Volume 5 of the Senate Committee on so-called Russian interference in the American electoral process was released this week. Running to a whopping 966 pages, it can be downloaded from the official website. One person who is very happy with this document is Glenn Kirschner, who says it proves collusion and that Donald Trump is an illegitimate president.
Check out this article to see what planet this former senior prosecutor is living on. Volume 5 proves no such thing, but before we take a peek into it, let’s take a brief look at the earlier volumes.
Report 1 runs to 67 pages. A summary of the findings on page 3 says:
“The Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level”.
And
“The Committee has seen no evidence that any votes were changed or that any voting machines were manipulated”.
The Department of Homeland Security is quoted at page 10: “numerous actors are regularly targeting election infrastructure, likely for different purposes, including to cause disruptive effects, steal sensitive data, and undermine confidence in the election.”
(Citations omitted in the above).
The report makes it clear there are vulnerabilities in the election management system.
Report 2 includes discussion of the Internet Research Agency, in particular its purchase of some 3,400 advertisements on Facebook and Instagram for around $100,000, not a vast sum in this field. At page 44, the reader is told: “Roughly 25 percent of the ads were never seen by anyone”.
Comedian Lee Camp suggests this organisation is a troll farm. If rather than that, it is the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB, the modern James Bond is unlikely to be shaken or stirred. Some of this is really puerile stuff.
Volume 3 is said to be the US Government’s response to these purported Russian activities. Page 5 alludes to the Russian cyber penetration (hacking) of the Democratic National Committee. Leaving aside the fact that the DNC isn’t part of the US Government, the evidence that it was Russia who hacked this body is non-existent, indeed people who know about these things, in particular William Binney, believe on credible evidence the DNC wasn’t hacked, rather the information was transmitted to Wikileaks by the late Seth Rich. We need not hypothesise here about his as yet unsolved murder, we need only reiterate that the evidence points not to Russia but elsewhere.
At page 25, the Obama Administration is said to have given the Russian Government at least five direct warnings, two from the President himself to Vladimir Putin. Susan Rice and John Brennan engaged directly with Russian officials as well, yet any time someone within the orbit of Donald Trump speaks to a Russian we are led to believe something sinister is afoot.
Volume 4 runs to 158 pages and is said to be a review. Much of it is redacted, so to Volume 5. There is a section devoted to Paul Manafort, and many of the names with which we have become associated are also mentioned including Joseph Mifsud, who gets over two hundred mentions, but in the context of his being a Russian operative instead of a Western spy of some sort. Stefan Halper isn’t mentioned at all. Carter Page is mentioned nearly fifty times, often in somewhat oblique terms, and the impression is given that he was some sort of Russian asset.
Christopher Steele gets hundreds of mentions on account of his fake dossier. All the information in this dossier has now been discredited, well, Donald Trump’s middle name is John, but apart from that…This begs the question why is it mentioned at all except en passant? At page 847 (internal document number) we find some interesting admissions:
The Steele dossier was given “a veneer of credibility by lax procedures and layered misunderstandings”.
And most interestingly, the DNC and the Clinton Campaign “worked through a law firm, Perkins Coie, to obtain opposition research, in part to preserve attorney-client privilege over the information”.
Translation: Hillary Clinton paid for this piece of dirt to be manufactured but realised if her name was attached to it, it wouldn’t be taken seriously. So she and her co-conspirators laundered the fee for this piece of dirt through a law firm to give it the aforementioned veneer of credibility, from former MI6 agent Steele via Fusion GPS.
Leaving aside all this talk about collusion, no one but no one has yet explained how Vladimir Putin or anyone else in Russia was able to influence millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton. No one has been able to explain the significance of Facebook advertisements or any other disinformation that has been published anywhere else on-line. This is the era of fake news, there are all manner of agencies and individuals churning out propaganda, lies, and at times total rubbish for the public to swallow, and as click bait. Heck, we have only to look at the mainstream media that insists on referring to rioters as peaceful protesters. At least three Federal officers were blinded by lasers in Portland, Oregon. People have been murdered. By peaceful protesters?
However Glenn Kirschner and the mainstream media spin it, the reality is that this Russian collusion garbage has been used to smear Trump for the entirety of his Presidency, but justice is coming, not though the kind of justice Kirschner and his fellow travellers envisage.
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