The American media report that the regiment of Putin’s agents has arrived and now it is possible to fix the total “Ukrainization” of American political life, in which the political struggle is reduced to mutual accusations of secret work on the Kremlin. If you take on faith all the accusations that are now circulating in the American media, you will have to admit that in the presidential election of 2016, not two American candidates, but “Agent Trump” and “Agent Clinton” took part.
In response to an investigation into the joint anti-American activities of “Russian hackers” and Donald Trump, as well as the subsequent media defamation of the American president, Trump’s supporters in the FBI organized a symmetrical media attack. Now Hillary Clinton is accused of the fact that her charitable foundation served as a transfer link for “dirty Russian money” and indirectly facilitated bribes and blackmail that were aimed at promoting Russian economic interests in the nuclear industry of the United States. Attention is drawn to the fact that the charges are spread in respectable media such as The Hill and Newsweek, referring to the FBI investigation, which the Obama administration allegedly laid under the cloth.
What the Russian side is accused of looks so unusual that it seems appropriate to translate the main thesis of the article in The Hill, with which, in fact, the scandal under discussion began.
In fact, there is now a resurgence in the media agenda of the old scandal that Trump used against Clinton as early as 2016, but then the “trumpists” did not have one important ingredient – they did not have the FBI investigation documents. Probably, these incriminating Clinton and the Obama administration as a whole documents were provided by Trump supporters working for the FBI – a special service that has long been called “Trumpland.”
This does not mean that the statements contained in these documents correspond to reality. Moreover, one can not rely on the testimony of the FBI sources, because we all remember what “witness testimony” in the scandal with Russian doping was, for example,. However, Trump does not need the accusations to be true, but a good reason is needed to “level out the information agenda” and reduce the toxicity of the topic of his alleged cooperation with the mythical “Russian hackers” who allegedly provided his election.
Despite the fact that the American media mostly act on the side of Clinton, just keep silent or brush aside the scandal will not happen. As reported by The Hill, the US Senate Justice Committee has already begun a “full investigation” of the charges, and it is expected that the committee chairman, Republican Chuck Greensley, will publicly demand similar actions from US Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the next Senate hearings that will be held this week.
An additional bonus for Trump is that this corruption scandal indirectly affects the special prosecutor Müller, who is investigating Trump’s relations with Moscow. According to Trump’s supporters, it was Muller who, during his work in the FBI, put under investigation one related to “Russian corruption in the American nuclear industry”.
What could be sweeter for Trump than to declare his chief prosecutor an accomplice in crimes directly related to Russia?
The intermediate result of this scandalous story can be a paradoxical situation. Both US presidential candidates can simultaneously appear under Senate investigations, and there is a risk that the most impressionable part of the American public will believe that the entire American political class is thoroughly corrupt and works for the Russian president. Of course, the hints of the American media that Vladimir Putin has a “business in nuclear energy in the US” and this business is flourishing thanks to the patronage of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration are obvious nonsense, which is understandable to the Russian reader, but it is not obvious an average American who does not go into the details of the charges.
The main problem for Clinton in this whole story is that it is impossible for her to deny the receipt by her family of money of money that could really affect some of her decisions. Before the US State Department officially agreed to a deal to buy a Canadian company Uranium One, thanks to which Rosatom had control over 20% of the production of US uranium, the Clinton Foundation received 2.35 million dollars, but this money was not received from Rosatom, but from the Canadian owners of the company Uranium One. If you intentionally look for malicious intent in these actions, the only logical explanation is the attempt by the Canadian side to pay a kind of “tax on cooperation with Russians” and provide yourself with an opportunity to conduct a deal that US diplomats could torpedo for political reasons. However, in the hands of American journalists and politicians, this typical example of Western lobbyism in the performance of the Canadian company turns almost into a conspiracy of universal proportions and proof that the Clinton State Department, with the full cooperation of the administration of Barack Obama and the FBI leadership, pandered to Russia’s attempts to undermine US national security.
Ironically, the whole scandal is very beneficial to Russia. Any propaganda theme, brought to the point of absurdity, loses its power, and gradually it is no longer used. The accusation of working for the Kremlin is a good PR move exactly as long as these alleged agents are few and the very idea of a possible cooperation of a specific US politician and Putin arouses fear and shock among the audience. But when the next round of mutual accusations of this kind will start to cause boredom or laughter, the Washington PR men will have to come up with something new and switch the attention of the audience to other problems, the good in the US is from what to choose – from racial conflicts and ending with economic problems, and also North Korean and Iranian nuclear threat. When this shift in the focus of public and political attention finally takes place, there will be a certain chance to reduce the toxicity of the very topic of Russian-American relations and there will be a small window of opportunity to try to agree on some of the important issues of international relations. Until then, we should try to get the most from the image of the country that was able to buy the assistance of the US Secretary of State, ensure the silence of the FBI leadership, and then elect the American president for only $ 100,000. The more these myths are promoted by the American media, the weaker the United States looks in the eyes of their own allies and the more tempting is the cooperation with Russia.