Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "Investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves engaged in "a cover-up."
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25-40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy-damage done not by an alleged "Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves.
Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history.
No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents-the so-called Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment-but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives.
Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, "Have no regrets."
Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "Cooperate with Russia" as somehow "Treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "Inappropriate contacts with Russia"-in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war.
The institutional costs of Russiagate are likely to be with us for even longer.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-real-costs-of-russiagate/
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25-40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy-damage done not by an alleged "Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves.
Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history.
No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents-the so-called Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment-but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives.
Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, "Have no regrets."
Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "Cooperate with Russia" as somehow "Treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "Inappropriate contacts with Russia"-in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war.
The institutional costs of Russiagate are likely to be with us for even longer.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-real-costs-of-russiagate/
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