[rad-green] Bernie Sanders Walks Straight Into the Russiagate Trap

*https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/20/bernie-sanders-walks-straight-into-the-russiagate-trap/
<https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/20/bernie-sanders-walks-straight-into-the-russiagate-trap/>Strategic
Culture Foundation          January 20, 2020*

*Bernie Sanders Walks Straight Into the Russiagate Trap*



*By Daniel Lazare*
[image: image.png]
*© Photo: Wikimedia*

The New York Times caused a mini-commotion last week with a front-page story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/us/politics/russian-hackers-burisma-ukraine.html?searchResultPosition=1>
suggesting that Russian intelligence had hacked a Ukrainian energy firm
known as Burisma Holdings in order to get dirt on Joe Biden and help Donald
Trump win re-election.

But the article was flimsy even by Russiagate standards, and so certain
questions inevitably arise. What was it really about? Who’s behind it?
Who’s the real target?

Here’s a quick answer. It was about boosting Joe Biden, and its real target
was his chief rival, Bernie Sanders. And poor, inept Bernie walked straight
into the trap.

The article was flimsy because rather than saying straight out that Russian
intelligence hacked Burisma, the company notorious for hiring Biden’s son,
Hunter, for $50,000 a month job, reporters Nicole Perlroth and Matthew
Rosenberg had to rely on unnamed “security experts” to say it for them.
While suggesting that the hackers were looking for dirt, they didn’t quite
say that as well. Instead, they admitted that “it is not yet clear what the
hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for.”

So we have no idea what they were up to, if anything at all. But the Times
then quoted “experts” to the effect that “the timing and scale of the
attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially
embarrassing material on the Bidens – the same kind of information that Mr.
Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the
Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his
impeachment.” Since Trump and the Russians are seeking the same
information, they must be in cahoots, which is what Democrats have been
saying from the moment Trump took office. Given the lack of evidence, this
was meaningless as well.

But then came the kicker: two full paragraphs in which a Biden campaign
spokesman was permitted to expound on the notion that the Russians hacked
Burisma because Biden is the candidate that they and Trump fear the most.

“Donald Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into lying about Joe Biden and a
major bipartisan, international anti-corruption victory because he
recognized that he can’t beat the vice president,” the spokesman, Andrew
Bates, said. “Now we know that Vladimir Putin also sees Joe Biden as a
threat. Any American president who had not repeatedly encouraged foreign
interventions of this kind would immediately condemn this attack on the
sovereignty of our elections.”

If Biden is the number-one threat, then Sanders is not, presumably because
the Times sees him as soft on Moscow. If so, it means that he could be in
for the same neo-McCarthyism that antiwar candidate Tulsi Gabbard
encountered last October when Hillary Clinton blasted her as “the favorite
of the Russians.” Gabbard had the good sense to blast
<https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1185289626409406464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1185289626409406464&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and-politics%2F2019%2F10%2F19%2F20922122%2Fhillary-clinton-tulsi-gabbard-queen-warmongers-russia-2020-election>
her
right back.

“Thank you @Hillary Clinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of
corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic
Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the
day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to
destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know –
it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the
corporate media and war machine….”

If only Sanders did the same. But instead he put out a statement
<https://twitter.com/mattduss/status/1217130566304305154> filled with the
usual anti-Russian clichés:

“The 2020 election is likely to be the most consequential election in
modern American history, and I am alarmed by new reports that Russia
recently hacked into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the
impeachment trial, as well as Russia’s plans to once again meddle in our
elections and in our democracy. After our intelligence agencies unanimously
agreed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, including with
thousands of paid ads on Facebook, the New York Times now reports that
Russia likely represents the biggest threat of election meddle in 2020,
including through disinformation campaigns, promoting hatred, hacking into
voting systems, and by exploiting the political divisions sewn [sic] by
Donald Trump….”

And so on for another 250 words. Not only did the statement put him in bed
with the intelligence agencies, but it makes him party to the big lie that
the Kremlin was responsible for putting Trump over the top in 2016.

Let’s get one thing straight. Yes, Russian intelligence may have hacked the
Democratic National Committee. But cybersecurity was so lax that others may
have been rummaging about as well. (CrowdStrike, the company called in to
investigate the hack, says it found not one but *two* cyber-intruders.)
Notwithstanding the Mueller report, all the available evidence indicates
<https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/18/the-guccifer-2-0-gaps-in-muellers-full-report/>
that
Russia did not then pass along thousands of DNC emails that Wikileaks
published in July 2016. (Julian Assange’s statement
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyCOy25GdjQ> six months later that “our
source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party” remains
uncontroverted.) Similarly, there’s no evidence that the Kremlin had
anything to do with the $45,000 worth of Facebook ads purchased by a St.
Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency – Robert Mueller’s
2018 indictment <https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download> of the IRA
was completely silent on the subject of a Kremlin connection – and no
evidence that the ads, which were politically all over the map, had a
remotely significant impact on the 2016 election.

All the rest is a classic CIA disinformation campaign aimed at drumming up
anti-Russian hysteria and delegitimizing anyone who fails to go along. And
now Bernie Sanders is trying to cover his derrière by hopping on board.

It won’t work. Sanders will find himself having to take one loyalty oath
after another as the anti-Russia campaign flares anew. But it will never be
enough, and he’ll only wind up looking tired and weak. Voters will opt for
the supposedly more formidable Biden, who will end up as a bug splat on the
windshield of Donald Trump’s speeding election campaign. With impeachment
no longer an issue, he’ll be free to behave as dictatorially as he wishes
as he settles into his second term.

After inveighing against billionaire’s wars, he’ll find himself ensnared by
the same billionaire war machine. The trouble with Sanders is that he
thinks he can win by playing by the rules. But he can’t because the rules
are stacked against him. He’d know that if his outlook was more radical.
His problem is not that he’s too much of a socialist. Rather, it’s that
he’s not enough.

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