Exactly five years ago, Donald Trump won the American presidential election unexpectedly for many
This particularly took the liberal public by surprise – both in the US and in countries on the other side of the Atlantic. After a brief period of frustration and confusion, they clung to the first and most convenient explanation for Trump’s success. It had nothing to do with the fact that his Democratic opponents had run a truly botched campaign, where they did not even fail to arrogantly call half of the electorate “untidy”. And not with the obvious voter fatigue of the stagnant status quo within the Washington establishment. No, Trump’s victory, according to the progressive public, was due precisely to the fact that he was helped in the election by the “conniving Russians”.
The agenda of “Russian meddling” in the American electoral process had its origins as early as six months before Election Day 2016. Already that summer, “Russian hackers” were accused by Democrats of hacking into the email servers of the Democratic Party’s national committee. They immediately named Trump as the beneficiary, accusing him of almost betraying American national interests in favour of Russia in order to come to power. After the election and Trump’s victory, this flood of accusations turned into an avalanche. It emerged that the FBI was investigating a “Russian connection” to Trump’s campaign. And then the notorious dossier of retired British spy Christopher Steele appeared on Buzzfeed, a liberal publication that does not shy away from publishing all sorts of “gossip”.
The dossier listed scandalous details of Trump’s “ties” to Russia. Steele accused the newly elected US president of working for Russian intelligence for at least three to five years. Trump was allegedly blackmailed with compromising videos of him partying with prostitutes in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Moscow, where he stayed in 2013. Steele was convinced that Russian intelligence agencies were secretly funding Trump’s campaign and providing him with some secret information about Democratic activities. And this was done in order to “rock the boat” in the US and increase controversy throughout the Western world.
Steele’s allegations were so serious – and so unsubstantiated – that even the FBI, which had hired the British spy to look into Trump’s past, soon rushed to disassociate itself from his dossier. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into Rashagate eventually came to the obvious conclusion that no compromising or illegitimate connections between Trump and Russia existed. That would have been the end of Rashagate, but at this point, Trump himself, furious about being indiscriminately accused of working for Russia for years, ordered a new investigation into who was behind the conspiracy theory.
The new investigation was taken over by John Durham, a well-known American prosecutor from Connecticut, who is famous for fighting corruption in the FBI. It began to bear fruit back in 2020, although few paid attention amidst the tumultuous election battle, BLM pogroms and the pandemic. The first to worry were the real authors of the Steele dossier, who ran to give interviews to the liberal press in order to get their point of view across before they were put on trial.
In the summer of 2020, we learned of the existence of a man called Igor Danchenko. He is a lad from Perm who moved to the US to study. After graduating from the University of Louisiana and Georgetown, Danchenko took a job at the Brookings Institution, one of the key think tanks under the wing of the Democrat Party in Washington. It was there that he was sought out by Christopher Steele, who was tasked with gathering dirt on Trump. At the same time, he was working with the US intelligence community, i.e. actually working for the government, and the Fusion GPS PR firm, which was engaged in political technology support for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The result was a very revealing amalgamation of the bureaucracy, intelligence services and party apparatchiks into a single liberal nomenclature with the aim of preventing Trump from taking power at all costs.
In the summer of 2016, at Steele’s request, Danchenko began paying frequent visits to Russia, where, by his own admission, in conversations with drunken friends in Moscow hangouts, he “collected” key items on the “Russian dossier”. The most salacious detail – about Trump and prostitutes in the hotel room – was “hinted at” by Danchenko, and then he simply made it up himself. That is how Russia’s liberal side, viewed ironically by many, sitting in a conditional Jean-Jacques, drinking whisky, concocted a scam on a global scale which would then be looked upon by progressive public on both sides of the Atlantic for years on end.
Of course, not without a “hefty profit” for themselves – after all, it was Rashagate that made the “Russian question” one of the most pressing issues in American politics for several years. And to create an artificially high demand for the “intellectual services” of the representatives of this very little community from all sorts of think tanks – be it the notorious Brookings or the Atlantic Council and Stanford. The collective “Parkhomburo” was able to effectively lobby their business interests by settling in these councils and selling expensive “analytics” on “Russian influence” in Western countries.
Danchenko also had a peculiar assistant called Olga Galkina, also from Perm. They went to the same school. She later moved to Cyprus, where she was picked up for the “Russian dossier”. It was Galkina who accused “Russian hackers” of hacking into the Democratic Party’s server in the summer of 2016: it was allegedly done by a Cypriot firm, from which she was fired. Now these notorious “Perm School” figures have been dragged in for questioning. Danchenko has been charged with perjury, although in reality he should have been tried for trivial fraud.
Danchenko is not the first defendant in the Durham investigation. The recent arrest of Michael Sussmann, a former prosecutor from Washington, D.C., resonated greatly. A few months before the 2016 election, Sussmann had approached his contacts at the FBI with information that Trump Tower allegedly housed a secret server through which Trump’s staff was communicating with Alfa Bank representatives for some reason.
During his testimony, Sussmann insisted that he was an unbiased witness to what happened and simply wanted the FBI to investigate Trump’s “collusion” with Russia. In reality, as Durham’s lawyers have established, he was of course hired by Clinton’s staff at the time and used personal connections to pit security agencies against her Trump opponent.
He even openly discussed in emails with various IT people how fake requests could be set up between Trump’s email server and Alfa Bank. And then uncover it themselves by solemnly accusing Trump of “collusion” with Russia. There are decent sentences in US law for such falsification of crimes.
Sussmann then also arranged for the details of the scandal to be published on the website of the Democrat-loyal publication Slate on the very eve of the election. When this happened, Clinton’s staff immediately announced that there was a “direct link” between Trump and Russia. Clinton aide Jake Sullivan – now Biden’s national security adviser – stood out.
The criminal case against FBI agent Kevin Clinesmith was no less landmark. He was found to have forged documents sent to a court to obtain permission to organize surveillance of Trump’s staff. The scandal, dubbed “SpyGate”, was long denied by the liberal public – until an independent Durham investigation found that Trump was indeed being illegally spied on by the FBI while he was an opposition White House candidate during the Obama administration era.
The Rashgate scam was as big as the Theranos scam or the big pyramid schemes. It simply had more to do with information and media, not economics – but the damage to US reality from Rashgate was more than significant. Public confidence in the intelligence agencies and the expert community, which haphazardly fear America of a “Russian trail” – and the institution of the presidency at the same time – will hardly ever be restored. It also dealt a severe blow to the legitimacy of the institution of elections, which was reinforced four years later by the “postal” voting scandals.
But for immediate purposes – an image attack on Trump that tied his hands for two years – Rashgate worked well. And, of course, it was successful in advancing the specific business interests of the emigrant “party bureau”. True, the sad experience of Igor Danchenko and his cohorts shows that if anything, they will be held accountable for their part in the perennial campaign to disinform the American public.
Malek Dudakov