by Gordon M. Hahn
- This is part 1 of a 3-part working paper
Introduction
My first book – Russia’s Revolution from Above: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime (2002) – argued that the fall of the reforming Soviet Communist Party regime in 1991 was the consequence of a “revolution from above” (RFA) and neither a revolution from below led by societal elements seeking to establish a new form of rule (regime), nor a pacted transition to a new form of rule negotiated between regime and opposition elements, nor an imposed transition to a new regime led by the old regime’ ruling groups and implemented through what is to be the old regime’s institutions. The Soviet/Russian was led by civilian Party-state elements, not the military as had been the case in many prior RFAs. I defined RFA as the illegal or extralegal takeover of some or all state institutions of political and/or economic power by high- and/or middle-ranking officials and bureaucrats (civilian and/or military) in order to overthrow the economic, social, and political systems of the ancien regime with little or no participation by societal elements.”[1]
This article presents a relatively detailed comparison of the Soviet-Russian RFA and what I regard as a nascent but not slow-moving RFA taking place before our very eyes in America today. I demonstrate that the present American administration is accelerating a revolution from above that began no later than the last year of the Barack Hussein Obama administration. Obama and his Democratic Party (DP) minions in both party and state apparati began to use state bodies such as the organs of coercion and law enforcement (FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, and the military) to overturn hundreds of years of rule of law government, free and fair presidential elections, and thus constitutional republican (representative as opposed to direc democracy) rule. In particular, it used state organs in order to carry out illegal measures and prevent the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump, from winning the 2016 presidential election, most notably by issuing completely fabricated charges of Trump’s supposed collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Further Defining Revolution from Above
If revolutions from above are “the illegal or extralegal takeover of some or all state institutions of political and/or economic power by high- and/or middle-ranking officials and bureaucrats in order to overthrow the economic, social, and political systems of the ancien regime with little or no participation by societal elements,” what are the specific mechanisms used in establishing a new form of rule and what is illegal or unconstitutional about that process?
It needs to be stressed that RFAs are RFAs regardless of their regime vector. In other words, a revolution from above can be undertaken in an attempt to replace republican rule with an auhoritarian or totalitarian regime or vice versa. Any RFA can also get stuck in between regime types and settle into a hybrid form of rule that incorporates both republican and authoritarian/totalitarian methods of rule.
The model of ‘revolution from above’ emphasizes the role of elite autonomy from civil society, the domination of the process of regime transformation by many of the former regime system’s governing institutions and personnel, and the nature of the elites that dominate the process. All stages of the revolution are carried out using the newly won state bodies with little or no mass participation or violence. Revolutionaries FA from inside the state deploy the institutions of the old regime in order to create new institutions, laws, and practices for a new regime antithetical to the form of rule. Revolutionaries use the old institutions to transform the regime and initially may do so without violating the old system’s laws and constitutions, but by definition at some point they will act in ways that violate the laws and/or constitution of the previous regime’s political system. The nature of the old elite making the revolution may be little committed to and/or schooled in the institutional design and function as well as the methods of political practice of the new regime type and can act as a drag on the transofmrational process and even ultimately confound a complete transformation, producing a hybrid regime that may or may evolve over a long duration and arrive at the destination to which the RFA was intended or revert to the old regime type.
What are some examples of RFA? Most RFAs have been led by elements in the military against civilian-led governments. Kemal Ataturk’s RFA against the crumbling Ottoman theocratic authoritarian regime in favor of a secularizing republican regime and the Japanese Meiji revolt in the early 20th century are two classic examples. The replacement of monarchical autocracies by Arab nationalist and quasi-socialist Baathist and other forms of non-monarchical rule organized by military leaders and the army with civilian elements typify Nasser’s RFA in Egypt, the Assads’ takeover in Syria, Sadaam Hussein’s seizure of power in Iraq, among others. The first such attempted RFA in modern times might be considered the failed 1825 Decembrist uprising against Russia’s Tsarist autocracy by aristocratic officers, who sought to establish a republican system and abolish serfdom.
As a comparative case for the ongoing attempt at RFA in the U.S., I will use the case with which I am most familiar – the Soviet/Russian RFA of 1990-1991 – recognizing that the vectors of the these respective RFAs run in opposite directions. The Soviet/Russian RFA achieved weak republicanism in the 1990s but got stuck in a hybrid state by the early 2000s began reverting to authoritarian rule, first soft but increasingly mid-range beginning from 2012. The nascent American case, aiming to replace republican rule with a form of authoritarian rule masked as democracy – something like the early Putin era’s ‘stealth authoritarianism’.
THE SOVIET/RUSSIAN CASE
The 1991 Soviet revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below, like Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, nor a negotiated transition to democracy, as occurred in Spain, Poland and Hungary. Nor was it like the violent Russian revolutions against tsarist autocracy or the Chinese communist revolution from below won by political movements organized in “councils of workers, peasants and soldiers” rooted in society and independent from the state. The essence of the Soviet/Russian regime transformation was a bureaucratic, state-led revolution from above by Russia-level officials against the Soviet Union’s central organs of Party-state power. Opportunistic members of the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and state apparatchiks defected from the reform camp led by Soviet President and CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to the radical reform then RFA camp led by Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected chairman of the new RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies in June 1990. These apparatchiks and their gaining control over Russia, the core administrative-territorial unit of the USSR, were instrumental in overthrowing the CPSU regime. Soviet Party bureaucrats and younger members of the Party-state, nomenklatura ruling class won control in mid-1990 over the core republic in the Soviet Union – the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) – and used the Russian republic’s bodies to carry out a creeping bureaucratic revolution against the central Soviet Party-state order. Neither bullets nor ballots were the key weapons of Russia’s revolutionaries from above. Their weapons were RSFSR state institutions, presidential decrees, administrative orders, and RSFSR Supreme Soviet and Congress of PD laws even more than the marches, strikes and bullets of revolution from below.
Power never made it to the streets as the partocratic state was dismantled. Instead it was picked up on its way down from the central USSR Party-state apparatus (and new institutions addended during perestrioka) by the RSFSR proto-state’s institutions as well as by its regional sub-divisions. While the RSFSR state apparatus was also weakening, it was perhaps not as weak as the Union state apparatus or state apparati in the midst of the kind of state collapse that usually accompanies revolutions from below. Instead, the lower-standing RSFSR state apparatus proactively seized or by default received state power formerly held by the dissolving partocratic Union state, being split along horizontal and vertical institutional lines as well as by political infighting up and down the Party and state apparati, most notably inside the apex of Union level Party apparatus. The RSFSR structures included and coopted the Union apparatus many of tis former bureaucrats, such as Boris Yeltsin, very few of whom were radical revolutionaries. The old and young nomenklatura retained power and redistributed property from above.
There was less of a need to regain control over the state and streets, usually totally riven in the more anarchic processes typical of revolutions from below, in which power and property are seized by individuals and organizations autonomous from and often virulently antagonistic to the old regime and state. Nothing could have been further from the truth with regard to Russia’s revolutionaries from above, who were from the Party-state and of the Party-state if no longer for the Party-state. Despite having come to reject the old Party-state structure and form of rule, the revolutionaries from above were limited and shaped by the old system, its ideology, and culture. This was even more true of the many who still wedded to interests, ideas, and ideologies rooted in the Party-state regime. This meant that there was no ideological deficit for organizing a thermidorian reaction and a reversion to authoritarianism. Reaction and revolution came to power almost simultaneously – hence the failed August 1991 Party-siloviki coup, the October myatezh or revolt, and ultimately the slow creeping revanche of authoritarianism, even if the old totalitarianism and structures were left by the wayside. The authoritarian thermidor was not inevitable but by dint of a powerful synergy between domestic influences (anti-Western security and non-republican culture and the ‘conservatism’ of the transformational mode of RFA) and foreign factors (NATO and EU expansion and Western color revolutionism or aggressive ‘democracy-promotion).
The number of anti-constitutional and extra-constitutional measures carried out by Russia’s revolutionaris from above against the Party-state and Union government was great. The RSFSR Supreme Soviet under Yeltsin’s leadership declared Russia sovereign in June 1990, and all RSFSR laws and the RSFSR constitution were deemed to hold greater legal force than USSR law and Soviet constitution, with no constitutional or legal measure stipulating the possibility of such legal supremacy having been adopted at the Union level. Russian law transferred all property, financial and natural resources in Russia from central Soviet control to RSFSR jurisdiction. The Russian Central Bank and new quasi-commercial banks destroyed the Soviet centralized financial, banking, and interbudgetary systems. By winter 1991, Russia took the first steps toward establishing its own presidential, KGB and military institutions separate from Union structures; though at least in the case of the Russian presidency the creation was done through the Party-state system if in its new perestroika-reformed configuration. Upon election as RSFSR president in July 1991, Yeltsin decreed the removal of Party organizations from all state institutions and enterprises in Russia; the constitutionality of this measure was dubious, though perhaps it was more aconstitutional than unconstitutional. During the August 1991 coup, Yeltsin compounded the coup-plotters’ unconstitutionality and illegality of the crisis by placing under RSFSR control all Soviet institutions, including the KGB and military—a revolutionary coup within the hardline, anti-reformist coup. When the Party-state coup was defeated, Yeltsin’s Russia banned the Party, effectively abolishing the old regime. With the Party gone, Russia fully abolished or expropriated virtually the entire Soviet state apparatus, ministry by ministry, including all the power ministries or siloviki (military, KGB, MVD, etc.). With the regime and state apparatus gone, there was little reason for the republics to maintain the Union. Yetsin withdrew Russia from the negotiations on a new Union Treaty in November 1991, Ukraine voted for independence in a December referndum, and Yeltsin recruited Ukraine and Belarus into a new Commonwealth of Independent States, declaring the Union dead. The Soviet Union was tossed into history’s dustbin along with its Party-state regime.
Throughout this period, the masses were not all that mobilized, excepting during a few pivotal crises. They never demonstrated for, or attempted the overthrow of the Party-state regime from the streets in a revolution from below (RFB), except in the Union’s periphery in places like the Baltic republics and Georgia. Most often, the country’s nascent and weak civil society mobilized onto the streets in order to defend the revolutionaries from above, not to overthrow the remnants of the partocratic regime. This explains the limited extent of social revolution and the lack of widespread violence during and after the fall of the Soviet regime. It also explains much of the troubled development of republican government and the market economic systems in post-Soviet Russia and other former Soviet republics. The co-opting of Party and state apparatchiks and entire structures of the Soviet Party-state by the revolutionary Russian regime – most threateningly for republican governance, the siloviki – left the nomenklatura in power along with its limited understanding of and weak commitment to building political and economic institutions based on the rule of law.
A key feature of RFA is the use of institutional creation and reorganization as a weapon of the internal political struggle between pro- and anti-reform factions. For example, Gorbachev instituted semi-free elections to the soviets and created and held such elections to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies (CPD) in 1989 and a Soviet presidency in 1990 in order to break the resistance to his early, modest, and non-political reforms by the CPSU and Soviet state apparati. Party apparat hardliners forced through the formation of a CP for the RSFSR (RCP) to counter Gorbachev inside the CPSU and the rising influence of Yeltsin in the newly empowered RSFSR Supreme Soviet and newly created RSFSR CPD. Gorbachev also began to separate the CPSU apparat from the siloviki (military, KGB, MVD), to which harline Party apparatchiki and siloviki created new organs – more robust unit Party organizations and committees and a new all-union umbrella Army Committee in the case of the military, for example – reconnecting their institutions to the Party, though not its apparat. In response to these moves, Yeltsin created a Russian presidency, as did the leaders of the other fourteen union republic CPs, dismantled the centralized financial system, and began to create Russian military and KGB bodies. All this created institutional confusion, dysfunction, and even greater infighting and dislocation, which undermined institutional and state loyalty, administrative-territorial integrity, economic performance, and financial solvency. These multiple crises of political division, growing separatism, economic collapse, and cultural-ideological disorientation confounded, indeed thoroughly overwhelmed Gorbachev’s reforms and brought the collapse of the Soviet Party-led regime and state.
Yeltsin appears to have come to power in Russia planning to force Gorbachev and the Union to a regime transformation imposed from above, but Gorbachev’s preference for a more gradual approach and hardline resistance to his reforms would eventually drive Yeltsin to a more radical, revolutionary strategy of destroying the old order using the RSFSR state apparatus. Obama and his DP successors may also have traveled a similar path, but Obama added a cultural Marxist, indeed racial element by blaming conservatives’ resistance to his reforms on whites’ racism, as he discusses in his latest biography. His DP successors have picked up this theme with revolutionary gusto in attempting to achieve an American RFA.
THE AMERICAN RFA
Barack Obama came to the presidency in order to institute, in his own infamous words, a ‘fundamental transformation’ of America, in his own famous words. By the last year of his second term, he had made some modest headway. He intensified interracial antagonism, brought another 16 percent of the economy under the control of the state, and created an ‘imperial presidency’ the likes of which Richard Nixon would envy, in the words of liberal constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley.[2] But to continue the revolution, he needed an equally radical, ‘transformative’ successor. That was supposed to be his former Secretary of State and the wife of former US president Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s record of massive corruption and lust for power in the name of social transformation in the feminist-socialist ‘nanny state’ mode was well known and popular within the radicalizing Democratic Party. However, Hillary had a problem: Donald J. Trump and the American people’s loss of all patience with Washington’s corruptionaires and elites. She had numerous other problems, ranging from use of an illegal server, Benghazi, and a history of corruption and illegality, all tolerated by America’s increasingly decaying post-Cold War constitutional order. In order to prevent Hillary’s defeat, Obama, his top aides and appointees, his vice president Joe Biden, the Clintons, and DP’s national committee (DNC) hatched a plan implemented through FBI, other state bodies, and DP operatives to frame Trump as a colluder with the foreign white supremacist, homophobic, and ‘conservative’ bogey man of the American identitarian left: authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin. The irony of violating the principles of republican government and the rule of law while invoking authoritarian bogeymen was lost on many.
Putin was just a symbol, and Trump an obstacle; the goal was to prevent Trump or any Republican from investigating criminal and corruption under the Obama-Biden-Clinton cabal and that required an illegal effort to secure power. The ensuing 2016 election coup in turn needed to be covered up, requiring the elimination of even the possibility that Trump or some other RP leader might some day occupy the Oval Office and endeavor to uncover the growing list of illegal actions undertaken by DP leaders and their network of revolutionary state apparatchiks inserted throughout the government U.S. government. A new single-party dominant order needed to be established and while the DP still had its tentacles entangled in the governmental apparatus it needed to make that state of affairs permanent by way of a RFA.
The American RFA’s Phase One: The Obama Administration
I have detailed the illegal efforts by the Obama administration to implement ‘legislation’ and later to discredit Trump during the 2016 election campaign, using state bodies to initiate and help the DP propagandize false charges of collusion and other misconduct by the future president and those associated with him and his campaign.[3] Here I will revisit a few of these illegal actions and the way state institutions were deployed to implement them in order to demonstrate the first phase of America’s RFA during the Obama administration and make some comparisons with the Soviet/Russia RFA. As a general pattern, whereas Russia’s RFA was carried out by the legislative and executive branches as it was promoting a transformation to a republican form of rule, the Obama administration and later Biden’s utilized the executive branch more than they have the Congress. There is a ‘logic’ in this, since the latter are moving along an authoritarian vector towards single-party dominant rule, while the former were moving in the direction of representative democracy, i.e., a republican regime.
Obama and his administration repeatedly circumvented and/or controled the legislative and judicial branches in part by establishing new anti-constitutional practices and constitutional interpretations. Intelligence agencies under Obama tapped the communications of journalists, allied leaders, and opposition presidential candidates in order to discredit and shut down dissent. The American president gained the power to engage in drone attacks against alleged jihadi terrorists abroad, which includes the authority to kill American citizens so suspected.
For example, the Obama administration instituted a watered-down version of a ‘super-presidential’ system (such was introduced under Yeltsin in nascent form and strengthened by Putin). What liberal constitutional scholar Turley called Obama’s “imperial presidency.” Obama intensified warrantless surveillance programs to a degree only Nixon’s fantasies might have envisioned, including implemeting a program that seized the communications of nearly every American citizen. Obama declared rather than attempting to finesse his right to define ‘war’ and thereby monopolize the power to declare it; one that sits squarely in Congress, according to the U.S. Constitution. As Turley notes: “(t)hat position effectively converts the entire provision in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution (‘Congress shall have power to … declare War’) into a discretionary power of the president.”[4] Moreover, Obama used this power when he bombed Libyan ground forces in violation of a UN resolution, which authorized a ‘no-fly zone’ only. Obama claimed presidential authority in the war on jihadism to murder any U.S. citizen without a specific accusation, indictment, or conviction, even when he lacked “clear evidence (of) a specific attack” being planned. The Obama administration instigated twice the number of prosecutions against whistleblowers than all previous U.S. presidents taken together and put two journalists under surveillance.
The Obama administration refused repeatedly to give evidence requested by oversight committees in a variety of scandals. When Congress voted to proceed to charge against Attorney General Eric Holder with criminal contempt, Holder’s own Justice Department blocked it. When Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper lied to Congress on surveillance programs and later acknowledged so, the Obama administration refused to fire or even investigate Clapper for perjury. Obama’s administration even was accused of searching Senate computers in investigating the CIA and attempting to intimidate congressional investigators. In addition, the administration frequently circumvented Congress to make unilateral changes to or suspend federal laws by executive order or administrative fiat. For example, when Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act to change immigration laws to protect potentially millions of people in the country illegally from deportation, he simply issued an executive order – what Russians would call an ukaz – instituting precisely the same measures. Obama ukazy were ordered in health care, drug enforcement, online gambling, and other areas. Turley concluded that on the basis of Obama’s new powers, he had reduced Congress to “an almost decorative element in governance – free to approve but not to block presidential demands.” Minus the word ‘almost,’ this describes precisely the role of Russian State Duma and Federation Council under Putin’s super-presidential system. Even Congress’s power of the purse was hollowed out. When the Republican-controlled Congress opposed Obama’s health care takeover under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare, which effectively began the nationalization of 16 percent of the American economy, he simply moved $454 million in funds from the purpose designated in law by Congress to implement the program until it was passed. Obama not only declared effectively his presidential monopoly on the power to declare war in the Libyan civil war, but he spent roughly a billion dollars on an undeclared war never funded by Congress. He also interpreted presidential powers to conduct war to include the use of drones to kill American citizens abroad suspected of involvement in jihadi terrorism. Obama executed at least one American abroad under such allegation—no trial, no judge, no jury. An out-of-control executive branch running roughshod is characteristic of an authoritarian or hybrid regime, not republicanism.[5]
In the economy, in addition to taking control of 16 percent of the U.S. economy – specifically the health and medical insurance systems – through the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration perfected the system of using state funds to bolster the DP’s old and garner new DP political supporters.[6] The the old trade unions (steal, auto, teachers, and others) and the state university and college systems Obama added Silicon Valley and its powerful Internet media to the ‘dinosaur media’ of newspapers and television over which it holds a near complete monopoly. Google was Obama’s biggest corporate donor in 2008: $485,961 in donations, compared to only $20,600 for John McCain.[7] Google has received regulatory kickbacks for years in return for financing DP political campaigns, most notably Obama’s presidential campaigns.[8] Internet tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, contributed more than 50 high-tech engineers to Obama’s second presidential bid, creating in-house technology and analytics departments and dominating the Chicago headquarters.[9] This is an inevitable result of state capitalism’s marriage between business and state. The consequences of this and the bad results of state-based economics are far reaching, as demonstrated by the ability of American and global oligarchs (e.g. George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar) to tilt the information space, fund essentially pro-DP street riots by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and to help fix the 2020 presidential election, along with numerous other illegal activities undertaken for DP candidate Joe Biden (see below).
Under Obama, the FBI and Justice began to act in support on one political party; the onset of a one-party takeover and America’s ongoing RFA. For years a now rogue FBI would ignore overwhelming evidence it had in its possession and appearing in the minority conservative media that VP Joe Biden and DP 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter had been engaged in doing business from the White House and using Biden’s official status as VP in the Obama administration to do so with foreign states, including the very same Russia the Obama administration was accusing Trump for falsified charges of collusion, most robustly with Ukraine and China.[10] This was just one way and not the most egregious way U.S. state bodies backed the DP in the 2020 elections.
But state repression for one’s political views began years before the Obama administration spied on and arrested and imprisoned members of the Trump presidential election campaign on the basis of false charges. In addition to prosecuting whistleblowers on an unprecedented scale, the Obama administration repressed freedom of speech and the press. The Obama administration by 2010 had already prosecuted twice as many leakers as all previous administrations combined, and its FBI seized two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press. Obama’s two most prominent journalistic victims were FOX News journalist James Rosen and award-winning journalist Sharyl Atkisson. Specifically, FOX News journalist James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails. The FBI accused Rosen of violating anti-espionage laws for carrying out routine journalistic work, but Obama said he made “no apologies” for the investigations, which turned up nothing. They did, however, create an oppressive chill surrounding the media and began the process of its cowing and subordination to the DP.[11] A month after the Obama administration’s attack on Rosen was disclosed, U.S. intelligence hacked independent, investigative journalist Sharyl Atkisson’s computer. Documents were exfiltrated by, according to an independent cybersecurity firm’s analysis, a U.S. government intelligence agency, and three classified documents were inserted into a folder. Later the Justice Department stole her computer’s hard drive.[12] This is authoritarian repression of dissent, speech, the press, and freedom of information. Republican regimes that intend to remain representative of all the people do not behave in this way. Obama’s fundamental transformation needed to demonize its political opponents and did so through its dominant mass media, including Internet social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Obama’s practice began moving American political culture away from its historical pattern of comity, compromise, fair and open political competition. Obama’s divisive rhetoric damaged American political culture long before Trump would. Obama, not Trump, became the first American president to publicly accuse the opposing party of being his, his party, and their constituents and “enemies.”[13] In standard authoritarian mode, this set the stage for Obama’s efforts to portray Trump as a traitor, using the country’s law enforcement, intelligence, and coercive organs. According to this and his more standard racial black-and-white logic, the Obama administration would implicate and attempt to charge enemy presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign of treason on charges that Obama, Clinton, and other high-ranking DP and administration officials knew were unequivocably false, violating U.S. law and Americans’ constitutional rights in the process.
The American RFA’s Phase Two: The Election Coup Attempt and Trump Impeachment
From the White House to the bowels of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) a massive conspiracy would be undertaken to defeat Trump through a massive wave of media and officials’ accusations and criminal charges. Even before the election season the FBI and Justice Department covered up and then during the campaign announced there would no charges filed against DP presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite their full awareness that she had handled secret documents in violation of the law by using of a home server to send and receive top secret U.S. government documents. Director James Comey’s FBI would be the same organ that would help develop, propagate, and prosecute the Trump campaign for allegations of Trump collusion with Russia it knew was false.[14]
When it appeared possible that Trump might defeat Clinton in the 2016 presidential election as a result of the leak to Wikileaks of DNC documents showing the DNC conspiring with the Clinton campaign to defeat Bernie Sanders in the DNC presidential nomination process, Hillary went on the offensive in her usual style of discrediting her opponents. Not only was Russia said to have hacked the DNC and leaked the documents to Wikileaks, but Trump and his campaign staff were in cahoots with the Russians in this and other nefarious affairs, she and the Obama administration declared. The DP used the FBI and other state organs to insinuate into the public discourse through loyal mass media organs completely contrived information on collusion between Trump and his campaign staff, on the one hand, and the Russian, on the other. After the campaign they would continue with hearings and falsified investigation reports for three years in order to keep the story on the front pages. The DP and Obama administration even considered blocking Trump’s inauguration (see below).
The Obama White House, the Clinton DP, and Collusion with Ukraine
AS has been their approach the Obama-Clinton-Biden cabal itself was involved in the very collusion with foreigners that it attempted to frame Trump for. The difference was the DP and its state network were actually colluding with foreigners and not with Russia but with Ukraine. In shock after Trump’s victory over Hillary in the presidential election, Ali Chalupa’s sister revealed on Facebook that she was putting journalsts in contact with certain Ukrainian sources – we now know she visited the Ukrainian embassy in DC and tried to recruit its assistance in smearing Trump – and that the Obama administration had teamed up with the global revolutionary ‘Anonymous’ hackers’ group at some point. On November 10th, 2016, Andrea Chalupa tweeted that hackers from Anonymous were working for Obama’s Justice Department on Election Day and were in contact with her sister Ali Chalupa: “.@inthehands @slavapestov All election day Anonymous hackers working w/DOJ updated my sister: they were at war w/RU hackers in our systems.” Andrea also quoted “American hackers” who she says were promoting the Russian hack theory about Russians hacking the election: “.@inthehands @slavapestov Russian hackers entered US voting systems in summer.US hackers believe they downloaded malware to influence count.”[15] Odd as it is, she never mentioned the company that dealt with the DNC/DCCC hacks: Crowdstrike. Dmitrii Alperovitch, Crowdstrike’s chief technology officer, is Soviet-born Russian expat, one-time hacker, and perhaps a former intelligence officer (this biographical detail does not appear in any of Alperovitch’s official biographies), who also is a senior fellow at the NATO-affiliated Atlantic Council. Andrea Chalupa may be Alperovitch’s wife, the identity of whom is impossible to identify by researching the WWW. Under Alperovitch, Crowdstike had hired numerous former US FBI and intelligence cyber officials. Also, Crowdstrike was hired by Perkins Coie, the law firm that was retained by the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the DNC and hired Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS to produce the infamous anti-Trump “dossier” (see below). The same FBI that was now opening illegal investigations and conjuring charges against Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Obama administration allowed the DP to investigate its hacking and hire Crowdstrike. Then all involved – the DNC, Crowdstrike, the FBI, and U.S. intelligence agencies – loudly proclaimed the Russians were the perpetrators. Interestingly enough, Crowdstrike’s CEO, Shawn Henry, had come from the FBI, where he “oversaw half of the FBI’s investigative operations, including all FBI criminal and cyber investigations worldwide, international operations, and the FBI’s critical incident response to major investigations and disasters.”[16]
Later released Congressional closed hearing transcripts would reveal Henry and the others stating under oath and in private that Crowdstrike did not have conclusive evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC and DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and local election systems, even while in public they insisted that they did. Henry could not state conclusively to the U.S. House of Representatives Executive Committee on Intelligence that Russian state actors, no less on Putin’s orders, hacked the DNC servers or even whether they were hacked at all.[17] Mueller and the Justice Department were never able to prove Russian hacking, never indicted a single American for any collusion with Russia – only Manafort for his activity in Ukraine like that conducted by the Podestas – and never indicted Julian Assange for accepting and publishing the illegally acquired data allegedly received from the Russian DNC server hack, while investigating a president-elect, then a sitting president. Although it remains unclear whether the Russians played any role in the DNC hack or not, the evidence to date suggests that the conclusion that they did is no to little more plausible than that they did not play a role (see below). But more importantly, the Chalupas reveal to us that their was collusion with Ukrainians (and the media) and Obama was using a criminal, revolutionary global hacking group for some unknown purpose.
Immediately after the leak, elements across these institutions with a wink and a nod from Obama conjured up charges against Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and president-elect Trump’s choice for his national security chief, General Michael Flynn and manufactured out of whole cloth a Trump-collusion-with-Putin narrative to discredit Trump, using a phony ‘Steele dossier’ and a distorted version of the hacking of the DNC which exposed Hillary’s and the DNC’s efforts to fix Hillary’s defeat of Bernie Sanders in the DP nomination race. The Steele dossier, financed in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC and organized by pro-DP firm, GPS Fusion, hired by Clinton campaign and the DNC, was used, along with FISA appeals falsified by the FBI so it could target Trump associates Manafort, Flynn, and Carter Page. This set off a media frenzy from the DP’s media hegemons and sparked a wild goose chase by the Mueller commission all in order to keep the propaganda on the ‘front page’ of the American mind. In doing so, the Democrats’ themselves colluded with Ukraine and ultra-nationalist Ukrainian-Americans, allowing them to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections.
The first ‘information’ billed as Trump ‘Russia collusion’ was a set of documents – the so-called chernaya kassa – that came from Ukrainians and after years of investigation not a single Trump campaign or White House staffer was brought up on charges of interacting with Russia. The ‘chernaya kassa’ documents became the basis for an investigation of Paul Manafort, leading to his removal from the Trump campaign and, on completely different charges (of tax fraud and operating as a foreign representative without having registered) to indictment, arrest, and imprisonment. On 27 May 2016, weeks after Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, radical cultural Marxist and DNC operative Ali Chalupa’s emails promising something big to the DNC and meetings with Ukrainian Embassy staff and, Artyom Sytnik, head of the US embassy- and Soros-controlled Main National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine or NABU confirmed that his department had received documents from the Party of Regions “black cash box” handed over to it by former (as of 2015) deputy head of post-Soviet Ukraine’s successor to the Ukrainian KGB, the Sluzhba bezopasnosti Ukrainy or SBU, and at the time a continuing SBU operative. Chalupa, who founded the U.S. ‘United With Ukraine Coalition’ in 2014, wrote that she led the DNC’s opposition research into any Trump ties to Russia.[18] That is not all she did. The White House visitor logs show that Ali Chalupa, the relatively low-level DNC contractor who coordinated with Ukrainians to investigate Manafort and Trump, visited the White House 27 times.[19] Four days later, a portion of these documents was published by a Rada deputy from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc Sergei Leshchenko and the editor-in-chief of the daily pro-Maidan Ukrainskaya pravda, Segvil Musaeva-Borovik. Although the documents they produced would help prove secret payments were made to Manafort from Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions before 2014, forcing Manafort to plead guilty to illegal lobbying and tax violations and sending him to prison, he was never accused or charged by US authorities, including the Mueller investigation, of colluding with Russia. Moreover, high-level DP political consultants such as the Podesta brothers were engaged in the same consulting activity. So Ukrainian officials and Ukrainian-American emigres conspired to smear a presidential candidate at the behest of the same DNC that claimed to be hacked by the Russians. In December 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that both NABU head Sytnik and Rada deputy Leshchenko had illegally meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by leaking financial documents that smeared then-Trump campaign manager Manafort. Sytnik and Leshchenko eventually ended up in Ukrainian prisons for attempting to influence the US presidential campaign on Hillary’s behalf.[20] All this was tied into what was the clear Obama-DP-FBI hoax: the Steele Dossier.
The FBI and the Steele Dossier Forgery
The Trump campaign and thus Manafort were investigated on the basis of false claims contained in the so-called Steele Dossier, which Obama’s FBI, CIA, and Justice Department knew was based on faulty intelligence and an unreliable source, who however was touted to the FISA court by the FBI as reliable. Ali’s Leshchenko was a source of supposed Russian dirt on Trump fed to Hillary Clinton’s opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, that commissioned the infamous and entirely false ‘Steele dossier,’ compiled by former British MI6 operative Christopher Steele, and received payments and a condo around the time Manafort was forced to step down. Steele’s dossier was being compiled for the Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC by the ‘Fusion GPS’ opposition research group in summer 2016, when Ali Chalupa’s email to the DNC leadership mentioning two different Trump projects she had afoot and her having put Ukrainians in touch with journalist Michael Isikoff.[21]
We now know that the president, Justice, FBI, intelligence agencies, and the Clinton campaign knew the Steele dossier was false. When the Crossfire Hurricane team was using it to win a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, they knew that the dossier’s primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko, had been assessed as a possible national security threat and the subject of a previous FBI counterintelligence investigation. Curiously, however, this information emerged after the dossier and all Russiagate were becoming fully discredited, and this information may have been yet another attempt to point the finer at Russia. When the FBI interviewed Danchenko for the dossier case, he claimed his sources were but close acquaintances and friends. None of the dossier’s claims – from ‘golden showers’ to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s ‘trip to Prague’ to meet with Russian intelligence – was true. Thus, while Danchenko’s information may or may not have been Russian disinformation, it was more importantly bad information that should have been vetted but was not because the DP-controlled law enforcement and intelligence organs and the DP-dominated mass media found the disinformation politically useful in the struggle for Hillary’s election victory.[22] The FBI knew when the dossier was published in January 2017 precisely who Steele’s primary sub-source was and Danchenko’s utter lack of qualifications, connections, or possible knowledge of any real intelligence on Trump’s past activity in or present ties to Russia or Putin. Yet special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller continued working and the media kept asserting ‘Trump collusion’ for years based on the false dossier. It has come to light that the No. 1 source for the false Steele dossier, so-called ‘Russian asset’ Danchenko, had been a one-time research assistant for and co-author with Fiona Hill at The Brookings Institution. Hill introduced Danchenko to Steele, leading to the collusion of this Russian and this Brit on the dossier to rig a U.S. presidential campaign. Hill then became a National Intelligence Council member, NSC official, and the impeachment hearing’s star witness.[23]
In autumn 2016, before and after the election, bits and pieces of the dossier were leaked to the press. On 14 September the dossier’s false ‘golden shower’ story and claims Trump paid bribes to keep things quiet appeared. This was followed by speculation that Trump’s cavorting with the prostitutes who supposedly provided the ‘shower’ in Moscow was captured on video by Russian intelligence, and Putin was already in a position to blackmail the soon-to-be-elected president. In the month before the election the claim was published that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen had met with Kremlin operatives in Prague—another claim that proved false. Then the dossier was published in its entirety for the first by BuzzFeed in January 2017 just a week before Trump’s inauguration. Concomitantly, the Obama administration was doing everything in its waning power to prevent the legally elected president from assuming office, including perhaps even delaying or preventing the inauguration, as a former Defense Department official recently revealed. According to this Defense official, for months there was discussion of the possibility of simply not handing over the presidency to Trump.[24]
To compile the Steele dossier based on Steele’s raw data, the Clinton campaign hired the DC-based firm ‘Fusion GPS.’ Like Crowdstrike, it had a tendency to hire former U.S. Government, in particular FBI officials. In this case, GPS Fusion hired as compiler of the dossier a former FBI official named Nellie Ohr. Her husband was an acting Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, also Director of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force, who focused on Eurasian oligarchs and was involved in the FBI’s efforts to use the Steele Dossier to obtain FISA warrants. Ohr illegally provided false information on Steele and the dossier to FISA in order to get the FISA order to allow eavesdropping on the Trump campaign, which led to the falsified cases against Manaforte, Carter Page, and Gen. Flynn. Ohr also worked as go-between for ‘Fusion GPS’ and Steele. After Trump’s ‘surprising’ victory over Clinton, the Democrats’ conspiracy kicked into high gear, amounting to an attempted stealth coup against first president-elect and then president Trump. On 20 December 2016, Justice’s Bruce Ohr handed to the FBI investigation the research his wife, Nellie Ohr, had done after being hired by Clinton campaign/DNC contractor, Fusion GPS, to work on the Steele dossier. Steele contacted Mr. Ohr in January 2016 to set up a meeting in London. Steele shared on 30 July 2016 some of his anti-Trump evidence with Ohr, who then took it to the top of the FBI. So Steele was working with one Ohr in Justice and another at Hillary’s contractor, GPS Fusion. Moreover, Ohr and Steele were in touch frequently through all of 2017, as Democrats conducted congressional hearings and then on 17 May 2017 appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to expand the investigation of Trump, harassing him ligeally and politically throughout his presidency.[25] In other words, the DP-hired firm ‘Fusion GPS’, the Justice Department, and the FBI were working together to draft and promote the dossier together inside the law enforcement bodies and in the media.
They did so, despite knowing the dossier was unreliable. Four days before securing the FISA warrant targeting the Trump campaign, the FBI was alerted that the dossier contained false information. Trump adviser Carter Page had denied to an undercover informer ever knowing no less meeting a key senior Russian official as FBI agents were preparing to allege to the court. This is evidenced by a 17 October 2016 text message from an FBI employee whose name is redacted to Strzok, who was heading the so-called Crossfire Hurricane ‘investigation’ into the manufactured allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. That message noted Page had denied meeting with any Russian officials, and such testimony had to be included in their FISA request by law. But it was not. In winning the 21 October 2016 warrant from the FISA court targeting Page on Oct. 21, 2016, Strzok’s team nevertheless directly claimed, using Steele’s and Danchenko’s false data, that Page had met Russian intelligence officer Diveykin and another sanctioned Russia official, RosNeft’ chief Igor Sechin as asserted in the Steele dossier. The FBI’s hiding from the FISA court this key revelation was noted in famous footnote 467 in Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 2019 report uncovering the FBI politically motivated and falsified Russia collusion probe.[26]
In addition to using the faked-up dossier to secure surveillance authority from the FISA court, the dossier-based document that kicked off the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation of Trump and his associates was illegal and incorrectly drafted. And it had been sent to a host of officials higher-ranking than its drafter, Peter Stzrok, head of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Division who helped block indictment of Hillary for her illegal server use.[27] The recipients were redacted from the released document but would certainly have included then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and then-Counterintelligence Assistant Director Bill Priestap, likely the Justice Department and CIA heads, as well as the White House and Obama himself.[28] That is, the entire FBI leadership, Justice Ministry, and perhaps the US president himself were using improper, formalized documents to push forward an investigation based, as they were aware, on no factual basis. The purpose was clear—to tilt the playing field in order to allow Hillary to defeat Trump or, should that fail, to remove him from office. FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok used false data in the Steele dossier provided by Danchenko, Steele, Fusion GPS and the Ohrs in order to acquire a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to begin spying on the Trump campaign and prevent him from becoming or remaining very long president.[29] FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith submitted a falsified claim to the FISA court by lying and submitting an altered email to the court in order to win sureveillence of the Trump campaign advisor Carter Page in 2016, admitted in court to such in August 2020, and so was convicted in January 2021.[30] In addition, the FBI falsified its claims about the reliability of Steele, deliberately leaving out condemnatory reports to the contrary. Months earlier, Strzok had discussed in emails with another FBI figure “an insurance policy” to prevent Trump from becoming president should he win the election, Discussed with higher ups in the FBI, the ‘insurance policy’ was an investigation of Trumpers like Page.[31]
From Alfa Bank to the DNC
This was not the only time DP operatives with FBI connivance made false claims to drive law enforcement investigations of Trump. Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Michael Sussman was near the center of summer 2016 plot to frame Trump for maintaining a server connected to the Kremlin through Moscow’s private Alfa Bank. The plot involved a co-conspirng Big Tech executive, co-conspirng cyber security experts, university tech analysts, and a massive media campaign reporting the false allegations in which DP candidate Hillary Clinton took direct participation. Sussman was recently indicted in September 2021 for falsely representing himself as a concerned citizen not working for anyone when he submitted his false claims to FBI officials, ultimately faking this early ‘Russiagate’ effort to be followed by many others.[32] In particular, Sussman manufactured a claim that Trump had a secret server that communicated with the Kremlin through a server of Russia’s Alfa Bank, and he coordinated with Hillary, a cybersecurity firm, its chief executive, a university team of cyber technicians and media such as CNN to develop and propagandize the false claim.[33] The technology and management firm Ankura’s cybersecurity analysis of the DNS records and the overt nature of the DNS activity, challenged the claim that Alfa-Bank’s servers found <trump1.contact-client[.]com> on September 27, 2016 was ‘evidence of direct contact between Alfa-Bank and Trump.’ A “likely scenario,” according to Ankura, “is that threat actors may have artificially created DNS activity to make it appear as though a connection existed, for ‘discovery’ later. If true, this would constitute a potential violation of various US federal laws.”[34]
A week or so after the Sussman indictment came revelations that special prosecutor, Durham, whose investigation led to the indictment, announced it was moving to uncover the involvement of Defense Department contractors who were involved in Sussman’s Trump-Alfa-Kremlin operation – that is, U.S. taxpayers’ money went through the Defense Department to frame Trump on false charges and media accusations in order to rig a presidential campaign on behalf of this first DP Obama-Clinton-Biden RFA coup attempt.[35]
The DP, FBI, Intelligence Community, and the DC Hack
Hillary, her lawyer Sussman, and FBI collusion with them also played a key role in the foundational element of Russiagate–the alleged hacking of the DNC’s server by Russian operatives (see below). The aforementioned Sussman indictment states that in or around April 2016, Hillary’s DNC “retained Sussmann to represent it in connection with the hacking of its email servers by the Russian government. In connection with his representation of the DNC as the victim of the hack, the defendant met and communicated regularly with the FBI, the DOJ, and other U.S. government agencies. In or around the same time period, Sussmann was also advising the Clinton Campaign in connection with cybersecurity issues.”[36] Around 30 April 2016 the very same Sussman hired the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike headed by Dmitrii Alperovitch and former FBI official Shawn Henry to investigate the purported hack of the DNC’s email server. In May DNC operative and Ukrainian nationalist Ali Chalupa informed the DNC of impending interesting developments she was working on with regard to Trump. In mid-June CrowdStrike announced discovering Russian malware on the DNC’s server. The next day, self-described Romanian hacker Guccifer 2.0 said he hacked the DNC and gave the documents to WikiLeaks. He soon posted online some DNC computer files that contained metadata that indicated Russian involvement in the hack. Guccifer 2.0’s actual existence or identity has never been disclosed and no U.S. government effort to find him/her has ever been touted or described. The Russian hack story begins to follow the same pattern of the Trump-Alfa-Kremlin server story: Sussman gets involved with an entity, and suddenly there appears ‘evidence’ of alleged Russia activity in support of Trump. On 5 July 2016, FBI Director Comey publicly exonerated Hillary of any criminal wrongdoing when she stored on and communicated highly sensitive and classified information with her private email server. Seventeen days later and days before the DP national convention, thousands of DNC emails were published on WikiLeaks demonstrating Hillary campaign-DNC collusion to promote Clinton’s candidacy against that of Bernie Sanders.
As investigative journalist George Parry has put things together, six days later, on 28 July CIA Director John Brennan informed then-President Obama on Hillary’s plan to frame Trump as a Russia colluder as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server” ahead of the upcoming presidential election. Brennan’s notes (which were not declassified until 2020) read in part: “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]…CITE [summarizing] allegedly approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” Six weeks later, on 7 September, U.S. intelligence officials submitted an “investigative referral” to FBI Director Comey on Hillary for her “plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections” in order to distract the public from her server scandal.[37] Comey and Strzok ignored the referral and in a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing denied remembering the submission of any such referral to his office![38]
Meanwhile, the FBI attempted or feigned to attempt to investigate the alleged Russian hack of the DNC server but handed the investigation over to the complainant. This is like handing over the investigation of a alleged crime to a victim with a record of making false allegations. When the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI learned of the alleged hacking, it moved to examine the server, but the DNC refused and instead hired Sussman-recruited Crowdstrike to carry it out. No U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency attempted against to gain access to the DNC server. The FBI — the same one that was exonerating Hillary’s illegal use of a home server for handling top secret documents — relied exclusively on Crowdstrike’s report, which was essentially a DNC report. Moreover, Crowdstrike under its contract with Hillary’s campaign legal team (Sussman and Perkins Coie) was limited in what information it could hand to the FBI, and Counterstrike Chief exec Henry in his interview with the congressional hearing acknowledged that I know that there were “redacted reports and there was some restrictionon the reports.”[39] That means the DNC withheld information from the FBI contained in Counterstrike’s investigative data.
Parry properly asks: “Why would the DNC, the purported victim of a crime, refuse to fully cooperate with law enforcement in solving that crime? Was it hiding something? Was it afraid the server’s contents would discredit the Russia-hacking story? Why, instead of full and complete cooperation with the FBI, was the DNC having CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie run the investigation and, in effect, filter and control the flow of information regarding the server’s contents to the FBI?”[40] As Parry also notes: “Instead of using a search warrant or some other legal process to perform a direct, hands on forensic examination of the DNC server, the FBI agreed to base its investigation on the findings of a private cybersecurity company. And, as discussed in the previous article, that company, CrowdStrike, was to do the investigation pursuant to its contract with Michael Sussmann of Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Think about that. When presented with allegations of a devastating foreign cyber attack on one of the two major political parties, the FBI meekly agreed to allow CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie to do the forensic examination and, for all intents and purposes, run the investigation.”[41]
Parry notes the investigation I have cited elsewhere carried out by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), an organization of former CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and military intelligence officers, technical experts, and analysts, including William Binney, a former NSA technical director and cofounder of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center; Edward Loomis, former NSA technical director for the Office of Signals Processing; and Skip Folden, a former IBM information technology manager. Their research concluded the DNC server data had been downloaded on a thumb drive on location at the DNC and not extracted by an external hacking. In addition to technical data evidence, the VIPS investigators noted that in the event of any hack, the NSA would have a data record easy to access and make public. Yet the NSA never produced any such evidence. Parry rightly asks: ‘Can this be because no hack occurred?” The investigation also concluded that the files published by Guccifer 2.0 on 16 June had been “run, via ordinary cut and paste, through a template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints.” In other words, the files were deliberately altered to give the false impression that they were hacked by Russian agents.[42]
Oddly enough, despite the reliance of the DP on Steele and his doctored ‘dossier’, the DP and its operatives in the U.S. government and media have ignored an interesting admission by Steele. A 5 March 2018 New Yorker profile of Steele revealed that, on July 26, 2016 (four days after WikiLeaks published the DNC emails), “Steele filed yet another memo” in which “Steele’s sources claimed that the [DNC] digital attack involved agents ‘within the Democratic Party structure itself’ as well as Russian émigrés in the U.S. and ‘associated offensive cyber operators.’”[43] At the 5 December 2017, Counterstrike’s chief executive Shawn Henry, in addition to admitting that the cyberfirm could not conclude conclusively that the DNC server emails had been extracted from outside, that is, hacked, acknowledged that Counterstike’s contract to examine the DNC servers was not with the DNC but with none other than……….wait for it………..“Michael Sussman from Perkins Coie.”[44] “Consequently, CrowdStrike’s findings were protected by the attorney-client privilege, an argument raised during the HPSCI (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) proceedings by an attorney from Perkins Coie. As he explained to the HPSCI, CrowdStrike was working for Perkins Coie and was ‘performing work in order to help Perkins Coie advise the DNC on this matter.’ Therefore, it was up to Perkins Coie and the DNC to decide what information CrowdStrike would be allowed to share with the HPSCI.”[45] More clues the ‘Russia hack’ may come when the name of the cybersecurity company and chief executive left unidentified in the Sussman indictment are revealed at trial or beforehand. The obvious question is: Are the noted unidentifieds Crowdstrike and/or former FBI official Shawn Henry or Dmitrii Alperovitch?
As Glenn Greenwald notes Hillary’s Alfa plot was “a perfect microcosm of the Russiagate fraud that the country endured for four years. Hoaxes were repeatedly cooked up by private intelligence operatives working for the DNC or anti-Trump factions within the CIA and FBI, and then fed to friendly reporters, who laundered the falsehoods by publishing whatever they were given, without the slightest concern for whether they were true.” As Greenwald also notes, the indictment attempts to portray the FBI as an innocent victim of Clinton disinformation is untenable given that “it is inconceivable that a high-level FBI operative like Baker would have been unaware that this Perkins Coie partner (Sussman) was deeply enmeshed in the Clinton campaign and DNC politics, since Perkins Coie is a well-known DC firm the trademark of which is being a DP outfit. Moreover, although the FBI determined almost immediately that Sussman’s assertions were empty, it never uttered a word as the DP’s ubiquitous media machine retold and retold the false story as Trump entered office and the FBI was investigating the other false ‘Russiagate’ claims. At the same time, Sussman’s Twitter account entailed a close relationship with that FBI official, James Baker, to whom Sussman sold his false claim throughout the summer of 2016. Indeed, on October 9, 2018 – some eighteen months after the FBI decided Clinton’s disinformation campaign was indeed false story – MSNBC’s Chris Hayes gave airtime to reporters engaged in the Clinton plot to further circulate the disinformation and report that the FBI was investigating.[46] This is not suprising when one considers Strzok’s and other FBI figures’ illegal activity in attempting to bring down Trump (see below).
The coup-plotting turned desparate as Trump’s inauguration approached. An infamous 5 January 2017 meeting of principals in the White House convened and included Obama, Biden, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, CIA Director Brennan, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Although the meeting ultimately endorsed the impeachment plan, Biden asked whether the Logan Act could be thrown at Trump to prevent him from being inaugurated. During this period, the aforementioned Defense official directly participated in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement involving NSA, its British counterpart GCHQ, and other allied nations and witnessed a significant spike in ‘end-around’ intelligence sharing between GCHQ and Obama’s NSA.[47] FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe at the time told the Justice Department inspector general’s office that he believed the Steele reporting needed to be included in that ICA because “President Obama had requested ‘everything you have relevant to this topic of Russian influence.’”[48] On 10 January 2017, just five days after the White House coup summit, the Obama-Clinton Steel Dossier told Americans that (1) Trump had compromised himself in Moscow with prostitutes and Putin had relevant ‘kompromat’ or compromising materials, rendering Trump beholden to the Kremlin, (2) that his campaign colluded with Putin in the DNC hack, and (3) that Trump was a Putin agent and ‘Manchurian candidate.’[49] A year later Isikoff was already backing away from the now entirely discredited Steele dossier.[50]
Various Washington official and unofficial plotters recruited or were in cahoots from the outset with foreign intelligence services, such as MI-6, as a way of circumventing U.S. laws limiting U.S. law enforcement’s ability to gather information on American citizens, wherefrom hailed Steele.[51] In other words, the plot to keep Trump out of the Oval Office also may have been a globalist, West-wide intel effort beyond the sordid players discussed in this working paper heretofore, with the Russians inserting disinformation to fill in the gaps. The “end-around” use of foreign intelligence services to gather information on American targets evades the legal restrictions against spying on Americans that constrain NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.[52] It is perhaps no coincidence that the first information to help spark the Trump investigation came abroad. In Italy, Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud told Trump campaign official George Papadapolous that Moscow was in possession of Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails held illegally on her home server, information likely designed to prompt the Trump campaign to attempt to collude with Russia.[53] Thus, the dossier and overall coup-plotting appear to have been a ‘global’ effort to prevent Trump from undermining globalist policies on climate change, the ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ wealth redistribution, and other policies antithetical to certain international interests with their base in the West.[54]
The Obama administration’s rogue law enforcement and intelligence agencies took the fake Steele dossier ‘intelligence’ to FISA to obtain a warrant to go after not only Manaforte and Carter Page but also Trump’s nominee for the post of National Security advisor, former Obama administration DIA Director, Gen. Flynn, as it did with Manafort. Flynn had clashed with the Obama administration’s dangerous efforts to transform weapons from Libya to Syrian rebels, which led to the Benghazi disaster and coverup. Gen. Flynn and other intelligence officials warned those weapons would fall into the hands of jihadists and risked the creation of a jihadi haven in western Syria and eastern Iraq, as would occur in the form of the rise of ISIS. Flynn was later acquitted upon news of the faulty documentation that led to his indictment, conviction, and imprisonment.[55] When in October 2019 Flynn’s lawyer, the now famous Sydney Powell, appealed to a Washington DC court to provide two blackberries used by the abovementioned Mifsud for discovery in the case, the feds suddenly dropped the charges against Flynn.[56]
Impeachment on False Charges: Episode 1
After they failed to defeat Trump at the polls, despite the massive propaganda campaign of falsehoods, the DP, Ukrainian-Americans, and the same government elements then falsely characterized a phone call made by Trump to newly elected Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy in a desperate attempt to impeach Trump. A key driver of all of this nefarious coup-plotting was the fear that Trump might be able to get Ukraine to finally investigate the Biden family’s illegal business in Ukraine and open the way to further investigations into Biden family illegal activities in China, Russia, and elsewhere during a Trump administration. Another was fear among pro-Ukrainian American apparatchiks, Ukrainian diaspora nationalists in America, and Ukrainian officials in Kiev that Trump would thrown Kiev under the bus because of his alleged Putinophilia. [57] This is why the impeachment attempt came in response to a phone call in which Trump sought Zelenskiy’s cooperation in investigating the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine. The appearance was given that there was a problem in the call as Trump had allegedly refused to provide Ukraine with weapons unless Kiev investigated the Bidens. But weapons were never mentioned in the call, and the discussion of general assistance did not occur in any proximity to the request for investigation.[58]
Until Biden himself extorted the Ukrainian government by threatening to block assistance to Kiev if President Petro Poroshenko did not fire the country’s chief prosecutor, Ukrainian law enforcement had indeed been investigating the business dealings of former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter Biden with the shady natural gas company called Burisma and media reports of funds having been money-laundered from Kolomoiskii’s Burisma though his Privatbank to Hunter. Kolomoiskii, Zelenskiy’s bag man banned from entry to the U.S. until VP Biden had the ban lifted. In this context, such a request by Trump would not have been illegal if it had been made. However, even a casual reading of the call’s transcript reveals there was no quid pro quo stated or even implied by Trump. Democrats falsely claimed that it was a violation of US law for a US president to request an investigation of a US official, who might be violating US law, no less one preparing to run for president. Since then it has emerged that the FBI is investigating Hunter for tax fraud and money-laundering, that both Bidens lied about VP Biden’s involvement and receipt of funds from Burisma through Hunter, and that when VP Joe ‘the Big Guy’, as he is referred to by Hunter in numerous released emails, he was helping Hunter’s business deals in Ukraine, Russia, and China. This explains why the Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi within hours of the news of Trump’s request to investigate the Bidens announced she would be seeking to introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment process against Trump.
The only source to ‘blow the whistle’ on the call was none another than a U.S. state official from the Ukrainian diaspora, the Ukrainian nationalist military officer and NSC official Alexander Windman. Windman hid the fact the identity of the whistleblower, lying to a a congressional hearing that he did not know—that is he did not know himself.[59] Windman had once been offered by Kiev the post of Defense Minister of Ukraine—the same military institution that is infused with a considerable Ukrainian ultra-nationalist and neofascist element. The significance for our purposes is that for the first time in the Obama-Clinton-Biden coup plot, elements in the military and CIA had become involved. I have gone over many of the details and documentation showing the DP DNC, FBI, Justice Department, other departments, and ultimately White House connivance elsewhere.[60] This led to to first impeachment of Trump. In the Russian/Soviet revolution from above one of the key elements of Yeltsin’s success was the split created within the so-called siloviki (military, KGB, Internal Affairs Ministry, and law eneforcement organs). The split within the military and KGB (and Party), in particular, facilitated the failure of the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which was a hardline attemept to stp Gorbachev’s reforms from above and Yeltsin’s revolution from above.
[1] Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002).
[2] Jonathan Turley, “A Question of Power: The Imperial Presidency,” 21 May 2014, https://jonathanturley.org/2014/05/21/a-question-of-power-the-imperial-presidency/. See also https://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/15/10-reasons-the-u-s-is-no-longer-the-land-of-the-free/.
[3] See Gordon M. Hahn, “The Authoritarianization (Putinization) of America,” Russian and Eurasian Politics, 29 December 2020, https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/.
[4] Turley, “A Question of Power: The Imperial Presidency”.
[5] Turley, “A Question of Power: The Imperial Presidency”.
[6] https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/#_ftn5.
[7]https://macdailynews.com/2008/11/04/silicon_valley_backs_obama_big_time/.
[8] https://globalnewstimes.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/googles-kick-back-payola-obama-white-house-breaks-records/.
[9] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-feb-19-la-fi-0219-obama-start-ups-20130219-story.html.
[10] https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/emails-obtained-fbi-detail-how-hunter-biden-landed; https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-12/BidenArcher4-13-14.pdf; www.westernjournal.com/hunter-bidens-associates-viewed-name-currency-bragged-pipeline-obama-admin/; https://dailycaller.com/2020/10/17/hunter-biden-salary-joe-biden-unconfirmed-text-rudy-giuliani/?fbclid=IwAR16KzIAXC2HKZJhzekHqcxr3MphMYnR1xjrdXVH_tM4X4SPeGsI99IDn0Q; http://www.westernjournal.com/media-officially-becomes-communications-department-joe-biden/?fbclid=IwAR2Gz8F8oEklB0D4lh-sVg_sesrgYTv5zDYYjxX8NYsfVM7yc14wWB7WctE; https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hsimp=yhs-att_001&hspart=att&p=Biden+fires+Ukrainian+prosecutor+cfr.org#id=1&vid=02355f4586ab1ecddbef61856af27b95&action=click; www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2019/11/18/7232239/; http://www.scribd.com/document/404001731/Rosemont-Seneca-Partners-Court-File; https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-12/BidenArcher4-13-14.pdf; https://johnsolomonreports.com/latvian-government-says-it-flagged-suspicious-hunter-biden-payments-in-2016/; http://www.unian.info/politics/biden-probe-ukraine-police-close-investigation-initiated-by-shokin-11214881.html; www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2019/11/18/7232239/; www.npr.org/2019/09/25/764052120/read-transcript-of-president-trumps-call-with-ukraine-s-leader?fbclid=IwAR2mcUd5xyZcQ78hp6YTV95H1cRgha4w4S3IfpWn0TTfyPblpzRLxqxCsqs; http://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-email-tax-returns-unreported-burisma-income; www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-letter-chinese-cefc-chairman-wire-request; http://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-requested-keys-new-office-mates-joe-biden-chinese-emissary-cefc-chairman; www.dailywire.com/news/hunter-biden-called-father-and-chinese-business-partner-office-mates?itm_source=parsely-api%3Futm_content%3Dnews&utm_campaign=daily_shapiro&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=102783006&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9LHufbiZzTqVQv2a1_mNbHldrUyw8My6QJFtyxD-m8rCimww4r49zPKQTzgJRLwHAoLoM8H8YGebzbTZw6VnF_rsQIskVGaIg84Q00rxESOw1DaTQ&utm_source=housefile; www.westernjournal.com/hunter-bidens-associates-viewed-name-currency-bragged-pipeline-obama-admin/; http://www.newsweek.com/hunter-biden-received-35-million-payment-ex-moscow-mayors-wife-republican-report-says-1533834; http://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hunter-biden-on-tape/?fbclid=IwAR1jWqmW2hnOxOWmnbXtvgiI6YwooF_dQ46oINwKBFNneBDbsT6QBIQwsvg; https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/biden-recording-spy-chief-and-sdny/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost or see https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hsimp=yhs-att_001&hspart=att&p=Hunter+biden+taped+phone+call+Chinese+spy+deal+million+dollars#id=3&vid=c944f8a1f4328b050302a2eb5058f9fc&action=click; www.foxnews.com/transcript/bobulinski-i-think-joe-biden-and-the-biden-family-are-compromised?fbclid=IwAR0sThkOZ7Y2J8KVrl2jM7GS70sT2Q7NZIO1mg1O_X_zGmjtfgHM8A_zpoY; https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hsimp=yhs-att_001&hspart=att&p=Bobulinskii+full+interview#id=2&vid=3c38bd8c0af103b20685279a711d914f&action=click; and https://thenewamerican.com/fox-new-emails-confirm-biden-china-connection-exposed-by-whistleblower-bobulinski/.
[11] www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/ticket/obama-admin-spied-fox-news-reporter-james-rosen-134204299.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tL3NlYXJjaD9mcj1tY2FmZWUmdHlwZT1EMjExVVM3MTRHMCZwPUJhcnJ5K1Jvc2VuK3JlcHJlc3Npb24rT2JhbWEmX2d1Y19jb25zZW50X3NraXA9MTYwNTU2NTY5MQ&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJtB2j88YCx5Bpci4a5CsN-NDzyjZsp4ne3ubH0YwTYROgYUn3fmoNtxZnRcEAjK7Anuj1hYW-1T8MSoUr4mTuy_7SVjxhItgZG_JUG1bwh9_iNcPoo5RqN5a3lGlLSchZT9w-5baT8YykAfGDdZr_BIliNFXqWzJIHwXBpx4pJP.
[12] https://thenewamerican.com/sharyl-attkisson-igs-office-swapped-out-my-hard-drive-after-fed-agents-hacked-my-computer/ and www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-confirms-sharyl-attkissons-computer-hacked/. After she went to the FBI for redress, she was asked to turnover her computer to the Justice Department. Atkission subsequently sued the office of the Inspector General of the Justice Department, charging they had swapped out her computer’s hard drive while the computer was in their possession. At the time, Atkisson was working on a book about the Obama administration’s falsification of the facts and coverup of the actual origins of the notorious Benghazi attack, and she concludes it was the U.S. government which hacked her computer. https://thenewamerican.com/sharyl-attkisson-igs-office-swapped-out-my-hard-drive-after-fed-agents-hacked-my-computer/.
[13] https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/ and www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-explains-his-remark-about-punishing-enemies/.
[14] https://saraacarter.com/text-messages-question-the-start-of-the-russia-collusion-investigation/.
[15] www.wnd.com/2019/07/ex-fbi-chief-of-staff-russia-conspiracy-came-from-obama-white-house/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons&fbclid=IwAR3jajczAD8Pm0hbZC48Sbrz049k78rp9OlI8BYJPniFBhp1OWs9NRWs5RU.
[16] https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157855450785389&id=614520388 and www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/11/report-dnc-hack-chalupa-who-is-caught-up-in-ukraine-gate-worked-with-us-hackers-who-interfered-in-2016-election/; www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/11/report-dnc-hack-chalupa-who-is-caught-up-in-ukraine-gate-worked-with-us-hackers-who-interfered-in-2016-election/; https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa/status/796934184480768000; www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/11/report-dnc-hack-chalupa-who-is-caught-up-in-ukraine-gate-worked-with-us-hackers-who-interfered-in-2016-election/; www.esquire.com/news-politics/a49902/the-russian-emigre-leading-the-fight-to-protect-america/; www.washingtonpost.com/postlive/steven-chabinsky/2012/10/30/35a3ff02-22e7-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_story.html; www.crowdstrike.com/about-crowdstrike/executive-team/shawn-henry/; www.crowdstrike.com/about-crowdstrike/executive-team/shawn-henry/.
[17] Henry testified: “We said that we had a high degree of confidence it was the Russian Government.” Describing the Fancy Bear group that Crowdstrike and the FBI sais hacked the DNC, Henry said that it is “likely” operating on behalf of a Russian intelligence service. According to Henry’s statement to the same committee, when Crowdstrike did its analytical “remediation event” on 12 June 2016: “There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.” U.S. House of Representatives Executive Committee on Intelligence Interview with Crowdstrike Executive Shawn Henry, Executive Committee, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence, 5 December 2017, https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sh21.pdf, pp. 24, 48, and 32.
[18] https://medium.com/@alexandrachalupa/russias-interference-americans-have-a-right-to-know-a2aabd922129#.i80moxkdh.
[19] http://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/12/fitton-white-house-visitor-logs-detail-meetings-of-the-cias-eric-ciaramella/.
[20] See https://gordonua.com/news/politics/sytnik-podtverdil-chto-antikorrupcionnoe-byuro-poluchilo-dokumenty-chernoy-kassy-partii-regionov-134217.html; https://gordonua.com/news/politics/antikorrupcionnoe-byuro-vyzvalo-na-dopros-ohendovskogo-i-usenko-chernuyu-po-delu-chernoy-buhgalterii-pr-136339.html; https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/499586-new-fbi-document-confirms-the-trump-campaign-was-investigated-without; www.facebook.com/AlexandraChalupa/posts/10157976743080389; www.politico.com/story/2016/12/russia-ukraine-trump-manafort-232101?fbclid=IwAR0ZxJMxcwkCL0ux7odOw6SMvUadn34jsdxrNcXvYYLGalBzNeeh67HJNSg; www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/05/breaking-ukrainian-embassy-confirms-dnc-contractor-solicited-dirt-on-trump-campaign-chairman-paul-manafort-in-2016/; www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446; https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/14/politics/dnc-contractor-ukraine-alexandra-chalupa-trump/index.html; https://medium.com/@alexandrachalupa/russias-interference-americans-have-a-right-to-know-a2aabd922129#.i80moxkdh; and http://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/11/12/fitton-white-house-visitor-logs-detail-meetings-of-the-cias-eric-ciaramella/.
[21] https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/444167-ukrainian-who-meddled-against-trump-in-2016-is-now-under-russia and www.wnd.com/2019/07/ex-fbi-chief-of-staff-russia-conspiracy-came-from-obama-white-house/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PostTopSharingButtons&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons&fbclid=IwAR3jajczAD8Pm0hbZC48Sbrz049k78rp9OlI8BYJPniFBhp1OWs9NRWs5RU.
[22] www.theblaze.com/news/steele-dossier-source-possible-russian-agent?utm_content=buffer3d68f&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=fb-glennbeck&fbclid=IwAR25AFrbercyfjAMk7XKzpZXIsKNr_xQSdKlj1PVgUOeprCEAMjBhk40xec; www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/us/politics/igor-danchenko-steele-dossier.html?fbclid=IwAR1RXyIc9FlscsaJ1Qgbf32nCT4xZw9C1tH5gGiPmGUTVqMeRO0XkW6NctY; and www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/February%209,%202017%20Electronic%20Communication.pdf; www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/judiciary-committee-releases-declassified-documents-that-substantially-undercut-steele-dossier-page-fisa-warrants; and www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/07/20/the_primary_subsources_guide_to_russiagate_as_told_to_the_fbi_124516.html?fbclid=IwAR230DXZYRRh3VRFT4AZh1rLPsnST0hzjmOuSAgssgpgW9huDglwU8aoFMc.
[23] See www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/declassified-fbi-notes-steele-fiona-hill-dossier-source.
[24] https://andmagazine.com/talk/2020/10/11/exclusive-coup-plotters-considered-never-allowing-trump-to-be-inaugurated/.
[25] www.foxnews.com/politics/fusion-gps-admits-doj-officials-wife-nellie-ohr-hired-to-probe-trump; https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/14/nellie-ohr-tracked-dozens-fusion-gps-bruce-ohr/; https://conservativedailypost.com/senate-releases-thumb-drive-notes-of-bruce-nellie-ohrs-circle-verification-of-dossier/; www.scribd.com/document/480057685/2020-10-13-Submission-SJC-SSCI-Part-2-of-2; https://johnsolomonreports.com/steele-distributed-other-dossier-reports-including-one-to-an-oligarchs-lawyer/; and https://conservativedailypost.com/senate-releases-thumb-drive-notes-of-bruce-nellie-ohrs-circle-verification-of-dossier/.
[26] http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/majority-media/johnson-grassley-release-recently-declassified-strzok-messages-about-fbis-midyear-and-crossfire-hurricane-investigations; https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-12/StrzokTextCarterPageHalper.pdf; https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-12/CarterPageFISA.pdf; and www.justice.gov/storage/120919-examination.pdf.
[27] In a 26 October 2016 email, he was informed about the total numbers of lower classified emails the FBI had located on Clinton’s private email: “27 confirmed classified TOTAL (26 to ClintonEmail, 1 to Yahoo): 6 of the 27 were SECRET then (4 of which remain SECRET now and 2 of which are CONFIDENTIAL) – 21 of the 27 were CONFIDENTIAL then (16 of which remain CONFIDENTIAL now and 5 of which are UNCLASS or FOUO).” See https://saraacarter.com/text-messages-question-the-start-of-the-russia-collusion-investigation/.
[28] https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/499586-new-fbi-document-confirms-the-trump-campaign-was-investigated-without.
[29] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/devin-nunes-peter-strzoks-insurance-policy-was-about-carter-page-fisa-warrant.
[30] See www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/ex-fbi-lawyer-gets-probation-falsifying-carter-page-surveillance-application-n1256179.
[31] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/devin-nunes-peter-strzoks-insurance-policy-was-about-carter-page-fisa-warrant.
[32] See the indictment at http://www.washingtonpost.com/context/u-s-v-michael-sussman-indictment/ae5ef5ba-6576-4190-a340-9cc854d08f23/.
[33] See http://www.washingtonpost.com/context/u-s-v-michael-sussman-indictment/ae5ef5ba-6576-4190-a340-9cc854d08f23/ and https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-indictment-of-hillary-clintons.
[34] See https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/Ankura_AlfaBank_ResearchAnalysis_Apr2020dh.pdf.pdf.pdf, p. 3.
[35] See https://thepoliticalinsider.com/durham-probes-pentagon-computer-contractors-in-anti-trump-conspiracy/?fbclid=IwAR1i9JXZQ3jBD2-55qhjSPxRKXPCc9Muj7t9mxGhh74lyyBtPiKxRi_wrZk.
[36] See https://www.judicialwatch.org/investigative-bulletin/targeting-trump-durham-uncovers-new-clinton-fbi-connections-in-russia-probe/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=investigative_bulletin and http://www.washingtonpost.com/context/u-s-v-michael-sussman-indictment/ae5ef5ba-6576-4190-a340-9cc854d08f23/.
[37] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and www.foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-memo-clinton.
[38] See www.foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-memo-clinton.
[39] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/?fbclid=IwAR3Cvz7SHiWOwKTRoPgTI7rKHtaNOrREYDJlDZEsh11VSDTkJPkbBjp-SRI.
[40] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/.
[41] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/?fbclid=IwAR3Cvz7SHiWOwKTRoPgTI7rKHtaNOrREYDJlDZEsh11VSDTkJPkbBjp-SRI.
[42] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/.
[43] Parry’s emphasis retained in https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier.
[44] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/ and U.S. House of Representatives Executive Committee on Intelligence Interview with Crowdstrike Executive Shawn Henry, Executive Committee, U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence, 5 December 2017, https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/sh21.pdf.
[45] See https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-mysterious-dnc-email-hack/.
[46] See https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-indictment-of-hillary-clintons.
[47] https://andmagazine.com/talk/2020/10/11/exclusive-coup-plotters-considered-never-allowing-trump-to-be-inaugurated/.
[48] www.foxnews.com/politics/ica-steele-dossier-claims.
[49] http://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia and www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html.
[50] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/18/steele-dossier-michael-isikoff/2347833002/.
[51] https://dailycaller.com/2020/08/13/steven-schrage-stefan-halper-spygate-trump-cambridge/. Perhaps related is the following from a court brief: “Burisma Holdings Ltd. finances Atlantic Council (Ukraine) and associated rogue operatives from USDOS [U.S. Department of State], FVEY [Five Eyes intelligence alliance of U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand], and Crowdstrike, through Privatbank” [Words in brackets not in original] (From document from an investigative company submitted to the court handling Hunter Biden’s paternity case dealing with his failure to make payments in which Hunter Biden was granted upon certain conditions not to have to submit any financial records on sources of his income covering the last five years; that is, from the time he began ‘working’ for Burisma. See ‘Ukraine: The Final Piece,’ The Blaze, 6 February 2020, www.theblaze.com/glenn-beck-special/ukraine-corruption-obama), at the 1:01:10 mark in video.
[52] See https://andmagazine.com/talk/2020/10/11/exclusive-coup-plotters-considered-never-allowing-trump-to-be-inaugurated/.
[53] See http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/shocking-released-fbi-302-joseph-mifsud-not-not-russia-italy-etc/.
[54] The DNC hack and Steel dossier were supplemented and given extra ‘credence’ by official and media manufactured and hyped myths about other forms of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, which approached a minimum level at best and fell far short of US involvement in post-Soviet Russian and other foreign elections: the hacking of state election data and troll farms to influence voters. See https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/. See also: Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Elections, https://wpcdn.zenger.news/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/24190822/2020-12-23-Sidney-Powell-Team-Binder-ZENGER-NEWS.pdf, p. 4-6, 8, 11-13, 14-20, and 38; www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/5/russian-troll-accounts-monetized-twitter-activity-/; and http://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990946/twitter-russian-trolls-bots-election-tampering; www.pnas.org/content/117/1/243. Tweets and retweets of Russian troll posts amounted to nearly 800,000—a drop in the bucket of U.S. domestic and other international activity on Twitter. See https://symantec-enterprise-blogs.security.com/blogs/threat-intelligence/twitterbots-propaganda-disinformation; https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-ad-spend/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFAgryG9JRe7_1GEYMVsnsb03geomsUVKggM8kmBI2oOpwEUCVb0Tl8d-iQAy6NaWbWvnaTcg61Y1tO58VG9r72OgjR44oDDCYs20_GhkERbhu02hOqz8AIQUX3vz8Vb2Tj_nrIYWRJHAT3oif2yI-Q-CV6E4fyyeECmrc_Q6K8b; http://www.vox.com/2018/10/19/17990946/twitter-russian-trolls-bots-election-tampering; http://www.pnas.org/content/117/1/243; https://nationalpost.com/news/world/a-russian-troll-farms-most-viewed-facebook-ad-wasnt-about-trump-it-promoted-u-s-law-enforcement; and https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/11/doj-attorney-says-russian-government-nothing-troll-farms/.
[55] See https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/499586-new-fbi-document-confirms-the-trump-campaign-was-investigated-without.
[56] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/16/doj-has-phones-man-sparked-fbis-probe-trump-flynn-/.
[57] For more details, see https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/.
[58] See the call transcript at www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Unclassified09.2019.pdf.
[59] See www.dailywire.com/news/the-driving-force-behind-trumps-impeachment-was-not-the-whistleblower-new-book-alleges.
[60] For more details, see https://gordonhahn.com/2020/12/29/the-authoritarianization-putinization-of-america-parts-1-and-2-complete/.
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About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org. Dr. Hahn is the author of The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, forthcoming in 2021), Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018), The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.