Gareth Porter, an early critic of Russiagate and the accusations of Russian spying and collusion with Wikileaksâ Julian Assange looks at the Mueller Report and finds little to change his opinion.
He expects the issue will still hang on, providing a distraction from the reality that requires our attention.
He points out that Russia had the ability and the motive to do what it has been accused in the Mueller Report as doing, given the critical intervention by experienced American electoral consultants in the Russian election of 1996 which enabled the incumbent Boris Yeltsin to come from a single digit in the polls to eke out a re-election victory about which the perpetrators later bragged.
But what the US intelligence agencies brought to the table regarding the Russian connection was not based on evidence that could be demonstrated in court but simply their opinion, as Mueller acknowledged.
Porter justifies the efforts of Russia to make contacts with the incoming Trump administration on the easily understood basis that it hoped to improve ties with the US which had dropped to a new low after the US generated coup in Ukraine and Russiaâs annexation of Crimea.
Porter is deeply concerned over the threat the intel agencies together with the media pose to democracy when the exposure of the sabotage of the Sanders campaign by the DNC is considered worse than the sabotage itself.(more to come).