As Alexei Navalny’s death was reported last week, an effort to tie the tragedy directly to US politics, Donald Trump, House Republicans, and the worthless foreign aid bill stalled in the House soon followed.
The never-ending Russian moral panic went into such a frenzy that a CNN reporter asked President Biden if “Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House Republicans,” as if aid to Ukraine would have prevented a death in a jail. One wonders if these reporters think the massive corruption “security” bill will bring world peace and an end to hunger and climate change.
Take John Harwood, who, after a long career at The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and CNBC, was released from his last post at CNN in 2022 for allegedly being too far left. He has followed the path of fellow ousted progressive journalists like Dan Rather and Keith Olbermann and completely lost all semblance of objectivity.
It is a shame, as I watched and respected all three in their prime, even if I found their reporting biased. That characterization fails miserably to describe their vitriol post-career, and in Harwood’s case it is quite shocking. Here’s a recent post on X by Mr. Harwood:
“Vladimir Putin, who caused Navalny’s death, helped Donald Trump become President. Trump is trying to help Putin conquer Ukraine, over the opposition of the free world. He has enlisted leading Republicans in his effort American voters will decide in November which side they’re on.”
I simply can’t fathom how someone in their right mind continues to play this silly game, especially as facts continue to surface which clearly impeach the claims. It has been eight years since the first bogus stories about Trump-Russia collusion first aired and the big corporate media outlets still have failed to admit their folly.
Two big stories have come out recently that turn Harwood’s post on its head. To directly refute the idea that Putin helped Trump, the first story showed how the “CIA Cooked the Intelligence,” to hide that Russia actually favored Hillary Clinton for President in 2016. According to the story on Racket News, the relationship between Clinton and Russia “…was a relationship they were comfortable with,” some CIA analysts believed, but intelligence was suppressed.” The story details how CIA intelligence was manipulated by CIA Director John Brennan and others to point the finger at Trump, rather than Clinton. Its a bombshell.
The second story of equally earth-shattering tonnage, this time from Public and Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag, details how the “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy on Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax.” Indeed:
Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In truth, the US IC asked the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance to surveil Trump’s associates and share the intelligence they acquired with US agencies, say sources close to a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) investigation. The Five Eyes nations are the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
After Public and Racket had been told that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target, a source confirmed that the IC had “identified [them] as people to ‘bump,’ or make contact with or manipulate. They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement — targets for collection and misinformation.”
So, much of the 2016 election cycle interference has become clear. Hillary Clinton herself ordered her campaign to start the Trump-Russia stories, first promoting the bogus Alfa Bank story, and then hiring Michael Steele (through Perkins Coie & Fusion GPS) to write the Steele dossier. At the same time, as we find above, CIA director John Brennan organized spying on the Trump campaign by allies, helped to feed both the Steele dossier and the “bumps” by foreign intelligence to entrap Trump campaign surrogates, and cooked the intelligence regarding Russia and Trump collusion. FBI Director James Comey and his leadership team did the rest, opening an investigation when none was warranted, briefed President Trump on its contents – which gave some cover for Buzzfeed to publish the dossier – and then continued to lie to Congress about the veracity of the claims made.
So, with Ukraine and Navalny topping all news coverage, the Russian moral panic is alive and well in its eighth year. It is amazing how easily the stories get manipulated and how incurious people are to investigate, as long as the answers are simple and fit the narrative. Take Navalny, for example. Aaron Mate, a reporter for the Grayzone, has made the following claim regarding the dissident:
Navalny was a marginal opposition figure who polled at around 2%. Putin didn’t fear him; it served Putin to have him seen in the West as his main opposition. The Russian gov’t meanwhile has just barred anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin. A Russian court has also issued a draconian prison sentence to anti-war sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky. We don’t hear about people like Nadezhdin and Kagarlitsky in the West nearly as much for one reason: unlike Navalny, they don’t collaborate with Western governments. Navalny worked with NATO intel cutout Bellingcat and went through the “Yale World Fellow” program, a regime change training ground.
It is hard to say whether Mr. Mate is correct about Navalny’s ties to the West, but it is fishy that Navalny’s death is the only such tragedy with which the corporate media and the deep state seem to care. There’s been absolutely zero big media reporting on Gonzalo Lira – a controversial figure – who nonetheless was an American journalist who died in an Ukraine prison a few weeks ago for the crime of speaking out against the Zelenskyy regime. And we have heard little outrage for the US dissident Julian Assange, who has been in prison for five years awaiting extradition to the United States to be tried for the crime of journalism. He is reportedly in very bad health and likely to die in prison, just as Navalny has. At least Navalny had a show trial; Assange has not.
Russia is a state of 150M people, less than half of the United States. Russian GDP is one tenth the United States or China and less than the GDP of both California and Texas. She is a regional power that treats the EU and NATO as adversaries, just as they treat her. Other than nuclear weapons (which assuredly are a threat that can only be dealt with through diplomacy, not war), the Russian Federation poses little threat to America.
The largest risk to American security, which we somehow continue to ignore through 25 years of useless foreign wars in first Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Ukraine and the Levant, is China.
China is a state of 1.5 billion people. Their GDP is on par with the United States. They have the largest Navy, the largest Army and have spent the past 25 years building relationships, infrastructure and bases around the globe while we dither.
The EU needs to contain Russia while we attempt to contain China. Everything else is a waste of time – a very precious resource.
Justin Weller is the Founder and Editor of The Country, and host of the podcast The Country with Justin Weller. Prior, he was a general manager and sales leader in startup and Big Tech firms, interned on Capitol Hill, and was a Contributing Editor at mxdwn.com. This piece is republished from The Country
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