Umair Haque Repackages RussiaGate, Tries to Fool Readers, Shames Self
- Haque claims there’s now proof that Russia elected Donald Trump in 2016, even though there’s zero evidence of such
- Haque tries to say RussiaGate was really the DNC Email leak and Podesta email leaks, even though both probably did not involve Russia
- Haque, in line with most partisan Democrats, refuse to look at obvious reasons for 2016 election loss
OUR RATING: Journalistic Malpractice. Even Salon.com is ashamed.
Indicted Outlet: Umair Haque | Medium | Link | Archive | July 15, 2021
Umair Haque is a discredited peddler of misinformation and various conspiracy theories.
The fact he has 167k followers [1] should tell you something about how prone blue America is to believing this kind of repeated trash as long as its delivered nice and comfy to validate their various biases and prejudices.
When I wrote ‘blue America believes this kind of repeated trash as long as its delivered in a nice and comfy way to validate their various biases and prejudices’ for some reason my Alexa started playing NPR.
Haque is like a one-man NPR barfing out neoliberal conspiracy theories. The only surprise is that he doesn’t have a sitcom on ABC or an anchor job at CBS yet.
He doesn’t disappoint by trying to validate the discredited Russiagate conspiracy theory with an online file dump of Russian documents purporting to show that Moscow made Trump President in 2016, “and it’s the greatest scandal in American history!”
Cue the scary music!
Major Violations:
- Lying
- Superficial Investigation
- Opinion as Fact
There was this brief period in December 2016, it only lasted a week or two, where the modern political left tried to do some soul-searching about why they had lost middle America in the 2016 election. [2] They talked briefly about the loss of manufacturing, [3] about trade deals that bankrolled Wall Street and bankrupted Main Street, they talked about why they couldn’t effectively talk to white males anymore. [4]
Then for 48 hours they remembered that Hillary had never once visited Wisconsin. [5]
And then that period of introspection ended once they had the most convenient and stupid conspiracy theory ever devised: Evil Putin used warlord magik and used the mysteries of the Czars to make Trump the illegitimate President.
When leftists picture Putin, this is who they’re really thinking of.
After years of investigation, millions spent, the government basically paralyzed from 2017-2020, the best we could end up with is… the damned Russians bought $200k worth of BLM and Texas secessionist Facebook ads? [6][7]
And you know what they say about Russians and their tendency to make devious plans for every scenario.
NPR previously tried to extend this argument by pointing out that although only $160k was spent, that it means that a large number of activists were being talked to, about politics, during an election season and that resulted in something. [8]
Our TGP FactCheck MVP Phil Bump made a rundown of the Mueller investigation ‘by the numbers’ that shows… not a whole lot. [9] Time Magazine tried to ‘debunk’ the debunking of the Mueller Report, I guess we could call that ‘rebunking’ a conspiracy theory? [10] And all they had was that team Trump met with Russians to try and get info on Hillary, and the meme that Russia was responsible for the DNC Leaks, [11] even though it’s without a doubt that Seth Rich who leaked them. [12][13][14][15][16]
RussiaGate was a total fraud. [17]
Just as a matter of a kind refresher, the DNC Leaks were the ones that showed:
- The Dem primaries were rigged for Clinton against Sanders [18]
- The DNC was actively selling ambassadorships in exchange for donations [19]
- White House “Pride” events were just donor events in disguise [20]
- France joined Hillary and Obama’s illegal war in Libya because they wanted their gold
The DNC email leak was similar in time, but separate from, the leak of John Podesta’s emails. The DNC leaks were in July 2016 and the Podesta email leak was in March 2016. [21] The Podesta emails were the ones where the public was graced with the knowledge that John Podesta really liked having dinner with Satanists where they cooked human fluids into the meal.
Media actually tried the “invasion of privacy” line to protect Podesta from scrutiny. [22][23]
Now Russia got blamed for all of this. [24][25] And maybe they did some of this, but many of the non-US intelligence experts seem to agree that it is a very weak case to blame Russia. [26][27]
And if you are blaming Russia for influencing elections via email leaks, in a way you’re saying that the revelation of these truthful emails would affect US voting patterns in a way that is undesirable and artificial. Meaning that, it’s a bad thing that Americans get to know before an election that the illegal wars their sons and daughters get sent abroad to fight are really about gold, and the ambassadors who help steward those wars and conflicts were just the highest bidder.
So if people were repulsed with Hillary Clinton because of either the DNC email leak or the Podesta email leak, that was because they were upset at what she was really doing. The accuracy of the emails is not seriously in doubt and has not been seriously challenged.
At the time the media made all sorts of weirdo explanations and rationalizations about why they refused to report on the contents of the emails. On the one hand they said they were illegally obtained, which was a direct parallel to the Pentagon Papers and the Snowden releases which were also illegally obtained. Then they said they couldn’t be verified because they just came off the internet from sources unknown, yet many great journalism stories started with an anonymous tip. Then they said because it was such a huge leak, it wasn’t trustworthy because small things could be falsified within the documents that would be hard to catch. That excuse might be reasonable, but failing to report on them at all was conspicuous partisanship at the time. [28][29]
Media non-profits even alleged that reporting on these leaks were unpatriotic and treasonous by helping a foreign country’s espionage campaigns. [30]
The media even helped the DNC at the time to craft and massage their response to the leak. [31]
Hillary had a slew of email problems, having set up her own private ‘homebrew’ server to conduct US government business, in violation of federal classification rules, department procedure, and certainly a major conspiracy to defraud citizens from using the Freedom of Information Act to find out what their government was actually doing and how they were formulating policy. [32][33] Hillary’s email was: [email protected] and reports that the server was repeatedly attacked and compromised by China, among others, was quickly suppressed. [34][35]
But for some reason actually giving a foreign country access to the Secretary of State’s confidential communications in real-time wasn’t worthy of a proper investigation, but when Trump jokingly said that Russia should release all of Hillary’s emails, that was tantamount to treason. [36]
This is a lot of backstory for a simple fact-check, but it’ll become relevant.
Here’s how Haque starts his article:
On the one side have been those who argue, seeing the grim reality of a coup, destabilization, authoritarianism, that Trump was Russia’s man — a puppet President, installed by Putin. And on the other have been those who argued back — often abusively and derisively — that such a thing was absurd, that Russia had nothing to do with the Trump, and believing that was just a fantastical, foolish conspiracy theory. Who was right?
This is a false dichotomy. Haque is constructing straw men [37] to represent his opposition. I don’t think too many contend that Russia did not buy $166k of Facebook ads. That fact is not in question. As well, the Kremlin may have seen Trump as preferable over Hillary since Hillary was a chronic liar and warmonger who kept trying to go to war with Syria irrationally. [38][39]
If the Kremlin came to that position it might be naturally because of their actual strategic interests and not because one candidate was their puppet.
Can you imagine that Russia might want stable economic trade to grow its economy, a retreat on the militarization of Eastern Europe, and to preserve its relationships with Middle East rulers whom they have been friendly with for generations?
Let’s make up a country named Xanadu and ask if they had these two options on whom to support:
Option A: A lifetime government official. Starts illegal wars. Brags about killing foreign leaders. Along with former President husband, set up a ‘non-profit’ that got major corrupt donations in a pay-to-play scheme. Clearly above the law. Might invade your country, might shake you down for a billion, never can tell.
Option B: A real estate businessman from the nation’s largest city. Entertainer. Likes making deals and making money. Brags about everything. Not overtly hostile to your country.
Unless you were worried about Option A possibly adding you to their kill list, I think you’d safely choose Option B 100% of the time. That doesn’t mean that you have Option B under lock and key, it just means it’s someone sane you can negotiate with.
Here’s Haque’s next revelation:
Recently, a Kremlin insider did something unprecedented — he or she leaked the documents which appear to prove that Trump was indeed Putin’s man, a Russian plant and puppet. The documents lay out not just the Kremlin’s plan to install Trump, but its reasoning, goals, ambitions, and even methods.
So, to recap: all the DNC leaks and Podesta emails, those were all illegitimate and not worth reporting on because they were illegally obtained and impossible to source. Because they were a big leak, they were probably false. You certainly weren’t supposed to believe anything in THOSE leaks or report on THOSE leaks because they were bad.
But this one is good because reasons.
And if these documents lay out the Kremlin’s plan to “install Trump” it ought to be pretty specific on details and logistics.
Haque doesn’t just double down, he steals all the bases shortly thereafter when he writes:
Trump appears to really be and have been America’s first Manchurian Candidate — a President put in the White House by a foreign, hostile nation, for the explicit purpose of collapsing America from within.
These documents better be pretty. damn. good.
Haque then blames the media, which I’ll be honest with you here, I appreciated even though his motives were a little dodgy:
Yet it’s even more fantastical that American papers didn’t break and aren’t really covering this story — London’s Guardian is. So don’t take my word for it — I hesitate writing in this tone, but I have to. Just read the facts for yourself, because they’re not just damning, they’re utterly surreal.
And so you’re waiting for the show to begin, gimme gimme gimme that ‘utterly surreal’ …and Haque teases you again:
“All possible force” was to be used to propel a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump to the American Presidency. Trump was an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”. One on whom, by the way, the leaked papers confirm that Russia had an entire “appendix” of kompromat, compromising material, gained on earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.”
…At this point it all feels like clickbait. Even the nuns who voted for Donald Trump didn’t do so because he was the nicest guy, or the most moral, or the guy with the best marital track record. People voted for Trump because they could tell he would be able to withstand the media onslaught, he didn’t seem personally corrupt, and he was a fighter. Many knew Trump had compromising material in his past and they just didn’t care.
The nuns are voting for the serial adulterer because they believed the alternatives were worse. Much worse.
There was enough ‘compromising material’ about Trump in the New York Times over the past decade that if the Russians got more than that, they were probably wasting rubles.
Haque then skips any logistics and gives us the conclusion from the documents, and this is where I, and you, should get pissed off:
Hence, the conclusion: “it is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate [Trump’s] election to the post of US president.”
Then it spells out a “multilayered plan” across all of Russia’s spy agencies for doing it. “The papers appear to set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016,” writes the Guardian.
A few weeks after this exact security council meeting, the DNC’s servers were hacked by Russian intelligence, and thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails were released.
Okay, so there’s nothing new here, it’s just the same old rehashed baloney from 2016 about Russia really wants to use its dark magick for Trump and is going to get a Russian hacker to dump Hillary, the DNC’s, and Podesta’s emails.
pictured: the alleged Russian hacker responsible for the DNC leaks and the Podesta email leaks
That’s the whole scam, repackaged. It’s “Russia did the DNC Leaks and Podesta’s emails” regurgitated to us. How those leaks influenced the US elections, they don’t even bother to say.
This is opinion presented as fact. It’s also an enormous misrepresentation.
If you go to the original reporting, here’s the best theory the Guardian has about HOW Russia actually accomplished this goal:
There are paragraphs on how Russia might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says.
So… Facebook ads. Haque is lying.
How Russia dumping John Podesta’s emails about spirit cooking caused Hillary to avoid campaigning in Wisconsin? Left to your imagination.
Imagine if Russia had directed their proxies to buy voting machine companies, or maybe invest a few hundred million months before the election through proxies in Switzerland, and those companies had a ‘data loss’ on election night where the critical difference in five swing states were added to Trump’s totals over Hillary clearly giving him a fraudulent victory. That would have been interesting! And it would have actually been a plan that could be tracked, traced, and analyzed. With the RussiaGate theory, there’s no plan. There’s no clear actions that resulted in an outcome.
Haque just takes it as a given that you are totally amazed and enthralled with his revelation of news that is five years past its expiration date:
Did you get all that? Masters of spy fiction like Robert Ludlum barely attempted writing a plot this audacious — or ridiculous. The story of Jason Bourne has nothing on Russia literally putting a madman in the White House — successfully. This leak is staggering in its implications. The President of the United States wasn’t just a fascist, an authoritarian, or a sexual predator. He was also a puppet and a spy.
Haque then, again, makes a claim that it’s just so OBVIOUS that Trump was a Russian plant all-along:
Why did Trump soft-pedal relations with Russia? Why did he appear to be Putin’s lapdog, and that’s an insult to dogs? Why did he appear to give Russia everything it wanted?
None of the people who peddle these kind of wild conspiracy theories, this vile misinformation based on superficial investigations, even bother to grace their readers with even a cogent coherent theory as to how it worked. They also don’t bother to identify even one policy that served Russia’s interests. Was it stopping the ISIS charade in Syria? Was it asking NATO members to start paying their fair share into the alliance as they had always pledged but had never done? How did Russia benefit? Those kind of details would make the theory have to fit the facts, and of course they can’t because it’s all left-wing fantasyland.
This whole article and theory is a dumpster fire. It’s amazing so much time was spent by the media on it.
167k people really love reading trash, and Haque is all too willing to keep serving it.
OUR RATING: Journalistic Malpractice. Even Salon.com is ashamed.
Bibliography:
1 ] https://medium.com/@umairh/followers
2 ] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/trumps-road-to-victory/507203/
3 ] https://mashable.com/article/hillary-clinton-knows-she-has-a-problem-with-blue-collar-voters/
4 ] https://www.salon.com/2016/11/19/neoliberalisms-epic-fail-the-reaction-to-hillary-clintons-loss-exposed-the-impotent-elitism-of-liberalism/
5 ] https://ecommons.udayton.edu/pol_fac_pub/116/
6 ] https://www.cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gallery/
7 ] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/russia-facebook-ads-2016_n_5af60946e4b00d7e4c1a9a34
8 ] https://www.npr.org/2019/04/24/716374421/fact-check-russian-interference-went-far-beyond-facebook-ads-kushner-described
9 ] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/13/a-summary-of-the-fruit-of-the-mueller-investigation-to-date/
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11 ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak
12 ] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/assange-implies-murdered-dnc-staffer-was-wikileaks-source
13 ] https://thenewamerican.com/alex-newman-roger-stone-seth-rich-murdered-dnc-wikileaks/
14 ] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/exclusive-documents-released-seth-rich-case-indicate-federal-investigator-claims-saw-read-emails-rich-wikileaks/
15 ] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/boom-hacker-kim-dotcom-knew-seth-rich-wikileaks-source-involved/
16 ] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/07/kim-dotcom-i-was-warned-not-to-turn-over-seth-rich-evidence-to-mueller/
17 ] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
18 ] https://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/8/julian_assange_leaked_dnc_emails_shows
19 ] https://dailycaller.com/2016/07/24/leaked-dnc-documents-show-plans-to-reward-big-donors-with-federal-appointments/
20 ] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/dnc-wikileaks-emails-fundraising.html
21 ] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/10/13/four-juiciest-leaked-podesta-emails/92014368/
22 ] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-podesta-email-leak_b_581ced82e4b0aac62484677f
23 ] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/on-wikileaks-journalism-and-privacy-reporting-on-the-podesta-archive-is-an-easy-call/
24 ] https://apnews.com/dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a/Inside-story:-How-Russians-hacked-the-Democrats’-emails
25 ] https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-podesta-and-the-russians-1477262565
26 ] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/amp/Ex-British-ambassador-WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html
27 ] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/if-russia-hacked-podesta-then-russia-knew-hillary_b_586f6742e4b0a5e600a789c7
28 ] https://fair.org/home/nothing-to-see-here-is-pundit-takeaway-on-dnc-leaks/
29 ] https://www.inquisitr.com/3349691/wikileaks-hack-proves-mainstream-medias-collusion-with-dnc-in-killing-bernie-sanders-campaign/
30 ] https://www.cjr.org/opinion/dnc_email_wikileaks_scandal_russia.php
31 ] https://www.dailysignal.com/2016/07/25/wikileaks-hack-exposes-democrat-media-bias/
32 ] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/234549-report-clinton-was-running-her-own-email-server
33 ] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160623/09170034795/emails-show-hillary-clintons-email-server-was-massive-security-headache-set-up-to-route-around-foia-requests.shtml
34 ] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/08/hillary-clinton-email-server-cyberattacks-china-germany
35 ] https://www.newsweek.com/report-hackers-china-tried-attack-clintons-server-381308
36 ] https://time.com/4426272/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-russia-emails/
37 ] https://ses.edu/logical-fallacies-101-straw-man/
38 ] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-and-the-s_b_9231190
39 ] https://time.com/4514931/david-perdue-syria-refugee-crisis/
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