The New York Times published an article with the headline “Vladimir Putin Hints at Russian Role in Hacking of U.S. Election”. This totally false headline was replaced by a misleading headline reading, “Putin Hints at U.S. Election Meddling by ‘Patriotically Minded’ Russians”. As of 18.53 Moscow time on 1 June 2017 this second headline is currently on the New York Times website.
Oscar Wilde once described the blood-sport of foxhunting as “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”. Increasingly, post-2016 election US politics is looking like the unshameable in pursuit of the illogical.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has given an interview with France’s Le Figaro in which he said that Russia had “no special expectations” about the election of US President Donald Trump.
Putin then described how a US President can often have his ideals totally crushed by what is known as the deep state upon entering the White House. Putin likened Trump’s inability to implement his desire to change US policy towards Russia with Barack Obama’s failure to shut down the still operational Guantanamo Bay prison camp in spite of campaigning on the pledge to shut it down.
Earlier this month I said in an article for The Duran that President Trump’s erratic behaviour has played a significant role in creating many of the problems he has suffered as a result of the Russiagate scandal.
After a G7 summit in Italy which like most before it was rather useless, Angela Merkel has gone back to Germany to address her political party, the CDU, where she delivered the news that this useless summit was rather more painful for her than its predecessors.
Apparently the chasm in both style and substance between European leaders lead by Merkel and Donald Trump is as wide as was expected.
She told her audience,
“The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I’ve experienced that in the last few days”.
The only reason the Russiagate farce is still remotely interesting is because of the hypocrisy and self-effacing attitude the liberal American elite in the Democratic party and mainstream media have shown themselves to have during the entire saga which they refuse to let die.
Yesterday I wrote that having failed to find any evidence against any of the other people involved in the Russiagate inquiry, the investigators have turned on Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Today predictably there is the leak intended to cause him harm from our old friends, ‘three anonymous current and former officials’.
Last week reports appeared in the US media that the FBI had discovered “a person of interest” in the Russiagate probe, who was still unlike all the other people being investigated a member of Donald Trump’s team. This week that person has been identified and it turns out to be Donald Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner.
A short while ago I wrote that President Trump by his own erratic behaviour had made his position over the course of the Russiagate scandal far worse than it needed to be, so that whilst FBI Director Comey’s sacking was fully justified, and even though not a single fact has come to light that implicates the Trump campaign or the President himself in any collusion with Russia, the President’s actions have – almost certainly mistakenly – convinced many people he is hiding something.
A few weeks ago, shortly after US President Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in the Oval Office of the White House, the Washington Post ran a story about how Trump supposedly leaked classified intelligence about an ISIS plot to use laptops to bring down civilian airplanes during this meeting to Lavrov.
Supposedly the leak compromised intelligence information provided to the US by a third country, potentially damaging the US’s intelligence relationship with that country.
