President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin was a profile in courage against an onslaught of media pressure that would have made a typical glad-handing huckster politician fold.
By engaging in rational foreign policy without the baggage of swamp politics, President Trump did precisely what American voters fed up with Washington’s insider games expected him to do.
Top Republicans wanted him to cop to Russian interference, but not collusion. “Putin is a thug” is a mantra dressed as a tautology that funds right-wing think tanks and embellishes the hero’s journey of many of Washington’s most notable Republicans.
It is sourced less in fact than in constant repetition. How is Russia worse than Saudi Arabia, to whom we supply F-15s and military training? Why is Putin a “thug” but Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman a diplomatic “partner”?
Trump kept faith with the disaffected voters who put him in office by not allowing Democrats and their kept media to dismiss his election triumph as a Russian plot.
By abusing the criminal investigation process, Washington has created a false dichotomy where Trump’s failure to accept Russian interference is evidence that he himself conspired in it.
Proper Skepticism
The easiest thing for Trump would have been to go along to get along. Instead, as any commander-in-chief should do when faced with “intelligence” he assessed it. He sought facts. He constructed theories of human motivation. And he declared, on the dais with Putin and later upon clarification, that he is skeptical.
He has reason to be. Most of what he knows about Russian interference was purposely withheld from him by the agencies with an obligation to disclose it. That alone is reason enough to be skeptical.
It has been learned that the lie was first fabricated by politically motivated investigators. President Obama’s one-time Communist voting CIA director John Brennan established a task force in the Spring of 2016 to connect Trump to Russia.
Brennan does not like post-Soviet Russia, probably, because it changed the name of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg, funnels all legislation through the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church for his approval, and has some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the world.
How dare those deplorables govern themselves without resort to the best intellectual ideas of the West, like Communism?
Unraveling the Russia “Hack”
At about the same time Brennan established his task force, the Clinton Campaign hired a former British spy to compile a Dossier on Trump and Russia. What a coincidence that the Democrats and the CIA came up with the same stupid idea at the same time, huh?
After Trump was nominated, the FBI opened its own Russian investigation. The head of that investigation, Peter Strzok, texted his lover a few days later that “we’ll stop” Trump.
When John Podesta’s emails were “hacked” showing a conspiracy between the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic Party to fix primaries against Bernie Sanders, they needed a false flag to throw the press off the stink of the corruption that was revealed.
Podesta said Trump and Russia stole the emails. There was no evidence of his wild claim, so the Clinton friendly intelligence agencies had to manufacture some.
Here’s how they did it. The supposedly hacked computers were not turned over to the FBI. Instead, they were given to a private contractor, CrowdStrike, whose CTO and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian expat and a senior fellow at an anti-Putin think tank, the Atlantic Council.
The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a $10 million donor to the Clinton Foundation. In 2013, the Atlantic Council gave Hillary Clinton its Distinguished International Leadership Award. CrowdStrike had skin in the game and reported that the Russians were behind the hack.
This only scratches the surface of the CrowdStrike shenanigans. The riveting full story of the server chicanery has been told by Mike Thau here at American Greatness.
Incredibly, Trump was placed on the defensive for leaked emails that showed his opponent fixing the primaries. Trump protested by stating that the federal government has “no idea” who was behind the hacks.
Strzok’s FBI and Brennan’s CIA called him a liar, issuing a “Joint Statement” that suggested 17 intelligence agencies agree that it was the Russians. This was a few weeks after Strzok texted his lover about an “insurance policy” against Trump’s election.
Hillary Clinton cited this “intelligence assessment” in the crucial October presidential debate to portray Trump as Putin’s stooge. The media’s fact checkers blasted Trump for not conceding Russian interference.
Trump won anyway against this media-Clinton-spy tag-team. It has since been learned that the “17 intelligence agencies” claim was false. The usual suspects at the FBI and CIA authored the intelligence assessment and deceptively packaged it as a consensus.
Last year The Nation, a venerable progressive publication, retained a group of former NSA computer experts to test CrowdStrike’s hypothesis. They concluded that Podesta’s emails were removed from his computer at a speed that makes an off-site download from Russia impossible.
The Commentariat Versus Public Opinion
When Trump stood with Putin and declared, “I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics,” he reasonably believed that Russian interference was primarily an invention of his political enemies.
The Western media predictably went nuts, but the frenzy has scuttled upon the rocks of public opinion as usually happens with Trump. The Washington Post reported on recent polling over the weekend:
[P]ublic reaction nationally [to the Helsinki summit] appears more muted than in Washington, where Trump faced withering bipartisan criticism for appearing to side with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies at a July 16 news conference in Helsinki.
The lesson? Standing against swamp politics to reestablish friendly relations with an armed nuclear state is not something that upsets ordinary Americans.
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