Consortiumnews
The Mueller Indictments: The Day the Music Died
February 24, 2018
Exclusive: The FBIs Russia indictments last week have whipped Democrats and
the mainstream media into a frenzy but the scandal may be collapsing under
its own weight, writes Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Fads and scandals often follow a set trajectory. They grow big, bigger, and
then, finally, too big, at which point they topple over and collapse under
the weight of their own internal contradictions. This was the fate of the
Me too campaign, which started out as an exposé of serial abuser Harvey
Weinstein but then went too far when Babe.net published a story about one
womans bad date with comedian Aziz Ansari. Suddenly, it became clear that
different types of behavior were being lumped together in a dangerous way,
and a once-explosive movement began to fizzle.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
So, too, with Russiagate. After dominating the news for more than a year,
the scandal may have at last reached a tipping point with last weeks
indictment of thirteen Russian individuals and three Russian corporations on
charges of illegal interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the
indictment landed with a decided thud for three reasons:
It failed to connect the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the alleged St.
Petersburg troll factory accused of political meddling, with Vladimir Putin,
the all-purpose evil-doer who the corporate media say is out to destroy
American democracy.
It similarly failed to establish a connection with the Trump campaign and
indeed went out of its way to describe contacts with the Russians as
unwitting.
It described the meddling itself as even more inept and amateurish than
many had suspected.
After nine months of labor, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller thus brought
forth a mouse. Even if all the charges are true something well probably
never know since its unlikely that any of the accused will be brought to
trial the indictment tells us virtually nothing thats new.
Yes, IRA staffers purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, 56 percent of
which ran after Election Day. Yes, they persuaded someone in Florida to
dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform and stand inside a cage
mounted on a flatbed truck. And, yes, they also got another real U.S.
person, as the indictment terms it, to stand in front of the White House
with a sign saying, Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss, a tribute, apparently,
to IRA founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the convicted robber turned caterer whose
birthday was three days away. Instead of a super-sophisticated spying
operation, the indictment depicts a bumbling freelance operation that is
still giving Putin heartburn months after the fact.
Not that this has stopped the media from whipping itself into a frenzy.
Russia is at war with our democracy, screamed a headline in the Washington
Post. Trump is ignoring the worst attack on America since 9/11, blared
another.
Russia is engaged in a virtual war against the United States
through 21st-century tools of disinformation and propaganda, declared the
New York Times, while Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter tweeted that the
IRAs activities amounted to nothing less than a tech Pearl Harbor.
All of which merely demonstrates, in proper backhanded fashion, how
grievously Mueller has fallen short. Proof that the scandal had at last
overstayed its welcome came five days later when the Guardian, a website
that had previously flogged Russiagate even more vigorously than the Post,
the Times, or CNN, published a news analysis by Cas Mudde, an associate
professor at the University of Georgia, admitting that it was all a farce
and a particularly self-defeating one at that.
Muddes article made short work of hollow pieties about a neutral and
objective investigation. Rather than an effort to get at the truth,
Russiagate was a thinly-veiled effort at regime change. [I]n the end, he
wrote, the only question everyone really seems to care about is whether
Donald Trump was involved and can therefore be impeached for treason.
With last weeks indictment, the article went on, Democratic party leaders
once again reassured their followers that this was the next logical step in
the inevitable downfall of Trump. The more Democrats play the Russiagate
card, in other words, the nearer they will come to their goal of riding the
Orange-Haired One out of town on a rail.
This makes the Dems seem crass, unscrupulous, and none too democratic. But
then Mudde gave the knife a twist. The real trouble with the strategy, he
said, is that it isnt working:
While there is no doubt that the Trump camp was, and still is, filled with
amoral and fraudulent people, and was very happy to take the Russians help
during the elections, even encouraging it on the campaign, I do not think
Mueller will be able to find conclusive evidence that Donald Trump himself
colluded with Putins Russia to win the elections. And that is the only
thing that will lead to his impeachment as the Republican party is not
risking political suicide for anything less.
Other Objectives of Russiagate
No collusion means no impeachment and hence no anti-Trump color revolution
of the sort that was so effective in Georgia or the Ukraine. Moreover,
while 53 percent of Americans believe that investigating Russiagate should
be a top or at least an important priority according to a recent poll,
figures for a half-dozen other issues ranging from Medicare and Social
Security reform to tax policy, healthcare, infrastructure, and immigration
are actually a good deal higher 67 percent, 72 percent, or even more.
Summed up Mudde:
the Russia-Trump collusion story might be the talk of the
town in Washington, but this is not the case in much of the rest of the
country. Out in flyover country, rather, Americans cant figure out why
the political elite is more concerned with a nonexistent scandal than with
things that really count, i.e. de-industrialization, infrastructure decay,
the opioid epidemic, and school shootings. As society disintegrates, the
only thing Democrats have accomplished with all their blathering about
Russkis under the bed is to demonstrate just how cut off from the real world
they are.
But Russiagate is not just about regime change, but other things as well.
One is repression. Where once Democrats would have laughed off Russian
trolls and the like, theyre now obsessed with making a mountain out of a
molehill in order to enforce mainstream opinion and marginalize ideas and
opinions suspected of being un-American and hence pro-Russian. If the RT
(Russia Today) news network is now suspect the Times described it not long
ago as the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation
campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize
the West then why not the BBC or Agence France-Presse? How long until
foreign books are banned or foreign musicians?
Im actually surprised I havent been indicted, tweets Bloomberg columnist
Leonid Bershidsky. Im Russian, I was in the U.S. in 2016 and I published
columns critical of both Clinton and Trump w/o registering as a foreign
agent. When the Times complains that Facebook still sees itself as the
bank that got robbed, rather than the architect who designed a bank with no
safes, and no alarms or locks on the doors, and then acted surprised when
burglars struck, then its clear that the goal is to force Facebook to rein
in its activities or stand by and watch as others do so instead.
Add to this the classic moral panic promoted by #MeToo to believe charges
of sexual harassment and assault without first demanding evidence is to
disbelieve, and deny due process to, the accused, notes Judith Levine in
the Boston Review and its clear that a powerful wave of cultural
conservatism is crashing down on the United States, much of it originating
in a classic neoliberal-Hillaryite milieu. Formerly the liberal
alternative, the Democratic Party is now passing the Republicans on the
right.
But Russiagate is about something else as well: war. As National Security
Adviser H.R. McMaster warns that the time is now to act against Iran, the
New York Times slams Trump for not imposing sanctions on Moscow, and a
spooky Nuclear Posture Review suggests that the US might someday respond
to a cyber attack with atomic weapons, its plain that Washington is itching
for a showdown that will somehow undo the mistakes of the previous
administration. The more Trump drags his feet, the more Democrats conclude
that a war drive is the best way to bring him to his knees.
Thus, low-grade political interference is elevated into a casus belli while
Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a supernatural villain straight out of Harry
Potter. But where does it stop? Libya has been set back decades, Syria,
the subject of yet another US regime-change effort, has been all but
destroyed, while Yemen which America helps Saudi Arabia bomb virtually
around the clock is now a disaster area with some 9,000 people killed,
50,000 injured, a million-plus cholera cases, and more than half of all
hospitals and clinics destroyed.
The more Democrats pound the war drums, the more death and destruction will
ensue. The process is well underway in Syria, the victim of Israeli
bombings and a US-Turkish invasion, and it will undoubtedly spread as Dems
turn up the heat. If the pathetic pseudo-scandal known as Russiagate really
is collapsing under its own weight, then its not a moment too soon.
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic:
How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).
