Will Democracy Now support AG Barr's "Trumped-up charges"?

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The Mueller Report found that the Russian Federation engaged in a sophisticated and robust program to interfere with the United States presidential election of 2016 with the goal of putting Donald Trump in the White House. It documented how this program operated on many levels: It included the use of hundreds of on-line operatives and thousands of advanced AI bots to spam the Internet from thousands of fake accounts with millions of fraudulent messages; it used polling data gathered by the Trump campaign to target those ads; it included live agents that operated inside the United States; and it included ongoing communications and co-ordination with the Trump campaign. Mueller's investigation led to the indictment of a number of top Trump campaign officials who conspired with the Russians, and the report documented at least ten instances of obstruction of justice by the president. Hundreds of federal, state, and local prosecutors have said that the only reason the president was not indicted is that Mueller was not allowed to indict him.

Although the Mueller Report was a damning indictment of Donald Trump, unless congress grows a spine, does its duty, and follows the law; it now looks like he may well weather the storm it has created. This situation owes a great deal to the way Trump's personal lawyer, United States Attorney General William Barr, stage-managed its introduction. He did it in a way that allowed Trump, and his Fox News echo chamber, to claim the report showed "No collusion; no obstruction," for weeks before we had even a redacted chance to see for ourselves.

Now the Trump cabal is preparing its counter-attack. He has long conflated his political opponents with his Justice Department investigators, while accusing both groups of treason, a capital crime. He has long led crowds of his deplorable fans in chants of "lock them up!" Recently, he told a rally, in response to this chant:

"We have a great new attorney general who will give it a very fair look"

These are extremely dangerous waters we are entering into. Anyone that has sampled Fox News, or other Trump media, regularly, knows that all along, they have been constructing an alternate reality in which the righteous Donald Trump is the victim of a Deep State conspiracy in the Justice Department and intelligence agencies. In their media, they have spent a lot of time weaving elaborate conspiracy theories out of "alternate facts" that damn those they consider Trump's enemies. These include former FBI directors, James Comey; former Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein ..... all the way down to FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. These are, by and large, honest cops mainly guilty of doing their jobs. If Barr can succeed in carrying out Trump's vendetta against them, he will have gone a long way toward making those agencies corrupt tools of Trump's personal power. Another group that this right-wing star chamber has long advocated prison for is Trump's political opponents, starting with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Christopher Steele, and anyone having anything to do with his so-called dossier. If Trump succeeds in using the Justice Department to jail his political opponents, then we have taken a huge step towards dictatorship.

That is why we must defeat AG Bill Barr's attempts to give
the phrase "Trumped-up charges," a whole new meaning!

It saddens me to report that today I saw more clues that Democracy Now has bought into at least some of these right-wing conspiracy theories, and will be reselling them. They promoted these views, ironically, in a segment about how former Brazilian president Lula da Silva has been jailed by the right-wing on trumped-up charges.  Long-time Democracy Now host Juan González kind of just slipped it in while interviewing Glenn Greenwald:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Glenn, I wanted to ask you, in a broader sense, this whole issue of corruption in government, and prosecutors removing or being able to jail or remove elected officials or key political leaders—clearly, in a democracy, in an industrial or Western democracy, there’s two ways to remove a leader: You vote them out of office, or you get them indicted and jailed and removed that way. To what extent is this a signal to people around the world, in other countries, about the kind of skepticism that you should have about investigations coming at the top leaders? And, of course, I’m sure there are people in the—Trump supporters here in this country, who would point to the FBI agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI counsel, as they were attempting to help remove Trump from office. But to what degree do you—is this a warning for people in other countries to be wary and skeptical, even in the face of what seems initially to be damning evidence against a political leader?

Glenn Greenwald on Tucker Carlson

I guess, since Juan González sees re-election or not as one of the two ways to "remove" an elected official, he sees only one way to remove a term-limited office holder, but I digress.

I have emphasized a portion of his statement so that you can see that this regular Democracy Now host is agreeing with the Trump cabal conspiracy charge that Strzok and Page were working to remove Trump from office. In the Fox News world, this is proven because they had significantly more anti-Trump than anti-Clinton texts on their phones. No wrong-doing in their professional roles is needed, and apparently, no "allegedly" or "they claim" is needed by DN either. Segment guest Glenn Greenwald, a new Fox News contributor, who was last a guest of white supremacist Tucker Carlson on Fox News only six days earlier, was happy to elaborate:

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, I mean, look, Juan, you know, as you know, as you guys know, I’ve been one of the people, along with Noam Chomsky and Matt Taibbi and a few lonely others on the left, who have been skeptical of the Russiagate story, in part because we know that these agencies have a long history of lying.

Far from being skeptical, Glenn Greenwald has long been a supporter of Putin, and his involvement in US politics. Greenwald knows that just pointing out that these agencies have lied in the past is a useful device, especially if they are presenting facts now. Facts are stubborn things no matter who presents them, so sometimes the best they can do is represent them as coming from a source that has proven unreliable in the past. This technique has also been commonly used by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They know it's easier to raise questions about facts coming from the CIA than those same facts coming from Syrians on the ground, but I digress.

Throughout the 2016 election year, Greenwald indirectly supported Putin's goal of getting Trump elected by focusing his criticism on Hillary Clinton and advising progressives to split the anti-Trump vote by voting for Jill Stein, who in the final count, was able to divert enough votes in three key states to put Trump over the top. This was the same road followed by Russian financed RT network. After the election he went on to support Putin by fighting any notion that Russia interfered in the US election, and to support Trump by backing his claims that the whole "Russiagate" thing was a hoax and an unlawful attempt to drive a duly elected president from office. Here is just one small example of the type of stuff he has filled the pages of The Intercept with in the past few years; in September 2017, Glenn Greenwald was bragging "Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart," he wrote:

LAST FRIDAY, most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of Homeland Security. “Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year’s presidential election, officials said Friday,” began the USA Today story, similar to how most other outlets presented this extraordinary claim.
...
So, what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false.

And what did the Mueller Report ultimately find on that score?

In addition to targeting individuals involved in the Clinton Campaign, GRU officers also
targeted individuals and entities involved in the administration of the elections. Victims included U.S. state and local entities, such as state boards of elections (SBOEs), secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals who worked for those entities.
...
GRU officers, for example, targeted state and local databases of registered voters using a
technique known as "SQL injection," by which malicious code was sent to the state or local website in order to run commands (such as exfiltrating the database contents).
...
For example, over a two-day period in July 2016, GRU officers [redacted] for vulnerabilities on websites of more than two dozen states.

I wish I had time to research, and present to you with many more example of how Greenwald's claims that what he called "Russiagate" was a hoax have proven to be false. But news has just broken on another story I have been blogging about recently, the "leaked" note from staff member Ian Henderson to the OPCW, so I'm afraid this will have to do.

Back on DN, Greenwald goes on to repeat one of the most fundamental and dangerous of the right-wing "Deep State" conspiracy theory claims:

And the FBI and the CIA and the NSA in the U.S. were vehemently opposed to Donald Trump and wanted Hillary Clinton, because they trusted her much more.

This is the Fox News technique, personified. Make a claim of preference or bias, with or without proof. Then say that the alleged preference translates directly to improper actions or abuse of power, as if no further proof is necessary. He continues this paragraph:

And so, there was a concern always, on my part, that they were abusing their prosecutorial powers to interfere in our domestic election in the United States in order to help the candidate they wanted to win and hurt the candidate that they wanted to lose.

So, Greenwald doesn't think the Russian Federation interfered in the US election to get Donald Trump elected, but he does think the FBI and the CIA and the NSA, i.e. THE DEEP STATE, interfered in our domestic election in a failed attempt to get Hillary Clinton elected. He must be getting fat stacks from Rupert Murdoch now that he is a regular Fox News contributor. He continues, trying to clean it up a little by telling us there was a "faction" in the FBI that was for Trump:

There were other factions in the FBI, by the way, who wanted Donald Trump to win desperately, and did their own abuse of power to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances and help Donald Trump win.

Would James Comey be in one of those factions? After all, his last-minute announcement that they were re-opening the Clinton investigation was damaging to her campaign, and may have cost her the election. At the same time, he kept silent about the ongoing FBI investigates into the Trump campaign. We would learn about those only after the election. But Comey was the FBI director at the time, so if his decisions were so detrimental to the Clinton campaign, just how was the FBI abusing its power to help her win?

So, there were two different factions inside these law enforcement agencies interfering in the U.S. election by abusing their power to help the two candidates they preferred,

In a very Trump-like fashion, Greenwald sees abuse of power on both sides. That means he sees abuse of power among those who have been investigating Trump, and is now positioning himself to support Bill Barr's Investigation of the Investigators. Greenwald end the paragraph:

which is an incredible—that was the real meddling that was dangerous in the 2016 election.

Translation: Now the real witch hunt begins, and it's becoming increasingly clear which side Democracy Now, Glenn Greenwald, and many other representatives of the white-Left will be standing.

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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