Russiagate turned out to be “Deflategate” in that the Mueller report deflated the 24-7 media narrative that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin. Against that backdrop, Aaron Maté joins an exclusive club, consisting of Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey, and Caitlin Johnstone and just a few other anti-Trump, left-wing/progressive journalists essentially concluding that the whole thing indeed was an establishment/media-driven hoax, if not a coup attempt against a sitting president.
Ever since the Wategate scandal in 1972, the media adds “gate” to every highly publicized cover-up.
Maté’s persuasive article published on Friday in the far-left The Nation is called “The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory: The real Russiagate scandal is the damage it has done to our democratic system and media.”
Read the entire work and draw your own conclusions. In the meantime, Selected portions of his article follow.
Russia Collusion Delusion
The author hints that the narrative-obsessed media (a.k.a. the fake news media) seemed to expect any day now that President Trump would be perp-walked out the White House:
“For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible to believe that ‘The Walls Are
Closing In’ on the traitor/puppet/asset in the White House.“The long-awaited completion of Mueller’s probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative—and the expectations it fueled—to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller’s report does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction….
“As a result, Mueller’s report provides the opposite of what Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself…
“To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a ‘Russiagate without Russia.’ Instead we have a series of interactions where Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to the Russian government. But none of these ‘links,’ ‘ties,’ or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting with a Kremlin intermediary.
“Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track every known instance in which someone in Trump’s orbit interacted with ‘the Russians,’ or someone who can be linked to them. There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national—but there is something xenophobic about implying as much.”
Fake News Hyped a Fake Dossier
Among his 10 key points, Maté discusses the fake Russian dossier that served as a pretext for the Obama administration to spy on the Trump campaign:
“The Steele dossier—a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia criminal relationship—played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent politicians, pundits, and media outlets promoted it as credible.
“The Mueller report, The New York Times noted last week, has ‘underscored what had grown clearer for months… some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove.'”
Maté also implies that it was a ghastly mistake for gullible, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to step aside from the Russia probe. Mueller. For one thing, Mueller only hired Obama- and Clinton-connected prosecutors for his team, and perhaps someone will ask for an explanation if the Special Counsel ever testifies on Capitol Hill. With that in minds, some have argued that Mueller knew about no collusion by year-end 2017 but held the findings for political reasons until after the 2018 midterm elections.
Moreover, there was no reason for the Trump administration to fire Gen. Michael Flynn, let alone for Mueller to indict him.
“Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of Jeff Sessions, then attorney general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
“After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak’s interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events ‘were brief, public, and non-substantive…’ When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention, Mueller ‘did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government.’ The same goes for Kislyak’s post-election conversations with Flynn.”
Russia Collusion Was Non-Fan Fiction
Maté concluded his essay by focusing on Democrats, Never Trump Republicans, and their media helpers:
[Featured image credit: DimitroSevastopol/ Pixabay]“In the end, Mueller’s report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and media establishments to be a work of fiction. The American public was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.
“It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller’s report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.”
