CONTRIBUTION BY HARLEY SCHLANGER

July 13 — As the world awaits the upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the battle over Russiagate in the U.S. is heating up to a boiling point.  Developments in the last days, which include a new level of partisan recrimination in the U.S. Congress, show that those who created the “Russian-meddling-Trump-colluded” narrative, to prevent Trump from breaking with the anti-Russian policies of the Obama administration, are escalating their efforts to sabotage any agreement which might be reached between the two leaders.  Watching this unfold, there can no longer be any doubt that peaceful cooperation between the two nuclear superpowers is seen as an existential threat to those London-based geopoliticians who created the post-Cold War order.  Their greatest fear is that Trump is committed to dismantling this order, and that there is growing support within the populations of European nations for that to occur.

 

Listen to the words of the Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate, Charles Schumer, days before the Trump-Putin summit.  Trump’s duty, he proclaimed, “is to protect the American people from foreign threats, not to sell out our democracy to Putin.”  Note that Schumer issued a slightly-veiled threat to Trump on January 4, 2017, before his inauguration, not to challenge the authority of the intelligence community officials under Obama, who were at the forefront of the U.S. side in making the charges against Putin and Trump.  Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Trump is “being really dumb” to challenge the intelligence community’s allegations against Russia.  “Let me tell you,” he said, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

 

Since that time, the regime change operation that Schumer was defending has been thoroughly exposed by diligent investigations conducted by Republican members of both houses of Congress.  Their investigations have confirmed what LaRouchePAC and this news service stated at the outset, that those seeking to defeat Trump’s campaign, and to destroy his presidency if he won, have engaged in illegal actions involving the highest levels of government, from President Obama on down; and that these actions were conducted, from the beginning, in collusion with the top levels of British intelligence — beginning with GCHQ’s charges of “suspicious” Russian cyber activity, to MI6 “ex”-operative Christopher Steele’s circulation of a lying memo alleging that Putin was engaging in sexual blackmail against Trump, to control him — which led to the establishment of FBI Director Comey’s “Get Trump” task force at the end of July 2016.

 

Among the small group tasked by Comey with the responsibility to take down Trump was FBI agent Peter Strzok, the number two man in the FBI in counterintelligence and the liaison to CIA director John Brennan, a leader in the Get Trump operation.  Strzok was at the center of a highly contentious hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on July 12, during which he defiantly denied that his bias against Trump affected his job in investigating both the Clinton email scandal and the allegations of a Russian connection to Trump.

 

After acknowledging that he “detested” Trump, a portion of Strzok’s text message exchange with his mistress Lisa Page, who was the chief legal adviser to disgraced former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, and worked with Strzok on the Clinton case, the Russian investigation and later Mueller’s team, was read aloud:

Page: Trump “is not ever going to become President, right?”

Strzok: “No. No he’s not.  We’ll stop it.”

 

The Inspector General of the Justice Department released a report last month, which said of the Strzok-Page exchanges, that they damaged the “FBI’s reputation for neutral fact finding  and political independence.”  However, incredulously, the report found that such displays of “bias” did not affect the FBI’s investigation!  When challenged on this, Strzok claimed there is “simply no evidence of bias in my professional actions.”  He later denounced the hearing, saying that it is “just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart,” which he obviously blames on those defending the President, not on those, like himself, who are committed to a “regime change” in the U.S., to overturn the result of the 2016 U.S. election.

 

At the beginning of the hearing, Strzok insisted that proof that he had no bias is that he was one of the few who “knew details of Russian election interference and its possible connections to members of the Trump campaign,” but he did not make that public.  He was not challenged as to what proof he had of election interference.  After two years of FBI investigation, not a shred of real evidence of Russian interference, or Trump collusion, has been produced.

 

MUELLER’S WITNESS TAMPERING

Meanwhile, special counsel Mueller is preparing for trial in the case he has brought against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, scheduled to begin on July 25 in Alexandria, Virginia.  Manafort has been charged with bank fraud and tax violations.  In a second case, which will open on September 17, Manafort is charged with money laundering, obstructing justice and acting as an unregistered agent of Ukraine.  Mueller’s team has acknowledged that in neither trial will they present evidence of collusion with Russian efforts to rig the election.  Manafort’s attorneys are arguing that the charges should be dropped, as they have nothing to do with Mueller’s mandate to investigate the election.

 

The charges against Manafort predate his involvement in the Trump campaign, and may reflect a British-Obama vendetta against him, for his role in aiding the election victory of Viktor Yanukovych as President of Ukraine in 2010.   Manafort served as a paid consultant to Yanukovych and his party, and developed a campaign strategy that was successful.  Obama political operatives had been deployed to help Yanukovych’s opponent.  Yanukovych was overthrown in a regime change coup orchestrated by neocons in the Obama administration in 2014, which triggered a series of events leading to sanctions against Russia, and kicking Russia out of the G8, based on the false charges that Russia invaded Ukraine and illegally seized Crimea.  Settling the Ukraine issue and possibly lifting sanctions will likely be on the agenda of the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki.

 

Manafort is presently in prison, despite having been convicted of no crime, his bail revoked due to charges from Mueller that he was engaged in “witness tampering.”  One legal expert commented that if anyone is engaging in witness tampering, it is Mueller, whose method of prosecution includes using threats of lengthy sentences, going after family members, and bankrupting targets through requiring them to absorb huge legal fees, to convince them to “flip”, to give concocted “evidence” to go after a bigger fish.  Mueller’s lead prosecutor in the Manafort case, Andrew Weissman, is notorious for his use of such tactics, and convictions he won using these tactics have been overturned by higher courts.  Manafort continues to assert his innocence, and is preparing an all-out fight, from his jail cell, against the charges brought by Mueller and Weissman.  The same tactics were applied against Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to “lying to the FBI”, after Mueller threatened to bring charges against his son, and Flynn acknowledged that he was running out of funds to conduct a legal defense.

 

These tactics are also being applied against Trump’s former personal attorney Micheal Cohen, who is rumored to be seeking a deal.  He told ABC News that “loyalty to my family” comes before loyalty to the President.  He has brought into his legal team Lanny Davis, formerly an attorney representing Bill Clinton.  Davis wrote a book, “The Unmaking of the President 2016”, in which he questions the legitimacy of Trump’s election and asserts he could be removed due to “mental impairment.”

 

As the hearing with Strzok demonstrates, the tide has shifted against Mueller, as FBI officials, including Comey and McCabe, as well as Department of Justice officials, such as Bruce Ohr, are now in the line of fire for the illegal actions and tactics they employed in service of a regime change in Washington.  Central to these investigations is the relationship these officials had with British intelligence operative Steele and his “dodgy dossier,” and the FBI’s use of sting operations, designed to entrap Trump campaign officials.  Already brought to light has been the role of Stefan Halper and Josef Mifsud, who are shared assets of U.S. intelligence and MI6, in planting the idea with lower-level Trump representatives that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary.  Also identified as a sting operator is Henry Greenburg, who spent years in a Russian prison, then worked for the FBI for nearly two decades.  Greenburg approached Trump strategist and long-time friend Roger Stone, offering “dirt” from the Russians on Hillary Clinton in return for a payment of $2 million.  Stone turned him down, telling the friend who set up the meeting that it had been a “waste of time.”

 

 

BRITS PANICKED BY TRUMP-PUTIN SUMMIT

As Mueller’s witch hunt has yet to find any evidence of  illegal acts by Putin or Trump, the U.S. President has undertaken a series of bold initiatives, which fundamentally challenge the post-Cold War order.  After leaving leaders of the G7 summit in Canada fuming, he held a successful summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, which was hailed by Helga Zepp LaRouche as the “Singapore example” for overcoming adversarial relations.  Trump’s success in dealing with North Korea was facilitated by international diplomacy, which included his collaboration with China’s President Xi Jinping, Russia’s Putin, Japan’s Prime Minister Abe and South Korean President Moon.

 

Though his opponents in both parties in the U.S. were visibly unhappy with the results of Singapore, Trump moved ahead to schedule his summit with Putin.  While he had hoped to meet with Putin long before now, the Russiagate attacks on him were an obvious impediment to scheduling a summit, due to fears of his advisers that he would appear to be a “Putin puppet” if he met with him.  Further efforts to disrupt a possible improvement of relations included the near-unanimous votes in both the U.S. House and Senate in July 2017 for harsh sanctions against Russia, and repeated British-instigated frauds, such as the alleged Russian role in the Skripal poisoning, and in supporting Assad’s use of chemical weapons — both frauds which have been subsequently refuted, but greatly heightened tensions between the two nations.

 

No sooner was the summit announced than the usual suspects moved to undermine his initiative.  Most vituperative were the British, who focused on the expected tussle with Trump at the NATO summit, which preceded his meeting with Putin, as a point of attack.  The {London Times} declared on July 8 that NATO leaders fear “an assault on the transatlantic alliance by Donald Trump.”

 

Even more hysterical was a column in the Guardian on July 8 by Simon Tisdale, who asks, “Is the U.S. a friend — or a foe?”  Tisdale writes that the problem is that Trump “is questioning the purpose of NATO.”  He “treats old friends worse than ostensible enemies,” citing as examples Trump’s dismissive attitude toward British PM May and German Chancellor Merkel, ignoring that most of the voters in those two countries have dismissive attitudes towards their leaders.  He added that Trump “has moved from difficult partner to potential enemy.”

 

In a blatant show of contempt for the President, Tisdale accuses him of “sycophantic courting” of Xi, and claims he will likely engage in “more crapulous fawning over an autocratic leader [Putin] who exercises a mysterious hold over Trump….”  In meeting with Putin, there likely will be “unilateral NATO-busting Trump moves” which will lead to the “normalization of Putin’s regime, and other concessions undermining the post-Salisbury western consensus.”

 

Or, as former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind put it, he fears that Trump “will empower the Kremlin” — the same sort of nonsense uttered by Peter Strzok when he said that the effort to get to the truth of Russiagate is putting a “victory notch in Putin’s belt.”  The British offensive against Trump continued after his challenge to NATO at its summit.  As he arrived in the UK after that meeting, the anti-Trump {Guardian} wrote that Trump’s actions “will please Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long pursued a strategy of creating division in NATO.”

 

On May 26, LaRouchePAC released a memo to President Trump titled “Time to End the Special Relationship; Declassify All British-Spawned Documents Concerning Your 2016 Campaign.”  It is likely that some of the uncontrolled frenzy coming from London-based networks results from their knowledge of the credibility of LaRouchePAC among some of the President’s closest friends and advisers.  If Trump is able to break free from the phony Russiagate charges, he will be able to lead a global realignment, with Russia, China and India, which rejects the Bush-Clinton-Obama neo-liberal/neo-conservative consensus, which was orchestrated in tandem with British “elites”, and which has resulted in endless wars and ongoing economic crises.  Such a realignment would necessarily require a return to the “American system” of economics, ending the scam known as “central banking”, in which a nation’s credit and debt policy is controlled by the leading private banks, for their benefit.

 

Further, such a change would devastate the City of London and Wall Street, as they would be forced to eat their losses, instead of being able to direct profits made by trading speculative financial instruments backed by nothing — e.g. derivatives — into their coffers.

 

Meanwhile, the government of Theresa May, which continues to dig in its heels while attempting to reverse the popular vote for Brexit, is crumbling, with resignations of leading cabinet members and a continuing drop in popularity.  Now is the ideal moment for a break of nations of Europe out from under the Trans-Atlantic domination of recent years, enforced especially by Bush, Jr. and Obama, to open a new era of sovereign governments acting cooperatively in the interests of their people, in collaboration with China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative.