THE PARAGRAPHS OF THE DAY

Today’s paragraphs come to us from Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University…and contributing editor for thenation.com.

The following paragraphs were drawn from Professor Cohen’s latest commentary, in which he presents several possible reasons for why “Russiagate”, as he calls it, took place..and why he strongly supports the investigations being pursued by Attorney General William Barr.

Here is the one he favors:

The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.

US Attorney General William Barr now proposes to investigate the origins of Russiagate. He has appointed yet another special prosecutor, John Durham, to do so, but the power to decide the range and focus of the investigation will remain with Barr. The important news is Barr’s expressed intention to investigate the role of other US intelligence agencies, not just the FBI, which obviously means the CIA when it was headed by John Brennan and Brennan’s partner at the time, James Clapper, then director of national intelligence. As I argued in The Nation, Brennan, not Obama’s hapless FBI Director James Comey, was the godfather of Russiagate, a thesis for which more evidence has since appeared. We should hope that Barr intends to exclude nothing, including the two foundational texts of the deceitful Russiagate narrative: the Steele Dossier and, directly related, the contrived but equally ramifying Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017. (Not coincidentally, they were made public at virtually the same time, inflating Russiagate into an obsessive national scandal.)

Is this investigation necessary?  Imperative?  Yes and emphatically yes…which is why I award Stephen F. Cohen Paragraphs Of The Day Honors.

Mainstream media have worked triple-overtime to hide this scandal – arguably the single biggest such scandal in United States history – for the past 2 1/2 years.  May Attorney General Barr uncover every bit if evidence, no matter where it takes him, so the people can know the truth about the apparent attempt to overthrow our legally elected President.