For more than two years the mainstream media, various US politicians, and eager anti-Trump bloggers, hyped the conspiracy theory about Russian meddling. They claimed that Russia had somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get the billionaire elected.
Massive investigations, paid for by the American taxpayer, were launched and every rumor, irrelevant detail and fabrication were scrutinized by Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation.
But after two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long maintained the fake narrative that special counsel Mueller and Congressional investigators would somehow unearth some evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians.
Now, Justice Department and Congressional sources say they believe that Mueller is close to wrapping up his investigation with nothing to show for it.
With zero evidence to support the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, Mueller could only charge minor figures for unrelated tax issues or for lying to his investigators about some irrelevant details. He has found nothing at all to support the dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.
Russiagate nevertheless resulted in a lot of damage, as military contractors tried to push for more NATO aggression against Russia. One victim of the conspiracy was Maria Butina, an innocent Russian citizen, who was held in solitary confinement until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.
An obviously fake “Dirty Dossier” about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence and proof of nefarious deals, while a Russian click-bait company was accused of manipulating the US electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media.
The Russian clickbait company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Peterburg, supposedly manipulated the electorate, but the explanations by the investigators made little sense, as the IRA activities had almost nothing to do with the election.
It used had Facebook and Twitter posts to attract views on websites filled with puppy pictures in order to sell advertisement and promotions on these sites. The Wall Street Journal reported that “[R]oughly 25 percent of the ads were never shown to anyone. That’s because advertising auctions are designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as a result.”
This was obvious from the factual content of the news and the various malicious “opinions” from the anti-Trump “experts”, that the narrative had been invented to show Russia as an adversary.
The Mueller investigation finally indicted several of the IRA’s officers over minor financial transactions and this was held up as a confirmation of the political nature of the IRA’s activities. But all the mainstream reporting ignored the fact that Mueller had confirmed the commercial intent of the IRA.
Point 95 of the Mueller indictment of the IRA in fact noted: “Defendants […] used the accounts to receive money from real US persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the organization-controlled social media pages. Defendants […] typically charged certain US merchants and US social media sites […] per post for promotional content.”
Over three decades as a government prosecutor, Robert Mueller has also been credited with keeping the FBI intact after the events of September 11, 2001. Before that, he led the case to prosecute the Lockerbie bombers.
In the latter investigation, Mueller claimed that a Swiss firm supplied a series of MST-13 timers to Libya, who in return used them to time the IED on Pan Am flight 103, but the firm MEBO has denied that the device that brought down the airliner contained a genuine MST-13 timer.
They maintained that the MST-13 timer fragment allegedly found in the ruins of the aircraft in Scotland was counterfeit.
