Of Course Russia Did Nothing Wrong

The Noo Yuck Posthole (a Murdoch rag) is out beating the drum for a new Central Insane Asylum "report" that supposedly torpedoes the Russiagate investigations.  I'm not going link it because I refuse to platform bullshit.  DYOFR.  Needless to say it actually says nothing.  It once again claims the Steele Dossier was part of the basis for the intelligence conclusions drawn and "discloses" flaws in the investigations that have long been known and were rectified long before and final reports and indictments.

It's a bundle of rubbish.  First, anyone who still claims the Russiagate investigation was based on the Steele Dossier is not a serious person.  It was reviewed by intel agencies, it was dumped, it is click bait MAGAt mouth-breathers.  The final Intelligence Assessment in 2017 was not based on it, the 2018 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (which was Republican-controlled) was not based on it, and the July 2018 indictments of a dozen Russian intelligence officers were not based on it.  Second, it's long been known the investigation was rushed, and it's an old saying in the intel community that there's nothing more dangerous than a spy in a hurry (Cornwell didn't invent that line for Smiley's People.).  There was a reason they were rushed: They knew Trump was taking over and would deep six everything.  That doesn't change that the ultimate conclusions were based on a lot of digging through a lot of sources.

Finally, even the "serious" investigations from the Right run the gamut from the spurious to the scurrilous.  An example is Richard Sakwa's Deception.  Sakwa's objectivity is suspect out of the gate since he is one of those people who claims Russian attacks on the Caucasus and Ukraine were necessitated by Western aggression, ignoring centuries of Russian politically and religiously motivated aggression in those regions (Being of Polish descent, Sakwa really ought to know better.  But then he's a commentator for Russia Times and holds an honorary professorship at Moscow State University, so . . . .).

Deception really is kind of a mess.  Sakwa purports he's doing and intelligence and academic deep dive, but it is apparent he was more than peripherally involved with many of these people, institutions, and events.  Personal involvement with the intel being collected does not make for good analysis.  For example he downplays any involvement by the Valdai Club (and his own involvement in Valdai), even though FSB/GRU constantly run assets through Valdai.  Sakwa criticized the Mueller report for biased investigating (He makes the same claim about the Roger Stone investigation, and if you're white-washing that guy, you need to rethink your life.) because he did not run down all the details on the Steele Dossier and all the dirt Matt Taibbi and Julian Assange had supposedly dug up.  The thing about investigations in the real world, though, is that resources are limited.  If you have a line of investigation and it looks like there's no there there, you stop going there.  By the time Mueller started, the Steele Dossier had been debunked, and Taibbi's and Assange's choo-choos had already jumped the track, so what was the point.  There was no point.  And while there were plenty of exasperating things about Mueller's report, most of the criticism Sakwa levels is actually the result of Bob Barr immediately flushing the report down an industrial commode.  But that would be contrary to Sakwa's narrative since it would indicate Putin in fact runs Trump.