Sorting Out the Russia Mess

However, even an article in The New York Times, which has aggressively pushed the Russia-gate "scandal" from the beginning, noted the evidentiary holes that followed from that point.

The Times' Scott Shane wrote: "A crucial detail is still missing: Whether and when Mr. Papadopoulos told senior Trump campaign officials about Russia's possession of hacked emails. And it appears that the young aide's quest for a deeper connection with Russian officials, while he aggressively pursued it, led nowhere."

Shane added, "the court documents describe in detail how Mr. Papadopoulos continued to report to senior campaign officials on his efforts to arrange meetings with Russian officials... the documents do not say explicitly whether, and to whom, he passed on his most explosive discovery -- that the Russians had what they considered compromising emails on Mr. Trump's opponent.

"J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon official who worked for the Trump campaign as a national security adviser and helped arrange the March 31 foreign policy meeting, said he had known nothing about Mr. Papadopoulos' discovery that Russia had obtained Democratic emails or of his prolonged pursuit of meetings with Russians."

Reasons to Doubt

If prosecutor Mueller had direct evidence that Papadopoulos had informed the Trump campaign about the Clinton emails, you would assume that the proof would have been included in Monday's disclosures. Further, since Papadopoulos was flooding the campaign with news about his Russian outreach, you might have expected that he would say something about how helpful the Russians had been in publicizing the Democratic emails.

The absence of supporting evidence that Papadopoulos conveyed his hot news on the emails to campaign officials and Mifsud's insistence that he knew nothing about the emails would normally raise serious questions about Papadopoulos's credibility on this most crucial point.

At least for now, those gaps represent major holes in the storyline. But Official Washington has been so desperate for "proof" about the alleged Russian "election meddling" for so long, that professional skepticism has been unwelcome in most media outlets.

There is also another side of the story that rarely gets mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media: that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has repeatedly denied that he received the two batches of purloined Democratic emails -- one about the Democratic National Committee and one about Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta -- from the Russians. While it is surely possible that the Russians might have used cutouts to pass on the emails, Assange and associates have suggested that at least the DNC emails came from a disgruntled insider.

Also, former U.S. intelligence experts have questioned whether at least one batch of disclosed emails could have come from an overseas "hack" because the rapid download speed is more typical of copying files locally onto a memory stick or thumb drive.

What I was told by an intelligence source several months ago was that Russian intelligence did engage in hacking efforts to uncover sensitive information, much as U.S. and other nations' intelligence services do, and that Democratic targets were included in the Russian effort.

But the source said the more perplexing question was whether the Kremlin then ordered release of the data, something that Russian intelligence is usually loath to do and something that in this case would have risked retaliation from the expected winner of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton.

But such questions and doubts are clearly not welcome in the U.S. mainstream media, most of which has embraced Mueller's acceptance of Papadopoulos's story as the long-awaited "smoking gun" of Russia-gate.

Next Page  1  |  2

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).