Rachel Maddow did an incredible segment on the letter that Attorney General William Barr wrote to the leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and released to the public. If you haven’t seen the segment yet, I suggest you watch it.
Rachel’s segment is not sitting well with a particular group of purported Leftists. On social media, hundreds of Bernie Sanders supporters have rejoiced that Mueller did not find enough evidence to be able to charge Trump or another US person of directly conspiring with Russian government entities, believing that it was vindication against charges that Russians ran effective influence operations targeted to, among others, die hard Bernie supporters. Mueller found no such thing. In fact, Barr says that Mueller confirmed the Russian influence operation. Even Barr is forced to admit in his letter, “The Special Counsel states that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.””
Nevertheless, writing for the pro-Russia Left, Glenn Greenwald slanders Rachel Maddow as “Judy Miller of the Trump/Russia story”. He gloats about how the Mueller report “humiliated” those who make the case for collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian efforts to hand the election to Donald Trump.
There are two problems with Glenn Greenwald’s line of argument, other than the fact that he’s a faux journalist and an anti-American blowhard. First, Greenwald doesn’t know what’s in the Mueller report, because he hasn’t read it. Trump’s attorney general has thus far refused to release the report itself; choosing instead to write a letter about it putting Trump in the best possible light. And for some reason, I get the feeling that Wikileaks is not going to be releasing this one, their keen advocacy for the public interest notwithstanding.
Secondly, and far more importantly, The Intercept and Glenn Greenwald are trying to distract from and obfuscate a key finding of the Mueller report that Bill Barr did reveal: a key finding that indicts Greenwald and his comrades almost directly in connection with the Russian collusion scandal. The finding in fact sets out a possible case that the Trump-Russia collusion took place not directly but through an intermediary that is a favorite of both the Trump-Right and the Bernie-Left: Wikileaks.
In one of the parts of his letter where Barr summarizes the Special Counsel’s findings rather than spouting his own opinions about it, Barr writes:
The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.
Special Counsel Mueller indicted one-time Trump campaign official and long-time Trump friend Roger Stone in January for obstructions and false statements in relation to the Russia scandal. Stone’s indictment says that he coordinated and communicated with Wikileaks and Trump officials about the stolen DNC and Clinton emails.
So while Barr claims that the Special Counsel did not reach any conclusion about whether or not Trump, anyone associated with him or other US persons conspired directly with the Russian government, he is silent about whether the Special Counsel found the Trump campaign to be coordinating with a Russian government intermediary. That silence is irrelevant, since Mueller publicly laid out the case in Court documents that Stone and others in the Trump campaign did exactly that.
Glenn Greenwald and the Intercept are not mere defenders of Wikileaks. Greenwald serves on the Board of a nonprofit Foundation dedicated solely to acting as a PR firm for Wikileaks and its star fugitive, Edward Snowden, who to this day is enjoying the fruits of his benefactor Vladimir Putin. Snowden also serves on that Board with Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, in testament to the excellent track record of freedom of the press in Russia and in Brazil.
We have always argued that Wikileaks is an intermediary for Russia, and now Trump’s own attorney general admits that to be the case.
Everyone dedicated to defending Wikileaks and popularizing its one-sided document dump operations designed specifically to hurt Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders) is at least an implicated indirect agent of the Russian government, or perhaps more technically speaking, an intermediary between Putin’s operations and its American accomplices. To the extent that Snowden and Greenwald retain their American citizenship, the Mueller report raises a direct implication that they are some of those American accomplices.
And this is why Greenwald is desperate to divert attention away from Wikileaks and its accomplices, namely himself and Edward Snowden. The Mueller investigation proves that there was collusion between Americans and the Russian government, if not directly then most definitely through the key intermediary of Wikileaks. Wikileaks is a handy Russian tool, and Glenn Greenwald is desperate to have everyone miss this key fact.
I can understand why. If you’d collaborated with a Russian intermediary commit to commit treason, you’d want people to look elsewhere, too.