A Look Back At 'Russiagate' In The Context Of 'Chinagate'.

Few Are Taking Trump's Claims Seriously That China Swung The 2020 Election, This Should Have Been The Reactions To Claims That Russia Swung The 2016 Election.

Written By: Justin K.P.

Donald Trump is currently making evidence-free claims that China interfered in the 2020 election, a claim that is being dismissed correctly by most of the mainstream media, pointing out that much of the declassified “evidence” put out by Trump to back up his claim contradicts it.

But this same skepticism was not shown towards the more sophisticated Russiagate hoax , which falsely claimed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and swung it towards Trump, a hoax that the mainstream media not only fully embraced, but made the main story of the first Trump story.

The story of “Russiagate” is often portrayed as one about the media getting a major story dead wrong, but- as I will show in this article- the deception had a much more blood soaked impact on geopolitics- in many way leading to the horrible and avoidable proxy war in Ukraine which has cost over a million Ukrainians and Russians- many of them drafted young men- their lives.

The Neo-Con Deep State Targets Russia.

Early claims that Russia nefariously was interfering in American politics did not actually emerge in 2016, and actually came prior to 2016 from the same neo-con cabal behind the Iraq war.

The Neo-cons and the American deep state had their eyes on drawing Russia into Ukraine and using it, and its people, to bleed Russia.

This was escalated in 2014 when the CIA backed a coup against Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych, who stayed neutral towards Russia, and installed a puppet government that was far more hostile to Russia,and which included Neo-Nazi elements.

Following the coup, the Neo-cons needed a way to get Americans to think Russia was their enemy and a threat to them, in order to manufacture consent for the planned proxy war in Ukraine.

This propaganda campaign was launched from a Neo-con think tank called the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and funded primarily by the major Neo-con billionaire donor, Paul Singer ( the same Paul Singer that poured one million dollars into the primary campaign to unseat the anti-war Kentucky representative Thomas Massie).

For context, Kristol and Kagan were the same Neo-cons who founded the Project for A New American Century (PNAC), where most of the Bush-era Iraq war architects came from, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Lewis Libby, and John Bolton.

The Project for A New American Century was not exactly shy about its goals.

Established in 1997, PNAC put out a policy paper in 2000 titled “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”, which called to maintain America’s position as a unipolar global hegemony, writing “The Cold War world was a bipolar world; the 21st-century world is – for the moment, at least – decidedly unipolar, with America as the world’s ‘sole superpower.’ America’s strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals. The military’s job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace;’ to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies”

In order to maintain global hegemony, the paper wrote that the United States needs to “retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars” and “maintain sufficient land forces to achieve political goals such as removing a dangerous and hostile regime when necessary”, i.e endless regime change wars.

Perhaps most concerning is the fact that the paper- written one year before 9/11- wrote that this vision could only be achieved by “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”.

The Foreign Policy Initiative was a rebranded version of PNAC, now pushing for a new Cold War with Russia to further of it’s goal of maintaining the United States as the world’d unipolar hegemony.

Journalists Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek reported in 2014 :

Launched by Weekly Standard founder William Kristol and two former foreign policy aides to Mitt Romney, Dan Senor and Robert Kagan (the husband of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland), FPI grew directly out of the Project for a New American Century that led the public pressure campaign for a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq after the Bin Laden-orchestrated 9/11 attacks.

In 2010, when FPI rose from the ashes of PNAC, whose name had become synonymous with warmongering, mendacity and strategic blundering, it pivoted away from Iraq toward “rising resurgent powers, including China and Russia,” according to its mission statement. Through a series of letters and manifestos urging President Barack Obama to take a more confrontational stance toward Russia, FPI has assiduously sought to establish the groundwork for a new Cold War.

On March 14, in The Weekly Standard, Kristol laid out FPI’s goals, writing that recent geopolitical crises could be exploited to reverse America’s “war-weary” post-Iraq attitude and prevent further cuts to defense spending.

“All that’s needed is the rallying,” he insisted. “And the turnaround can be fast.”

Pictured Above: Bill Kristol and Rober Kagan in 2019.

Neo-Cons Stage Manage RT Resignation.

Shortly after the U.S. overthrew Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, and then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland- the wife of Robert Kagan- was caught on tape picking who in the Ukrainian opposition would be in and out of the new government, Liz Wahl, a dimwitted anchor for the Russian funded channel RT America, resigned from the network live on air, saying, “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin. I’m proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth, and that is why, after this newscast, I’m resigning”.

It turned out that this resignation was actually a stunt stage-managed by the FPI.

Blumenthal and Khalek reported :

It was a full 19 minutes before Wahl resigned. Inside the offices of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative think tank in Washington D.C., a staffer logged on to the group’s Twitter account to announce the following:

“#WordOnTheStreet says that something big might happen on RT in about 20-25 minutes.”

Then, at 5:16, exactly 10 minutes before Wahl would quit on air, FPI tweeted:

‘#WordOnTheStreet says you’re really going to want to tune in to RT’

Up until two minutes before Wahl’s resignation, FPI took to Twitter again to urge its followers to tune in to RT.

And finally, at 5:26 p.m., at the very moment Wahl quit, FPI’s Twitter account broke the news: “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’ ”

The tweets from FPI suggested a direct level of coordination between Wahl and the neoconservative think tank. Several calls to FPI for this story were not answered.

The reporters added that, “Just over an hour later, an exclusive interview with Wahl appeared at The Daily Beast. It was authored by James Kirchick”, noting that “Kirchick was a senior fellow at FPI” and that “Kirchick acknowledged having been in contact with Wahl since August”.

They added, “Later that evening, Kirchick tweeted a photo of himself with Wahl, calling it a “Freedom selfie.” The two had apparently gathered to celebrate.

Pictured Above: Liz Whal.

Liz Wahl- RT’s Ron Burgundy - soon began mindlessly reading scripts written by the Foreign Policy Initiative, rather than RT.

In April of 2015, Wahl read one of them in front of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, claiming that RT America was responsible for turning people against the always benevolent and honest U.S. establishment.

Wahl claimed at the hearing that on RT, “, an alternative reality is pushed, or in most cases, several alternative realities” and “to deflect from the facts and confuse the public”.

Ironically, Wahl (in reality her Neo-con handlers) gave examples of indisputable facts as examples of RT and the Kremlin pushing “an alternative reality”.

“When protests erupted in Maiden Square, it was made to look not like a popular uprising, but a coup comprised mostly of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis and fascists. Through suggestive and misleading language, RT pinned the blame on the West for fomenting unrest in Ukraine”.

These are just facts.

After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, Foreign Policy Magazine wrote, “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kyiv’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists,” and the UK’s Channel 4 news reported that “the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum”.

As for the U.S. fomenting the coup in Ukraine, U.S. senator Chris Murphy, who was photographed standing beside Ukranian Neo-nazi politician Oleh Tyahnybok before the coup took place, admitted on C-Span , “With respect to Ukraine, we have not sat on the sidelines; we have been very much involved. Members of the Senate have been there, members of the state department that have been there on the (Maidan) square. The Obama administration passed sanctions, the Senate was prepared to pass its own set of sanctions, and as I said, I really think the clear position of the United States has been in part what has led to this change in regime” and concluding, “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.

New Citizen, the main NGO behind organizing the protests that led to the far-right coup in Ukraine, was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited to advise the U.S. installed Ukrainian government, and later revealed that “I flew there (to Ukraine) … and when I got there somebody representing an American NGO … somebody explained to me how much American money had gone into pumping up the Maidan (coup). I saw it (the Americans said) we gave 50 thousand to this one (think tank), 5 million to this one, 5 thousand to this one and so forth”.

George Friedman, the director of the U.S. government-tied private intelligence firm Stratfor, said after the coup:

At the beginning of this year there existed in Ukraine a slightly pro-Russian though very shaky government. That situation was fine for Moscow: after all, Russia did not want to completely control Ukraine or occupy it; it was enough that Ukraine not join NATO and the EU. Russian authorities cannot tolerate a situation in which western armed forces are located a hundred or so kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh.

The United States, for its part, were interested in forming a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia is on the rise, and were eager not to let it consolidate its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of the pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow the U.S. to contain Russia.

Russia calls the events that took place at the beginning of this year a coup d’etat organized by the United States. And it truly was the most blatant coup in history.

As noted above, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape plotting to install Ukrainian opposition politician Arseniy Yatseniuk as the interim president of Ukraine after the coup.

This- as Forbes Magazine noted- was because “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund’s demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.

Not to mention the fact that U.S. backed militants affiliated with the far-right “Right Sector” group fired snipers on protestors on the Maidan square, and then falsely blamed the massacre on Yanukovych, using it to justify violently removing him from power in a false flag likely orchestrated by the U.S.

Yet Wahl and her Neo-con handler portrayed RT America sharing these facts about the “Maidan” coup as Russia being “able to shape reality or at least make it difficult to find out what the reality is”.

“Themes and disinformation tactics employed by RT during the war in Ukraine have been used before, though not as vigorously and strategically,” she added.

She accused RT of fomenting anti-establishment sentiment in the U.S. through “themes and disinformation tactics employed”, and was waging a “rapidly expanding propaganda campaign” on Americans to foment “staunch anti-Western views”and “conspiracy theories”.

The same hearing, journalist Mark Ames reported ,also featured the writer Peter Pomerantsev, who had written a paper about Russia’s supposed information war titled “Menace of Unreality” alongside Michael Weiss, a hardline Neo-conservative.

Journalist Max Blumenthal noted, “The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-backed entity dedicated to encouraging regime change across the globe through the semi-covert backing of political opposition groups and media fronts, also provided a forum for Weiss and Pomarantsev’s white paper on Russian subversion”.

In filmmaker Robbie Martin’s documentary “A Very Heavy Agenda” - on this subject, he showed that Peter Pomerantsev also spoke at the Foreign Policy Initiative on the subject of supposed “Russian disinformation” threatening America.

At the Foreign Policy Initiative, Pomerantsev claimed that Russia was “attacking liberal democracies from inside their very fabric”.

Pictured Above: Peter Pomerantsev speaks at a Foreign Policy Initiative Conference, shown in the documentary “A Very Heavy Agenda Part 2: How We Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The New Neocons” By Robbie Martin.

As Mark Ames noted, Peter Pomerantsev was “so close to (Bill) Browder, we learn from his book, that he even serves as one of Browder’s lobbyists before the British parliament to push through an anti-Kremlin sanctions bill, the Magnitsky Act, bankrolled by Browder’s ill-begotten stash.”

For context, as Mark Ames noted, Bill Browder was a “billionaire vulture capitalist … who served as Putin’s most loyal attack dog while he was raking in his billions, but then transformed himself into the Andrei Sakharov of vulture capitalism as soon as Putin’s KGB tossed Browder out of their circle and decided to keep his share of the take for themselves.”

Browder, Mark Ames noted, was a long defender of the Russian government, saying “A nice, well-run authoritarian regime is better than an oligarchic mafia regime — and those are the choices on offer” until “his KGB pals decided they’d had enough of him and chased him out to London”.

Browder then fabricated a story- used to justify the Magnitsky Act sanctions in 2012- claiming that his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky found evidence of Russian corruption and testified to it in court, and was killed intentionally in a Russian prison for it.

The reality, as multiple investigations have shown, was that Sergei Magnitsky was actually Bill Browder’s accountant in Russia, who was brought to testify in a corruption trial against Browder, never made any allegation of Russian government corruption, and was jailed over corruption charges.

While he did die in prison due to horrible medical neglect from Russian prison authorities , there is no evidence that it was an intentional murder, nor is there evidence that Sergei Magnitsky blew the whistle on any Russian government corruption, as Browder has falsely claimed.

Peter Pomerantsev would often use the corrupt fabulist Bill Browder as a source for his claims of a “Russian information war,” including by claiming that Browder’s American lawyer told him that Russia was waging war on “the whole of Western civilization”.

Browder would use his fabricated story to call for the U.S. to ratchet up tensions with Russia. As Der Spiegel noted , “In interviews, he calls for Russia to be largely isolated. He attacks politicians who disagree with him. He called John Kerry, the former U.S. secretary of state, a ‘lapdog’ and accused him of ‘appeasement.’ Browder has also called for Russia’s banishment from the SWIFT banking network, which would have devastating consequences for the Russian population.”

As Mark Ames added, “The hearing was put on by Orange County (one of California’s most reactionary counties, famed for its concentration of millionaires.—Eds.) neoconservative Republican Ed Royce; the purpose of the hearings was to drum up fear about Russia’s ‘unprecedented’information war on the West — a propaganda battle which obviously exists, but whose dimensions and dangers are being cynically exaggerated — and then convert that fear into budget money for US propaganda and NGOs to subvert Kremlin power.”

However, the Neo-cons claim that RT America, a network with low ratings, was brainwashing Americans and waging an information war on America for criticizing U.S foreign policy, and the U.S. establishment was not convincing many- that was until the 2016 election.

Russiagate:

By the time Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, the Neo-cons and the U.S. deep state were ramping up the new Cold War with Russia, trying to draw Russia into Ukraine while trying to convince the public that Russia was waging an “information war” to destroy the West through a TV station.

It should not come as too much of a surprise that Neo-Cons and the deep state believed Trump’s rise to power was a threat to this agenda, given that he called for the United States to have better relations with Russia.

For this reason, PNAC-associated Neo-Cons began to migrate towards the Democratic Party, feeling more comfortable with the extremely Hawkish Hillary Clinton campaign.

Journalist Rania Khalek in The Intercept reported that in July of 2016 , that Robert Kagan ran a fundraiser for the Clinton campaign called “foreign policy professionals for Hillary”.

“Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s know-nothing isolationism has led many neocons to flee the Republican ticket. And some, like Kagan, are actively helping Clinton, whose hawkishness in many ways resembles their own” Khalek noted.

She added, “The way they described Clinton’s foreign policy vision suggested that if elected president in November, she will escalate tensions with Russia, double down on military belligerence in the Middle East, and generally ignore the American public’s growing hostility to intervention.”

The Neo-cons similarly hoped that Hillary would be better to advance the proxy war in Ukraine.

As Khalek noted:

When Robbie Martin, a filmmaker who recently produced a three-part documentary on the neoconservative movement, asked how Clinton plans to deal with Ukraine, Kagan responded enthusiastically.

“I know Hillary cares more about Ukraine than the current president does,” Kagan replied. “[Obama] said to me [that he wouldn’t arm Ukraine because] he doesn’t want a nuclear war with Russia,” he added, rolling his eyes dismissively. “I don’t think Obama cares about Putin anymore at all. I think he’s hopeless.”

However, once Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the Neo-cons needed a way to , ensure Trump would advance the same proxy war plans that Hillary Clinton would.

This is how “Russaigate” came into play.

The Clinton campaign needed a way to deflect from the fact that it ran a bad campaign, and the Neo-cons, deep state, and Clinton campaign conducted a narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election and was controlled by the Kremlin.

Most believe that Fusion GPS, the research firm behind the fraudulent Steele dossier which launched the “Russiagate hoax,” was funded by the Clinton Campaign, but the reality is even worse.

As Forward reported , Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier were initially funded by Paul Singer, the same Neo-con mega donor who was the “primary seed donor” for the Foreign Policy Initiative, before further funding was “provided by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Furthermore, the claims of “Russian interference” helped the Neo-cons with their claim that Russia was a “threat” and interfering and manipulating every aspect of American politics.

In reality, there is no actual evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election at all.

The claim that Russia influenced the 2016 election primarily comes down to two claims: one that Russia ran social media bots through a troll farm called the “Internet Research Agency” that influenced the election and two that Russia was behind the leak of DNC emails that were published on WikiLeaks.

As for the Internet Research Agency claim, journalist Aaron Mate in the Nation noted:

The Mueller report begins by declaring that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” A few paragraphs later, Mueller tells us that Russian interference occurred “principally through two operations.” The first of these operations was “a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” carried out by a Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

The inference here is that the IRA was a part of the Russian government’s “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign. Yet Mueller’s team has been forced to admit in court that this was a false insinuation. Earlier this month, a federal judge rebuked Mueller and the Justice Department for suggesting that the troll farm’s social media activities “were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government.” US District Judge Dabney Friedrich noted that Mueller’s February 2018 indictment of the IRA “does not link the [IRA] to the Russian government” and alleges “only private conduct by private actors.” Jonathan Kravis, a senior prosecutor on the Mueller team, acknowledged that this is the case. “[T]he report itself does not state anywhere that the Russian government was behind the Internet Research Agency activity,” Kravis told the court.

Furthermore, he noted that “most of the Russian social media content was juvenile clickbait that had nothing to do with the election (only 7 percent of IRA’s Facebook posts mentioned either Trump or Clinton). There is also no evidence that the political content reached a mass audience, and to the extent it reached anyone, most of it occurred after the election.”

As for the claim of Russia stealing emails from the DNC, the “intelligence assessment” asserting this was outsourced to a private firm called “CrowdStrike”.

The company’s CEO, Shawn Henry, was forced to admit under oath that his firm found “no evidence” that Russia stole emails from the DNC, saying, “There’s no evidence that they (DNC emails) were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence - but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”

More recently, declassified documents showed that “the FBI and NSA expressed ‘low confidence’ that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails”and that “U.S. intelligence agencies ‘lack sufficient technical details’ to link the stolen Democratic Party material released by WikiLeaks and other sources ‘to Russian state-sponsored actors.’”

The documents also showed that “The ‘attribution of the intrusions’ to Russia, the DNI wrote, was ‘based on the forensic evidence identified by a private cyber-firm and the IC’s review and understanding of cyber activities by the Russian Government’”, a reference to Crowdstrike, the firm which admitted it found “no evidence” to back up this claim.

Russiagate, however, was a way for the Neo-cons who had now migrated to the Democratic Party to essentially blackmail Trump into continuing the proxy war in Ukraine.

Neo-Cons such as Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and David Frum became heroes of the liberal “resistance” to Trump, which focused entirely on this false claim that Russia installed Trump and that he was their puppet.

Pictured Above: Bill Kristol and rapper “Fat Joe” appear on MSNBC in 2018. MSNBC labelled the PNAC and FPI co founder “Woke Bill Kristol”.

This, in effect, caused Trump to abandon his campaign pledge to engage in diplomacy with Russia and instead carry out the Neo-Con preferred policy towards Russia.

After the 2014, coup in Ukraine, a civil war broke out in Eastern Ukraine between the U.S. installed Ukrainian government and pro-Russia rebels in the Donbas region, escalated after far right Ukrainian militants trapped ethnic Russian Ukrainian in the burning Trade Unions House in Odesa, burning 42 alive, due to the fact that “the deployment of fire engines to the site of the fire had been deliberately delayed for 40 minutes” by the U.S. installed Ukrainian government, and “the police had not stepped in to help evacuate people from the building promptly and safely” according to an EU court judgement.

Wanting to escalate the violence against ethnic Russians, in hopes it would draw Russia into Ukraine at their behest, Kagan lamented that Obama wouldn’t send lethal arms to Ukraine.

However, wanting to prove that he was not a “Russian asset”, Trump did exactly what the Neo-cons wanted, and escalated the civil war in Ukraine by sending lethal arms to Ukraine in 2017 and 2019.

The Trump administration also pressured Volodymyr Zelensky to abandon the Minsk Accords, the peace deal that would have ended the conflict in Eastern Ukraine- after he was elected on a platform of ending the war in 2019.

Konstantin Bondarenko, one of the most prominent Ukrainian political scientists and experts on Ukrainian politics, documented in his book on the Zelensky presidency how then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale pressured Zelensky not to end the war in the Donbas.

As he noted, “On March 7 (of 2019), U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale held new meetings with the main presidential candidates,” including the current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky where, “Zelensky was clearly told about the U.S.’s interests in Ukraine and the need to follow the rules set by the American authorities in Ukraine after Maidan: cooperation with the IMF, continuing the confrontation with Russia, sabotaging the Minsk agreements [the peace agreement to end the civil/proxy conflict in Eastern Ukraine], and protecting the interests of transnational corporations, among other things”.

He noted that “[then U.S.-backed Ukrainian president Petro] Poroshenko fully relied on his U.S. curators, believing that the State Department would see him as the only viable candidate to lead the country as the main outpost of American policy in Eurasia” but then “could not believe that the State Department would view him with indifference and reach the same agreement with Zelensky.”

To ensure Zelensky did not implement the Minsk Accords, CIA and U.S. funded think tanks issued letters opposed to it.

Ukrainian Canadian professor Ivan Katchanovski documented that , “The Western governments and foundations, such as Soros foundation, funded all but one of about two dozen Ukrainian NGOs, which initially issued in 2019 a collective statement that any talks with Donbas separatists were impermissible after the head of Zelenskyy’s presidential administration supported creation of a consulting group with representatives of the separatist-controlled Donbas during the Minsk negotiations.”

It was this U.S. backed opposition, as well as open threats of violence from Neo Nazi militants within the Ukrainian army, armed with lethal weapons by the Trump administration, that prevented the Donbas war from being ended.

The former Secretary General of NATO from 2014 to 2024, Jens Stoltenberg, acknowledged in his memoir that :

he (Zelensky) was under pressure from a nationalist-oriented parliament, which wanted central control and a strong presidential office. Poroshenko had pushed through an amendment to the constitution, which paved the way for decentralisation and increased autonomy for Luhansk and Donetsk, but the changes had not yet been implemented. He faced significant opposition; the amendment was regarded as an expression of weakness and capitulation to the Russians and the separatists.

Zelenskyy was in favour of holding elections in Eastern Ukraine and giving the region separate status; he had not insisted that the Ukrainians must first have control of the entire Donbas region before such elections could be held. The opposition in Kyiv, however, mercilessly struck this down, because they believed it an expression of weakness.

All the while, the Democrats ran an impeachment of Trump in 2019 that was based entirely on claims that he temporarily withheld lethal aid going to fuel this war in Ukraine and the blocking of the Minsk accords.

The entire impeachment inquiry was used by Hawkish Democrats to laud Neo-con policy towards Russia and Ukraine, such as when Adam Schiff, who spearheaded the impeachment effort, said “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight them over here”.

Furthermore, to “prove” he was not an asset of the Russians, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia in 2019, which Russia directly cited as one of their grievances against the West that led to the invasion of Ukraine.

In effect, by joining with the Democratic Party and pushing it’s messaging as “resistance” to Trump, the Neo-cons behind the Foreign Policy Initiative, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, were able to pressure Trump to escalate the war in Ukraine, stop the Minsk Accords, and unilaterally pull out of long standing diplomatic nuclear treaties with Russia, the exact policy they wanted implanted to draw Russia into Ukraine after the 2014 coup.

As for the false claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, it was used by Neo-cons and their allies in the mainstream media to convince Americans that the Russians were a threat to them, often calling the allegations of interference “an act of war” and even comparing it to Pearl Harbour.

Pictured Above: Article published in Politico Magazine in 2018.

The claim of a Russian information war “threat” against America that the Foreign Policy Initiative attempted to create in 2014, was now being repeated by mainstream media across the spectrum, in even more extreme and war mongering ways.

All of this was orchestrated by the Neo-Cons and deep state with the end goal of provoking and manufacturing consent for a proxy war with Russia using Ukraine.

Now that the same playbook is being repeated with China, it needs to be remembered how dangerous this campaign could become.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.