FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Stephen Cohen Exposes ‘Anti-Trump Russiagate Allegations’ as ‘Gravest Threat to Security’
Jan. 17, 2019 (EIRNS)—In his Jan. 16 article in The Nation, entitled “Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens To End Superpower Diplomacy,” whose kicker reads, “Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia,” New York University Professor Emeritus Stephen Cohen documents the flood of “ever-more frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship—why mince words and call it ‘collusion’?—with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.” Much of his argument, he stresses, is spelled out in his new book, War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.
Cohen asks, why is there now such a wild anti-Trump frenzy, which he appropriately calls “cult-like commentary.” Perhaps, he suggests, it’s because Russiagate promoters in high places “are concerned that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will not produce the hoped-for ‘bombshell’ to end Trump’s Presidency.” He points to a multitude of comments, such as that of the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, who demands, “The President must go,” yelling “what are we waiting for?” In some countries, Cohen states, articles like Leonhardt’s “would be read as calling for a coup.”
Despite the fact that “there is no new credible evidence” in the case against Trump, Cohen points out that Russiagate “has become a political-media cult that no facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.” Even in its latest rant, the New York Times had to issue a disclaimer, although buried deep in the article, that “no evidence has emerged publicly” that Trump was in secret contact with Russian government officials.
As for the current hysterical demands from
“Congressional zealots” that the interpreter’s notes from the Trump-Putin meeting be confiscated, or that the interpreter be subpoenaed (Democrat Adam Schiff’s idea), Professor Cohen recounts a useful history of past Presidents whose private meetings with foreign leaders were never made public. He referenced a knowledgeable, unnamed former American ambassador who stated “the secrecy of presidential private meetings ... has been the rule, not the exception. ... There’s nothing unusual about withholding information from a bureaucracy about the President’s private meetings with foreign leaders. Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not.”
If current recklessness prevails, Cohen warns, “it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep America and the world safe from catastrophe for nearly 70 years.”
