A Letter to an Anonymous Friend About the Current State of the “Russiagate” Scandal

Editor’s note: after such a long time away from this website, I’m keenly aware that regular readers are expecting some sort of explanation for my shockingly prolonged absence; an absence that is now roughly a week shy of two full months. I’ve been working on a long letter explaining the numerous small problems and one massive issue that kept me away but it isn’t finished yet and at the rate I’ve been writing it over the past four or five days, I can no longer afford to simply wait it out. The long and short of it is that I’ve had numerous consecutive bad weeks plagued by moving arrangements, the health of one of my cats, writer’s block and quite honestly a deep, paralyzing depression brought on by watching everyone in mainstream society “forget” that Trump is a nazi and go on about their business like nothing is wrong.

I haven’t logged into my Patreon or Facebook in weeks and if I’m being honest, I’d have to objectively describe my behavior as hiding from a horrifying near-future I’m terrified it’s too late to avoid now. This morning I’ve also found that I’m too tired to go crawling the internet for sourcing links and I’m currently struggling to re-acquire my writing form as a whole. As a result, even today’s offering is just an expanded letter about where I feel we currently are in the convoluted (and at times, objectively absurd) Russiagate scandal:

—–

 

Here’s the thing – what is collude?

I’ve already said I’m pretty sure Trump was bribed by people in Russia, although much like in the West, proving those people are intelligence assets is going to be harder than the center establishment is telling you; regardless, they appear to have offered info about Clinton in exchange for sanction relief – setting aside any cold war stories, that’s bribery because opposition research (dirt about Clinton) would in fact have value in an election campaign.

Bribery is technically illegal, although very hard to convict on because of the SCOTUS ruling that saved VA Democrat Governor and Clinton bagman Terry McAuliffe.

As of yet, nobody has actually proven that the information offered to the Trump campaign is the same as the information Wikileaks eventually published but if it is, that’s still a problem for the establishment because the documents Wikileaks released are clearly 100% real and unaltered emails from the Clinton campaign; which means the establishment would be arguing that Russians bribed Trump to reduce sanctions against Russia with… the truth; that’s pretty awkward.

Regardless, receiving the information (independent of if it was true or false) and in return offering sanction relief (which would be worth billions and billions of dollars to fossil fuel corporations globally, including AMERICAN fossil fuel companies) is pretty clear quid pro quo – bribery.

But is that “treason?” Is that “Putin controls the President?” Is that “the election was rigged?”

No. That’s bribery and literally every high level government official in both the Republican and Democratic parties is accepting money in some way from places like Saudi Arabia, Israel, China, Qatar, etc in exchange for policy changes/favorable outcomes all the time.

Are those acts of war? Are those actions treason in a legal sense? Are those “Foreign Governments Controlling Our President With a Piss Tape?” I don’t think anyone arguing Russiagate is real, would agree that they are.

I wrote, dozens of times, that at the end of the day I felt Trump would be caught breaking the kinds of laws rich people and politicians break – it seems like he and his circle are going down for money laundering, lying to the FBI and taking bribes. That’s very much in line, to the exact charge, with what I predicted this whole time.

What it is not, is evidence that A) Russia controls Trump’s government or B) that Russia rigged our election for Trump against Hillary Clinton.

—–

I don’t know what collusion is – it’s not in the US legal code as far as I’m aware; it’s a word that could mean a lot of things to a lot of people and I don’t think it’s an accident that we’ve gone from “treason/controlled/rigged” to “interfered/colluded” in regards to this scandal over the past few months – the establishment knows they oversold the goods.

What I do know however is that virtually none of the evidence that has been presented supports the conclusion that Russia rigged the election or for that matter, the idea that Trump is somehow under the influence of a foreign government (any more than anyone else in DC taking money from foreign donors, typically through foundations and shell companies.) As foreign assets go, Trump seems a little too unpredictable, vain and unstable to rely on in what would amount to a global conspiracy by Russia to subvert the entire western world or something.

I’m sorry, we’re still back where we started – Trump is a crook, his inner circle is full of crooks, foreign governments bribe our politicians all the time and the only thing different this time is Trump’s pack of idiot lackeys are so goddamn awful at this that they’ve managed to get caught taking bribes from foreign agents that might even be attached to Russian intelligence, in a system literally fucking *designed* to protect the rich, corrupt and powerful.

I’m not gonna cry when that toxic crook fascist goes down for crimes he committed; that’s literally the result I predicted all along in my writing about “Russiagate.”

What I refuse to do is agree that shit-tier propaganda efforts on Facebook that nobody read and negative stories about Hillary Clinton on a cable network literally nobody watches, amounted to a successful attempt to subvert the US election. Nor am I prepared to agree that trading propaganda in the media (or social media) back and forth with the Russian government amounts to an act of war, because we (and they) have been doing this for forty some odd years and it wasn’t an “act of war” any single time before now. That’s just fucking insane; Google Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and then explain to me why Russian trolls posting comments on Vice News articles is an act of war again.

This is very serious now and I’m not interested in letting our bloodthirsty corporate overlords start a proxy war to push Russia out of the Middle East because Mother Dearest got humiliated at the finish line by 100% real campaign emails and a carnival barker fascist with a bad spray tan.

 

• Nina Illingworth