Manafort, Assange, and Spies: Russia Collusion Disinformation Heats Up

Just before former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was trotted off to the slammer for lying to the FBI, the odor of a disinformation campaign from intelligence agencies began to emanate from powerful leftist media outlets in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

...bat-guano over the prospect of the White House declassifying documents...

The whole Russian collusion investigation has moved from a quagmire to an incomprehensible spider web of intrigue and inference with very little in the way of facts. That is unless you want to take as gospel the words of anonymous sources. And they are aplenty.

Secret Talks

The Guardian, for example, is floating a story that claims “secret talks” occurred between Paul Manafort and Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. And not just once, mind you, but several times:

“A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.”

Manafort pronounces this new revelation as “100% false” and is considering legal action against the paper. No matter how vociferous Manafort’s denials, however, the way the legacy media works is akin to the oozing of red ink across the map a la the movie Canadian Bacon. Once a story like the Manafort-Assange connection is printed, there’s no stopping it. Within hours of the “well-placed sources” story that was published in the Guardian, others breathlessly followed, HuffPost, WaPo, CNN, and MSNBC, to name just a few.

But what has caused this sudden spill of such fascinating information? The run-up to the Guardian story may give us a clue. Last week Fortune published an article essentially saying intelligence chiefs in Britain, the U.S., and Australia were bat-guano over the prospect of the White House declassifying documents having to do with the Russia probe.

And why perchance would they be in an uproar over bringing this information to light? The man in the orange jumpsuit, Papadopoulos, tweeted that “FISA declassification will assure all the actors who tried to harm America are finally exposed.”

Uh-oh.

Then the Sydney Morning Herald went to press citing intelligence source concerns, “The U.K. is warning he [Trump] will undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers.”

But not everyone thinks declassifying FISA information is such a perilous idea. George Neumayr penned an article in The American Spectator:

“What the British spy chiefs fear from declassification, among other potential embarrassments, is that they were trafficking in the idiotic ‘intelligence’ of [Stephan] Halper who had won Brennan’s affection with gossip about Flynn in 2014 — a reported sighting of Flynn at Cambridge University allegedly talking too cozily with a Russian historian. As even the New York Times has noted, Halper had passed this absurdly simpleminded tattle to a British spy who in turn gave it to Brennan.”

And for the most part, Liberty Nation not included, Halper has flown under the radar screen for his participation in this political morass. Even the Washington Post seems to express doubts about the Manafort-Assange meeting that has caused such a left-wing media dust-up. “If a meeting did occur,” WaPo asserted, “it's not clear how important it might have been.”

Could all these stories springing from the mouths of God-only-knows be part of an extensive disinformation campaign? Originally used as a tactical strategy by the KGB, disinformation was actively used in Soviet political warfare.  A vital part of any deception campaign is deliberately spreading a hoax to confuse, which in turn causes chaos. The storyline then becomes so mystifying as to be unintelligible to the average citizen. Could Western intelligence sources have adopted this methodology in the Spygate/Obamagate/Russiagate affair?

That just might be a key question as the American public tries to separate fact from fiction during this blitzkrieg of anonymous information.