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By John Varoli, Substack, 3/9/24

John Varoli is a former foreign correspondent for New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters TV. Trained as a U.S. foreign policy expert with a focus on Russia and Ukraine.

Joe Biden began his State of the Union rant on March 7 by discussing another country — Ukraine. This is quite bizarre and unprecedented in American history. The main point of the State of the Union is to focus on the U.S. and not other countries.

But Ukraine is no ‘other’ country. It’s a place that the Biden family has long seen as its personal vassal state, ripe with highly lucrative corrupt deals. In my last article, I mentioned my work with Ukrainian clients before 2022. At that time, a well-connected client who worked in both the State of Delaware and Kiev told me that in 2010 he helped introduce Biden to Ukraine’s oligarchs. Apparently, it was love at first sight. They spoke each other’s language of ‘money talks’ and abuse of power.

A few years later, in early 2014, Obama and Biden orchestrated a violent insurrection, toppling Ukraine’s elected president and installing a regime loyal to NATO. Naturally, this enraged the Kremlin, which will never tolerate a heavily armed U.S. client state on its southwestern border.

Having started the current conflict with Moscow in 2014, Biden now calls for a total crusade against Russia since it’s a bastion of Conservatism defying the liberal globalist agenda. Also, Biden needs a bogeyman to scare Americans, distract them from their domestic problems and unite them for his reelection. Inciting racist fears of ‘invading Asian hordes’ — whether Russians, Japanese or Chinese — has sadly long been a ploy in U.S. politics.

Even though the U.S. is in a severe economic and financial crisis, with our Constitutional freedoms being stripped away, with crime soaring, social problems exploding and life expectancy rates plunging, here’s how Biden began his speech:

“My purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today. What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time. Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. But Ukraine, Ukraine can stop Putin. Ukraine can stop Putin, if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons they need to defend itself.”

Nearly every word is a lie. It’s reckless to insinuate that President Putin plans to invade NATO. For 15 years, the Kremlin has repeatedly asked NATO to stop its eastward expansion and to keep Ukraine neutral.

The U.S. pushed NATO to Russia’s border, even though it promised Moscow never to expand eastward. Russia didn’t expand to the U.S. border. Biden’s determination to expand NATO into Ukraine was a red line that the Kremlin clearly said it would respond to with force.

Biden tells us that U.S. interests are closely tied to Zelensky’s Ukraine, which he praises as a great democracy. In fact, Ukraine has become one of the world’s most repressive regimes, where freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, freedom of movement and the political opposition have been brutally stamped out. This regime perpetrates Europe’s most heinous war crimes since 1945 — frequent terrorist attacks against innocent Russian civilians, such as the bombings of Belgorod; and the brutal ten-year siege of Donbass that has killed thousands and made refugees of several millions.

If such a reprehensible regime as Kiev is so dear to Biden’s heart, then what does that make him? It makes him one of the worst villains in modern history. But even worse — what does it make the U.S., since we Americans are now complicit (through silence and cowardice) in this deliberate destruction of the post-1991 international order.

With Biden determined to continue using Ukraine as a battering ram to bring down Russia, this conflict will only end when the Ukrainian people take matters into their own hands and reclaim their freedom and dignity, and to try once again to live in peace with their Slavic brothers and sisters to the east.

Instead of offering a solution that could save thousands of lives, Biden only calls for more war, more suffering, and more death. The world needs constructive solutions and not destructive ones.

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 3/12/24

News came last week that, after a long and storied career, Victoria Nuland resigned as undersecretary of state for political affairs at the U.S. State Department. Over the years she gained a reputation as a neoconservative hardliner, having, among other roles, worked as a top aide to the anti-Russia hardliner Strobe Talbott; as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; and as spokeswoman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nuland’s reputation also derived partly (and perhaps unfairly) from the family into which she married. So there is an understandable temptation on the part of advocates of realism and restraint to breathe a sigh of relief over her departure from government service.

But one has to wonder: Does Nuland’s figurative defenestration actually matter?

Nuland deservedly got a lot of criticism (not least from this writer) for inserting the U.S. front and center into the geopolitical squabbles afflicting Ukraine. It is widely believed that before, during, and after the Maidan Revolution, she steered both the Obama and Biden administrations toward a more hawkish course than was advisable. But this perhaps inflates her influence; after all, both Obama and Biden have been plenty hawkish on their own on issues outside of Russia–Ukraine; just consider their actions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. 

Informed speculation as to the import of Nuland’s resignation requires us to consider at least three questions:

• Where is the sausage made? In this regard, the current administration is little different from its immediate predecessors. Policy emanates from the National Security Council under the direction of the White House. By all available accounts, Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan is primus inter pares among the president’s men. Antony Blinken’s almost sublime incompetence has required the president to send Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns, and the Israeli-American envoy Amos Hochstein as emissaries on sensitive diplomatic missions. To appreciate the extent to which State has been downgraded,  this past summer, an up-and-coming member of the foreign policy establishment, Jon Finer, was floated as a possible candidate to fill the role of deputy secretary of state, the department’s number two position. Yet, in the end, he was deemed too valuable to leave his current position of deputy national security adviser. In other words, while Nuland occupied an esteemed position within the State Department hierarchy, the real decisions are made elsewhere.

• What do those who formulate policy actually think? That is relatively straightforward, since the president and his top foreign affairs adviser, Jake Sullivan, have told us repeatedly. Appearing on Meet the Press in late February, Sullivan expressed his view that “Ukraine still has the capacity if we provide them the tools and resources they need to be able to prevail in this war.” And the president, in a near perfect example of what George F. Kennan once mocked as “patriotic emotionalism,” used last Thursday’s State of the Union Address to compare Vladimir Putin, once again, to Adolf Hitler, declaring: “Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond. If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself.” Does it really seem likely, then, that the president and his advisers are going to gracefully withdraw from Ukraine now that Ms. Nuland is gone?

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 2/17/24

That the tide of the war in Ukraine has turned in Russia’s favor is now too obvious to ignore—unless, that is, you are a high ranking Biden administration official, in which case 2024 will likely lead to some sunlit upland of victory and prosperity for Ukraine. 

Consider the comments made a week apart at the end of January by the then-Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and one of her successors in the office of the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, James O’Brien. Upon her departure from the Ukrainian capital, Nuland (who is believed by many to be among the principal advocates behind the decade-long proxy war between the United States and Russia) declared, “I leave Kiev tonight more encouraged about the unity and the result, about 2024 and its absolute strategic importance for Ukraine.”

“I also leave more confident that,” she continued, “as Ukraine strengthens its defenses, Mr. Putin is going to get some nice surprises on the battlefield and that Ukraine will make some very strong success.”  

Around the same time, at a talk given at the German Marshall Fund, O’Brien expressed his optimism about the future for Ukraine: “We believe Ukraine will be stronger by the end of 2024 and in a better position to determine its—its future.”

Nuland and O’Brien’s statements are the Beltway equivalent of happy bedtime stories the establishment tells itself in order to keep the wolves of reality, conscience, and failure from the door. They are highly improbable accounts of the current situation on the ground where, according to former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine has suffered 500,000 dead in its war with Russia, losing “30,000 people a month in the war as killed and seriously wounded.” 

Even the New York Times, which has been among the administration’s most dutiful accomplices, has reported on what it describes as Ukrainian “suicide missions” across the Dnipro River. According to a December 16, 2023 report, “several soldiers and marines spoke to journalists out of concern about the high casualties and what they said were overly optimistic accounts from officials about the progress of the offensive.”

These reports fly in the face of the repeated insistence on the part of the president and high administration officials that the Russians are not just losing, they have lost. 

We see President Biden telling reporters in July 2023 that “there is no possibility of him [Putin] winning the war in Ukraine. He’s already lost that war.” Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, in a meeting with NATO defense ministers a year ago this week, declared that “Russia has lost; they’ve lost strategically, operationally and tactically.” That very same week, appearing on CNN, national security adviser Jake Sullivan likewise declared that, “Russia has already lost this war.”

The media, as usual, was only too eager to play along. Thus, the New York Times columnist David Brooks told his readers, “The war in Ukraine is not only a military event; it’s an intellectual event. The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea.” Almost exactly a year ago, January 2023, readers of the Washington Post were informed by reporter Liz Sly that, “if 2023 continues as it began, there is a good chance Ukraine will be able to fulfill President Volodymyr Zelensky’s New Year’s pledge to retake all of Ukraine by the end of the year—or at least enough territory to definitively end Russia’s threat, Western officials and analysts say.”

David Bromwich, a Yale University Professor and author of The Intellectual Career of Edmund Burke, has written,

The greater the improbability of an official explanation, the more pressing is the need to shore it up with unchecked reiterations, confirmations, enhancements. So the kingdom of untruth expands, without boundary or restraint. An officially sanctioned account of this or that event is affirmed by bureaucratic oversight and announced to the populace by a cooperative press and media. A consensus is thereby established that floats free of any concern with veracity.

If we are being lied to about the progress of the war—and we are—what do you suppose are the odds we are also being lied to about the causes of the war?

The war, we are serenely and repeatedly informed, was neither caused by NATO expansion nor by Ukraine’s post-Maidan ethno-nationalist agenda, nor by its refusal to implement the Minsk Accords, nor by Zelensky’s threat, made in Munich in February 2022, to acquire nuclear weapons—but by Putin’s revanchism. 

This is a point reiterated even in irrelevant contexts. In a speech on October 23, only two weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, Biden declared, “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it.”

Strobe Talbott, a former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and president of the Brookings Institution, believes that Putin’s “endgame” is to recreate “the Russian Empire with himself as tsar.” Kathryn Stoner of Stanford is of the opinion that “this is a war on Ukraine’s democracy and has nothing to do with Russian fears of it one day joining NATO.” While readers of a recent article in the New Republic would learn that “Putin has actually made it pretty clear why he invaded Ukraine: He wants to force the country to rejoin Russia, in an effort to reestablish the Soviet Union.” 

If we are being lied to about the causes of the war, are we also then being misled about what is at stake in eastern Ukraine? Probably. Here the parallel with the government’s mendacity during the war in Vietnam period becomes too obvious to ignore.

Recall in the first case that the template, that of the Cold War, is essentially unchanged, even in some of the particulars, not least in the comparisons of Ngo Dinh Diem and Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill. The South Vietnamese government (avaricious, corrupt) had the right to American arms by virtue of its right “to determine [the nation’s] future.” The Ukrainian government (avaricious, corrupt) likewise has the right, we are endlessly told, to be allowed to “shape its own destiny.”

Thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Domino Theory, long derided in the years following Vietnam, has made a comeback. Thus, President Biden’s declaration on December 6, “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there. It’s important to see the long run here. He’s going to keep going…. Then we’ll have something that we don’t seek and that we don’t have today: American troops fighting Russian troops,” echoes that made by President Johnson in July 1965:

This is really war. It is guided by North Viet-Nam and it is spurred by Communist China. Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism. There are great stakes in the balance. Most of the non-Communist nations of Asia cannot, by themselves and alone, resist the growing might and the grasping ambition of Asian communism.

Following the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed during the Vietnam era, “the policy of lying was hardly ever aimed at the enemy…but was destined chiefly if not exclusively, for domestic consumption, for propaganda at home and especially for the purpose of deceiving Congress.” Two years on, we citizens have been serially lied to by the Biden administration and the media about the war’s causes, its stakes, and its progress. The question that should, but of course will not, be addressed in the aftermath of this latest American misadventure abroad is: Will we ever learn?

James W. Carden served as advisor on U.S.-Russian affairs at the State Department during the Obama administration.

By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 2/16/24

Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.” Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday. Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

Others who got this story right but were singled out for dismissal or ridicule include:

• former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who was called “fringe” and “conspiracy-mongering” by Max Boot, a member of the illustrious club of pundits who botched both the Steele dossier and Iraqi WMD stories;
• former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, who has been on this subject for years and was called a “misinformation superspreader” by the New York Times after the 2020 election;
• Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, denounced as a pathological bigot for dissenting on Trump-Russia themes, and ultimately forced out of his own publication for writing critically of Hunter Biden and Burisma without adequately addressing the question of “Russia’s hand”;
• former CIA operative Larry Johnson, who said years ago that the surveillance campaign began with the GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, in 2015 and was among the first to say publicly what our source just told us, that there is intelligence suggesting Maltese professor and supposed Russian asset Joseph Mifsud was British intelligence. He’s naturally been denounced as a “conspiracy theorist”;
• Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, declared “bonkers” by the Daily Beast, perhaps the most aggressive promoter of the “collusion” theory and one of the most dependable producers of factually dubious stories on this subject in the mainstream press landscape;
• author Lee Smith, the major chronicler of the HPSCI work (more to come on this), who naturally was ripped for “conspiracy theory” for publishing a book on the subject;
• Pulitzer-winner Jeff Gerth, who wrote a 24,000-word deconstruction of Trump-Russia coverage in the Columbia Journalism Review that included a quote from Bob Woodward saying the media needed to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” He was called a “Trump-Russia denialist” who “can’t handle the truth,” by David Corn of Mother Jones, one of the first people to publish the phony Steele-blackmail story;
• another RealClear writer, Paul Sperry, who wrote about CIA chief John Brennan overruling dissent to create the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. Sperry popped up in the Twitter Files when the office of California congressman Adam Schiff, who infamously said he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, asked to have Sperry banned;
• Professor Margot Cleveland of The Federalist and Chuck Ross of the Daily Signal, who both got this right and were both marked “unreliable” by Pentagon-funded NewsGuard;
• former The Hill and current JustTheNews writer John Solomon, who published a significant amount of the key documents in this matter, and was the subject of a poisonous media campaign that crested particularly during the period of the first Trump impeachment;
• citizen investigators like the Racket-profiled “Sleuth’s Corner” of @Walkafyre, @TECHNO_FOG, @RyanM58699717, @climateaudit, @FOOL_NELSON, and @Hmmm57474203. This group who uncovered the name of the “primary sub-source” of famed British ex-spy Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, not only went roundly uncredited, but was immediately accused in the New York Times of putting Danchenko “in Russia’s sights” by Virginia Senator Mark Warner.

There are countless others. Even I took more than one whack at this material in the past, among other things listing episodes involving illegal classified leaks as a way of focusing attention on intelligence abuses surrounding the Trump-Russia scandal. I heard the gist of this week’s story six years ago, but didn’t have the details and the multiple people willing to be sources I needed to put something in print. That changed when Michael, Alexandra, and Public got their scoop a few weeks ago.

Anyone can go back and read the reports of the figures listed above and piece together pretty much the whole story we ran this week, minus a few conspicuous details. We learned there were 26 surveillance targets among Trump’s aides and associates in the 2016 campaign year, and we were able to use a number of key quotes, including the internal intelligence community analysis that Russia wasn’t desperate to avoid a Hillary Clinton presidency at all, but saw her as “manageable and reflecting continuity” and a “relationship they were comfortable with.”

These details, along with things like the assertion that the surveillance had “nothing to do with our relationship with Russia” and was “just leveraging capabilities to undermine a rookie unprepared Trump campaign,” are important and move the story forward. The quotes about Russia’s attitude toward Hillary in particular could be impactful in helping undo one of the last surviving Russiagate myths.

Still, it’s important to make clear that the substance of these pieces was already out thanks to the people listed above, along with others (Joseph Wulfsohn? Rich Lowry? Caitlin Johnstone?) I may have neglected to mention. The novelty with our series is that headline-ready specifics from still-classified reports do not often get out in a way that’s reportable. And far from searching for credit, the goal in jumping on TV shows and podcasts and trying to make noise with these stories is to inspire or shame (either will do) other reporters to build on these articles, as we built on eight years of past reports.

A last note on the media angle. Amid the initial rush of Trump-Russia mania, a series of reports came out that featured tantalizing details. One was Jane Mayer’s March 2018 “Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Dossier,” which told us about a “stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted” by the GCHQ. The New Yorker piece asserted GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief John Brennan about these details. Brennan already co-signed that story in May of 2017, when he testified in Congress, saying he had been “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns” that those people “were cooperating with the Russians,” and that this “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion… occurred.” The Guardian’s “British Spies Were First to Spot Trump Team’s Links With Russia” also told this same basic story.

There’s considerable overlap between those accounts, the ones we just published, and the reports of the people listed above. In each place you find the elements of very early intercepts of Trump team conversations captured abroad. I think I speak for everyone on the above list when I say I’d be thrilled if Brennan or Hannigan or whoever would come forward and show us what those “illicit communications” were, or what that “intelligence… that raised concerns” was. If there’s proof all of this was legitimate, we all need to see it.