This essay was originally published in late November 2016 on the now defunct website Criticl. The original title was “#TrumpTreason—and 99% of the mainstream media are not reporting the story.”
Republican U.S. Senators Bob Corker and Lindsay Graham, along with National Security Agency Director Michael Allen, have now said that they either believe or know that Russia interfered in the recently concluded United States presidential election. None of them will say definitively that Russia hacked our nation’s electoral computer systems to enable Donald Trump to win. None of them will say that Donald Trump and a “whole array” of Trump campaign officials colluded with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin in rigging the election to ensure a Trump victory. But Russians have said it. That should be a good enough starting place for us to consider the previously unthinkable:
Vladimir Putin is now taunting we, the people of the United States of America: Yes, we interfered in your election to elect Donald Trump president. What are you going to do about it? Nothing, is my guess. As Donald Trump is my puppet now, so will your own government become my plaything on January 20, 2017.
That is a tough reality to swallow.
Psychologists tell us that the default mode for human consciousness is the status quo in which we exist. For Americans since last week’s election, that plays out as “Donald Trump won the election. There may be evidence that he colluded with the Russians in what can only be described as treason, but Donald Trump won the election.”
This is the circular logic, “new normal” stupor that must be shaken off by the American people in this unique case. This is the “normalization” of Donald Trump in which most of the American Corporate Media is now fully engaged. Such a normal psychological reflex is what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are counting on to ease Trump’s way into the Oval Office. If they succeed, Vladimir Putin will be pulling the strings of a President Donald Trump in a little over two months from now.
Wake up, wake up, wake up!—Donald Trump, the Russian government, Wikileaks and the James Comey wing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are all guilty of conspiring, individually or collectively, to destabilize the American electoral process, in order to allow an authoritarian-minded Russian dupe to be elected president of the United States!
If you are unaware of most or all of the information collected below, please try to suspend what you have been thinking about, until now, about last week's election results. Imagine that U.S. Senators Corker (R-Tn.) and Graham (R-SC), and National Security Agency Director Rogers, know of what they speak. Consider that they know more than they are willing to talk about. The odds are excellent that they know more about #TrumpTreason than this writer, or you, know. All we have to go on are what the trio referred to above have intimated, along with what we have been told by two high-placed Russians, a former Western intelligence source and two high-level Democratic Party operatives who studied Donald Trump’s Russian ties during the course of the general election. The statements made by all of the above have been little more to date than obligatory news item mentions made by the traditional Corporate American media on the day the statements were made. For 99 percent of the American mainstream media, the Trump transition trumps #TrumpTreason.
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Two days after the November 8 election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Russian Interfax news organization that “there were contacts" between the Putin government and "a whole array” of Donald Trump campaign officials. The UK newspaper The Guardian also reported on November 10 that a pro-Kremlin political analyst suggested that “maybe (the Putin government) helped (Trump) a bit with WikiLeaks.”
On the morning after the election, Alexandra Chalupa, who led the Democratic National Committee’s Trump-Russia-ties research team, published a long comment on Facebook that reveals Russian sources had “successfully hacked into the election systems of more than half the states in the country” by or on our Election Day. Chalupa, a rising Democratic Party star who was featured in “16 in 2016: The people, places and moments that shaped the election,” a Yahoo News video, also wrote that “(Department of) Homeland Security/Department of Justice teamed up with a group that is part of Anonymous based in Washington D.C. called ‘The Protectors.’” She reports that the group saw multiple attempts by Russian hackers to break into state election systems on Election Day, and that The Protectors believe that the voting results we see today “don’t match the internal and public polls because the voting results were manufactured in favor of Trump in heavily Republican counties in key states, and that voting results may have been decreased for Clinton in key Democratic counties via malware that was placed by the Russians … “ In an interview with Gothamist, Chalupa stated that in Pennsylvania, a large number of voters voted for the Republican presidential and US Senate candidates, but then crossed parties down ballot. "That's usually not the pattern," Chalupa told Gothamist. An audit of state votes would be able to determine if this break from American voting norms occurred in other states as well.
So let’s take a breath here and let all of this sink in: Russians have admitted to interfering in our presidential election. Hackers aligned with Anonymous—the near antithesis of a run-of-the-mill, status quo organization— witnessed Russian hacking into numerous state election systems on Election Day.
Was that the American way before November 8, 2016? No.
Should we now allow it to become a “new normal,” simply because Donald Trump has yet to be called out for his treasonous collusion with the Russian government to subvert the American political process? No.
There is more evidence indicating that the Trump campaign did conspire with the Russians to assure his election, and that Trump himself may well be Vladimir Putin’s puppet. On Halloween, Mother Jones Washington, D.C., bureau chief David Corn published an expose of Donald Trump’s links to Russia and the Russian government. Based on information provided to him by a “former Western intelligence official,” Corn wrote that in June, the former official gave the FBI a report on Trump’s ties to Russia that the official prepared while working in his current capacity for an American company that collects information on Russia for its corporate clients. “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years,” his report reads. “Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” The report goes on to state that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” The report also states that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.”
Corn reports that, not surprisingly, FBI officials were "shocked" and "horrified" by the former intelligence officer’s report. In August, the FBI contacted the official and asked for the materials he had collected that formed the foundation of his report. He complied. And then—nothing. The FBI said nary a word about Donald Trump’s possible ties to Vladimir Putin until after bureau Director James Comey turned the presidential election upside down on October 28, just eleven days before the election, by announcing a reopening of the bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. Facing withering condemnation, Comey and/or his allies in the FBI contacted or were contacted by the New York Times. The intent of the FBI officials who spoke to reporters Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers was made clear in the Times October 31 story headline: “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
If anybody wasn’t clear about the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton partisanship in play within the bureau by that time, the FBI Records Vault made the partisanship even more apparent the next day, on November 1. The Records Vault, which had been dormant on Twitter for a year, dumped a veritable load of FBI records online, including those reporting on the agency’s investigation into President Bill Clinton’s January 2001, last-day-in-office pardon of disgraced financier Marc Rich. In the same dump, the FBI officials in charge of the vault also released documents they had on Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump’s father. Fred Trump was identified as a “real estate developer and philanthropist” by the Records Vault, which was a neat way to contrast the “virtues” of Fred Trump with the sinister Marc Rich.
But the FBI’s rose-colored description of Donald Trump’s father is flawed at best: Fred Trump was such a well known racist that Woody Guthrie wrote a song in which a lyric cited Fred Trump by name and branded him as the racist landlord that he was. In February 2016, the Washington Post reported that, in May 1927, Fred Trump had been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally for refusing “to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.” The Post unearthed a New York Times story that reported on the Klan action, which turned into a riot involving up to 1,000 white-robed Klansmen. In reporting on Fred Trump's arrest, the Times listed Donald Trump's father by name and home address. Fred Trump was a real estate developer and may well have also been a philanthropist, but he was also a world-class bigot. Fred Trump didn't rent apartments in his residential buildings to those he referred to as—well, what word do you think a guy such as Fred Trump would use to demean African Americans?
All of the actions taken by FBI Director Comey and likeminded partisan FBI agents in the waning days of Campaign 2016 make it clear that the FBI cannot be trusted to investigate Donald Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin without a serious screening of possible g-men and -women.
Even more information has been unearthed about Donald Trump's extensive Russian ties. A report by Scott Dworkin, a Senior Adviser of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, was delivered on Friday, November 11 to President Obama, Vice President Biden and leading Democratic members of Congress. That report details the numerous contacts that Donald Trump has had with senior Russian officials through the years, as well as the almost 250 registered businesses in Russia that have the Trump name on them. Not surprisingly, Trump has claimed more than once that he is not doing business in that country. Refusing to disclose American businesses in foreign countries with the United States government is a federal crime. In Trump’s case, imagine close to almost 250 federal charges for just this one aspect of his wide-ranging criminal conduct.
The traditional mainstream media has yet to attack this story with the same ferocity they displayed when attacking Hillary Clinton for having a private email server. (It is easy to forget that, after the months-long, automatic machine gunfire-attack that passed for “balanced news media coverage” during Clinton's campaign for the presidency, the FBI could not prove that her computer had been hacked, despite numerous hacks of the Democratic Party's National Committee Senatorial Campaign Committee, State Department and other government agency systems. Equal opportunity hackers, the Republican National Committee announced that its computer system had been hacked as well.) The American Corporate media’s near-total silence to date on a hostile foreign government’s hacks into American government election systems, and Donald Trump’s alliance with said hackers' sponsoring government body, is unconscionable. A near-total blackout of #TrumpTreason and the possible Russian manipulation of the vote for Donald Trump and Republican Party US Senate candidates could well facilitate the transition of the American government as we know it from a dysfunctional democracy to a democratic authoritarian state known to many other countries throughout the world—including Russia.
The Electoral College meets on December 19. The American Corporate Media must break their silence en masse and take the story to its logical conclusion before then—even if that leads to another stage of the constitutional crisis that we are now already experiencing.
We, the people must use every nonviolent means available to try to keep Donald Trump from ever entering the Oval Office as president. A WhiteHouse.gov We the People petition was posted on November 11 asking President Obama to “Confirm investigation of Donald Trump for collusion with Russia to win election, charge with treason if warranted.” This petition is but one of many efforts Americans across the country are engaged in to hold Donald Trump accountable for the treason and other crimes that he has committed. The link to the petition is https://wh.gov/iekyr.
Focus! Fight! It is only the future of democracy in America—and, by extension throughout the world—that is at stake.
Sources
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/11/15/senate-foreign-relations-chairman-bob-corker-believes-russia-tried-meddle-election/Lckl9eFieaC0YUce3e4mrN/story.html
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-gop-sen-lindsey-graham-wants-congress-1479254194-htmlstory.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-chief-nation-state-swayed-president-election-2016-11
http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.752386
http://gothamist.com/2016/11/17/russia_hackers_election_trump.php
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157855450785389&id=614520388#_=_
https://www.yahoo.com/news/16-in-2016-the-people-places-and-moments-that-shaped-a-shocking-election-033033380.html
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html?_r=0
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/28/in-1927-donald-trumps-father-was-arrested-after-a-klan-riot-in-queens/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/white-house-reviewing-democratic-coalition-report-on_us_5825e308e4b0852d9ec214c2?
Also, a link to a story about Donald Trump’s link to the Russian Alfa Bank via a private email server located in the basement of Trump Tower:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_server_registered_to_the_Trump_organization_communicating_with_Russia.html