Listen to a reading of this article:
Collusion author Luke Harding continues to receive mainstream traction authoring stories which generate headlines in influential media outlets around the world promoting his theory that Trump conspired with the Kremlin, despite the fact that both he and his theory have been completely and utterly discredited many times over.
The Guardian has published an article co-authored by Harding on “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents” which “suggest” that Russian officials had a conversation which delivers “apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president.”
“The paper refers to ‘certain events’ that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow,” says Harding with his two co-authors. “Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.”
“Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature,” the article reads, adding, “Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.”
Exclusive: Leaked Putin papers appear to show #Russia’s plot to put a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump into the White House – my story with @julianborger in Washington and @dansabbagh in London https://t.co/rfgD3IfAll
— Luke Harding (@lukeharding1968) July 15, 2021
Note the highly qualified language, an ever-present phenomenon in the thinly sourced Russiagate stories we were inundated with throughout the entirety of Trump’s presidency: “suggest”, “assessed to be”, “apparent”, “appearing to”, “seem to”.
Also note how Harding and company do not know what’s in the appendix referenced which supposedly elaborates on their most incendiary claim.
Also note how “Western intelligence agencies” are the authoritative sources behind these claims.
Beyond this, the actual document provided by The Guardian has come under scrutiny for containing numerous linguistic errors unlikely to have been made by native Russian speakers.
Then there’s the little itty bitty problem that the president who the authors claim was beholden to the Kremlin via kompromat was indisputably far more hawkish toward Moscow than both the president who preceded him and the president who replaced him. If Kremlin intelligence did indeed compromise Trump with blackmail, a claim for which the Mueller investigation found no evidence, then it was a very poor investment indeed as it clearly had no impact on US foreign policy.
But the most damning evidence of all against this claim is the fact that serial fabulist Luke Harding had anything to do with it.
This is after all the same reporter who authored The Guardian’s notorious 2018 claim that Trump crony Paul Manafort had meetings with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, an evidence-free claim that was clearly false from the moment it was published and discredited even further by the fact that the Mueller investigation found no evidence for it. The same author who was involved in publishing a WikiLeaks password which led to unredacted documents becoming public. The same author who was humiliatingly incapable of substantiating his allegations of Trump-Russia collusion when he finally encountered an interviewer who challenged him to defend the titular claim in his book, Collusion.
Luke Harding should not be able to find employment anywhere more influential than the far side of a cashier’s counter, yet here he is still getting his ridiculous stories published by one of the most influential news media outlets in the English-speaking world.
Given legitimacy by The Guardian‘s publication, other western media are picking up this transparently bogus story and hyping it through the roof, from the Daily Beast headline “Reported Kremlin Leak Appears to Confirm Existence of Trump ‘Kompromat’” to the Forbes headline “Trump Kompromat Claimed: Kremlin Documents Reportedly Show Putin Conspiring For Billionaire” to the Raw Story headline “‘The pee tape is real’: Critics claim Kremlin leak confirms ‘every awful thing said about Trump ends up being absolutely true’“.
These articles will generate plenty of clicks, and they will make sure mainstream liberals maintain their virulent hatred of Russia. What they will not do is help anyone form a truth-based worldview.
'The pee tape is real': Critics claim Kremlin leak confirms 'every awful thing said about Trump ends up being absolutely true' https://t.co/XxoDgOtkxW
— Raw Story (@RawStory) July 15, 2021
If you needed any more proof that western media does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, there you go. The news in our society exists not to create an informed populace but to preserve partisan worldviews which protect the interests of the imperialist oligarchic class.
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