Russiagate, Like Count Dracula, Will Never End

Ann Garrison, BAR contributor

29 May 2019

Are the Democrats serious? Or just mortified, like most vampires, by the light of day?

“The current state of US-Russian relations is more perilous than any moments of the First Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

“Russiagate, like Count Dracula, will never end because new political blood will be fed to this vampire . . . The Russiagate fable—fraud—has become a kind of theocratic cult, and it has millions and millions and millions of self-interested and unwitting followers.”

Stephen F. Cohen, Russian Studies Professor Emeritus, Princeton and NYU, and author of War with Russia: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate thus likened Russiagate to Dracula on April 17, 2019—after Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence to convict President Donald Trump or any of his campaign staff of colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. Now, a month later, Democratic elites are still roaming the streets of Washington and the Halls of Congress in search of fresh blood.On May 16, the Washington Postreported that House Democrats have begun a marathon public reading of the Mueller Reportfor citizens who don’t have time to read the whole thing but might listen to the audio. There’s no there there, but they won’t let go. Are they serious? Or just mortified, like most vampires, by the light of day?Whichever, they’re likely to lose again in 2020, because poll after pollsays that Americans don’t care; Russiagate is nowhere near the top of their list of concerns.

“Democratic elites are still roaming the streets of Washington and the Halls of Congress in search of fresh blood.”

Cohen says that Russiagate has deeply damaged at least five US institutions: the presidency, the electoral system, the State Department, the “intelligence community,” and the media, meaning most of all the influential “legacy” media: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television and cable news networks. Will Americans find reason to widely trust any of these institutions again? Will any Washington officials and their staffers, and their allied power brokers and intelligence agents, trust any others from hereon?

The Democrats, Cohen says, have created a permanent excuse for failure: the Russians did it. And what’s to keep the Republicans from using the same excuse for their own electoral failures? Or to keep dangerous tension between the US and Russia, the world’s two greatest nuclear powers, from ratcheting up all the while?

War with Russia?

Cohen asserted that Russiagate will live on like Dracula while speaking to nationally syndicated radio host John Batchelor on several of their weekly broadcasts on Radio WABC-AM, New York City, which have been archivedon the website of The Nationfor the past five years. War with Russia?is a series of essays published in The Nationand text elaborations of those broadcasts. It’s an analysis of where we are, how we got here, and where we can go if US-driven military escalation between the US and Russia doesn’t lead to nuclear apocalypse. Cohen still believes that there are options as long as there is human agency, as he wrote in “Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938.”

That book, published in 1973, made him a prominent voice in both US and Soviet politics until his dissidence about the New Cold War, then Russiagate, made him persona non grata at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the network news outlets where he had previously been a welcome commentator.

Since Russiagate was “ginned up,” as Cohen puts it, he has even been attacked by fellow Nationwriters. Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editorial Director of The Nationand Cohen’s wife, has, to her credit, defended him, despite their own disagreementsabout the Mueller Investigation. She opposes the new McCarthyism, but she has said that the investigation is worthwhile insofar as it reveals the corruption of Trump and friends; he has said that politicians are corrupt—Democrat, Republican, and Russian—and that the central reality of the Mueller Investigation is its dangerous escalation of US-Russian tensions. He has often said that he doesn’t like Trump, but that Trump is the president we’ve got, for two more years or even six, so any moves he makes toward détente with Russia or military de-escalation anywhere else in the world should be encouraged.

“The central reality of the Mueller Investigation is its dangerous escalation of US-Russian tensions.”

In the introduction to “War with Russia?,” he writes:

“The book would not have been possible in any way without the support of my wife. Whatever her own opinions, no matter the external pressures, Katrina posted every commentary I wrote.”

Again, kudos to Katrina vanden Heuvel, but the fact that Cohen’s critique of Russiagate has stirred such anger even at The Nation, the publication that led the opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s, is evidence of how much ground Russiagate has gained, even among liberal progressives.

Cohen and Batchelor readily acknowledge their differences as well—Cohen a liberal progressive, Batchelor a libertarian conservative—but they agree on the dangerous folly of the New Cold War. After a lifetime of scholarship and engagement in Russian history, Cohen says that the current state of US-Russian relations is more perilous than any moments of the First Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, one of his concerns is that President Trump has been so fraudulently vilified as a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin that he may be politically unable to defuse another equally precipitous confrontation. Irrational and terrifying as the anti-Communist Red Scare of the 1950s was, he writes, it never led to the claim that a US president is the puppet of a foreign government or that there’s been a silent coup leaving the White House in its clutches.

Cohen on Wikileaks

In February 2017, in a chapter titled “Kremlin-Baiting President Trump,” Cohen writes:

“But the crux of pro-Kremlin allegations against Trump was, and remains, the charge that Putin hacked the DNC and disseminated the stolen emails through WikiLeaks in order to put Trump in the White House. A summary of these ‘facts’ was presented in the declassified report [the Steele Dossier] released by the US ‘intelligence community’ and widely published in January 2017.

“Not addressed [in the report] is the point made by a number of American hacking experts that Russian state hackers would have left no fingerprints, as US intelligence claimed they had. Indeed, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity believe that the damaging DNC documents were not hacked but leaked by an insider. If so, it had nothing to do with Russia. (The NSA, which has the capacity to monitor the movement of emails, was only ‘moderately confident’ in the report it co-signed, while the CIA and FBI were ‘highly confident,’ even though the FBI inexplicably never examined the DNC computers.) [Later, Cohen said that a source had told him that, in NSA parlance, “moderately confident” means they don’t know.]

“Obama referred to the DNC scandal as a leak, not a hack.”

“There is another incongruity. At his final presidential press conference, Obama referred to the DNC scandal as a leak, not a hack,and said he did not know how the emails got to WikiLeaks—this despite allegations by his own intelligence agencies. (No one seems to have asked Obama if he misspoke!) On the other side of this alleged conspiracy, nor is it clear that Putin so favored the clearly erratic Trump that he would have taken such a risk, which if discovered, as I also pointed out earlier, would have compromised Trump and greatly favored Clinton. (Judging from discussions in Kremlin-related Russian newspapers, there was a serious debate as to which American presidential candidate might be best—or least bad—for Russia.)”

In his May 8, 2019 broadcast with Batchelor, Cohen said even more adamantly that Mueller’s a priori assumption that Russians hacked into the DNC emails, his failure to undertake his own forensic investigation, and his failure to interview VIPS’s Bill Binney and Julian Assange himself, should be enough to discredit the whole report.

Amen, and I hope these highlights recommend the book. It’s a page-turner.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prizefor her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected].

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