Sunday, November 13, 2016

Why Is the Media Ignoring Wikileaks' and Russia's Aid to Trump?


One of the many factors that I find so distressing about Donald Trump's election victory is the manner in which the mainstream media basically ignored a frightening story: the effort of Russia and Putin's apparent puppet, Wikileaks' Julian Assange, to make sure Trump was elected.  While constantly reporting on Hillary Clinton's e-mail "scandal," this much more significant story was for the most part ignored.  Rather than engaging in investigative reporting and informing the American public of this highly unusual situation - can you imaging how the media would have acted if Hillary Clinton had been conspiring with Putin? - Trump's lies and denials were docilely accepted and the media moved on to other GOP manufactured scandals and memes.  Two pieces are worth a full read. The first is in Huffington Post and looks at the evidence of Trump/Russia ties ignored by the pro-Trump FBI.  The second, in The Hill, asks why this media silence has been allowed.  First, these highlights from Huffington Post:
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are reviewing the Democratic Coalition’s investigative report highlighting 10 “clear links” that the FBI failed to investigate about our President-elect’s business ties to Russia, and to the Putin regime.
It’s named “The Dworkin Report.”
“The FBI missed at least 10 key connections between President-elect Trump and Russia when they conducted their investigation and concluded that our President-elect had no links to the country,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor to the Democratic Coalition and author of the report. “It is imperative that the American people be made aware of this information.”
The Dworkin Report shows that Donald Trump has incorporated almost 250 registered businesses in Russia.
This hard evidence directly contradicts Trump’s prior statements about having no business ties to Russia over the summer.
Additionally, the evidence shows that Trump has travelled to Russia dating back to 1987, before the end of the Soviet Union.
In particular, a visit in 2010 included a tour of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum led by a Russian government official of sufficient ranking, that he earned a personal photo and award from Vladimir Putin earlier this year.
The Democratic Coalition also revealed a 2013 video recorded interview with Donald Trump to MSNBC’s Thomas A. Roberts - which he has confirmed as authentic - where he claimed twice to have a relationship with Putin.
Also in 2012, Donald Trump Jr. told Latvian interviewers in a video recorded interview, that he had been to Russia many times and that the Trump Organization has a significant business there.
The Dworkin Report was also shared with Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Harry Reid, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Congressman Keith Ellison on Thursday evening.
Russian government officials told the New York Times that they had direct contact with Trump’s closest allies this week, after polls closed.
“I’m surprised that - if not shocked - that the FBI claims to have found no “clear link” of Trump’s Russian ties when it’s right in front of us and stretches back decades,” said Dworkin about the federal agency’s investigation exclusively in a telephone interview, “You can learn more about Trump’s Russian ties from Google, than you can from the FBI’s public purported investigation.”
Then there are these highlights from The Hill:
In the excitement — some might say panic — surrounding Donald Trump's upset victory, many people are forgetting what helped propel him there.
In addition to an Electoral College system that Trump had previously criticized, an inept FBI, and a poorly executed campaign by the Democrats, there was, of course, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
the television news media is somehow not obsessed with the hacking of emails and the threats against our cybersecurity.
Think about this: Here we have an agency bent on anarchy, fueled by Russian hackers who are very possibly supported by the Russian government, and the story is getting hardly any coverage whatsoever.
As reported in The Washington Post, Trump and a number of his surrogates have had extensive business dealings in Russia. In 2007, Trump said that "Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment." His son, Donald Trump Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008 that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," adding, "we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, also had extensive ties to Russia through his work in Ukraine. A recently unearthed ledger found his name listed alongside large cash payments.
And, of course, Assange, that anti-Clinton cyber-terrorist who may have been Trump's second-best ally (after FBI Director James Comey), had his own Russian TV show not too long ago.
Meanwhile, Interfax is reporting that the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has stated that the Russian government was in contact with the Trump campaign throughout the election.
And so we have a story here that plays like a James Bond movie — Russian oligarchs; a smart, but immoral anarchist bent on destroying the U.S. government in Assange; a president-elect with suspicious business ties; Russian hackers; and a Russian dictator who literally even looks like a Bond villain.
Yet, there's no massive news story here?  Why not?

3 comments:

Daryl said...

interesting. what better way for Russia to get total control of the Arctic with its resources and shipping potential (global warming and all). We Canadians can really do nothing about Russia's lurking in the shadows and a friendly US will give Putin all sorts of leeway.

I was directed here by a reader on Joe.My.God. I'll be coming back. Thanks, Daryl

Michael-in-Norfolk said...

Thanks for checking out my blog. I hope you visit again. I've know Joe since 2008 when we were both at a LGBT blogger summit in Washington, D.C.

EdA said...

Yes, it's remarkable how Comey and his minions have never been able to connect the dots between Uday's statement several years ago that his father was getting massive amounts of Russian money coming in and Benedict Trump's denial of having links with Russia, or any connection between the Wikileaks leaks and Benedict Trump's open invitation to Russia to conduct espionage against the United States, or the Putin Puppet's repeated threats that he would abandon America's allies to Russia if he couldn't extort more money from them.

And given Comey's obsession with private servers (if they're not held by Republican secretaries of state or national security advisors), he's shown a remarkable lack of interest in well researched article in Slate and elsewhere documenting hidden and unexpected links between a private trump server interacting apparently exclusively with a Russian bank.

Snopes calls this claim "Unproven" (not False, but unproven) http://www.snopes.com/trump-server-tied-to-russian-bank/ Apparently primarily on the basis that the server is not physically owned by trump but by a trump contractor and that it is possible that the two servers have been sending each other spam during the normal working hours for each server. That's about as plausible as the likelihood that the piece of trump would hire as his campaign manager someone who was notoriously on Moscow's payroll and who somehow failed to tell Tax Cheat Trump that his bosom buddy had invaded Ukraine two years before Benedict Trump went on worldwide television denying that Putin had any interest in doing so.