Saturday, February 24, 2024

How Putin seized control of the GOP

Image via Harold Escalona/Shutterstock.
February 22, 2024
ALTERNET

There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy.

Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.

Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who’d been feeding this phony info to “Gym” Jordan and James “Gomer Pyle” Comer is now in jail.

READ: The problem isn't just Biden's age

Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off US aid to Ukraine.

The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”

Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the US political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending US aid to the democracy they’ve brutally attacked.

And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda.

Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it’s becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump.

I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it weren’t for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He’d burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino.

As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policy magazine:

“By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.”

He’d been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find.

No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future.

He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis.

He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who’d been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.”

As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018:
“The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.”

Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia.

Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower.

Putin’s personal troll army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president.

Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook.

Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”

A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:
“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.
“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.
“The Internet Research Agency also created a dozen websites disguised as African-American in origin, with names like blackmattersus.com, blacktivist.info, blacktolive.org and blacksoul.us.”

And it appears to have worked in suppressing the potential Black Democratic vote in swing states.

A 2018 bipartisan Senate report found the Russian efforts consequential, as the BBC headline on that analysis summarizes:

“Russian trolls’ chief target was ‘black US voters’ in 2016.”

The news story summarizes:

“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group... more than African-Americans.’ …
“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.
“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.
“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”


Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all microtargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.

So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House.

Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States.

They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the US economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US.

They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions.

Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea.

Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words.

Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump.

— When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid?

— Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform?

— Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”?

— Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin?

— Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden?

— Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did?

Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?

As the old curse goes, we live in interesting times. Stay tuned…

Republican complicity in Kremlin espionage against the US is now overwhelming

Rep. Ken Buck at CPAC 2017 in National Harbor, Maryland (Gage Skidmore)
'We were warned': GOP rep says Smirnov indictment 'really undercuts' impeachment efforts
February 24, 2024
ALTERNET

If you believed that the Republicans in Congress couldn't sink any lower, recent events have proved you sadly mistaken. House Speaker Mike Johnson, in his latest displays of subservience to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, has made his most wretched predecessors seem like statesmen and patriots. For the first time ever in America, a branch of the government, the House of Representatives, appears to be decisively influenced, if not controlled by a hostile foreign power.

These are not accusations to be made lightly, but the evidence of Republican complicity in purveying Kremlin espionage against the United States is now overwhelming.

On Feb. 23, a federal judge in California ordered marshals to seize Alexander Smirnov at his lawyers' office only days after he had been released on bail by a different judge, with the clear implication that he might be preparing to flee the country. Smirnov is the much touted prime witness in the House Republican impeachment campaign against Joe Biden, accusing the president of having taken $5 million in bribes from Ukrainian oligarchs. It's all a lie manufactured by Russian intelligence.

Smirnov's initial arrest was ordered by special counsel David Weiss, the Trump-appointed Republican investigating Hunter Biden, who has indicted the star witness for fabricating his entire story and lying to the FBI. In subsequent court filings, the prosecutor charged that the lies transmitted by Smirnov originated with Russian spies.

In other words, the No. 1 Republican witness in the public and repeated smearing of President Biden -- on the floor of Congress and in right-wing media -- was a knowing conduit for Kremlin disinformation. The intent is nothing less than to help elect Trump.

What makes this scandal so much worse -- and so embarrassing to Johnson, if he were capable of shame -- is that Smirnov's deception emanated from the much broader Russian penetration of American politics that began ... when?

Perhaps with that Trump Tower meeting in 2015, when Donald Trump Jr. enthusiastically welcomed the idea of a Russian dossier on Hillary Clinton from a Russian intelligence operative. And then it continued with the Kremlin's cyber assault against Clinton in 2016, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's secret cooperation with a Russian spy named Konstantin Kilimnik. After Trump became president, he withheld weapons from Ukraine while demanding a phony probe of Biden. Trump's blackmail attempt triggered his first impeachment.

Along the way, a gang of Trump associates led by Rudy Giuliani worked with various Putin stooges in Ukraine and elsewhere to invent mendacious nonsense about the Bidens. Giuliani worked closely with Putin crony Andriy Derkach and other dubious characters, who were later indicted for attempting to interfere in the 2020 election.

For years, it has been blindingly obvious that the "investigation" of Joe Biden and Ukraine emanated not from any legitimate source but directly from this country's enemies. And yet while those accusers were repeatedly exposed and discredited, congressional Republicans insisted on pursuing the bogus case invented in Moscow.

But Johnson's undermining of American security has gone well beyond the assistance he and Republicans have provided to the Kremlin in subverting American democracy. Now refusing to fund U.S. military assistance to Ukraine in its courageous struggle against Russian invaders, they have helped Putin gain a critical victory in the battle of Avdiivka and jeopardized the Western alliance that is fundamental to European and American security. Johnson has admitted he's taking his orders from Trump, who worships Putin. The cowardice of Johnson and the Republicans has become crucial to Putin and his savage war.

Johnson has his own little Russian secrets. The speaker must still explain the laundered campaign funds from Konstantin Nikolaev, a Russian oligarch and confederate of confessed convicted Kremlin spy agent Maria Butina. She served a prison sentence here after the exposure of her successful scheme to penetrate the National Rifle Association and other right-wing groups, including some of the "Christian nationalist" outfits that Johnson promotes.

What attracts extremists like the House speaker -- and his puppet master Trump -- to the Russian dictator who looms above them is an authoritarian political orientation that smells of fascism. Putin is a threat from without, and they are a threat from within.

Exposure of Kremlin lies won’t alter course of impeachment


House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY),
 Image via Creative Commons.
February 23, 2024



A key witness in the impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden had been caught trafficking in lies originating from the Kremlin, but that’s not going to stop the Republicans from moving forward. There is no there there, but there never had to be, because “there” doesn’t matter. They are picking up where Donald Trump left off when he extorted Ukraine’s president. The problem is the Republicans are bad at this.

Longtime FBI informant, Alexander Smirnov, told the FBI that Joe Biden and his son were at the heart of a bribery scheme involving Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that Hunter Biden worked for. Smirnov told this lie after meeting with Russian intelligence officials who are close to Vladimir Putin. According to CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane, “prosecutors claim Smirnov had contact with Russian foreign agents, including one described as a Russian official ‘who controls groups that are engaged in overseas assassination efforts.’”

After his arrest this week, Smirnov said the lie he told the FBI came from Russian intelligence officials. MacFarlane: “The special counsel argues Smirnov’s contacts are ‘extensive and extremely recent,’ and that he’s a risk to peddle Russia’s lies in an attempt to interfere in the 2024 election and dissuade congressional support of Ukraine aid.”

This lie, the one about the Bidens taking bribes, is the basis of the inquiry, which is the last stage before an impeachment. Politico’s Jonathan Lamire said after prosecutors revealed Smirnov’s connection to the Kremlin, House Republicans know their case is falling apart.

“White House staffers … received subpoena letters this week saying you have to come and testify … One staffer told me he received a letter and 90 minutes later received a second that said, 'Hey, disregard the first, use this one instead.' He said, 'What is the difference between the two? All the references to Smirnov in the first letter had been stripped out,’ and now they were going forward without it. That's their acknowledgment, the Republicans know it's falling apart."

Even so, they won’t stop. Remember, there’s no there there. What matters is smearing Biden before the election, the way Donald Trump tried smearing him before the last one. But as I said, the problem is the House Republicans are bad at this. Like their leader, they can’t adjust to changing conditions. They do the same thing no matter what. When things go sideways, they don’t double-check. They double down.

Take Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and co-leader of the House impeachment inquiry. On Fox, he said the news doesn’t change that Biden went “to Kyiv and fires the prosecutor and he does so by leveraging, conditioning the release of our tax money on the firing of the prosecutor, applying pressure to the company his son sat on the board of and made a million dollars a year from.”

Jordan called this word-salad one of “four facts” that are, apparently, the new and improved foundation for the GOP’s impeachment inquiry. It is not a fact, however. Indeed, Jordan is backing away from one Kremlin lie – the one about the Bidens taking bribes – into another.

As vice president, Joe Biden did pressure the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor, but not because Viktor Shokin was investigating corruption at the energy firm that Hunter Biden worked for. Biden pressured the government to fire Shokin because he wasn’t investigating enough. He was dirty. He was among Putin’s circle of corrupt foreign officials. Biden was speaking for the global community. The “leverage” Jordan speaks of was part of an anti-corruption effort.

This lie, about Biden’s saving Burisma from criminal investigation, has been around since at least 2019, when then-President Donald Trump attempted to extort Ukraine’s president. In exchange for the release of vital military aid, Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky to announce that his government would investigate Biden’s “meddling.” Trump had believed, rightly, it turns out, that Biden would be his Democratic challenger in 2020. For all this, he was impeached the first time.

The thing about this lie, about Biden saving Burisma from criminal investigation, is that Trump isn’t its source. The Kremlin is. It’s part of a larger package of lies, to wit: Not only did Biden corrupt US foreign policy for his son’s benefit, it was Ukraine, not Russia, that sabotaged the 2016 presidential election. Moreover: Trump didn’t collude with Russia. Hillary Clinton colluded with Ukraine. Trump was the victim. And all he wanted from Zelensky was help in uncovering the truth.

Before the 2020 election, a Republican-led Senate committee released an exhaustive report showing that Biden did nothing wrong. According to a supplemental report to it, this package of lies is rooted “in Russian disinformation efforts – that Ukraine and not Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, and that Hunter Biden’s connection with Ukrainian energy company Burisma influenced former Vice President Biden’s actions and US foreign policy. These types of theories were used by Russian intelligence to obscure their interference in the 2016 election, as well as by Republicans to defend President Trump during impeachment proceedings, despite having no basis in fact.”

This is what I mean when I said Jim Jordan backed away from one lie, the one about the Bidens taking bribes, into another, the one about Biden saving Burisma from criminal investigation. And this is what I mean when I said the House Republicans are bad at this. When one impeachment rationale melts into the air, they turn to another, which in turn melts into the air. They don’t adjust, though. They don’t double-check. They double down. What matters is picking up where Trump left off in 2019, smearing Joe Biden before an election, even if that means ensuring the appearance of being Putin’s apparatchiks.

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