Jeff Sessions, and the ongoing drumbeat of Russia hysteria

in #politics8 years ago

Another day, another article in the Washington Post or the New York Times about how the Russians are coming.  The media is convinced that the Kremlin has infiltrated the Trump administration, and that contact with Russian officials has occurred continuously since the days of the campaign.   Newly appointed attorney general Jeff Sessions is now the one standing in front of this oncoming tidal wave which not long ago swallowed up national security adviser Mike Flynn.  From the Washington Post we get the story: "Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last year, encounters he later did not disclose."  

As with most WaPo stories, you have to scroll down at least halfway to get past the innuendo to find the facts of what's going on.  "Justice officials said Sessions met with Kislyak on Sept. 8 in his capacity as a member of the armed services panel rather than in his role as a Trump campaign surrogate."  So, in other words, Sessions was doing his job- he also met with ambassadors from China, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere from around the world.  So, did Sessions really tell a boldfaced lie under oath?

The answer is no- the accusations of Sessions are extremely disingenuous, because the Washington Post story has deliberately not shown you the full context of the conversation.  The way that Senator Al Franken framed his question to Sessions was in regards to specific allegations that Russian operatives had compromising personal and financial information on Trump, and furthermore that Trump surrogates were in a continuing exchange of information with the Russian government.  This is specifically what Sessions denied, not whether or not he had met with Russian diplomats, among diplomats from many other nations, as a routine part of his job.  But we're talking about the Washington Post here, so what can you really expect? 

What the WaPo is aiming for, aside from obviously trying to spark the fire that could down Sessions, is the trusty, tried-and-tested fake news "first ripple" effect.  Whenever one of these fake news stories is handed down to them from the intelligence community, as with the PropOrNot debacle back in 2016, the initial reports of the story spread like wildfire on social media, on cable news, and in the print press.  But when the retractions or clarifications inevitably follow, they barely gain any traction at all, so in the minds of most of the low-information public there exists only the initial story and nothing else.

The fine irony in all of this is that Eric Holder, the only attorney general in history to be held in contempt of congress, has recently re-emerged into the public eye alongside Obama, announcing that the former president will ostensibly be leading the fight against gerrymandering.  This likely has to do with how badly the Democrats were defeated at all state and federal levels in November- the globalists are determined to fight back, and Obama, with his high approval ratings among Dems, still has political capital to be exhausted in service of the cause.  Hillary and co. have him by the balls and aren't letting go.  Just as it was during his term in office, criticism of the man who raised the national budget by over $9 trillion, while quantitative easing and the nonexistent recovery only made the rich richer, can conveniently be written off as racist.  The fight will be led from right down the road from the White House in Obama's new walled-off palace, where former senior adviser Valerie Jarred is moving in with the Obama family.  Elsewhere, Hillary's 650,000 missing emails still have not seen the full light of day, as deputy FBI-director Andrew McCabe does his best to stonewall the investigation into both Hillary and Huma's clandestine communications.  

The mainstream liberal media under the Trump presidency thus far has served more as a vehicle for diversion than anything else.  Whenever a 'big' story is being puffed up by the New York Times or the Washington Post, you can be sure that there's something else even more important going on behind the scenes that they are attempting to divert the public's attention from.  So what could be the case here?  I see several good candidates:

1.  The biggest story in news right now should be the Awan brothers.   Imran, Jamal, Abid Awan, all originally from Pakistan, and two of their family members all on the congressional payroll were fired earlier in February under suspicion of stealing national security information from the Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Homeland Security Committees.   Since not long after Obama first took office, the brothers had been doing IT work for the notoriously corrupt Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as well as other congressional Democrats.  This story should be all over the place by now, and the public has a right to know just what was going on.   Thus far, only the Daily Caller has really given it a detailed expose. 

2.  A swath of Hillary's emails were released this morning by the Clinton-infested State Department, but they are so redacted as to be almost valueless in most cases.  Still, expect at least a few interesting finds here in coming days from those sleuths who are paying close attention to this case.  

3.  The massive human trafficking busts, over 1500 in Trump's first month of office, still have not been given any play by most of the MSM.  The globalist reaction to Pizzagate/Pedogate is intensifying, with investigative journalist Jake Morphonios hit with a $5 million lawsuit by friends of James Alefantis over the exposure of his links to the Laura Silsby affair.  There has been a crackdown of Twitter accounts in the wake of the Amazon Cloud service outage, and even Gab.ai was briefly down earlier.  The deep state is hellbent on suppressing free speech at all costs wherever it could poke holes in their mirage.

Of course, the brouhaha over Sessions could also be in part because the reaction to Trump's joint address to congress on Tuesday night was overall positive, and it's the media's job to get you to believe that the only valid characterization of the Trump administration is that it is consumed by chaos, and run behind the scenes by bigots and white nationalists who don't speak for mainstream America.  The reaction to Trump's joint address threatens this narrative.  The speech didn't offer much in the way of specifics, especially on what his economic policies will be.  We learned, among other things, that he intends to introduce an infrastructure stimulus of over $1 trillion, replace Obamacare with something, and that he will launch a new agency named VOICE- Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement.  Most worrisome was the talk of doubling down on his promise to beef up the military, with its already bloated budget- instead, a reduction of wasteful spending and a willingness to take on the military-industrial complex is needed.   But the speech sounded the right notes on education and immigration, two areas where decades of liberal policies have failed catastrophically.  Moreover, Trump appeared more measured and presidential, and there were no major gaffes to harp on or to mischaracterize, like that infamous night in Sweden. 

The Russia hysteria has not died down- the media, backed into a corner and at a loss for other tactics, is content to keep beating this drum.   No hard evidence of Russian meddling has yet emerged, and just last Friday it emerged that "senior administration officials said that the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, personally told Priebus last week that the reports were BS." 

It's time for the Trump administration to start playing hardball.  If Trump and Sessions have aces up their sleeve, now is the time to reveal their hand.  If Sessions is undone, the rest of the administration could be soon to follow.  The deep state's soft coup on behalf of the Clinton-globalist cabal should not be allowed to succeed, or even to move beyond this point without putting forward some hard evidence to back their allegations. 

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excellent article! resteemed

I'm going to update today's compilation to include this

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