While Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to announce his conclusions regarding the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the Donald Trump campaign's supposed "collusion" with Moscow, Karel Vereycken, French journalist and vice-president of the Solidarity and Progress Party, says that the much-discussed probe is not worth the paper it's written on.
Vereycken cited a 2017 study by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) that indicated that the alleged "Russian hackers" had never stolen files from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server, because the aforementioned data was most likely copied to a thumb-drive or a storage device. In short, it appeared to be an inside job rather than an outside hack.
According to the politician, "getting rid of the ludicrous Russiagate scandal would be not only the first step but the key to start shaping a different environment in which Trump might be channeled into more decent policies".
The French journalist opined that the FBI was nothing but "a mercenary force for the ruling financial forces for whom Trump, who's not part of the two-party system they control, is a factor of potential disorder".
"Russian Hack" That Never Took Place
The 2017 VIPS study did not go unnoticed in Washington. According to The Intercept, on 24 October 2017 then CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with VIPS member William Binney, an ex-NSA technical director and whistleblower. The meeting reportedly took place at Donald Trump's request.
However, the next day Trump backpedaled on his statement by saying that he accepted the US intelligence community's conclusion "that Russia's meddling in the 2016 election took place".
On 13 February 2019, VIPS members, Binney and Larry C. Johnson, a former analyst at the CIA, published an op-ed challenging the Russian hack story and detailing its flaws.
"The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks on 22 July 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged 'hack' no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim", the intelligence veterans wrote.
"The data breach was local. It was copied from the network", they concluded.
The Kremlin has repeatedly refuted Washington's accusations with regard to the alleged interference in the US election process as well as the "breach" into the DNC server system.
Commenting on Special Counsel Mueller's probe Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov underscored: "Russia did not interfere, it has not had such a custom to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and is not doing so now".
Trump and Non-Stop "Russiagate"
On 5 March 2019, WikiLeaks published a document which is claimed to be a motion filed by lawyers representing President Donald J. Trump's campaign. The memo calls for shredding the "Russiagate" case filed by the DNC in the Southern District of New York. It argues that the claims put forward by the Democrats have no solid grounds.
FULL DOC: Trump motion to dismiss 'Russiagate' case filed by DNC https://t.co/SdKjPsAtL9
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4 марта 2019 г.
"In this case, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) seeks to litigate and explain away its candidate's [Hillary Clinton] defeat in the 2016 presidential election. The DNC thus alleges — unburdened by any actual facts — that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and a hodgepodge of others to publish materials stolen from the DNC's computer systems", the memo said.
On 4 March House Democrats announced that they were going to launch an extended probe into the US president by sending letters to 81 groups, people, and organisations associated with Donald Trump.
According to Vereycken, Trump's domestic anti-globalist agenda and apparent plans to reconsider US-Russia and US-China relations pose a serious challenge to the American "financial oligarchy" and their dollar-dominated global order.
When asked about Donald Trump's decision to suspend the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Moscow, the journalist presumed that the "unfortunate" move "was the result of [Trump's] giving in to the US China hawks since the treaty, as a bilateral treaty with Russia, limits US legal capacities to station missiles in the Indo-Pacific Ocean to contain China".
"While formally most people say that Trump, under pressure goes with China and avoids Russia, in reality, an unholy alliance between Henry Kissinger and Steve Bannon is trying to impose a 'Kissinger reverse' policy, i.e. the US becoming friends with Russia, to oppose what they see as 'the real problem': the fulgurate rise of China as the largest economic world power and leap-frogging champion of high tech", he opined.
The French politician continued by saying that the real problem of today's politics is the deadly prison of outdated "geopolitical" doctrines. According to him, the only way to break this vicious cycle is to finally dismiss the "Russiagate" and "scrap the entire palette of sanctions against nation states, notably those hitting North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and China".
The views and opinions expressed by the speaker and the contributor do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
