“sophisticated,” “massive,” of “breathtaking” scope, one with “tentacles” that “reached deeply into American political life.”

That describes about 99% of the most recently published books I've come across at the library and about 90% of those published in the last 5 years. Where the protagonist is a "rogue" or ex-CIA, FBI etc., who left whatever spy agency because his or her bosses and the bureaucracy weren't patriotic enough.

Same thing with tv, cable and movies.

Meanwhile any mention of the "conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories" is unpublishable or unfilmable.

I wish I'd thought of that! Yes, you are right.

Crap Crap Crap this Government is Despotic!!!

Truth and reality are irrelevant, as long as most Americans, and most other westerners only get their information from the MSM, they can create their own reality.
You only have to look at McCarthyism to see this type of propaganda is not new. The US use of Germ warfare during the Korean war, and the imprisonment of John W Powell without trial, for printing the story, is an example to any journalist who crosses the US Government.

What I liked was Trump's response that he felt the Russian effort proved that there was no collusion, which of course it did not do. However, one could easily conclude that Russian preference for Trump and assistance to his campaign is an extremely unfriendly act toward the United States, or to any a country that has an idiot for leader that could bankrupt it in short order, which means that in most respect the Russians can just sit back and let the U.S. disintegrate with Trump! Nonetheless, I suspect Mueller will find minor acts of collusion between the Trump campaign and its minions and Russians of all kinds; the economic benefits that have accrued Trump for many years through Russian investment in his real estate being another matter I suppose.

Maybe the John Birch Society was right and it took the slimes and the compost 40 years to catch up?

"Conspicuously absent is any indication of direct Russian government involvement in the operation, which was funded by a Russian multimillionaire. Nor is there any claim that the Trump campaign collaborated with the activities of the Russian operatives, or that these activities had any impact on the course of the election."

Additionally I would like to know what "crime" has been committed that anyone could be "indicted" for.. . Political Advertising is certainly legal in the US,no doubt about it.So is having an opinion (so far) . Using a pseudonym is legal..So what did the "conspiracy" do that was illegal?

Does it matter? The goal posts will just keep moving. This whole damn thing started with "Russia hacked the DNC computers and worked with Wikileaks to publish their emails. Then they moved their goal posts to "Trump colluded with Russia" and then ....

I dont know if its THE government/media conspiracy of all time, the Oswald , magic-bullet scam was pretty big. The "other holocaust" anti-communist fraud goes on, but this is another one of mammoth scope.

Try 9/11 - the New York one; not the1973 9/11 US coup in Chile.

I would give that a hundred "up" votes if I could.

Bernie 'sheepdog' Sanders who has been pushing the Russiagate fabrication the whole time, finds himself implicated with the those pesky Russkies! Ironically, had Bernie somehow managed win the 2016 election despite the rigging, the media and BOTH capitalist parties would be using 'RUSSIAGATE!!!!' to beat back Bernie's milquetoast leftist agenda. HE would be the lighting rod of 'russian attacks' on our supposed plutocracy. Yet the idiot has pushed the narrative himself.

Sheepdog Sanders learns the hard way that when you pander to America's latest version of McCarthyism, it can turn around and bite you in the ass.

That's the funny thing about witch hunts in general

That's a good point. No matter who had won the election we'd still be the recipients of endless anti-Russian propaganda, though perhaps the narrative would have been tweaked a bit.

EXACTLY. Even before Nov election we had the mainstream media attacking Putin/Russia and the drumbeat for war with Russia was already clear for all to hear and see.

This report, i read elsewhere, also implicates Jill Stein and Bernie as having received (knowingly or not) the help of russian trolls and THUS, had bernie won the establishment would be using RUSSIA!!!! to beat back his proposals. I think that much is clear.

Problem Bernie himself has pushed and promoted Russiagate, so that, when the time comes, the media will use it to destroy him.

I have no doubt that foreign monies cross all kinds of borders during elections. I also have no doubt that Russian money crossed into the United States. All I really want to know is if the philosophy of Alexander Dugin came along with it.

This is not a “conspiracy theory”—I am a conspiracy theorist and don’t like to see the term abused. It is, as you note, the Big Lie, and the Big Lie is the escutcheon of the totalitarian state in which we live. But what makes it the Big Lie? This: the entire indicated enterprise is nothing more than a modest apolitical marketing scheme started by a Russian hot-dog vendor to aggregate persons of various political persuasions solely in order to sell each audience as a group to whoever wanted to buy such an audience for their own marketing purposes, e.g., pro-Trump, anti-Trump, pro-Hillary, anti-Hillary, LGBT, anti-LGBT, etc. ad nausea. The details are laid out wonderfully by Moon of Alabama:

http://www.moonofalabama.or...

"…At Point 86 the indictment turns to Count Two - "Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Bank Fraud". The puppeteers opened, as explained above, various Paypal accounts using 'borrowed' data.

Then comes the point which confirms the commercial marketing story as laid out above:

Point 95:

Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts, including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.

There you have it. There was no political point to what the Russian company did. Whatever political slogans one of the company's sock-puppets posted had only one aim: to increase the number of followers for that sock-puppet. The sole point of creating a diverse army of sock-puppets with large following crowds was to sell the 'eyeballs' of the followers to the paying customers of the marketing company. …

Again - this had nothing to do with political influence on the election. The sole point of political posts was to create 'engagement' and a larger number of followers in each potential social-political segment. People who buy promotional posts want these to be targeted at a specific audience. The Russian company could offer whatever audience was needed. It had sock-puppets with pro-LGBT view and a large following and sock-puppets with anti-LGBT views and a large following. It could provide pro-2nd amendment crowds as well as Jill Stein followers. Each of the sock-puppets had over time generated a group of followers that were like minded. The entity buying the promotion simply had to choose which group it preferred to address. …

When Yevgeni Prigozhin, the hot dog caterer who allegedly owns the internet promotion business, was asked about the indictment he responded:

"The Americans are really impressionable people, they see what they want to see. [...] If they want to see the devil, let them see him."

Yes, I've read the Moon over Alabama blog. Very informative.

As the article suggests, this indictment even reads more like a tawdry work of fiction than a rigorous, meticulous legal pleading. It's a lurid rat's nest of trash-tabloid doubletalk.

It's basically a narrative that recycles and clumsily stitches together some well-worn factoids and hyped talking points from the Russophobia infoganda campaign.

It's like a jigsaw puzzle assembled by meth freaks who just hammered random pieces together until they're all used up. The result is roughly rectangular, but the contents are fractured and incoherent, with no resemblance to the picture on the cover of the box.

A "MacGuffin" is "an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance". This Potemkin "indictment" is the latest Beltway MacGuffin in a circituous, serial scheme to undermine and prematurely remove Trump.

The legal underpinnings are sketchy and virtually nonexistent, to the point where the "indictment" has to rely on preposterous, tortured interpretations of existing crimes, and invent new crimes, to give this piece of chicanery a very faint, pastel "color of law".

It isn't plausible enough to support a show trial, even given the surrealistic state of post-9/11 US kangaroo jurisprudence. It's just something to string along complacent, submissive, and desperate rubes in the belief that US citizens are victims of malicious predators: Russia, Putin, and "not my President" Trump.

Speaking of which, the main count of the indictment is an alleged "Conspiracy to Defraud the United States". This may be a "be careful what you criminalize" moment too. After all, it's a succinct capsule description of the everyday work of the US Congress-- and, for that matter, the other two rotten branches of government.

If US Elected Misrepresentatives are brought to the dock on this novel charge, the evidence of their heinous criminality will not be nearly as elusive and obscure as the long-sought Russian "smoking guns".

Another thing this indictment does is to derail the Nunes memo that showed that Hillary's campaign "colluded" with the FBI to get a FISA warrant to spy on her political opponent. This is illegal, but so was using paid trolls to get people to vote for her. Isn't that what this indictment says?
:)

The foreign devil paranoia in the USA now has TWO fronts: Dumb and dumber Rhode Island Talk Radio has been bringing attention to sinister Chinese government sponsored " Confucius Institutes " springing up on college campuses everywhere. Talk Radio thanks the venerable FBI for alerting us to the spy operation. And this morning it unmasks yet another " Confucius Institute " at the University of Rhode Island . I will hear more about this from an old friend of mine in the math department out there. The reactionary trends in higher education disturb him.

Sounds more and more like Stalin.

The sad truth is the dark arts of political distraction including the rehash of reds under the bed commies (read Russians) works overtime on a credulous, manipulated and poorly informed audience.

The whole scenario is reminiscent of the Philip K Dick novel, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, where one of the character's drug trip warps reality for the rest of humankind. We have all become trapped inside Hillary Clinton's mind, inside the bitter bubble of the defeat she will simply never accept, and now the only way out is thermonuclear war and the extinction of all life on planet Earth. And why? Because it was her turn.

I think there's a bit more to all this than that.

So the bottom line is not that fantasy and reality have become impossible to separate...

Could Hillary Clinton be a 21st century Helen of Troy - the face that launched a thousand nuclear missiles ? But a facelift might help. Putin correctly saw " Hawk Hillary " as the face of World War III -before the Trump Junta.

Helen was beautiful. Hillary is not, either outside nor inside.

The Russians are coming! The Russians are Coming! This whole scene would be great fodder for comedy, were it not for the real war preparations of these deranged and rather stupid people.

The American ruling class has committed so many crimes against he people in Russia that now they feel super guilty. They see a Russian waiting to exact revenge around every corner.

As their fear grows by the day they will lash out eventually. The Russian people need to start protecting themselves sooner rather then later.

There is a great play about that by Bertolt Brecht: The Exception and the Rule. Worth reading.

"now they feel super guilty"? that's just impossible!! even average Americans do not feel or experience "imperialist guilt" --- but a lot of them always feel "white guilt", where they excuse or ignore the awful behavior of certain layers of the African-American population

What I find distressing is that my bipolar, rightwing, anti-Semitic, conspiratorial*, “free market”, pro trump relative is saying some of the same things as in this article.
Good instincts, poor politics.

*he says the FL shooter was MLKUltra

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. :)

Ours is a Marxist critique. Your relative may harbor illusions that Trump won't be whipped into line by the warmongers of both parties. The other aspects of his/her personality I cannot account for.

. The Mueller indictment report is kind of reminiscent to Collin Powell's "smoking gun" evidence shortly before the Iraqi invasion of 2003. At this point it is fair to say that the United States should be the last country on earth to accuse other countries in meddling in its own internal affairs. The American bourgeois media knows that there is a rising tide of social discontent across the country, but they are blaming it on to the forces sent from the Kremlin. Of course, these absurd statements totally negate the real causes of the growing social tensions which is the outcome of wealth disparity between the haves and have nots. In any case, a week ago the US military in Syria deliberately used air power against Russian mercenary forces which left many scores of dead and wounded. Now suppose for a minute, however, had Russia done that strike instead. One would just imagine afterwords the reaction coming from the Pentagon, CIA and their sycophant media in this regards.

Especially when an ex CIA agent admitted that we have interfered in other countries elections.

https://m.youtube.com/watch...

Well of course they have to go after these Russians. Must distract from the fact that it was/is Israel interference. Allies in NATO are sending in dozens of advisers to Ukraine as we speak. Russian elections are coming up; no coincidences, just connections. This is, in my opinion is thus: 1) Distraction, from Americans and West for what is going on in their own countries, 2) Ukraine is part of the old State of Khazaria, and those whom are descended from that, want the state back, 3) NATO is business, profits, capitalism, and there are natural resources to be plundered by those with primitive and beastial mindsets, i.e. Disease Biden's virus sits on the Natural Resource Council in Ukraine, 4) Fear! Be afraid, so you(me,us) lose natural and critical thinking skills and instincts. Plus the Hegelian Dialectic So, multifaceted this is but there is always ulterior motives involved. And the lest information there is about something, the more that needs investigated.

The inane hysteria of the MSM - especially TV "news" coverage - of this non-story nonsensically alleging that a dozen Russian social media commentators posting on Facebook and Twitter somehow constitutes "a new Pearl Harbour" and defeated a multi-billion dollar Clinton campaign supported by every major US newspaper and TV would be laughable if it weren't that much of the US public actually believes it. And, I can personally attest, much of the apparently not much brighter Canadian public. Propaganda works because the credulous target audience fails to apply the minute amount of intelligence required to ask "Does this make sense?"

Can you imagine if Trump had lost the election and he blamed it on Russian interference? What do you think the reaction would have been by Hillary's supporters?

pretty sure Hillary and her supporters would be too busy starting Armageddon to care.

My thoughts exactly. I have been shunned for mentioning it by a lot of people who should know better.

Propaganda works--that's why the US population is so docile and willing to tolerate 3/4 of the budget going to the military industrial complex while the infrastrurcture is in decay and there's no money to institute a nationalized healthcare system. And I might add, that's why the
ruling class is so intent on censoring the internet.

This is a comment I posted on another thread:

The greatest threat to social stability is income and wealth inequality. The elites are well aware of this. They know that the social unrest personified throughout Facebook during the 2016 Presidential Campaign had little or nothing to do with 13 Russian Nationals, but represented genuine outrage expressed by the middle-class, working-class, and working poor to social injustice and income and wealth inequality. That's the real reason the intelligence agencies working with the Dems desperately want to censor the internet. It's imperative that they destroy any outlet which provides working-class solidarity. More than Forty-five percent of the population are obtaining their news from the internet--the mainstream media is losing its relevance.

The ruling class knows that without mainstream media propaganda to keep the population in-check they will need to use more brutal methods. That's why they will do everything possible to inculcate their official narrative for as long as possible.

To enforce their agenda the ruling class uses both the Dems and the Republicans to carry their water. They finance politicians from both political parties, so in reality it makes NO difference who wins or loses since legislation will always be enacted to satisfy their interests. Both political parties unanimously always vote to allocate additional funds for the military. And both political parties always agree on getting involved in new military misadventures. That's why the 2016 election was nothing more than a theatrical production. Many liberals were disappointed that Hillary lost, however, the ruling class was perfectly content with Trump. The wealthy always prefers fascism over socialism.

Trump was used by a certain segment of the ruling class to sabotage progressive populist movements, such as the pseudo socialist Bernie Sanders and divert white working-class outrage towards right-wing reactionary ideology. Trump is the "sheepdog" for the fascists just like Sanders is the Sheepdog for the Dems.

A billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star, pretended to represent the "little guy" using simple language and uncomplicated statements. Professional pollsters were used at rallies to determine which popular slogans and phrases Trump should repeat over and over again to get the audience excited.

Trump tapped into the anger and rage felt by the working-class towards the Democratic Party which betrayed them for decades. His campaign was able to transfer workers indignation to the support of fascist ideology getting the disaffected to believe that he was anti-establishment, populist, and progressive.

The ruling class offered two choices to the US electorate--Hillary Clinton a neoliberal warmongering shill for Wall Street, AIPAC, and the intelligence agencies or swindler Donald Trump funded by right-wing oligarchs for the purpose of promoting a fascist pro-corporate militaristic agenda.

Excellent thoughts well expressed. Thanks.

Liked your comment about Trump being a "sheepdog" for fascists as Sanders is for the Dems and your take on the whole Trump phenomenon.

Putin hates me yes I know, for the media tells be so. From biblical obscurantism to the blatant lies of the New York Times, what a world we live in! For the record let me state quite categorically there are no reds under my bed. Being a divan there is no underneath.

There is a good detail analysis of what "Russian meddling" was really about - that is, making money, not politics
http://www.moonofalabama.or...
The author just looked into very indictment and found it.
On the other hand, I still(!) cannot fully believe that USA "progressives" really lap it up, even though there is a lot of them in web doing exactly this!

WSWS readers might also check out: "Mueller's indictment of 13 Russian's perfectly timed to be buried in media cycle" @www.rt.com; "Mueller indicted 13 Russians to drag probe out and keep his position -State Senator Black" @www.rt.com; "'Until there are facts on election meddling, it's all just blather'-Lavrov on Mueller indictment"@www.rt.com.

Absolutely. Great observations.