How Russian Agents Have Perverted Our Politics:
A View From 1000 Feet
Well, as we should all know by now, the days of intelligence agents passing secrets in the night are long gone.
Now the spies are right out in the open.
And that’s the other thing we haven’t done.
We haven’t stood back and looked at recent political events from an overall perspective.
We’ve gotten lost in the rapidly and endlessly unfolding scandals of you-know-who,
buried in the details of this secret meeting or that illegal campaign contribution or that questionable character being invited into the Oval Office, no less,
for meetings that have gone all the way from trying to get the FBI Director to look the other way and
go easy on one of what would become several White House felons,
to out-and-out plots to use the military to seize election machinery and re-run an election, which was not in effect a coup, but a coup in progress.
Almost all the unusual events in our recent political life have involved Russians,
and as we will see, they go back much further than we usually recall.
Trump would waltz Kislyak and his boss the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, past all the White House handlers and the Russian media –
but not the American press pool covering the White House, who were banned from the event –
right into the Oval Office where,
it would later be reported, he passed some kind of top secret information to them about Israel and assured the two that he wasn’t bothered at all about Russian involvement in his election campaign
because the United States does the same thing to other counties around the world.
Contacts between Russian spies and their targets in the U.S. would happen
at places like an NRA convention, as when Maria Butina – remember her? – and
her SVR handler, Aleksandr Torshin, a Russian senator who would soon become the Speaker of the Senate of the Russian Federation,
a position you don’t get without the personal approval of Vladimir Putin,
were given all-access passes to the NRA convention in St. Louis in 2012 and
the next one in Houston in 2013,
not to mention being welcomed at NRA headquarters in Virginia both years.
Torshin and Butina arranged for officials of the NRA to travel to Russia in 2015 for the convention of a completely fictional organization established by Butina called “Right to Bear Arms.”
There is no right to bear arms in Russia
Mueller...
able to lay out in excruciating detail how, under the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, SVR agents and hackers working for the Russian government
infiltrated the American political system, exerted influence over the Trump campaign in 2016,
helped to distribute hacked Democratic Party emails to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton
Trump himself hired a man with ties to Russian intelligence, Paul Manafort, to chair his campaign.
Lev Parnas? How about Igor Fruman? What the were those two doing dining with Rudy Giuliani and President Donald Trump at his hotel in Washington in 2018, discussing how to get rid of the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch? They were both involved with Deripaska, to whom Manafort owed something like $12 million.
all of them were so neck deep in Trump’s Ukraine scandal that if Parnas’ connections were made public,
they would lead directly to Russian intelligence assets like Deripaska and Kilimnik and oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and others, right up to and including the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.
intended to destabilize the country of Ukraine, which under the leadership of Zelensky,
Putin had been up to his games with the U.S. since Trump,
who had announced he would run for president someday, took his Miss Universe pageant to Russia in 2013.
Putin had backed right-wing candidates for office in countries like France and Germany and Poland and Hungary.
his biggest, most heavily-funded and closest-watched meddling was against Russia’s eternal big power rival, the United States.
The whole “Ukraine scandal” that got Trump impeached was actually a power play by Putin to destabilize that country.
https://www.nationalmemo.com/trump-russia
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