Fake newsers: John Solomon and Aaron Maté

Let's begin with a great recent tweet...

please tell me again how a bunch of lifelong Republicans in the FBI colluded with Ukraine and Hillary to frame Russia and lose her own election so that Trump would win so that then the deep state could take him down because fuck yes that all makes perfect sense to me derpity derp

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) November 16, 2019

This outrageous conspiracy theory is being promulgated by two "journalists" tasked with selling what is basically the same bullshit to different audiences. Both of them have contrived to work for "real" news outlets not associated with the pro-Trump right.

The unwisdom of Solomon. The first of these pseudojournalists is John Solomon, who has been exposed as a conduit for Rudy Giuliani's pal, Lev Parnas -- who is himself a conduit for crime boss Dmitry Firtash, who works with Putin.

If you're interested learning more about Solomon, start your research here.

Solomon depicted a second innocent victim of these conspiracies in addition to Trump: Ukrainian oligarch Dimitry Firtash, “a major target of the Soros group.” Firtash — close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian mafia kingpin Semion Mogilevich, and a chief financier of former Ukrainian president Yanukovych — is fighting extradition to avoid U.S. federal charges of bribery and racketeering. Solomon wrote that Robert Mueller’s investigation was attempting to frame Firtash to get “some dirt on Donald Trump,” but that the case against Firtash was “falling apart.” Solomon stated, “The oligarch’s defense team told me that Firtash rejected the deal because he didn’t have credible information or evidence.”

The State Department labeled the charges in Solomon’s initial article about Yovanovitch “an outright fabrication.” Later, the Ukrainian prosecutor Solomon quoted as his source, Yuri Lutsenko, was dismissed from his position and disavowed Solomon’s reporting, saying that Hunter Biden “did not violate anything” and now said that his statements to Solomon about a do-not-prosecute list were false. Lutsenko is now under criminal investigation for abuse of power. Meanwhile, the effort to extradite Firtash to face corruption charges continues.

Whenever a "journalist" offers evidence-free blather about Soros, you know you're dealing with disinformation. The important point is that Solomon has defended Firtash, a crook who attained power working for Semion Mogilevich, the most brutal gang leader in the history of the modern world.

A side note about Mogilevich. Among other crimes, Mogilevich runs a prostitution ring which supplies underaged girls to powerful men, who thus become subject to blackmail. (You should not presume that the men know ahead of time that the girls are underaged.) I have long believed that Epstein became rich handling the finances of Mogilevich, Firtash and other oligarch/gangsters -- and that Epstein's girls (at least the ones with eastern European accents) were actually supplied by Mogilevich.

Aaron Maté worked for Democracy Now and is a writer at The Nation, once a proud left-wing institution, now BernieBro central. I consider him the new H.A. Goodman -- a Trumper in disguise, infiltrating the left via the Bernie byway.

For quite a while now, Maté's main mission in life has been twofold:

1. He poisons lefties against the Mueller probe.

2. He assails the established FACT that Russia hacked the Democrats in 2016.

Relentlessly, Maté has denounced not just the claim of collusion but the very concept of Russian interference. That's just a conspiracy theory, sayeth Maté.

You may ask: But didn't the entire intelligence community confirm that Russia did it?

Maté has an answer: The entire IC was led astray by Evil John Brennan. That was also the scenario favored by Roger Stone.

The "Blame Brennan" theory is laid in this lengthy Maté piece for RealClearInvestigations. I suggest that you read it (or at least skim it), though you definitely should not believe it.

That piece offers a very clear glimpse of the William Barr/John Durham disinfo extravaganza that is about to hit. Indeed, I would not be surprised to learn that Barr leaked information to Maté.

(Incidentally, there are increasing calls for William Barr's impeachment. Bravo! His recent addresses to the Federalist Society indicate that the guy really is coming unglued.)

Maté's argument makes sense only if you can accept the image of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people -- in government, journalism and academia -- engaging in a massive plot to defame poor, innocent Vladimir Putin. In Maté's upside-down universe, that ridiculous narrative makes perfect sense. But if you say that Russia committed cyberwar on behalf of Donald Trump in 2016, Maté will scoff as if you had just reported a unicorn on the grassy knoll.

It's all a scam, says Maté. Never mind the fact that this "scam" has been certified as factual by the entire U.S. security establishment, by the Mueller team, by Congress, by members of the Trump administration itself, by foreign services, by evidence presented in court, and by God-knows-how-much reporting by real journalists.

Maté apparently thinks that those dozens and dozens of real journalists -- and their editors -- are all part of the conspiracy. This is Alex Jonesism at its tin foiliest.

His afore-cited article does not specifically endorse the "Ukraine did it" theory of the DNC hack. Nevertheless, that theory pervades the air like a bad odor. The "Ukraine did it" theory, which has been completely debunked, remains Trumpworld's preferred alternative to the "Russia did it" theory -- an alternative which can be traced right back to Russia. One commonly-heard variant holds that the DNC hacked itself (!!!) with Ukraine's help.

Marcy has spent a fair amount of time sparring with Maté. You may enjoy this thread.

Maté on Flynn. There's a lot to unpack in the above-linked article -- and once you unpack it, you can toss it into the garbage bin, right next to John Solomon's recycled Fir-trash. For now, I'd like to focus on this bit toward the end:

One early motivation may have been the intelligence community’s broad dislike of Flynn – Trump’s first national security adviser, who was one of the earliest targets of the collusion narrative.

Flynn had served as Obama’s head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, but fell out of favor by 2014, in part because of his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and the CIA's arming of anti-Assad militants in Syria. Obama had specifically warned Trump against hiring Flynn.

Oh, come off it. It wasn't Iran or Syria.

Actually, Flynn developed an unnervingly close (but probably not sexual) relationship with a Russian woman whom a lot of people consider spookier than a Christmas party at Scrooge's bachelor pad. This woman denies any link to the FSB; believe her if you feel so inclined. But even if you do, you have to look at the situation through the eyes of a counterintelligence specialist, who would naturally interpret the relationship as a probable honeytrap.

Counterintelligence does not require courtroom-quality evidence. Reasonable grounds for suspicion are enough to set off the alarm bells.

A longtime critic of the bureaucracy, Flynn earned particular enmity from Brennan’s CIA with an effort to create a new Pentagon spy organization, Foreign Policy reported in 2015.

Oh, that's just what we need: Another military-based spy shop, freshly created to promote theories that the professionals won't take seriously. We saw a few "new Pentagon spy organizations" spring up during the W administration. They helped give us the Iraq War.

When certain writers denounce "the bureaucracy," they mean "Anyone drawing a government check who is not 100 percent loyal to Putin and/or Trump." The word "bureaucracy" now has no other meaning.