cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34033627

Article has a hard paywall, so here it is:

It was a cover-up.

The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time. It even has multiple names thanks to its peculiar chronology. From 2016 until April 2019 — while Democrats still held out hope of “presidency-wrecking” revelations that would topple Donald Trump — it was generally known as the Trump-Russia scandal. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller broke the hearts of MSNBC audiences by issuing a report without new indictments, attention began to be cast on the scandal’s fraudulent construction, how it was propped up by political spying, illegal leaks, and WMD-style intelligence fakery. Trump and others began to call it Spygate or the Russia hoax, but the name that stuck was Russiagate.

Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do, after a month of disclosures, capped yesterday by the release of an explosive (and inexplicably long-classified) annex to the report of Special Counsel John Durham. Finally, it seems, we can explain how the idea that Donald Trump was “gaffing his way toward treason” through a secret love affair (really!) with Vladimir Putin and extensive “ties” or “links” with Russia suddenly became The Biggest Story in the World in the summer of 2016.

“THE KISS”: Media outlets were promoting the “love story” as early as March 2016

It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

Now, we know. With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes.

One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme. The last stage required the enthusiastic cooperation and canine incuriosity of the entire commercial news business, which cheered as conspirators made an enforcement target of Trump, actually an irrelevant bystander.

I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge. Now, there’s no doubt. Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple:

At the outset of 2016, Hillary Clinton was in a world of self-inflicted hurt. Having put her entire life as Secretary of State onto a private server, opening up the possibility for an unprecedented penetration of American cybersecurity, she was facing a grave and damaging federal investigation. The story that she “chose not to keep” (read: delete) over 30,000 emails had been broken the previous year, and the details were appalling, with private computer specialist Paul Combetta belatedly wiping them out in what he called an “oh, shit” moment, three weeks after the issuance of a Congressional subpoena.

Clinton’s position was so unsteady by early 2016 that she made Bernie Sanders a real challenger for the Democratic nomination, losing New Hampshire in a landslide and essentially tying in Iowa, where she somehow lost 84% of the vote of women under 30. This was in addition to other problems, like an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation that had been “put on hold” until after the 2016 vote, creeping issues with donors, and negative publicity around husband Bill. This forced her to scramble to do damage-control interviews, many of which just did more damage. An exclusive talk with Scott Pelley of CBS produced the headline, “Hillary Clinton: ‘I’ve Always Tried’ To Tell the Truth.” Watch Clinton’s total inability to avoid lawyering a simple question, and blunt irritation at Pelley’s insistence on asking it:

[YouTube video: Clinton: I Always Try to Tell the Truth]

On top of all this, a cache of correspondence that the Justice Department Inspector General would later describe as “data exfiltrated…from various U.S. victims, including the Executive Office of the President (EoP), the State Department, the U.S. House of Representatives, [and] other federal agencies” had fallen into Russian hands. It contained material potentially very damaging to Clinton. Authorities were soon forced to plan for the possibility that it would get out.

This is the backdrop for the most key piece of information in the classified appendix to the investigation of Special Counsel Durham, whose probe fizzled with a semi-whimper in 2023, describing materials that “individuals affiliated with Russian intelligence services” hacked at some point prior to January 2016. What you need to know: Russians had a pile of emails and correspondence involving “government agencies, non-profit organizations, and think-tanks based in the United States.”

This pile of material ostensibly contained information about conversations between DNC chief Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and two members of the Open Society Foundation, Jeffrey Goldstein and Leonard Benardo. A Russian analysis of these communications described how investigations of possible preferential treatment of Clinton Foundation donors by the Department of State caused a “significant negative reaction” for Clinton within the party, and that Barack Obama was unwilling to “darken the final part of his presidency” with a scandal involving his successor:

Open Society Foundation Senior Vice President Leonard Benardo

That Russian memo, described as delivered to the U.S. by a source called T1, was dated January, 2016. A March, 2016 Russian memo referenced more rumors between American officials and think-tankers, describing how “[the Democratic Party’s] opposition is focused on discrediting Trump…. [a]mong other things, the Clinton staff, with support from special services, is preparing scandalous revelations of business relations between Trump and the ‘Russian Mafia’”:

Durham on a March, 2016 analysis by Russian intelligence

Papers like the New York Times are already focusing on the idea that some of these email communications and conversations might have been “made by Russian spies,” with some principals like Benardo denying having sent at least one version of one of the key emails, and others saying they didn’t recall conversation. This isn’t a news flash: the report itself addresses inconsistencies in versions of some communications, concluding in one area that later emails from Benardo were a “composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking.” But even the Times says the composites were assembled from “actual emails by different hacking victims.” So what are we talking about?

The figures involved haven’t issued full-throated denials. The strongest statements involve Benardo and Wasserment Schultz insisting in 2017 that, as the Times put it, they “never even met, let alone communicated about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.” Others went the “I don’t recall” route, with former Clinton aide Julianne Smith dreaming up an entry for the Hall of Fame of non-denial denials. She didn’t remember proposing a plan, she said, but said it was not only “possible she had proposed ideas on these topics to the campaign’s leadership,” but that “they may have approved those ideas.” She added it was “also possible someone proposed an idea of seeking to distract attention from the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s use of a private server,” but she didn’t specifically remember, you know, that:

I DON’T REMEMBER DOING IT, BUT MAYBE I PROPOSED SOMETHING, AND MAYBE THAT SOMETHING WAS APPROVED: Julianne Smith

Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan went with “absurd, but maybe!” He called the idea of a “plan” to vilify Trump “ridiculous,” but added he could “not conclusively rule out the possibility”:

RIDICULOUS! BUT MAYBE Jake Sullivan

How should one weigh that “ridiculous”? Here’s Sullivan in 2018, a full six months after news broke that Clinton and the DNC paid for the Steele dossier, denying in an interview with David Axelrod that he had any knowledge of the dossier during the campaign:

[Embedded video cannot be included.]

It’s a more explosive story if one can confirm sordid details like Smith saying it will be a “long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,” or an alleged communication from Benardo to Smith that the FBI will “put more oil into the fire” to help the “plan.” However, the veracity of the details is irrelevant. What matters is that the FBI did “put more oil into the fire.” Even if the emails are art (which I doubt), reality sure as hell imitated it. Both the Bureau and the CIA had this intelligence of the alleged plan as early as March of 2016, took it seriously, and instead of investigating the allegations, investigated… Donald Trump!

This is the smoking gun: intelligence agencies got wind of the rumors early, took them seriously enough to brief President Obama, but instead of investigating the rumors, they made the rumors true.

This brings us to the most embarrassing passage, a Russian summary of how the “plan” was to play out, post-Wikileaks:

During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated… technical structures… in particular, the Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect companies, from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications.

The Russians viewed “leading U.S. publications” as pliant wards of the state who’d print whatever they were handed, as media works in Russia. The idea that the press might push back on any part of the story, like that there was a hack at all (still in doubt, as Crowdstrike’s CEO later admitted in long-concealed testimony), or that Russia might have kompromat on Trump, or that there was any logical connection at all, was not entertained. Russian spooks proving dead right on this question should be fatal to these news organizations. If I were the American author of any of those stories and read those intercepts, I’d eat a grenade today.

A damning detail hanging over all of this is the fate of the T1 material. We already knew the FBI found a dozen different ridiculous reasons not to examine the “trove” during the “Midyear Exam” investigation. We also learned, from the House Intelligence Probe, that the Obama White House refused to let CIA officers see the T1 docs when preparing their Intelligence Community Assessment, citing privilege issues. And we know CIA chief John Brennan, after learning of the “Clinton Plan” intelligence in July of 2016, placed a direct call to counterpart Aleksandr Bortnikov, warning him to stop interfering in the election. The flow of intelligence coming back from Russia ceased at that point.

As Hans Mahncke notes, it sure looked like Brennan was at least indirectly signaling to Russia that the Americans had a way of accessing key Russian documents. A more cynical reporter than me might conclude that just as FBI leaders didn’t want subordinates to look at intelligence embarrassing to Clinton, and Obama didn’t want CIA analysts seeing the same stuff, the CIA chief didn’t want any more damaging leaks reaching anyone at all, and was willing to sabotage a intelligence gold mine to cauterize the Clinton leak. Actually, screw caution: that’s what it was. Beyond being strong circumstantial evidence the documents really did describe a cover-up, this was a brazen intelligence gift to adversaries, which should put Brennan in Robert Hanssen’s old cell in the Florence Supermax for the rest of his liver-spotted life.

Lastly: the omission of all this T1 material and the “Clinton plan” intelligence from subsequent “investigations” into Trump-Russia links proves they were all fakes, in furtherance of a coverup. At minimum, it should have been included as an element to consider when weighing evidence. As Durham noted, the FBI “was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or... the product of Russian disinformation.”

Crucially, agencies gained this knowledge without taking “any investigative steps” into the veracity of the underlying material. As Aaron Maté points out, the Washington Post even today is trying to claim in a headline that the “FBI Investigated, Never Verified, Purported Clinton Plan,” when they never investigated at all.

These people just can’t stop lying. The whole thing is one endless lie, the reason for which is now clear. Hillary Clinton got in trouble being dumb, tried to save herself by doing something dumber, and all of American officialdom backed the play. That’s it. A last period of denials awaits, but they’ll fizzle like the rest, after which not much will be left but blunt truth — and hopefully, consequences.

Marat Khairullin: THE LUGANSK PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC HAS BEEN LIBERATED FROM THE NAZI TROOPS OF THE ARMED FORCES OF UKRAINE

On June 30, 2025, LPR Head Leonid Pasechnik announced that the territory of the LPR had been completely liberated from the Nazi invaders of the AFU.

H/T to @tastemyglaive@lemmy.ml for https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8378787

Full text of paywalled article below.

This is a report on what is most likely to happen in Iran, as early as this weekend, according to Israeli insiders and American officials I’ve relied upon for decades. It will entail heavy American bombing. I have vetted this report with a longtime US official in Washington, who told me that all will be “under control” if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.” Just how that might happen, short of his assassination, is not known. There has been a great deal of talk about American firepower and targets inside Iran, but little practical thinking, as far I can tell, about how to remove a revered religious leader with an enormous following.

I have reported from afar on the nuclear and foreign policy of Israel for decades. My 1991 book The Samson Option told the story of the making of the Israeli nuclear bomb and America’s willingness to keep the project secret. The most important unanswered question about the current situation will be the response of the world, including that of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who has been an ally of Iran’s leaders.

The United States remains Israel’s most important ally, although many here and around the world abhor Israel’s continuing murderous war in Gaza. The Trump administration is in full support of Israel’s current plan to rid Iran of any trace of a nuclear weapons program while hoping the ayatollah-led government in Tehran will be overthrown.

I have been told that the White House has signed off on an all-out bombing campaign in Iran, but the ultimate targets, the centrifuges buried at least eighty meters below the surface at Fordow, will, as of this writing, not be struck until the weekend. The delay has come at Trump’s insistence because the president wants the shock of the bombing to be diminished as much as possible by the opening of Wall Street trading on Monday. (Trump took issue on social media this morning with a Wall Street Journal report that said he had decided on the attack on Iran, writing that he had yet to decide on a path forward.)

Fordow is home to the remaining majority of Iran’s most advanced centrifuges that have produced, according to recent reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to which Iran is a signatory, nine hundred pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a short step from weapons-grade levels.

The most recent Israeli bombing attacks on Iran have made no attempts to destroy the centrifuges at Fordow, which are stored at least eighty meters underground. It has been agreed, as of Wednesday, that US bombers carrying bunker bombs capable of penetrating to that depth, will begin attacking the Fordow facility this weekend.

The delay will give US military assets throughout the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean—there are more than two dozen US Air Force bases and Navy ports in the region—a chance to prepare for possible Iranian retaliation. The assumption is that Iran still has some missile and air force capability that will be on US bombing lists. “This is a chance to do away with this regime once and for all,” an informed official told me today, “and so we might as well go big.” He said, however, “that it will not be carpet bombing.”

The planned weekend bombing will also have new targets: the bases of the Republican Guards, which have countered those campaigning against the revolutionary leadership since the violent overthrow of the shah of Iran in early 1979.

The Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes that the bombings will provide “the means of creating an uprising” against Iran’s current regime, which has shown little tolerance for those who defy the religious leadership and its edicts. Iranian police stations will be struck. Government offices that house files on suspected dissenters in Iran will also be attacked.

The Israelis apparently also hope, so I gather, that Khamenei will flee the country and not make a stand until the end. I was told that his personal plane left Tehran airport headed for Oman early Wednesday morning, accompanied by two fighter planes, but it is not known whether he was aboard.

Only two thirds of Iran’s population of 90 million are Persians. The largest minority groups include Azeris, many of whom have long-standing covert ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. Jews make up a small minority group there, too. (Azerbaijan is the site of a large secret CIA base for operations in Iran.)

Bringing back the shah’s son, now living in exile in near Washington, has never been considered by the American and Israeli planners, I was told. But there has been talk among the White House planning group that includes Vice President J.D. Vance, of installing a moderate religious leader to run the country if Khamenei is deposed. The Israelis bitterly objected to the idea. “They don’t give a shit on the religious issue, but demand a political puppet to control,” the longtime US official said. “We are split with the Izzies on this. Result would be permanent hostility and future conflict in perpetuity, Bibi desperately trying to draw US in as their ally against all things Muslim, using the plight of the citizens as propaganda bait.”

There is the hope in the American and Israeli intelligence communities, I was told, that elements of the Azeri community will join in a popular revolt against the ruling regime, should one develop during the continued Israeli bombing. There also is the thought that some members of the Revolutionary Guard would join in what I was told might be “a democratic uprising against the ayatollahs”—a long-held aspiration of the US government. The sudden and successful overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was cited as a potential model, although Assad’s demise came after a long civil war.

It is possible that the result of the massive Israeli and US bombing attack could leave Iran in a state of permanent failure, as happened after the Western intervention in Libya in 2011. That revolt resulted in the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi, who had kept the disparate tribes there under control. The futures of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, all victims of repeated outside attacks, are far from settled.

Donald Trump clearly wants an international win he can market. To accomplish that, he and Netanyahu are taking America to places it has never been.

Hard paywalled: https://americanprestige.supportingcast.fm/listen/american-prestige/special-the-la-protests-and-the-imperial-boomerang-w-spencer-ackerman

Spencer Ackerman of Forever Wars is back on the podcast to talk about the LA protests and his piece on them for Zeteo, "The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles."

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is struggling to control the LA protests. But she was previously a senior board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the world's biggest instigator and financer of anti-government protests internationally – including in Hong Kong in 2019, as their own documents show.

European Court of Human Rights press release

Full text of the paywalled article, without the markup or the dozens of links, because I don’t have the patience to recreate them.

From the BBC’s “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backing’ in warm No 10 welcome” today:

Sir Keir Starmer has told Volodymyr Zelensky he has "full backing across the United Kingdom" as the two met in Downing Street.

The Ukrainian president told the prime minister he was happy his country had “such friends” after arriving in the UK in the wake of a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump that descended into a row between the two leaders…

I read that headline as “Starmer gives Zelensky ‘full backrub,’” which might have been more accurate. The Zelensky World Tour for the last week now includes punking the White House, lecturing America for its insufficient billions, getting yelled at for having “no cards” by a furious Donald Trump (who took offense “on Putin’s behalf,” not the taxpayer’s, according to the New York Times), then instantly backtracking on X and opening the door to a NATO-less solution. Afterward, he fled across the pond to England, where he offered to resign in exchange for NATO admission before dismounting into the arms of Starmer, who eased urgency toward a settlement by pledging to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it may take.”

Zelensky’s transformation from affable populist to Anne Applebaum’s idea of a sex symbol was off-putting even before he started appearing before swooning legislators around the world wearing his trademark wan face and “I Saved The World From Putin and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” costume. We just spent three years turning a fixable local issue into a test case for a new ethos of imperial intransigence, one that apparently requires constant weeding of unbelievers and full control of media to preserve “democracy.” Zelensky may not have started as a hawk for this global Misinformation is Murder movement, but once he realized selling the idea was a requirement for NATO’s billions, he threw himself into the role with gusto. Now, he’s refusing to give up the part.

Many readers were offended last week by my irreligious attitude toward Ukraine’s president. Those of us who won’t salute this NATO-crafted character actor are apparently “careening into full-on MAGA paranoia,” no better than “comrades” and “fellow travelers” in Vladimir Putin’s figurative if not literal employ. The former comedian is now reprising Ben Kingsley’s Marvel role as the Mandarin, playing tough-guy mascot for transnational bureaucrats whose idea of a good joke is getting Americans to pay to correct their own wrong opinions. Maybe he’s doing what he has to do for his country, but seriously, fuck him. And fuck Starmer, for that matter.

If you’re not offended by the whole affair, you should be. Recapping:

Placed in an impossible situation when Russian forces massed on his border in early 2022, Zelensky at first pursued a strategy of speaking his mind. He criticized Americans for withdrawing diplomats from Kyiv pre-invasion, saying, “We do not have a Titanic situation here.” American officials complained he was “poking us in the eye” with comments that were “mind-boggling,” adding they were “puzzling” over his apparent optimism about a deal with Russia. They preferred he take a different approach, one in line with a new American idea about “information warfare” that didn’t permit local politicians to act like they had a say in how America chose to conduct wars on their territories.

Before Russia invaded, American officials announced in a series of high-profile features in the New York Times that it planned to “beat the master at his own game” by using the press to engage in “information warfare,” claiming it was difficult to go “toe-to-toe with an autocratic state” if the U.S. couldn’t also flood the media zone with untrammeled propaganda. The first target of “information warfare” was said to be Putin. By releasing intelligence in papers like the Times, we were told, he might be stunned by our level of insight into his operations and “reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.” Pre-invasion, America’s former ambassador to Ukraine even told us the new strategy was working, that “Putin has already blinked” and was now “looking for a way out.”

Tanks rolled anyway three weeks later, after which we were told there was a new target of “information warfare”: ordinary people, including Ukrainians and the foreign populations supporting them. Our leading media outlets now filled with heroic stories of Ukrainian resistance, including the eerily Bastogne-like “Go fuck yourself” tale of Snake Island Ukrainians choosing death over surrender to a Russian warship, or portraits of the mysterious “Ghost of Kyiv,” a MiG-29 fighter pilot who “dominates the skies” with his supersonic “brass balls.” The story was repeated over channels like MSNBC even after it came out that the key images had been stitched together from old Twitter posts and a flight simulator program:

[Video insert]

The Times in pointing out that these stories proved mythical noted they “do not compare to the falsehoods being spread by Russia,” and that it was “important” to “keep morale high among the fighters and marshal global support for their cause.” A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Peter Singer, said, “If Ukraine had no messages of the righteousness of its cause, the popularity of its cause, the valor of its heroes, the suffering of its populace, then it would lose.” He added that in the social media age, audiences are targets and participants, so sharing such images “makes them combatants of a sort as well.”

We were no longer just readers about the conflict in Ukraine, but a type of soldier in battle. By swallowing tales like the “Ghost of Kyiv,” we were “doing our part,” to put it in Starship Troopers terms. But how to square this with the movement against “misinformation”? First, the Times quoted one “Twitter user” saying, “‘Why can’t we just let people believe some things?’” Then it quoted Twitter, which said such videos didn’t violate its terms of service. Finally, Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos declared, “I think this demonstrates the limits of ‘fact-checking’ in a fast-moving battle with real lives at stake.”

Things got weirder when the excuses for leaving mythical stories untouched coincided with Europe’s decision to ban RT and Sputnik continent-wide for the crime of “disinformation and information manipulation.” Microsoft, in announcing its adherence to Europe’s decision, echoed other American firms in pledging to stop “state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” bent on “undermining truth.” Most Americans seemed to agree with this decision. Even some once-liberal friends of mine explained in the New Republic that losing RT was no big loss, both because RT was “ridiculous” and because it gave the likes of Tucker Carlson “Russian talking points.”

It wasn’t until a year later that we found out that these events coincided with a broad-scale program in which the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, sent lists of accounts it wished to ban to the FBI, which in turn sent those requests to American platforms. We thought it was a scoop when a letter from the FBI’s San Francisco office to Twitter asking to remove Canadian journalist Aaron Maté along with hundreds of other accounts was found in the Twitter Files.

That was just one item on a giant conveyor belt of SBU requests to Twitter, Instagram, and other outlets. The House Weaponization of Government Committee later found the SBU induced the FBI to pass on requests to remove 15,865 posts across 5,165 Facebook accounts, and even requested (by mistake, possibly) the removal of the official Russian language Instagram account of the US State Department, @USAPoRusski. When colleague Lee Fang managed to contact Ilya Vitiuk, head of Ukraine’s cybersecurity service, and asked how he differentiated “Russian disinformation” from legitimate content, Vitiuk explained, “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’”

From SBU to FBI to STFU: Left, SBU requests to Meta sent via FBI. Right, an SBU-to-FBI-to-Twitter request, from Twitter Files

In April 2023 word broke that an Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira was arrested after leaking intelligence documents. These showed internal U.S. assessments calling Ukraine a “catastrophic situation” that was “grinding toward a stalemate” and a “protracted war beyond 2023.” This came out just after Anthony Blinken said Ukraine’s position was “stronger than ever,” Joe Biden said Putin would “never” win, and General Ben Hodges said Ukraine would be liberated by August.

Having established the U.S. may conduct “information warfare” even against its own people, it now arrested Teixeira for interrupting official messaging with truth, and media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post helped authorities catch their own source. Not only did media not report negative news about Ukraine, it helped authorities arrest those who possessed such information.

David Sanger, the Times reporter who helped write the piece introducing “information warfare,” now wrote an article explaining that the “freshness” of the Pentagon Leaker docs made them different from those of Ed Snowden or the Wikileaks cables. It also became common to dismiss any defense of Teixeira or communication of the information he leaked as right-wing propaganda.

Not long after we saw American media shrug off the death in Ukrainian custody of writer and YouTuber Gonzalo Lira. While he was in jail, The Independent set the tone, suggesting the United States should not ask the recipient of billions its aid to free one of its citizens: “An American ‘Putin propagandist’ was jailed in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk want him freed.” The Daily Beast did better: “How a Sleazy American Dating Coach Became a Pro-Putin Shill in Ukraine.” When Lira died, the headlines featured lines like “Kremlin Shill Died in Ukraine” and “Pro-Putin Expat Dies in Ukrainian Jail.” Ukraine meanwhile banned the World Socialist Web Site and jailed local writer Bogdan Syrotiuk, a cause that didn’t animate the American left much, perhaps because it lacked a Trump angle.

If you’re keeping score, the Ukraine war established American officials could plant deceptions in media as part of “information warfare”; Pro-Ukraine deceptions would be tolerated to maintain “morale”; Russian media was blocked officially in Europe and quasi-officially here; individual posts of Americans were routinely removed or deamplified, sometimes at the behest of Ukraine; and leaks of true information running counter to our own state media narratives would be harshly punished. We banned foreign state media, and essentially mandated fealty to our version at home.

Less formal campaigns denounced anyone who advocated a “diplomatic solution” as a spewer of Russian talking points, on par with the Russian diplomats who were now described as “disinformation warriors.” It did not take much digging to figure out that many Ukrainian news operations denouncing figures like John Mearsheimer or Robert F. Kennedy were funded by the American State Department. The U.S.-Ukraine Foundation that ran a piece saying Kennedy furthered “Russian talking points” had a DOS award, and others with detailed schematics of Ukraine’s informational enemies were done up spiffily by USAID contractors. One is a perfect metaphor for what this war turned into: a way for European contractors to get paid by Americans to correct Americans.

On September 20, 2017, a company called Peregrine Technical Solutions, LLC which specializes in “customized cyber offense and defense,” was awarded $101,917 by the U.S. State Department. The funds were for a transaction described as “ACS CALL CENTER SERVICES — MONTERREY, MEXICO.”

The sub-awards for Peregrine (a company “associated” with other names like Goldbelt and CP Marine) included a $2.43 million outlay for a British firm called “Zinc Network.” That contract featured a similar start date of September 27, 2018, and ran through 2023. Like Peregrine, Zinc is linked to at least three names, including Breakthrough Media and Camden Creative. The description of its award from Peregrine says it aimed to “mitigate the effects of Russian disinformation and engage online audiences primarily in the east of Ukraine by amplifying trusted local voices” to “present a positive, democratic version of a unified Ukraine.”

Following just this one group of contractors reveals the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “social media influence” all over the world. In Ukraine, much of the money went to European middlemen who created dummy Internet personalities to sell the war. They put this in writing! Zinc was obligated $1.23 million from the State Department’s Office of Acquisition Management for two contracts, each of which would “identify, train, and engage 25 to 40 social media influencers” who’d “produce and publish their own social media content in line with U.S. Foreign policy objectives.”

Your tax dollars, turned into dummy social media accounts

When I called Peregrine, they were shocked to hear a request for a public relations office. The London-based Zinc office seemed similarly unprepared for public inquiry. It’s too bad, because it would be good to know why an American contractor like Peregrine at the outset of a Ukrainian social media campaign needed to hire a call center associated with a U.S. embassy in Mexico. From Zinc, it would be nice to know identities of its social media influencers (did they “engage” Americans?). Also, what did it do for its $500,000 USAID “Pro-Vaccination Campaign” in Georgia, or its $911,613 State Department award for “social media management services for Hindi/Urdu”? What does an “information integrity” services contract entail?

I generally have sympathy for people like Zelensky. The former Soviet Union is a place where success is mostly reserved for men of violence, and anyone outside that club who manages to rise usually needs a big bag of other extraordinary qualities. But this politician allowed his persona to become just another legend “in line with U.S. foreign policy objectives,” forgetting that voters decide what those objectives are, not contractors who don’t answer the phone, or Keir Starmer, or Jens Stoltenberg, or any of a hundred other officials who think they know what wars we must support. I’m tired of being lied to about why this mess can’t get fixed and just want to move on. Is there really anyone left who doesn’t feel the same way?

These are the same European and American liberals who not only couldn't bring themselves to express an ounce of solidarity with defenceless Palestinians as America's colony state went on an 18 month genocidal slaughter spree but who, in many cases, enthusiastically armed and funded this slaughter spree.

But now, in headline after headline, statement after statement, these fucking liberals, who’ve displayed biblical levels of satanic death-eating depravity, who said the square route of fuck all about the gravest act that a state can ever inflict on a people, they’re desperate for us to feel sorry for a rich man sitting in the White House because Trump said some hurty words?

FUCK OFF.

And let me tell you what you won’t hear from the media obsessing and whining over bullied little Zelensky. You won’t hear that at almost the exact moment Zelensky was walking out of the White House the Trump administration signed off on an emergency package of ‘military aid’ for Israel.

$3.01 billion in arms & equipment. On top of the $7 something billion from a few weeks ago. More than $10 billion in a few weeks.

They’ll say nothing about this. Nothing about this at all. Because they are murderous, racist, irredeemable scum who apply a selective morality to advance political and geopolitical agendas.

They’ll condemn Trump when he doesn’t play along with their imperial games but lose their tongues and their keyboards when he does.

Trump is an obscene and hideous character, but I blame liberals for all of it. All of it. Everything that’s happening.

Because of Trump’s funding freeze, the extent of that shadow media structure has newly come to light. According to Reporters Without Borders, USAID is the “the primary donor” for the nine out of 10 Ukrainian media outlets that rely on foreign funding. The head of one such outlet, Detector Media, told the Washington Post that “more than 50 percent” of the media organizations that receive foreign money are “dependent on American assistance.”

The Post headlined its story “Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze.” According to the Post’s editorial standards, a foreign media outlet can presumably remain “independent” even while funded by the most powerful state in the world. To shore up its narrative, the Post argued that these US-funded outlets have “produced work often critical of their governments,” including the US client in Kyiv. Yet these same outlets have often promoted the US government’s agenda in Ukraine at the country’s expense.

One illustrative case came in March 2020, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky took a major step towards implementing the Minsk accords, the February 2015 pact that sought to end Ukraine’s post-2014 civil war. In a landmark move, Zelensky agreed to hold direct talks with representatives of the breakaway Donbas republics – a major step towards Minsk’s implementation.

In a statement at the time, dozens of Ukrainian NGOs, political figures, and media outlets denounced Zelensky’s decision on the grounds that it would recognize the breakaway republics as equal partners, and play into the Russian narrative that Ukraine was facing an as an “internal conflict,” rather than “armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” According to Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski, the vast majority of Ukrainian groups that signed the list were funded by Western governments and foundations. These include the media outlets and organizations Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, and Internews-Ukraine, all of which are supported by USAID.

US-funded opponents of diplomacy are not just targeted at Ukrainian audiences. As journalist Lee Fang reports, USAID “has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that American voices in favor of peace negotiations with Russia are agents of the Kremlin.”

US media outlets often interview these same groups and present them as independent voices without acknowledging their US state funding. To show how pervasive this is, even the stalwart progressive news show Democracy Now!, which has long challenged government propaganda, has been susceptible. Last month, DN! interviewed Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, who argued against diplomacy with Russia and advocated the “Reagan principle” of “peace through strength.” DN! failed to inform its audience that Matviichuk’s group, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, is funded by USAID, and that she is also on the Steering Committee of the “World Movement for Democracy,” a project of the National Endowment for Democracy. Reagan, whose administration founded the NED to advance the foreign policy objectives that DN! was founded to expose, would have approved.