A Martyr to Cowardice
The party of swindlers and thieves is putting forward its chief swindler and its chief thief for the presidency. We must vote against him, struggle against him.
— Alexei Navalny
No, this wasn’t taken from a Haley campaign ad. Joe Biden’s campaign committee didn’t conjure this up, nor is the Lincoln Project responsible. The quote from the now-deceased Alexei Navalny is an indictment of the Russian state and its accomplices within the Republican Party in America. The predicament we now find ourselves in with a broken and treasonous GOP can be laid at the feet of the cowards who lead it. We cannot make the same claim for Putin’s Russian opposition. While America’s Republican leadership shakes in fear of the bloviating coward who has them under his spell, Russian and Ukrainian heroes ask only for their support in fighting the tyranny of Vladimir Putin who doesn’t just defeat his opponents, he murders them. This is the man whom they support by proxy, bending to the will of a true American traitor.
This week's disgrace is particularly on display in their shameless inability to choose between right and wrong in its most basic form. While Donald Trump remains the beating heart of their recalcitrance, they have sold out to Russian interests. Whether they choose to admit their compromised allegiance, they are in Putin’s service.
Pulling on Threads
The death of Navalny follows their irresponsible position on aid to Ukraine, which in turn is the unraveling of a multi-year surrender to a Russian campaign to undercut democracy. While their party’s leader has been mired in court losing judgments to the tune of a half-billion dollars just this week, his minions in Congress have been caught red-handed for the second time attempting to implicate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in a bogus bribery scheme. It is time we begin to pull together the loose ends of a concerted effort by the Russians to insert a puppet leader in the White House that began more than a decade ago.
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Thread #1: Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was in great part conducted with Russian interference and American collaborators. The failure of the Mueller Report to reveal the full plot was rooted in their successful gamble that Trump’s victory enabled the conspirators to take over the Justice Department probe with the help of acolytes in the Republican-led House and Senate. Collaborators included House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, AG William Barr, and numerous congresspersons. The so-called “witch hunt” netted 34 indictments, and 7 prison terms. Three Russian businesses were found to be involved in the plot.
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Thread #2: The events that began before Biden’s victory over Trump in November 2020 and ended with the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s second impeachment led to two Federal criminal trials and several civil complaints. Trump is now facing over 90 counts for events surrounding J6 and a stolen documents case involving the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. What followed was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the continued support of the Putin regime by prominent Republican officeholders whose commitment to the Russian dictator was tied to their allegiance to Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, praises Putin and instructs his friends in Congress to hold up aid to Ukraine, while scuttling a bipartisan border deal to create a campaign issue that he could run on in his attempt at another term as president. Putin tries to mitigate the close relationship between himself and Trump making a nonsensical argument that Trump victory would be worse for Russia:
“Biden, he’s more experienced, more predictable, he’s a politician of the old formation,” Putin said, when asked which candidate would be better for Russia. “But we will work with any U.S. leader whom the American people trust.”
— AP, “Putin says Russia prefers Biden to Trump but criticizes current US policy”
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Thread #3: The Republican House majority probe into a bogus criminal conspiracy involving Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in a $5 million bribery scheme is revealed to be based upon false testimony by two leading witnesses— one, Gal Luft, a Chinese plant who was indicted on charges of serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign nation:
First, LUFT conspired with others in an effort to act within the United States to advance the interests of the People’s Republic of China (“China”) as agents of China-based principals, without registering as foreign agents as required under U.S. law. As part of this scheme, while serving as the co-director of a Maryland-based non-profit think tank, LUFT agreed to covertly recruit and pay, on behalf of principals based in China, a former high-ranking U.S. Government official (“Individual-1”), including in 2016 while the former official was an adviser to the then-President-elect, to publicly support certain policies with respect to China without LUFT or Individual-1 filing a registration statement as an agent of a foreign principal with the Attorney General of the United States…
— www.justice.gov/...
The second, Alexander Smirnov has been indicted for his false testimony as an FBI informant attesting to meetings and bribes that never occurred. Smirnov, a shadowy figure whom Federal indictment has identified only as “a globe-trotting businessman who speaks Russian and who became an F.B.I. informant in 2010” revealed information tying Biden and his son to criminal acts during the 2020 campaign. Republicans Jim Jordan and James Comer who were leading a House-sponsored investigation of the “Biden crime family” pressed the FBI to release information that it deemed skeptical for the purposes of their phony probe:
Republicans pressured the F.B.I. to release internal reports after they learned of Mr. Smirnov’s claims. In May last year, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, threatened to hold the bureau’s director, Christopher A. Wray, in contempt if he did not disclose some details.
www.nytimes.com/...
The indictment by the DOJ states the allegations made by Smirnov were baseless and politically motivated, facts the FBI had concluded from their own investigation as noted in the indictment:
He (Smirnov) repeated some of his fabricated claims when he was interviewed by F.B.I. agents in September 2023, “changed his story as to other of his claims and promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian officials...” (emphasis mine)
— NYTimes, “Ex-F.B.I. Informant Is Charged With Lying Over Bidens’ Role in Ukraine Business,” by Glenn Thrush
Selective Silence
All indications suggest the likelihood that Smirnov is a Russian sleeper agent who has infiltrated U.S. intelligence since at least 2010 and that his efforts were directed since 2016 toward advancing the political fortunes of Vladimir Putin’s American lackey. Luft and Smirnov as tools used by Comer’s subcommittee are evidence of the much wider Russian interference in U.S. politics that had been found present in the Mueller investigation. Their indictments point to the only conspiracy theory that the Republican fellow travelers in the House and Senate refuse to believe— that there is and has been a connection between Trump and the Russian leader to undermine the U.S. government through election interference. For their part, they lie in headlines, while they conspire in whispers.
The next thread can be deduced from the reaction of the GOP leadership using common sense and Occam’s Razor. Even after James Comer’s bogus “findings” have been left in tatters by the knowledge that their basis relied on false information provided by foreign agents, he and some of his colleagues remain undeterred and shamelessly vow to continue their political farrago:
Mr. Comer, in a statement released after the charges against Mr. Smirnov became public, took no responsibility for spreading a claim that prosecutors suggested was a smear intended to hurt Mr. Biden politically.
Instead, he blamed bureau officials for privately telling the committee their “source was credible and trusted, had worked with the F.B.I. for over a decade and had been paid six figures.”
— NYTimes, Thrush
The implication should by now be clear that those in Congress who choose to be misled for their partisan political advantage are now more than fools, they are collaborators. Since its start in 2015, despite the knowledge that their theories are based on lies and the intercession of foreign agents tied to Russia and China, they have chosen Donald Trump over the truth. They have done this with full knowledge of the danger to America— Trump’s lies and distractions have created and now serve not simply himself but Vladimir Putin’s agenda. The string of Republican losses in elections following Trump’s 2016 win further demonstrate that his friends in Congress were in service to the same agenda. They have abandoned both nation and party to please Trump and his Russian master.
There are no other conclusions to be made, no explanations to justify their indifference to the dangers of their continued betrayal of American interests. They are traitors to their country. Navalny's words repeated here should be a message to us, or his fate will become our own:
“The party of swindlers and thieves is putting forward its chief swindler and its chief thief for the presidency. We must vote against him, struggle against him…” (emphasis mine)
And,
“Silence is often mistaken for acceptance, but it is actually a sign of fear.”
— Alexei Navalny
As for the American “party of swindlers and thieves,“ whose voice has been muted by fear of Trump, their selective silence is deafening.