Though the new sanctions law which has just been passed by the US Congress will have little actual impact on the Russian economy, no one should be in any doubt about Russian anger on this issue.
That anger has expressed itself in a number of ways.
Firstly there are the stiff comments from President Putin himself made on the eve of the passage of the new sanctions law
Back in May, shortly after President Trump sacked FBI Director Comey, I wrote an article for The Duran in which I said that President Trump’s own erratic behaviour is a major reason for his problems.
Since then the President has made some wise decisions – such as getting himself some good lawyers and an accomplished Communications Director – but he persists in undermining them with other bad and extremely unwise ones.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (“VIPS”), one of the most formidable commentary groups in the world, which includes such heavyweights as William Binney, the former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, the former top CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and many others, has published another in its highly enlightening series of public memoranda addressed to the President of the United States.
In back to back tweets earlier today, US president Donald Trump signaled a lack of confidence in his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who until now was considered one of his staunchest allies.
The senator from Alabama was the first US senator to endorse Trump, and publicly supported the president throughout the unconventional campaign that brought him to the White House.
Jared Kushner, US President Trump’s son-in-law, has published a lengthy and detailed statement setting out his contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 Presidential election.
The statement is published immediately prior to Kushner giving evidence to a closed session of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is one of the Congressional committees carrying out the multiple investigations into the Russiagate scandal.
In my lengthy discussion of the new anti-Russian sanctions package, which the US House of Representatives is expected to vote for tomorrow, I said that the EU would be furious at being presented by the US with a sanctions fait accompli introduced without any prior consultation, and which the EU would undoubtedly see as at least in part an attempt by certain groups in the US to force the EU to buy expensive US liquified natural gas in preference to cheap Russian pipeline gas.
The story of the meeting between Donald Trump Junior and the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on 9th June 2016 has now taken a further twist with the disclosure that the lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin accompanied Veselnitskaya to the meeting.
Some sections of the media are trying to find something sinister in Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting. He is being called a ‘lobbyist’ working on behalf of Russian interests to oppose the Magnitsky Act and a “former Soviet counter-intelligence official”.
Akhmetshin is a US citizen.
The Hill has reported that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was given special clearance to stay in the United States by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice. That means that unlike every other Russian who has to go through an incredibly complicated and expensive visa process, Natalia Veselnitskaya was simply allowed to stay in the US without a valid visa or a diplomatic passport.
Sergey Lavrov was speaking in Belgium when he was asked about the latest ring to be added to the American political circus involving Russia. This time it’s all about Donald Trump Jr. speaking with a Russian lawyer who does not now, nor has she ever had any connections to any government.
Lavrov stated,
A consistent pattern of the Russiagate affair is that the New York Times or the Washington Post “expose” what is presented as some dark and terrible twist to the story of Donald Trump’s connections to Russia.
The rest of the news media and the Democrats in Congress following up by greeting the “revelation” with a mixture of enthusiasm and feigned horror.
The days and weeks pass, it turns out that nothing of importance has been “exposed” and that the “revelation” is not so dark or terrible after all.
At that point it quietly drops out of the news.
