man, they are often the same and because they are insecure more likely to do evil on this world. Poisoning your critics is hardly the sign of greatness.

    See my post above if you want to understand Putin.
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    Quote Originally Posted by midcan5 View Post
    Putin is another insecure small man, they are often the same and because they are insecure more likely to do evil on this world. Poisoning your critics is hardly the sign of greatness.

    See my post above if you want to understand Putin.
    it's a mistake to conflate Putin's electoral shenanigans with his policies of Russian nationalism

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    'Russia Rising, Hunting for Internet Trolls'

    https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts...1-51yElAxnp98/
    Wanna make America great, buy American owned, made in the USA, we do. AF Veteran, INFJ-A, I am not PC.

    "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." Voltaire

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    ^
    https://www.realclearinvestigations....ng_claims.html
    The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.

    The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder
    Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.

    There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
    Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.

    U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves.

    Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party.
    This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.

    Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.

    Mueller’s report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a private Russian entity" known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

    Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations,
    Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.


    John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate.
    Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump.

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