The Catch-22s of Trump-Russia Collusion — and Why The Media Ignores Them
America’s politicized legacy media abandons simple logic in its efforts to attribute Clinton and Obama’s crimes to Trump.
BY ZACH HALLER | SEPTEMBER 11, 2018
Since the 2016 election, Americans have watched in real-time as a belligerent and brazenly political bias against Donald J. Trump has permeated virtually every element of mainstream news and entertainment media. Regardless of anyone’s opinion of Trump, the undeniable and uncanny homogenization of Washington and Hollywood opinion against him and his supporters has exposed the grave extent to which America’s political and entertainment establishments united to oppose him and the American people in support of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s joint agenda in 2016.
The roots of American media’s consolidation with the state traces back to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Mockingbird program of the 1950s. During the Cold War, the CIA began paying journalists in a covert effort to manipulate public opinion in favor of the U.S. shadow government’s interests. Originally exposed by Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein in 1977 for Rolling Stone, many journalists — including Pulitzer Prize winners — started joining CIA payroll, reporting deliberately fake or misleading stories to disseminate the agency’s agitprop. Other reporters were threatened or blackmailed into cooperating; many were given falsified or fabricated information to justify and manufacture support for the Deep State’s nonpublic operations.
Ominously, Operation Mockingbird has never been officially discontinued. While the program may have been more effectively discreet in the era of print media, the emergence of digital media in the Internet era has dramatically expanded information access and led to the rise of alternative media and independent journalists seeking to expose subversive government operations and the way mainstream media is used to manipulate public opinion. Supported by whistleblower groups like Judicial Watch and Wikileaks, the public is growing increasingly enlightened as to the extent Mockingbird and other propaganda operations are used by bad actors in government to carry out and cover up organized crime in plain sight.
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The emergence of this anti-Trump bias — by now aptly described as Trump Derangement Syndrome — marked a turning point in the Deep State’s propaganda front. After decades of post-Cold War efforts that sought to cast the legacy U.S. political establishment in a favorable light as America’s military industrial complex expanded, the Deep State saw its first real threat since John F. Kennedy in Trump’s candidacy. Given the likelihood that Trump would defeat an unpopular Clinton, the Democrats would need to consolidate their assets in media as well as politics to ensure the Clinton Restoration. The goal was not only to get Clinton elected, but also to prevent Trump from getting to the bottom of the Clinton-Obama scheme to take down Trump using political and media operatives against him and the American people.
While the Mockingbird media ignores the origins of this anti-Trump bias, the infamous “Pied Piper” memo that surfaced in Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s email leaks laid bare its true origins. In it, Clinton and the Democrats instructed their media accomplices that Clinton would be the Democratic Party nominee regardless of how Americans would vote, and set forth an ongoing media strategy to downplay the Democrats’ crimes and use disingenuous and sensationalized reporting as part of a broader operation to sabotage Trump.
As Clinton’s donor network — that includes warlord George Soros — forked out to protect Democratic Party interests following Trump’s election, a subsequent strategy memo leaked, exposing the digital strategy of the Clinton-Obama regime under a Trump administration. Given the gravity and sheer volume of the crimes unfolding, the Democrats would need to reinvent Correct the Record, the shady apparatus that protected Clinton and Obama during the election, as one of few defenses they had left following Clinton’s loss.
READ MORE: Anatomy of a Fusion Smear
For their own sake, Clinton and Obama would need an alternative “Russiagate” to muddy the waters around their own illicit Russian liaisons. Originating as a distraction from the Democratic Party primary as it was rigged in Clinton’s favor, Clinton’s campaign settled on the false narrative that Russian hackers were to blame for her loss on election night. Since then, the Democrats and their co-conspirators have evolved the myth of the Russian hackers into allegations that Trump colluded with Russia to win, brazenly stoking new tension between the nuclear superpowers based on false pretenses in their belligerent effort to derail Trump at any cost.
While the phony Trump-Russia collusion narrative has dominated the airwaves of the Democrats’ state-aligned media partners, alternative media has widely reported on Clinton’s role in funding the Steele Dossier, the unverified opposition research ginned up and passed to Obama’s FBI to justify the launch of a baseless probe into alleged Trump-Russia “collusion” in the absence of any evidence or intelligence. As the mainstream media used the Dossier’s allegations in attempt to weaken Trump’s image with voters, corrupt holdovers in Obama’s administration used it to justify the illegal surveillance of Trump and his associates that Obama had initiated.
READ MORE: Nunes Confirms The FBI’s Trump-Russia Collusion Probe Was Baseless
A bombshell memo on government surveillance abuses made public in February detailed the way high-level Obama officials presented the Democrats’ false evidence to FISA courts while deliberately obscuring its origins as part of an “insurance policy” to oust Trump should he defeat Clinton. Ongoing investigations into the makings of this coup against Trump are now examining Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s role in the FISA court conspiracy and his awareness of operations to systematically leak unverified information to the press regarding alleged Russian collusion to harm President Trump and his administration.
Rosenstein isn’t the only Clinton crony in hot water. Americans are still making noise to ensure Trump is “draining the swamp” as he promised; fortunately, the fallout of the failed Clinton-Obama coup has seen widespread departures of numerous key figures in the FBI and long-overdue consequences for countless nongovernmental actors that supported the crooked Democrats from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. The 50,000 sealed indictments and growing list of Investigator General probes are clear signs the Trump and his allies are acting in good faith in their efforts to bring the corrupt to justice and begin to reform an American justice system that has long betrayed its people.
READ MORE: Worse Than Watergate: FISA Memo Blows Open the Biggest Scandal of Our Time
As the midterm elections in November 2018 approach, Congressional leaders are pressuring Trump to declassify documents that comprise the paper trail of the FISA abuse. Accordingly, legacy media’s anti-Trump tantrums are getting worse: One recent Times report sought to spin the FBI’s purchase of the Steele Dossier as an effort to ‘flip’ Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an excuse that doesn’t pass the laugh test; a subsequent anonymous op-ed — now being vetted for its national security implications — sought to blame Trump for staffer disobedience. While the Times’ “reporting” may deceive some, certainly most are more interested in the outcome of ongoing investigations into disgraced Times employee Ali Watkins’ records and the consequences the outfit will face when its complicity in the FISA fraud is revealed.
As more Clinton-Obama operatives are stripped of power and access — and with midterms just two months away — the cabal is growing more reliant on the use of politicized and weaponized media to sway public opinion against Trump. Considering Robert Mueller’s investigation has still failed to produce a scintilla of evidence of collusion after two years and millions in taxpayer resources, the media will need to continue to rely on spin and innuendo as they fight tooth and nail to protect themselves and their accomplices.
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Unfortunately for the Times and other Clinton-Obama media assets, two simple and enduring catch-22s expose the hypocrisy of the media’s anti-Trump bias in its efforts to make Trump-Russian collusion “a thing”. Coined by Joseph Heller in his 1961 novel Catch-22, a catch-22 is a paradoxical situation from which an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules. As the walls close in on the Clinton-Obama regime, both lead actors will remain beguiled by their own catch-22 as documents are declassified and as the Russiagate hoax is exposed to the public as the sham that it is.
Obama’s catch-22:
If Russia interfered in the 2016 election, it was Obama’s failure, not Trump’s.
As unimpeachable as the mainstream media purports its reporting to be, the most glaring flaw in the argument that Trump is at fault for alleged Russian election interference is the obvious reality that Obama was still President during the 2016 election. Notably, the Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified in June that proposals he was developing to counter Russian election meddling were put on a “back burner” after he was ordered to “stand down” his efforts in the summer of 2016.
If Russian hackers were a true risk, it would be unmistakably a failure of the Obama administration to adequately obtain intelligence and to develop an appropriate response. Obama and his cohorts’ suggestion that they are a legitimate authority after a botched response represents the peak hubris of Obama and the Democrats’ disingenuous doublespeak. Given Obama’s complicity in exonerating Clinton from the investigation into her email and his overseeing of the scheme to setup and surveil Trump, using the Russiagate hoax to distract from his crimes in his interest, logical flaws notwithstanding.
Clinton’s catch-22:
If foreign collusion is a sin, there was no 2016 candidate more guilty than Clinton herself.
Since 2016, the “Russiagate” media frenzy has inundated Americans with wall-to-wall reporting that advances the premise that foreign collusion, particularly with Russia, is an unpardonable sin — seemingly ironically if and only if the perpetrator is Trump or his associates.
If foreign collusion is as grievous as the media suggests, given Clinton’s record and voluminous evidence of her corruption, it is she that should be undone. Clearly, Steele’s verified collusion with Russian cohorts — funded by payments laundered from Hillary— should bother Americans and the media more than the unproven collusion claims Steele could only allege against Trump. The xenophobic and blatantly false “Russiagate” narrative engineered by Clinton’s goons has long been seen by the public as a direct projection to distract from Clinton’s illicit dealings with Russia; Wikileaks’ disclosures concerning the Clinton Foundation and its unlawful international dealings — including the liaisons between her campaign, her Foundation, and Russia and the Ukraine — have long been publicly available.
While “collusion” itself may not be a crime, efforts between parties colluding to aid and abet any person to break the law should produce criminal charges. In particular, the likelihood that Clinton’s approval of the purchase of Uranium One by the company Rosatom was connected to Clinton Foundation donations suggests the Clintons, along with Mueller and others, colluded privately to enrich themselves off a deal that sold Russia 20% of America’s uranium. To this day, there is still no evidence whatsoever that Trump colluded with Russia; as it is, Russia’s most extensive involvement in America’s 2016 election are the dirty deals made with Clinton behind closed doors that supported her family foundation prior to her 2016 campaign. The double standard of legacy media that overlooks the crimes of Clinton and Obama while accusing Trump of crimes without evidence is the clearest indication legacy media is controlled — and weaponized — by the Democrats.
READ MORE: New Texts Reveal FBI Leaked Information to the Press to Damage Trump
As has been apparent since Trump’s December 21st Executive Order, it will not be long before the day of Clinton and Obama’s reckoning. While they and their media assets work overtime to distract Americans from the depths of their corruption, their guilt will be abjectly inescapable as more documents are declassified that bring to light the extent to which Clinton, Obama, the FBI, DOJ, and CIA were involved in the insidious effort to undermine American democracy by setting up and surveilling their political opponent to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
READ MORE: We're Watching an Antidemocratic Coup Unfold
As Americans await declassification, Clinton, Obama, and the other great deceivers’ only recourse will be to continue to rely on the false narratives engineered to protect themselves and advance agendas unpresentable to Americans in earnest. Fortunately, Trump knows the truth is the key to confronting high profile cheats and fraudsters like Clinton and Obama; as the scams of the Democrats are laid bare in front of civilian and military courts in the Trump era, the media conspiracies to protect the Democrats will be too, and the Clinton-Obama media co-conspirators’ impunity will not hold.
Like the Clinton-Obama regime failed to defeat Trump at the polls, they will fail to defeat Trump with the unconscionable coup they have concocted since. While there is much more work to be done, the crooked Democrats and their media co-conspirators will soon be brought to heel, and America can begin to rebuild an image that once again honors and upholds the values of truth and justice.
That day can not come soon enough.∎
This article was originally published on Medium on September 11, 2018. Since then, Medium has permanently suspended my account for violating its "Trust and Safety'" standards. I am an independent writer, activist, and everyday American based in Seattle, Washington. If you enjoyed this, please share it with your networks and give it an upvote.