The Case for Donald Trump, Part I
In an election full of bad choices, sometimes you need to choose the one least likely to kill you.
I recently posted an article entitled “How RFK Jr. Made Me a Trumper”, in which I explained how RFK Jr.’s joining the Trump campaign had convinced me to abandon my party (the Green Party USA) and vote for Donald Trump instead of Jill Stein.
I have been inundated with comments and emails criticising this position, so I thought I would explain the calculus behind my decision, and make the case that Donald Trump may not be the demon that many people think he is.
You have been propagandised
First, I wish to address the fact that a large part of the animus that many people have toward Trump is a result of a ruthless and relentless propaganda campaign that was launched by the Hillary Clinton campaign with the help of UK and US intel agencies and supported by the DNC and its minions in the mainstream media.
This campaign, generally known as “Russiagate”, is a giant network of interlaced conspiracy theories that started in 2016 and carries through to present day, despite all the debunking and total lack of evidence.
I will defer here to the immortal Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a Nation contributing editor, wrote in 2019:
“Russiagate — allegations that the American president has been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to put him in the White House — is the worst and (considering the lack of actual evidence) most fraudulent political scandal in American history.”
We all know that the Mueller investigation found no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but conspiracy theories are hard to kill.
The whole Russiagate story was cooked up at various stages by the Hillary Clinton campaign, who thought it would be a great way to kill two birds with one stone: demonise Putin, for whom Hillary harbours tremendous personal hatred, and demonise Trump, with whom the Clintons had always enjoyed a great friendship, but who now had to be destroyed because he stood between Hillary and the White House.
And the mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, etc. were all too happy to run stories that were wholly without evidence, fact free, and based solely on innuendo and rumour, prompting Trump to take several outlets to court for libel, as they printed things they knew to be wrong at the time.
“But her emails”
Russiagate first started in 2016 with the DNC “email hack” scandal, in which the organisation’s emails were leaked to WikiLeaks, who published a trove of documents proving that the DNC and the Clinton campaign colluded to steal the Primary election from Bernie Sanders.
The FBI never examined the allegedly “hacked” servers, relying instead on the DNC’s cyber-security contractor, the now widely discredited CrowdStrike, who claimed that the emails had been “exfiltrated” (hacked) remotely by Russia.
There was no “hack”
HOWEVER, when CrowdStrike CEO Shawn Henry testified under oath to the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2017, he admitted that there was no proof of any hacking by Russia — or anyone else. In fact, there was no indication that the files had been remotely accessed at all.
As ITWire explains:
“While the exfiltration of emails from the DNC server has been accepted as a proven fact, Henry’s answers to queries from committee members make it clear that this was definitely not the case.”
Adam Schiff, head of the committee, “buried” Henry’s critical testimony, keeping it secret for two years, until he finally released the transcripts in 2020. But by then, the story of “Russian hacking” was widely accepted as truth.
Putin and the FBI-CrowdStrike connection
It should be noted that Shawn Henry, the CrowdStrike CEO, had formerly served as the FBI’s former top official on cyber crime, specifically as Executive Assistant Director. This could explain the cozy, “trusting” (or colluding?) relationship between CrowdStrike and the FBI in the DNC emails case, and why the FBI did not push to examine the server themselves.
And — not surprisingly — CrowdStrike was cofounded by a fiercely anti-Putin Russian immigrant named Dmitri Alperovitch, who serves as the company’s CTO and has posts in various shadowy organisations like the National Security Institute, the Atlantic Council, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
No doubt Alperovitch was eager to blame Putin for the email leak — despite the absence of any proof. And I am sure his falsification of his firm’s “findings” earned him accolades with his clients at the DNC and the Atlantic Council.
The Alfa Bank scandal
In 2016, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign lied to the FBI, claiming that he had proof that Trump had illicit connections to a Kremlin-linked Russian bank (he did not), while neglecting to inform the Feds that he was actually working for the Clinton campaign. A trial ensued, and the “Alfa Bank” scandal was found to be nothing but a hoax directed by Hillary Clinton herself.
Meddling in the 2016 election
While they found no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Robert Mueller and the DOJ charged dozens of Russians with online meddling in the 2016 election in an alleged effort to get Trump elected. This also turned out to be untrue. In fact, when some of the accused actually demanded their day in court, the DOJ dropped its charges.
The Steele Dossier
Perhaps the biggest hoax was the Steele dossier. This was a portfolio of damning and incriminating “information” collected by an ex-British intel operative named Christopher Steele. On January 10, 2017, BuzzFeed News published this “collection of DNC-funded reports alleging a high-level conspiracy between Trump and Moscow”.
This was where the so-called “pee-tape” originated. Steele parleyed his once credible reputation into all sorts of headline-grabbing “revelations” — NONE of which turned out to be true.
In fact, the company that hired Steele, Fusion GPS, was a consultant working for — you guessed it — the Hillary Clinton campaign. The so-called “dossier” was nothing more than fabricated “opposition research” created out of thin air in return for a client’s fees.
As journalist Aaron Maté explained in an analysis in The Nation:
“Steele told a London court in August 2018 that Fusion GPS was hired ‘to obtain information necessary’ on ‘the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election’. Based on this, Steele explained, the Clinton campaign ‘could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.’”
In other words, despite having “conceded”, Hillary Clinton and her followers were trying to use the Steele Dossier to overthrow the 2016 election results.
The Deep State does exist — at least for Trump
In 2016, when Trump said that “Obama tapped my phone”, the claim was scoffed at and dismissed by US intel agencies and the media. However, it later came to light that the FBI had indeed wiretapped and surveilled the communications of the entire 2016 Trump campaign.
Moreover, it was discovered that, despite having at first denied the wiretap program, the FBI had actually LIED to a FISA court no less than 17 times in order to fraudulently obtain a warrant to collect all the communications of the campaign in Trump Tower.
In fact, FBI Director Christopher Wray had to apologise to the court for misleading it.
The Clinton Campaign against Trump
Hillary Clinton used her DC muscle to also spy on the Trump campaign. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Clinton’s presidential campaign paid an internet company to surveil servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to link Donald Trump to Russia, according to a DOJ filing in February 2024.
Clinton hired a tech researcher named Rodney Joffe “to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” according to a report filed by DOJ special counsel John Durham.
Moreover, the tech spies continued their operations after the election, hacking the Trump White House servers to look for evidence of “Trump-Russia collusion”.
The FBI versus Trump
The illegal wiretapping episode isn’t the only instance in which the FBI was going after Trump. The FBI actually set up an entire operation to secretly investigate the Trump campaign in 2016.
Codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane”, the bogus FBI investigation was based on the unfounded suspicion that one of Trump’s advisors, Carter Page, was a Russian agent.
In fact, Page, a US Naval Academy graduate, was working for the CIA as an informant and also worked with the FBI itself in 2016 to help jail two actual Russian agents.
As RealClearInvestigations reports:
“…former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, his counselor Lisa Page and counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok — learned of Page’s role with the CIA before they first sought to wiretap him during the 2016 presidential campaign. The CIA had confirmed his role two months earlier in an August 2016 memo it sent to the FBI. And Page’s status as a CIA contact had been documented in the FBI’s own electronic files going back to 2009.
And yet they proceeded with the FISA warrants and the Crossfire Hurricane investigation anyway.
It turns out that the FBI had based their suspicions on the wholly falsified Steele dossier.
Indeed, in an almost comical twist, the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to prove any part of his dossier to be true. The ex British spy could not deliver. As CNN reported:
“FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten testified that Steele never got the money because he could not “prove the allegations”.
“Auten also said Steele refused to provide the names of any of his sources during that meeting, and that Steele didn’t give the FBI anything during that meeting that corroborated the claims in his explosive dossier.”
Strzok and Page: the villainous lovebirds
In addition, leaked text messages showed that two FBI operatives involved in the Trump investigation didn’t just ignore Cater Page’s innocence; they seemed willing to use their positions to prevent Trump from winning the 2016 election.
Counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok exchanged “anti-Trump” text messages with his lover, Lisa Page, who was also involved in the Trump investigation:
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page texted Strzok.
“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.
Strzok was working as a lead investigator on the Robert Mueller team investigating Trump collusion. He was removed from the probe when the inflammatory text messages came to light.
But Strzok was not just “anti-Trump”: he was rabidly pro-Clinton. Strzok had also led the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, and he used his position to he change the language in former FBI Director James Comey’s description of how Clinton handled classified information:
“Strzok changed Comey’s earlier draft language describing Clinton’s actions as “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.” That change in wording has significant legal implications, since “gross negligence” in handling classified information can carry criminal penalties.”
Coda: the disgraced Strzok was transferred to the Human Resources department of the FBI, but has since left the agency. The anti-Trump left looks out for their own: Strzok was “given a lucrative book deal, lionsed on the left, featured prominently as an expert by CNN, and given a teaching job at Georgetown”.
The CIA versus Trump
The FBI wasn’t the only government agency to actively work against Trump. The CIA was also involved in promulgating the propaganda narrative and the demonisation of the President.
As Seymour Hersh has stated, the Russiagate campaign was orchestrated by then CIA Director John Brennan. “It was a Brennan operation”, Hersh is quoted as saying in 2017.
Now in 2024, Hersh’s reporting has been confirmed. Recent filings by the DOJ show that in 2016, US intel agencies asked foreign counterparts to surveil 26 associates of Donald Trump:
“Former CIA Director John Brennan identified and presented the targets to the US’s intelligence-sharing partners in the so-called “Five Eyes” agencies — the intelligence-gathering organizations in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand”
Michael Shellenberger has published this information based on sources in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).
Indeed, it all started with Brennan and the CIA, according to Hersh:
“Hersh accused former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and current NSA Director Michael Rogers of peddling “disinformation” and misleading Obama and the press.”
The Hunter Biden laptop
The CIA never stopped sabotaging Trump. During the 2020 election, important information about Biden family corruption was gleaned from a laptop that Joe Biden’s wayward son Hunter had reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.
The story, first published in the New York Post, cited emails found on the laptop that were damning. They showed how Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
Hunter ended up getting a $50,000 a month “no show” job on Burisma’s board, in return for influence with his VP father.
The election was just weeks away, so the Obama White House sprung into action. According to a House special investigation:
“Five days later, on October 19, 2020, 51 former intelligence officials signed on to a public statement that stated that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” in an attempt to discredit the New York Post’s reporting.”
Antony Blinken, then Senior Campaign Advisor to Biden, contacted CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, and asked a favour. Morrell testified that, following Blinken’s call, he then corralled the 51 current and former top CIA officials to sign the false letter, which stated:
Russia was “trying to influence how Americans vote in this election … Moscow [will] pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win.”
Blinken, for his part, denies any involvement.
That letter allowed Biden to scoffingly dismiss all the damning revelations for the rest of the campaign. For example, Biden cited the letter during a presidential debate to rebut Trump’s criticisms, asserting that “there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan.”
However, in 2021 the laptop was proven to belong to Hunter Biden when it was seized by the FBI, and the Post’s story was “vindicated”. Prosecutors have even used the data from the laptop to convict the younger Biden of gun crimes.
The 51 CIA officers who lied? They have never apologised. And what’s more, in less than three years, the Biden administration has brought on six out of the 51 “spies who lied”.
Trump’s first impeachment was unjustified
The CIA and the Hunter Biden laptop story are also intertwined around Trump’s first impeachment. In 2019, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives filed articles of impeachment against Trump based on testimony from a CIA whistleblower who claimed Trump was “pressuring Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate Burisma and its corrupt dealings with Biden when he was Obama’s Vice President and “point man” for Ukraine.
In other words, Trump wanted an investigation into the illegal activities that were later documented through Hunter’s own emails.
Or to put it more clearly: TRUMP WAS RIGHT.
Unfortunately, at that time, the proof was lacking.
When such information as this comes to light, it is easy for someone to start thinking that the wheels of government are turning against you.
This is what Trump means when he talks about a “Deep State”.
“Six ways from Sunday” to take out Trump
On January 4, 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) went on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC to issue a warning to the incoming President Trump.
He castigated Trump for being “dumb” enough to criticise the intel community. Specifically, Trump was sceptical of the “Russian hacking” report issued by the intel agencies. Of course, we now know that the Russiagate narrative was a hoax cooked up by those very intel agencies, but at the time, that proof had not yet come out.
Still, Trump’s instinct was right, and he expressed criticism and suspicipn towards the so-called “intel community”.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
That marked the beginning an internecine struggle between Donald Trump and the “intelligence community” — a.k.a. the “deep state”.
Political prosecution
The operation to “get back” at Donald Trump started on January 6, 2021. That was when a pro-Trump protest at the US Capitol turned violent, thanks to a battalion of undercover FBI agents in the crowd.
These agents, who may have numbered upwards of 200, acted as “agents-provocateurs”, breaking windows and exhorting the crowd to enter the Capitol building. The exact number is not know, and even the FBI itself admitted that it had “lost track” of just how many informants were present in the crowd that day.
Nonetheless, the Democrats, with the help of that nefarious “intelligence community” turned the January 6 riot into a giant cause célèbre, arguing that the event amounted to an attempt to overturn the election and overthrow the government of the United States.
The committee also found that the intelligence community was exculpated and bore no responsibility for having failed to warn or make preparations for what happened that day.
In December 2022, the Congress issued a “report” on the January 6 events. This report recommended that Trump be barred from holding office:
Citing the 14th amendment, the committee recommended Trump should be barred from holding federal or state office ever again.
As a result of the report, Donald Trump has been indicted and charged with attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
Other cases of political prosecution
Trump was famously convicted of many other “crimes”, the most salacious of which was his conviction in New York that stemmed from a $130,000 “hush money” payment his attorney Michael Cohen made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election.
In addition, Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts of “falsification of business records” related to his repayment of teh $130,000 to Cohen. Each time Trump cut a check to Cohen for some of that money amounted to a new felony count. In other words — one crime, 34 felonies.
But that is what the headlines screamed: “Trump guilty of 34 felony counts”.
Trump also faced four indictments for “election interference” in Georgia, where he questioned the legitimacy of the vote count.
Trump gets his own personal Inspector Javert
The Biden DOJ appointed a Special Counsel named Jack Smith to charge Trump with federal crimes related not just to January 6, but also to mishandling classified documents that he had stored in his Mar-a-Lago home.
Like the fictional policemena in Les Miserables, Smith is relentless in his pursuit of Trump, concocting all manner of indictments, throwing everythibng against the wall in hoes that something will stick. He once filed 37 indictments against Trump, 32 of which were based on the obscure and seldom invoked Espionage Act of 1917.
Smith’s indictments on the mishandling of documents and the election interference were thrown out earlier this year, but, like the indefatigable Javert, he is re-filing those charges, hoping to damage Trump as much as possible prior to the election.
The Establishment overplayed their hand
The ruthless and exaggerated use of “lawfare” against Trump has backfired. Indeed, each indictment has only increased Trump’s popularity. Moreover, Trump saw a huge boost in donations after the indictments were announced.
Even the convictions have little effect. In fact, an Ipsos poll taken after Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts showed positive results for Trump:
“In fact, in the same poll, 55% of Republican voters said the verdict didn’t make a difference to their vote, and 34% said it made them more likely to vote for Trump.”
Trump’s second impeachment was equally specious
The Democrats in Congress sought to impeach Trump an unprecedented second time on January 13, 2021, just a week after the Capitol Hill riot that served as the basis for the impeachment. The charges of incitement were not uphold by the majorities necessary to convict Trump, however.
Moreover, months later evidence surfaced showing that there was no organised attempt to infiltrate the Capitol, and it was in fact FBI informants planted in the crowd who directly incited the people to enter the Capitol building. In fact, in 2023 FBI agents were actually indicted for their actions on January 6.
The entire campaign of political prosecution has only served to consolidate Trump’s support base. Indeed, as with the indictments, the announcement of Trump’s convictions caused another massive surge in his campaign donations.
Poor Special Counsel Jack Smith. How frustrating must it be that his efforts to “take out” Trump only result in Trump becoming stronger?
More importantly, how frustrating is it for the deep state actors who want to see Trump “taken out” of the race”?
And maybe not just the race?
The assassination that almost was
When we think of Chuck Schumer’s “six ways from Sunday” warning, we cannot help but think that the “intelligence community”
On July 13, 2024, there was an attempt to assassinate Donald Trump while he was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The assassination attempt had all the hallmarks of a deep state operation, such as was performed on John F. Kennedy.
Firstly, audio analysis indicate the presence of at east 2 or 3 shooters (triangulated fire), according to CNN.
Secondly, Trump’s normal Secret Service security detail had been pulled that day, to cover Dr. Jill Biden as she gave a speech elsewhere in the same part of Pennsylvania. The USSS agents were replaced with random agents from other agencies, not the Secret Service.
The Secret Service had also denied repeated requests by the Trump campaign for additional resources, which led to an investigation by the House for dereliction of duty and other irregularities dating back to May.
Thirdly, there was a “stand down order” given, such that the security forces on site that day deliberately ignored the alleged shooter, according to CNN:
“Text messages released by Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office show that law enforcement officers knew of and raised the presence of shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, more than 90 minutes before the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.”
In fact, there appears to be a remarkable and highly unlikely series of confusing events that took place in Butler that day, culminating in the assassination attempt. As The New York Times put it, the 13th of July saw “multiple agency failures” which allowed the shooting to happen.
One thing is certain, however: the security forces that day had made specific plans for an assassination attempt and subsequent evacuation:
“In preparation for the rally, law enforcement was planning for a lone active shooter situation as well as explicitly watching for drone activity in the area, both of which happened under their watch.”
Conspiracy theories and the despicable Christopher Wray
Almost immediately, countervailing conspiracy theories surrounding the events in Butler emerged. Primary among these was a false rumour that Trump had staged the attempt himself in order to garner sympathy as well as media attention.
Another, more widespread theory, was that Trump was not struck by a bullet, but rather suffered minor injuries from glass splinters from a shattered teleprompter.
Amazingly, this specious theory was even voiced by the disgraced FBI director Christopher Wray — the same director who had to apologise for lying to a FISA court in order to obtain a warrant to surveil the Trump campaign in 2016.
When it comes to political assassinations, Americans are the only people gullible enough to believe in the concept of a “lone gunman”. Most other countries are inured to the idea that political assassination is organised by specific factions in order to remove other factions from power. Only Americans are naive enough to believe not just in the pristine nature of their political system, but also in the inherent virtue of everyone in it.
In fact, even today, there are still a remarkable 35% of Americans who believe the Warren Commission, that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald alone.
The deep state’s “six ways from Sunday”
Looking back at the trials and tribulations of Donald Trump, we can see how eerily accurate Chuck Schumer’s warning about the “intelligence community” was.
In fact, the deep state has tried six ways to get rid of Donald Trump:
Russiagate
Impeachment Nr. 1
Impeachment Nr. 2
New York felony convictions
Federal indictments
Assassination (?)
The deep state f*cked up
The forces that were trying to take out Trump in Butler, PA failed. Whether those forces were the CIA, the FBI, the Clintons or all of them together — or even some other group — is a question that will hopefully be answered when Trump sets up his Presidential Commission on assassinations.
But aside from his impressive persistence and indefatigable willingness to fight the “powers that be”, there are several very practical and convincing reasons to vote for Donald Trump in 2024.
“Everything you know is wrong”
As the above article highlights, many things that Americans (about 50% of them) believe about Donald Trump are incorrect. The negative things you were told were true about Trump were, in fact, FALSE.
Conversely, Trump’s claims of crimes and skulduggery, which you were told were “baseless” and “lies” and “conspiracy theories” were, in fact, TRUE.
It’s a bizarro world, built and curated by a corporate captured media.
I would ask that anyone who is interested in truth and in peace give the Trump campaign another look — not in the light of 8 years of media propaganda, but in the frame of what Trump and his campaign stand for TODAY.
I will lay out these good and logical reasons in Part II of this miniseries about The Case for Donald Trump in 2024.
#End.
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I took out an annual subscription based on your excellent articles on Israel, and I was very happy with your support for Jill Stein, who is the only serious anti-Zionist candidate in the presidential campaign. So I'm massively disappointed that you've now decided to abandon her and throw your lot in with the arch-Zionist Donald Trump and the equally-arch-Zionist RFK Jr (although his Zionism only dates back little more than a year). Everything you say about Trump in this article (apart from the "assassination attempt", which was obviously a pantomime performance - if the Deep State wanted him dead, you could tell by him being dead already) is well-known to anyone who's being paying attention for the last few years, and you knew all that already, so using it as an excuse to switch your support to him is really poor. I hope you soon get back to your critique of Israel, and the Harris/Trump/Kennedy Uniparty's support for it.
“…First, I wish to address the fact that a large part of the animus that many people have toward Trump is a result of a ruthless and relentless propaganda campaign that was launched by the Hillary Clinton campaign with the help of UK and US intel agencies and supported by the DNC and its minions in the mainstream media...”
Well no.
A great deal of our responsibilities as adults is to hold simultaneous thoughts in our heads at the same time.
Do the deep state have it in for Donald? Have the deep state infested media turned on him? Yes.
However…..
Donald Trump is a man with a long track record of boldly odious, deliberately polarizing behaviour and utterances.
He generates his own hatred. By his own hand. By his own intent. From real people. And lots of it. He loves to cultivate very public enemity. He baits it, and he relishes it.
He always has. It’s his way of being. Nothing new. At all.