'The Media vs. Donald J. Trump: the Russia Hoax'
Steven F. Hayward, The Pipeline
An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "The Media vs. Donald J. Trump: the Russia Hoax," by Steven F. Hayward.
We now know that the “Russian collusion” narrative was cooked up as an opposition research project against Trump initially by the conservative Washington Free Beacon, but soon acquired and propelled by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the middle of 2016, after it became apparent that Trump had a slim but realistic chance of winning the election. The irony of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats mounting accusations of collusion with Russia is that there is scarcely anyone in American history with a deeper record of corrupt collusion with Russian interests than the Clintons.
As President Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton famously attempted to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations that had soured during the George W. Bush administration. Behind the scenes, Bill Clinton was assisting Rosatom, a Russian energy company, to acquire complete ownership of Uranium One, a Canadian mining company, that would make Russia a dominant supplier of the world’s uranium supply. (The acquisition required U.S. government approval because some of the company’s mines are in the United States.) Bill Clinton collected $500,000 for a single speech in Russia in 2010, his fee paid by an investment bank that was financing the Rosatom acquisition, and during which visit he met privately with Vladimir Putin.
During these years the Clinton Foundation was scooping up huge overseas contributions (the largest country of origin was Ukraine), all the while denying that Secretary of State Clinton exerted any influence over Russian transactions involving her husband and his foundation. Hillary said she had adopted strict conflict-of-interest rules, but everyone over the age of six understood the value to foreign donors of sending cash to the former president and possible next president. The simple proof of this is the complete collapse of foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation immediately upon the defeat of Hillary in November 2016. The foundation still has more than $300 million in assets.
You really can't hate them enough.
Following the Rosatom acquisition of Uranium One, the chairman of the Canadian-no-longer subsidiary sent a contribution of $2 million and $350,000 to the Clinton Foundation that the Clintons “forgot” to disclose. Other investors in Uranium One contributed a further $8.5 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010. To their credit, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported these dodgy dealings, though the reporting behind these stories was not done by Times or Post staff, but by independent investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, who gladly supplied the Times and the Post.
Naturally there was blowback in the newsrooms over these stories, and there was little to no follow up by the mainstream media. It is little wonder that Hillary Clinton thought she could easily get away with having an insecure private email server, and with a preposterous slander of her 2016 rival, Donald Trump. In any case, given that the Clintons had serious problems with their own Russia connections, it was perhaps a simple matter of what psychologists call “projection” to gin up an attack on Trump based on nothing more than Trump’s campaign statements expressing criticism of NATO and optimism about achieving the better relationship with Russia that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration had promised and failed to deliver. In fact, the Clinton campaign’s own internal polling showed that her dubious ties to Russia were one of her largest vulnerabilities with voters.
Is it merely a coincidence that the principal agents in the Trump collusion hoax were former corporate media journalists? If there is a “patient zero” of the Trump collusion hoax (aside from Hillary), it is Glenn Simpson, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who founded Fusion GPS in 2011. Fusion GPS is described as a “strategic intelligence” consultancy based in Washington, D.C., and is the kind of enterprise that can only exist in Washington. Like many other such firms, its “assets” are the personal contacts of its principals (mostly other former reporters like Simpson), engaged in the political version of private investigative work (most frequently known as “opposition research”). Fusion GPS’s first target in 2012 was Mitt Romney, but other targets the company was hired to damage included anti-abortion activists and foreign business figures implicated in Russian money-laundering schemes.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign got its money’s worth, though peddling a preposterous claim of Russian collusion with Trump was pushing on an open door in most newsrooms...
Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, and lecturer at Berkeley Law. His most recent book is "M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom." He writes daily at Powerlineblog.com.
