We
won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over
the place. Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it.
Hoover didn't even cooperate.... It was won in the papers. I leaked
out the papers.... I leaked out the testimony. I had Hiss convicted
before he ever got to the grand jury.... Go back and read the chapter
on the Hiss case in Six
Crises
and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn't done waiting for the
goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI. Richard
Nixon tapes
Unless
you are my age or spent time hanging around old Reds you probably
don’t know about Richard Nixon’s Great Pumpkin ploy. Nixon ran
for office in California in 1946 under a “Red under every bed”
platform, successfully red-baiting a New Deal Democrat House
incumbent. His understanding of the power of anti-Communism became
the driving force in his career, a career further realized when he
promptly joined the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) soon after his election.
Always
on the lookout for scandalous new revelations about Communist
“mischief,” Nixon soon found a source in Whittaker Chambers.
Chambers-- a damaged personality-- had, in the 1920s and 1930s, been
allowed to take on responsibilities in the Communist Party far
greater than his stability or trustworthiness. After he broke with
the Communists, he tried to peddle his ever-changing, exaggerated
tales of clandestine activity and espionage to the Roosevelt
administration.
They
declined.
In
the early war years, the FBI interviewed Chambers. They also walked
away from his stories.
As
the Cold War heated, Chambers made another attempt to sell his
product, this time to HUAC. Many, including President Truman,
discounted Chambers’ claims.
But
they underestimated Richard Nixon. In a media-recorded drama,
orchestrated by Nixon, Chambers visited his farm where he proudly
showed the public a pumpkin in which he had hidden documents
allegedly incriminating Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State
Department official, in Soviet espionage.
The
Great Pumpkin Caper, infused with the ominous threat that Communists
were out to assassinate Chambers for his treachery, proved to be just
the right amount of theatrics and fear-mongering to put Chambers’
wild accusations into mainstream respectability. It should be added
that many New Deal liberals quickly lost their spine and dutifully
joined the anti-Communist crusade.
I
was reminded of these Cold War hysterics when I read a
Bloomberg News
45 pt headline, Putin’s
Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip, Logo Indicates.
Could the gift from Putin to Trump after the recent summit actually
be a spy device?
Author
Vernon Silver attempts to place an inch of distance between his
suppositions and an actual allegation of Russian perfidy, but he
takes it seriously enough to inquire with the ball’s maker, the
President’s spokesperson, and a hacker group. Further, he reminds
us of a Forbes
article that described an engineer who used a chip similar to the
chip affixed to the ball to invade a nearby cell phone. Could the
soccer ball be a nefarious Russian attack?
Apparently
another intrepid journalist thought so. Clare Foran, writing for CNN,
revisited the story under a 42 pt headline
Putin
gave Trump a soccer ball that may have a transmitter chip.
Like Silver, Foran checked in with Adidas, the President’s
spokesperson, and the ubiquitous “cyber-security expert” hanging
around newsrooms and TV studios. In addition, she checked with the US
Secret Service. Its prepared statement, reassuring readers, suggests
that many other amateur sleuths had inquired about the suspicious
soccer ball.
Despite
the cautions, Foran remained vigilant, citing Senator Lindsey
Graham’s “warning”: “if it were me, I’d check the soccer
ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”
Not
for lack of effort, these two elite-school graduates failed to
generate enough interest to warrant a serious look from the master
conspiracy theorist, Robert Mueller. Nixon would have gotten it done.
In
another crackpot moment,
Newsweek
writer, Cristina Maza, sensed a trojan horse in the NATO camp. Her
article, VLADIMIR
PUTIN'S BIKER GANG SETS UP MILITARY CAMP IN NATO MEMBER STATE, PUBLIC
FIGURES URGE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE ACTION,
raises the specter of a military take-over by a group of Russian and
Slovakian motorcyclists from the Night Wolves motorcycle club. The
group recently occupied a building complex about the size of a large
high school campus. Maza worried “that the group had access to
tanks and armored vehicles.” Apparently, they had rented a few
Soviet era tanks from a local military museum to add some color to
their gathering. While the Night Wolves claim to have organized the
event to inaugurate a new chapter, two hundred “public figures”
signed a petition urging the Slovakian government to expel the
invaders.
The
US’s enduring regime change vehicle, Radio
Free Europe,
quotes the vigilant petitioners as characterizing the Night Wolves
ominously as “Putin’s paramilitary vanguard in a hybrid war
against the EU, NATO, and Slovakia.”
Nixon
would approve.
How
do you “infiltrate” the National Rifle Association (NRA)? Like
most membership organizations (AAA motor club, the local library,
even the Democratic Party), you give your personal information and
pay a fee to the NRA and you’re a member. If you want to join from
Russia, Afghanistan, or Colombia, it’s an additional $10.
Yet
an uncommon diversity of news and entertainment organizations (MSNBC,
Bloomberg, CNBC, Chicago Tribune, Vox, Democracy Now!, Rolling Stone,
Jimmy Kimmel Live, etc. etc.) have charged Russian national, Maria
Butina, with “infiltrating” the NRA. I suppose that my membership
in the Green Party, coupled with my openly expressed desire to
influence the organization towards advocating socialism, makes me an
“infiltrator,” too.
Curiously,
her Department of Justice affidavit does not describe as an
“infiltration” Butina’s
engagement with a more elite, politically charged organization, The
Fellowship Foundation, and its annual National Prayer Breakfast.
Wikipedia
describes the National Prayer Breakfast as “designed to be a forum
for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build
relationships,” seemingly an ideal event to “infiltrate.”
Wikipedia
also asserts that the guest list is limited to about 3,500 people
including guests from 100 countries, presumably none of which, except
Russia, were bent on influence peddling.
The
Butina case reeks of the media’s hysterical “Russian under every
bed” campaign. Nixon would be pleased with the use of the Cold
War-tested, sinister-conjuring word, “infiltrate.”
It
is no surprise that the Gallup poll reports that only 22% of its
respondents have a “Great Deal” or “Quite A Lot” of
confidence in the criminal justice system. The recently reluctantly
released-- and heavily redacted-- FISA application that the FBI
submitted to the secret FISA court in October of 2016 and the ensuing
disputes give ample evidence for that lack of confidence.
The
focus of the request for extra-legal surveillance was Carter Page, a
business consultant and a campaign advisor to Donald Trump for six
months or so. Despite the fact that the FBI released 414 pages, the
meat of the case could be carved out in about thirty heavily redacted
pages. The rest of the release was redundancies, boiler-plate and
blackened copy to add gravitas
to an otherwise slight document.
No
doubt the FBI anticipated that the FISA courts are perceived as
push-overs for government agencies; of 22,990 FISA requests from 1979
to 2006, only 5 have been rejected. So much for judicial vigilance.
Remarkably,
much of the revealed substance of the suspicions about Carter Page
are based, in one way or another, upon the infamous Christopher
Steele dossier.
To
an objective observer, the fact that no one wants to take ownership
of the
claims
made in the dossier would cast suspicion on the real intent of the
FBI and Justice Department officials who sought the surveillance
approval. Even when the security agencies presented the dossier to
Obama and Trump before the 2017 inauguration, they refused to attest
to its veracity, they refused to take ownership of Steele’s
“research.”
The
FISA request does not, in those sections not redacted, explicitly reveal that
the Steele information was gained at the paid behest of the
Democratic Party (Steele
was told, his immediate employers claim [Fusion GPS], that he was only instructed
to answer the question: “Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do
deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious
investors shun?" -- a question akin to ‘when did he stop
beating his wife?’).
Surely,
no one would contend that the Democrats were paying for positive
information on Trump. Nor could any rational person expect Steele to
receive the instruction and not understand that his job was to dig up
dirt. And just as assuredly, the failure to explicitly reveal the Democratic
Party connection-- with no independent verification of the dossier--
casts a long shadow over the FISA request and its granting.
Either
the FBI withheld relevant information or
the FISA court is such a rubber stamp that its standards of evidence
are nearly non-existent. Or, perhaps, the FBI used unverified claims
for a fishing expedition and
the FISA court is a sham.
If
further proof of the corruption of the legal system is needed, it is
provided by the vapid, amoral defense of the FBI’s FISA request by
three former US Attorneys. Writing in the Daily
Beast,
they argue that, in fact, hearsay-- a sophisticated word for gossip--
is a sufficient condition for surveillance. The FBI would have been
“derelict” if it had not sought a FISA request based on the
Steele dossier or any other hearsay-- leaks, innuendo, anonymous
calls, vendettas. They seem little concerned with establishing the
limitations of hearsay.
They
assure their readers that a FISA request only requires revelation of
“potential for bias.” What an amazingly low standard for the
credibility of evidence!
Nixon
would have regretted not living to exploit such an abysmal decay of
journalistic and legal standards.
Had
he lived, he would have enjoyed the incredible expansion of the
surveillance state, the demise of critical, combative, questioning
journalism, the glorification and unchallenged legitimacy of the
security services, and the punitive use and abuse of the grand jury
and court system. He would have seen opportunity in narrowing the
scope of permitted discourse and action-- all long strides toward a
national security state. He would have hailed the promise this
development offers for protecting the interests of the rich and
powerful.
On
the other hand, he would have been surprised at the complicity, even
enthusiastic advocacy, of many liberals and “civil libertarians”
in furthering this agenda.
Greg
Godels
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