TO AID TRUMP, REPORT SAYS.” The paper claimed that the revelations in “this damning report … undermined the legitimacy” of the President-Elect, and “made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin,” but a back-page article in the same issue stated: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack.… [There was] no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow’s propaganda machinery.”57
For VIPS, the key question was how the material from “Russian hacking” got to WikiLeaks, because WikiLeaks published the DNC and Podesta emails (John Podesta was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign). William Binney, former technical director of the NSA, pointed out it “would almost certainly have yielded a record of any electronic transfer from Russia to WikiLeaks.” If Obama could not make public any evidence, he probably did not have any.58
A forensics study undertaken by a retired IBM program manager, Skip Folden, found that DNC data were copied onto a storage device at a speed that exceeds the Internet capability for a remote hack. The operation was performed on the East Coast of the United States, suggesting an inside leak, which was later doctored to incriminate Russia. Folden’s study was ignored by the Times and other media, along with the curious fact that the FBI never sought access to the DNC computers as part of its investigation or bothered to interview a British diplomat who claims to have met the leaker outside Washington.59 Months after the fact, when the government’s own investigation stalled, the Times kept publishing sensational front-page exposés purporting to unearth secret hackers in Ukraine, and a diabolical plot by Russia to set up fake social media accounts to spread stories critical of Clinton and U.S. foreign policy, which the Times baselessly claimed helped sway the election.60
Russia-Gate in Context: Trump and His Pro-Kremlin Cabinet
Times writers have routinely lambasted Donald Trump for his alleged “slavish devotion to the Russian strongman” as Max Boot put it in an op-ed calling for a get-tough policy, and cast him as beholden to Russian interests. Paul Krugman on July 22, 2016, predicted that “Mr. Trump would, in office, follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.” Maureen Dowd later advised Trump to “stop fawning over his new BFF [Best Friend Forever] whose eyes flash KGB” and to stop “adopting a blame America First attitude when it comes to the Russians.”61
Following on the heels of the Senate Russia-Gate investigations, the Times published numerous articles trying to show collusion between Trump advisers and Russia, insinuating some had committed treason.62 However, thus far the only proof is that they had financial dealings in Russia or communications with Russian officials they failed to disclose, or expressed some interest in obtaining political dirt on Clinton from people with vague ties to the Kremlin. There is no evidence they, or Trump, colluded with the Russians, as a number of key figures including former CIA directors have acknowledged.63
Even Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign his position after intelligence officials leaked that he had discussed Obama’s last round of sanctions with the Russian ambassador before he took office, appears to have simply said, when the Russian ambassador brought it up, that the sanctions would be reviewed upon taking office. This statement by Flynn violated the 1799 Logan Act prohibiting individuals outside the administration from influencing foreign governments in disputes by the United States. However, critical commentators have pointed out that if this is a crime, there are far worse precedents, including Obama’s top Russian adviser Michael McFaul visiting Moscow on the campaign trail in 2008 for talks, and treason committed by Richard Nixon when he sabotaged the Vietnamese peace talks to secure his election in 1968. The underlying agenda behind the Russia-Gate is apparent in that Flynn’s replacement, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, has a strongly hawkish view on Russia, suggesting Russia-Gate was succeeding in pushing Trump away from his one sensible campaign pledge for détente.64
A Broken Promise: NATO Expansion and the New Cold War
American policymakers were deceitful at the end of the Cold War as they privately made plans for U.S. and NATO dominance in Eastern Europe while promising Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze that if they agreed to German reunification and Germany’s becoming a member of NATO, the latter would not “expand one inch to the east.” When Russian political analyst Alex Duggan asked Zbigniew Brzezinski how the West managed to persuade Gorbachev to withdraw Russia’s troops from East Germany, Brzezinski smiled and said, “We tricked him.”65
Gorbachev had proposed a pan-European security agreement and raised the idea of having the Soviet Union join NATO, which then Secretary of State James Baker refused, leaving Russia on the periphery of post–Cold War Europe. According to historian Marie Elise Sarotte, a “young KGB officer serving in East Germany in 1989 offered his own recollection of that era in an interview a decade later in which he remembered returning to Moscow full of bitterness at how ‘the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe.’ His name was Vladimir Putin and he would one day have the power to act on that bitterness.”66
In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO amid Russian opposition, followed over the next decade by seven Central and Eastern European countries including Georgia and Estonia, which is just sixty miles from St. Petersburg. Stephen Cohen points out that the use of NATO for offensive military purposes following the end of the Cold War represented a “radical departure from its original defensive mission, particularly in Russia’s traditional backyard.” Coming on the heels of the first NATO expansion, the U.S.-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 inflicted “‘a deep psychological wound’ on Russian political life.” The U.S.-NATO war against Russia’s fellow Slav nation “played a major role in bringing the country’s security forces back to the center of the political stage.… It even aroused the fear that Russia itself might be NATO’s next victim—‘Yugoslavia yesterday, Russia tomorrow.’” Since Russia could not “match the U.S. conventional air weapons it had observed over Serbia,” the Kremlin fell back on a frightening conclusion: “There remained nothing else but to rely on nuclear weaponry.”
In the face of misleading media coverage, Cohen pleads with citizens to “imagine how this encroachment … is seen from Moscow. Coupled with NATO’s movement toward the country’s western borders, it has revived the specter of a ‘hostile encirclement of Russia.’ Among the worst legacies of Stalinism, that fear played a lamentable Cold War and repressive role in Soviet Russian politics for four decades.”67
Heading a state that has collapsed twice within eighty years, Putin’s main focus has always been to ensure that the Russian state endures; not so it can conquer the world but so it can protect its people. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, GDP in Russia plunged by forty percent, people lost their social benefits, 75 percent were plunged into poverty, longevity for men dropped to about fifty-seven years and disease epidemics revived. The 1990s was a horrible decade, though the New York Times extolled Boris Yeltsin as a “key defender of Russia’s hard-won democratic reforms” and “enormous asset for the U.S.”68
In a rekindled Cold War atmosphere, those who try to explain Putin’s motives today are subjected to neo-McCarthyite attacks, branded as Putin apologists, or worse. To sustain respectability, even progressive commentators go out of their way to demonize the Russian leader. Matt Taibbi, for example, called Putin a “gangster-spook-scum of the lowest order … capable of anything” in a Rolling Stone article critical of Russia-Gate.69
The net effect of all the media coverage is to entrench the belief that Putin is an aggressor and menace to
