Favorite An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper. Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using…
All posts tagged Russia
How Shoddy Reporting and Anti-Russian Propaganda Coerced Ecuador to Silence Julian Assange
Favorite Julian Assange has been barred from communicating with the outside world for more than three weeks. On March 27, the government of Ecuador blocked Assange’s internet access and barred him from receiving visitors other than his lawyers. Assange has been in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, when Ecuador granted him asylum due to fears…
Harvard’s Laurence Tribe Has Become a Deranged Russia Conspiracist: Today Was His Most Humiliating Debacle
Favorite Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe did not wait even 24 hours to exploit yesterday’s tragic crash of a Russian regional jet shortly after it took off from Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard. On Twitter this morning, Tribe (pictured above in 2010 with former Vice President Joe Biden) strongly insinuated that the Russian government…
Dutch Official Admits Lying About Meeting With Putin: Is Fake News Used by Russia or About Russia?
Favorite Every empire needs a scary external threat, led by a singular menacing villain, to justify its massive military expenditures, consolidation of authoritarian powers, and endless wars. For the five decades after the end of World War II, Moscow played this role perfectly. But the fall of Soviet Union meant, at least for a while,…
Russia’s Top Diplomat Enjoyed His Oval Office Visit, and Has the Photographs to Prove It
Favorite Last Updated: Thursday, 11:04 a.m. EDT Russian officials, at least, seem to be enjoying the turmoil that’s engulfed Washington since last night, when President Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, to derail his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The first hint of that came when the country’s…
A Bernie Sanders Campaign Adviser Was a Russian. Now He’s Speaking Out.
Favorite A high-level adviser and operative for the 2016 Sanders campaign was Vitali Shkliarov, a Soviet-born citizen of Belarus. Shkliarov, who had previously worked on the 2012 Obama re-election campaign and for several other successful Democratic Party campaigns, has also become increasingly in demand as a political adviser and campaign manager in Russia, working for…
Trump’s CIA Director Pompeo, Targeting WikiLeaks, Explicitly Threatens Speech and Press Freedoms
Favorite In February, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. media were the “enemy of the people,” the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedoms more befitting of a tyranny. By stark and disturbing contrast, the media reaction yesterday was…
The Spoils of War: Trump Lavished With Media and Bipartisan Praise For Bombing Syria
Favorite In every type of government, nothing unites people behind the leader more quickly, reflexively or reliably than war. Donald Trump now sees how true that is, as the same establishment leaders in U.S. politics and media who have spent months denouncing him as a mentally unstable and inept authoritarian and unprecedented threat to democracy are standing and applauding…
The New Yorker’s Big Cover Story Reveals Five Uncomfortable Truths About U.S. and Russia
Favorite The New Yorker is aggressively touting its 13,000-word cover story on Russia and Trump that was bylined by three writers, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick. Beginning with its cover image menacingly featuring Putin, Trump and the magazine’s title in Cyrillic letters, along with its lead cartoon dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically…
The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook
Favorite For aspiring journalists, historians, or politically engaged citizens, there are few more productive uses of one’s time than randomly reading through the newsletters of I.F. Stone, the intrepid and independent journalist of the Cold War era who became, in my view, the nation’s first “blogger” even though he died before the advent of the internet. Frustrated…