Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
President Donald J. Trump boards Air Force One at Tampa International Airport on Friday, July 31, 2020.
It’s official. Vladimir Putin’s Russian intelligence agents are already “using a range of measures” to interfere in the 2020 presidential election to help elect President Trump just like they did in 2016, according to William Evanina, director of U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Russia scored a worldwide propaganda coup four years ago that discredited and embarrassed American democracy by helping to elect a crude, ignorant, incompetent president of the United States. Why wouldn’t Putin want to repeat his success, especially after Trump did one of the worst jobs in the world of protecting American lives and the U.S. economy in a deadly international pandemic?
It’s a lot harder to understand why conservative Republicans would want to continue their party’s active collaboration with their most hated international adversary to prolong the inept, nationally destructive Trump presidency. Wisconsin voters also should know their Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, elected in the 2010 Tea Party backlash as an old-school, rightwing, anti-Communist, is one of the top Republicans using his Senate position to promote fraudulent 2020 election propaganda created by Russian intelligence.
Smearing Biden
Remember that phony criminal investigation into Joe Biden and his son Trump tried to coerce Ukraine’s president into announcing to damage Biden’s presidential candidacy? It never happened and instead led to Trump’s impeachment. But just in time for November’s election, Johnson’s Senate Homeland Security Committee and Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Senate Finance Committee have revived their own investigation into Biden’s relations with Ukraine to try to smear his candidacy.
Not only that, but a prime source for the investigation is Andriy Derkach identified specifically by Evanina, the U.S. counterintelligence official, as a key player in Russia’s 2020 disinformation campaign. Derkach is a pro-Russian, Ukrainian member of parliament with ties to Russian intelligence actively spreading fraudulent claims “to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,” Evanina said. Democratic Senate and House leaders have complained about Senate committees laundering Russia’s political disinformation.
|
|
Responding to the criticism, Johnson and Grassley wrote Democratic leaders claiming: “Far from promoting Russian disinformation, our investigation is focused on uncovering the facts concerning what did or did not occur (in Ukraine) so that we can put these matters to rest.” Yeah, right. They can hardly wait to disprove all that fraudulent Russian disinformation about Biden right before the election.
One of the most bizarre reversals in U.S. political history has been fiercely anti-Communist Republicans who idolized President Reagan for denouncing Russia’s “evil empire” meekly following along as Trump curries favor with former KGB officer Putin. The latest outrage is Trump’s failure to object at all after U.S. intelligence reports Putin paid bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Sucking Up to Dictators
No one really knows why Trump eagerly sucks up to the world’s most dangerous international mobster and Republicans are afraid to ask. Many assume Russian blackmail is involved, but what could video surveillance of Trump in Russia reveal that would be any worse than everything we already know about Trump as a horrible human being? Trump’s most hard-core supporters and cowardly elected Republicans would simply ignore yet another scandal like they always do.
It’s more likely Trump fawns over Putin because he’s one of the few international leaders Trump’s ever heard of and exactly who Trump wants to be — the world leader everyone talks about. You also can bet Trump is salivating over lucrative future business deals with all the notoriously wealthy criminals now plundering Russia.
Trump dodged questions about Putin’s bounties for weeks before shrugging them off in an interview with Jonathan Swan on Axios on HBO: “I have never discussed it with (Putin), no.” Trump said they had more important things to discuss. But what could be more important to America’s commander-in-chief than protecting the lives of U.S. soldiers? Trump then fell back on his standard response as president. Lying. “It never reached my desk. . . If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it.” Actually, it was included in the president’s daily intelligence report in late February and distributed to other high-ranking officials. Possibly Trump didn’t read it. He’s not a big reader.
But Trump certainly knows now about the intelligence reports of Russian bounties for murdering of American soldiers. So do Republican officials and Trump voters. Now Republican officials and Trump’s most fervent disciples have a choice. They can choose to believe their constantly lying president. (The Washington Post documented database of presidential lies and misleading statements passed 20,000 in early July, a speeded-up average of 23 lies a day as election approaches.)
Or they can pretend there’s nothing wrong with having a president who still hasn’t put Putin, his good friend and election supporter, on notice that Russia endangering the lives of U.S. soldiers around the world is unacceptable. But, seriously, do any Americans, regardless of political party, really believe that?
