Hot Trump story gets little media attention
This season of “Homeland,” the TV espionage thriller that continues to grip me, is particularly dark and twisted. But it has nothing on real life, as President Trump’s regime and the deep state continue to wrap their oily tentacles around each other’s throats. In season six of the Showtime series, brilliant bipolar spook Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) thinks she has safely escaped the CIA vortex, only to be dragged into the whirlpool of a violent Washington power struggle that pits a female president-elect (yes, the show’s writers were just as fooled by Hillary Clinton’s “inevitability” as the rest of us) against a ruthless CIA faction aligned with a vast Breitbart News-type fake news operation. Nuclear peace in the Middle East hangs in the balance. Hohum. Like I said, art pales before reality in today’s Washington.
There’s so much political drama and
intrigue unfolding by the hour in the nation’s capital that not even news junkies can keep up with it. In the latest reality episode of Trump’s Washington, FBI Director James Comey emerged as the liberal media’s hero. The towering, 6-foot-8 lawman is now portrayed as the only one with the power to bring down the clownish, orange-haired villain — by laying bare the truth about his corrupt pact with Russian archenemy Vladimir Putin. Now that’s entertainment!
But sorry, I’m not buying this story line. James Comey? The same wily Washington operator who tipped the election to Trump in the final days of the presidential race by reviving Clinton’s email issues? He’s no hero of mine.
Comey’s belated focus on the Russia-Trump connection strikes some Washington observers as a blatant effort to deflect the spotlight from his own role in throwing the election to Trump. Recently I spoke with Dennis Kucinich, whom I bumped into at a Berkeley party in honor of progressive journalist Robert Scheer. Kucinich, who served 16 years in Congress and twice ran for president as the Bernie Sanders-type candidate of his day, has seen it all in politics.
As the youngest mayor in America, he was run out of Cleveland by banks and mobsters when he refused to sell the city’s municipal utility to private interests. “I was lucky to get out alive — they tried to kill me twice,” said Kucinich, who has just finished writing a memoir about his wild days in the city on the fiery Cuyahoga.
“I know from my own experience in politics how important the final lap of the election is — when you drop a bombshell in the last days of the campaign, it can have enormous impact,” Kucinich said. “The Russians didn’t do that — Jim Comey did. I don’t know what you’d call that, but where I come from, when a secret police agency intervenes in the presidential election process, we call that fascism. Comey has a lot to answer for.”
But the media has a short attention span. In November, Newsweek called for Comey to be not just fired, but run out of Washington on a rail as “unfit for public service.” But last week, the magazine ran an article praising his honesty and “transparency” and claiming that he had tried to blow the whistle on Russia’s interference in the U.S. election back in July — only to be blocked by the timid Obama administration. Comey’s PR offensive is clearly producing impressive results — from Washington scoundrel to hero in just months!
But not all the media has jumped on the Comey bandwagon. If you want to read the most fascinating new angle about the Trump-RussiaFBI drama, you should check out WhoWhatWhy.org. Last week, the spunky investigative publication broke a major story about the Russia shadow play, reporting that Comey chose not to tell all about the Trump-Moscow connection during the U.S. presidential race “because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.”
But if the FBI can’t reveal the sordid details, WhoWhatWhy does, with a reporting team that included publication founder Russ Baker, a respected investigative journalist, and former Village Voice Executive Editor Jonathan Z. Larsen. The article reveals a fascinating world where mobsters and financial hustlers conducted business out of Trump Tower suites, brokering deals that often led back to Semion Mogilevich, a Russian crime kingpin closely connected to Putin whom one FBI official described as “the boss of bosses.” Some of these deals, reports the WhoWhatWhy team, clearly benefited Trump, whose shaky empire was rescued by a pipeline of Russian credit and investment in the early 2000s.
The shady activity at Trump Tower was closely monitored by the FBI’s New York office, according to Baker and Larsen. But the bureau doesn’t emerge as exactly heroic in the reporters’ article. Two of the FBI agents who investigated the corrupt business operations centered in Trump Tower later went to work as private security contractors for the Trump presidential campaign.
And then there’s the million-dollar question of why Comey chose to sit on this explosive investigation into Trump’s financial dependence on Russian mobsters and oligarchs. Once again, the FBI director — an official who is supposed to be scrupulously above partisan politics — chose to play his shadowy Washington game rather than informing the American people.
Strangely, the media have not jumped all over the WhoWhatWhy story, despite its ravenous appetite for all things Trump and Russia. Maybe it’s because the story doesn’t make Comey, the new liberal hero, look good. Baker thinks it’s because the media “has a hard time handling anything complicated.” He wrote an opinion piece summarizing the story for the Hill and hopes this will attract the attention of congressional investigators such as the Bay Area’s own Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has emerged as a point man on the Trump probe.
Washington is such a “wilderness of mirrors” these days — in the T.S. Eliot phrase made famous by CIA counterintelligence wizard James Jesus Angleton. Everyone is thought to be pursuing a secret agenda. But Baker said that his investigative team is not out to vilify Russia or expose Comey — they simply want to get at the truth. “We’re journalists — we’re just doing our jobs.”