My column last week on the arrest of Charlie McGonigal, the top level U.S. FBI counterintelligence official who took money of a Russian oligarch prior to the 2016 presidential election and triggered the FBI’s last minute reopening of the Hillary emails case that gave Trump the win, has reopened the conversation about the Russian role in Trump’s fraudulent 2016 presidential election victory. The report and subsequent commentaries on Twitter by Michael Beschloss have been downright explosive.
That is, so they should have. But the story was buried almost as fast as it was reported in the same manner that the Mueller report was shelved almost as soon as possible and the issue of Trump was moved away from that angle. The reason is that while it is OK to pin the blame on Trump for all the terrible things that went on during his watch, it is not ok to expose the much wider range of forces responsible for plotting the current ongoing coup effort against American democracy.
Among other things, this is the story that was also covered up by the final report by the House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection. For reasons that were explained to “maintain focus,” it did not go into reports that would have displayed far wider focus on culpable agencies whose roles helped the insurrection scenario, such as leaders in the Secret Service and arrayed law enforcement and intelligence agencies who otherwise could have easily put down the deadly riot. Nothing on the Jan. 6 Committee report touched on any of that.
But as the Mueller report cites, key revelations show that a Russian television, RT, anniversary celebration in Moscow December 2015 marked a kickoff of a Russian flank of the Trump campaign. Putin sat at a circular head table next to U.S. turncoat Gen. Michael Flynn and others there included the U.S. Green Party candidate and representatives of the American Lyndon LaRouche outfit.
It turns out an extensive report of this meeting was provided that December to FBI Director James Comey, Mueller, U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner and U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff by former Watergate attorney Doug Caddy. Caddy had become a fan of LaRouche in Houston in the 1980s (as sadly so had I) but in 2016 broke away when it became clear that the LaRouche outfit was in fact a covert operation of Moscow. (I disassociated much earlier in the 1980s).
A knowledgeable LaRouche watcher, Caddy wrote that after that Moscow dinner, in January 2016, LaRouche’s Harley Schlanger asked Caddy, still a LaRouche supporter at the time, to arrange a meeting with key Trump operative, Roger Stone, in hopes of making LaRouche’s extensive Moscow networks available to Trump for purposes of establishing a direct “back channel” with Russian intelligence. That meeting occurred in Atlanta in February 2016.
In intelligence reports cited by Caddy in his letter, Putin “both hated and feared,” Clinton and used Wikileaks for “plausible deniability” purposes among Sen. Sanders supporters to switch them to Trump.
Meanwhile, it proved the case that in LaRouche’s marginal U.S. political cult, modes were tested from the early 1970s to convince his cultists that LaRouche never lost a single election, and that LaRouche was right and everyone else wrong about everything, which became very Trumpian formulas, especially when LaRouche shed any leftist tendencies and began appropriating right wing, antisemitic and homophobic beliefs.
LaRouche’s sharp right turn (precipitating my departure) was initiated in the early 1970s as a component of Nixon’s “detente” where the covert deal was to allow thousands of Russian organized crime thugs to come to the U.S. to help Nixon and his reactionary pro-fascist cronies destroy remnants of the anti war, feminist, gay and civil rights movements that developed into major events by the end of the decade such as the elimination of almost 1,000 souls “suicided” at Jonestown and the murder of seminal gay activist Harvey Milk in San Francisco in 1978, much less the advancement of post-modern nihilism and the greed-dominated “Reagan revolution.”
