Reviews
Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency by Andrew C. McCarthy
peterseanesq's review
5.0
This book is infuriating.
Andrew C. McCarthy reviews the last three years and puts together the history of the Media/Democrat Russian Collusion hoax. He finds collusion, but the collusion is between Democrats and Russians or between Democrats and Ukrainians. Along the way, he explains and puts together the various threads of gaslighting and backpedaling that have been presented as Truth. For example, he reminds us that the New York Times presented two different origin stories for Crossfire Hurricane - FBI's investigation of Donald Trump - which (a) contradict each other and (b) were generated within months of each other (c) without any effort to reconcile or explain the two.
The Ministry of Truth could not have managed it any better.
Along the way, Americans were defamed as Russian agents by the most callous and corrupt kinds of betrayal. Hence, Papadopoulos and Page were both befriended by English academics with long ties to British intelligence in order to induce them to say things that could be used to charge Trump with collusion with Russia.
There are several factors that support Andrew C. McCarthy's account in "Ball of Collusion": first, McCarthy is not a Trump supporter. He didn't support Trump in 2016 and he is willing to call out Trump's silly expressions of support for China. Second, McCarthy is clearly in the foreign policy hawk camp and, so, is naturally opposed to Trump's movement toward a kind of isolationism in American foreign policy. Third, McCarthy was a career federal prosecutor and so can sniff out the normal procedure from the ad hoc and extraordinary. Fourth, recent developments in the release of previously redacted or concealed information has proven that McCarthy's inferences and deductions - based on his experience as a prosecutor - have been exactly correct.
For example, McCarthy wrote last year that the FISA court had been hoodwinked by the FBI's misrepresentations into granting surveillance on Carter Page. This was at a time when the mainstream media was still buying the claim that the court had been told everything it needed to be told. Yet, lo and behold, this year - 2020 - the FISA court has explicitly said that at least the last two FISA warrants lacked legal support and in late 2019 it clearly identified the lies in the FBI application - including the failure to share the known fact that the Clinton campaign had created the data the FBI was using - as the reason for granting the warrants.
Similarly, McCarthy repeatedly implies that British intelligence was intimately involved in the setting up of low-level, uninvolved, innocents like George Pappadopoulis and Carter Page. In mid-March 2020, this role was supported with more evidence, but still something less than an admission.
Finally, there is this:
"There is absolutely no chance any of the Russian officials charged will ever see the inside of an American courtroom. The indictment is an artifice by which the special counsel hoped to accomplish two objectives. First, Mueller wanted to put to rest the question of Russia’s guilt, because if that is in question, many Americans will rightly demand to know why the country was put through a two-year investigation of the president on suspicion of abetting the Russians. Unfortunately, as we’ve just detailed, the best that can be said about the Kremlin’s culpability has already been said—and not completely convincingly—in the intelligence agencies’ assessment report. Mueller hoped, however, that by having a prosecutor reaffirm the intelligence assessment in a court proceeding, its conclusions would assume the gravitas of judicial findings—i.e., he hopes you won’t notice that he hasn’t actually proved anything, that no one has been or will be convicted. Second, the special counsel wanted to justify his superfluous investigation. It is “superfluous” in the sense that there never was evidence of a Trump–Russia conspiracy and, again, we already had a report about Russia’s clandestine activities, so what did we need a prosecutor’s investigation for? Answer: prosecutors are there to indict, so now we have an indictment—woo-hoo!
Often, no harm comes from publicity stunts.
That can’t be said here. Look at how farcical Russia-gate became: In announcing the indictment of Russia’s intelligence officers, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asserted, “In our justice system, everyone who is charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.”10
So we have to think of the Russians as innocent? After the president of the United States has been a suspect for two years for purportedly conspiring with them?"
Lo and behold, this month - March 2020 - all of the indictments against the Russians were dropped. The whole thing was what McCarthy predicted it would be.
There is a lot of information in this book. It is worth keeping as a reference. Any time anything is said that is near this subject, use this book to fact-check. For example, in one of the debates, Joe Biden explained how he had gone to the intelligence services to warn them about Russian meddling.
I immediately remembered this book and I knew that it wasn't true:
"By late October, the Russian “cyberespionage” effort to meddle in the election was well known. In the same debate in which Clinton rebuked Trump for refusing to concede the election’s legitimacy, she attacked her rival as “Putin’s puppet” and cited the finding of government agencies that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Clinton was not at all concerned that Putin’s shenanigans would have any actual impact on the election. She invoked them because she thought it was helpful to her campaign—an opportunity to portray Trump as ripe for rolling by the Russian regime. And how could she have taken any other position? None other than President Obama himself observed that there was nothing unusual about Russian scheming to influence American elections, which he said “dates back to the Soviet Union.”39 Obama deftly avoided mentioning that past scheming had never gotten much media traction because the Soviets had been more favorably disposed toward Democrats. While he blamed the Putin regime for hacking emails during the 2016 campaign, Obama described this as “fairly routine.” He acknowledged, moreover, that it was publicly notorious well in advance of the election—which, of course, is why Clinton had been able to exploit it in a nationally televised debate three weeks prior to November 8. What happened here is very simple: Russia was unimportant to Democrats, and was indeed avoided by Democrats, until they needed to rationalize a stunning defeat. Prior to the election, Democrats had little interest in mentioning “Russia” or “Putin.” Of course, they sputtered out the words when they had no choice—when, not wanting to address the substance of embarrassing emails, they had to shift attention to the nefarious theft of those emails."
Of course, we know this is true because we were there, but we are often confused by gaslighting and big lies, such as the one that Biden told in the middle of that debate, which was never fact-checked by the media.
Get this book and read it. It's about more than the temporary phenomenon of "Russia Collusion." It is documentation that shows what is dysfunctional about our democracy.
Andrew C. McCarthy reviews the last three years and puts together the history of the Media/Democrat Russian Collusion hoax. He finds collusion, but the collusion is between Democrats and Russians or between Democrats and Ukrainians. Along the way, he explains and puts together the various threads of gaslighting and backpedaling that have been presented as Truth. For example, he reminds us that the New York Times presented two different origin stories for Crossfire Hurricane - FBI's investigation of Donald Trump - which (a) contradict each other and (b) were generated within months of each other (c) without any effort to reconcile or explain the two.
The Ministry of Truth could not have managed it any better.
Along the way, Americans were defamed as Russian agents by the most callous and corrupt kinds of betrayal. Hence, Papadopoulos and Page were both befriended by English academics with long ties to British intelligence in order to induce them to say things that could be used to charge Trump with collusion with Russia.
There are several factors that support Andrew C. McCarthy's account in "Ball of Collusion": first, McCarthy is not a Trump supporter. He didn't support Trump in 2016 and he is willing to call out Trump's silly expressions of support for China. Second, McCarthy is clearly in the foreign policy hawk camp and, so, is naturally opposed to Trump's movement toward a kind of isolationism in American foreign policy. Third, McCarthy was a career federal prosecutor and so can sniff out the normal procedure from the ad hoc and extraordinary. Fourth, recent developments in the release of previously redacted or concealed information has proven that McCarthy's inferences and deductions - based on his experience as a prosecutor - have been exactly correct.
For example, McCarthy wrote last year that the FISA court had been hoodwinked by the FBI's misrepresentations into granting surveillance on Carter Page. This was at a time when the mainstream media was still buying the claim that the court had been told everything it needed to be told. Yet, lo and behold, this year - 2020 - the FISA court has explicitly said that at least the last two FISA warrants lacked legal support and in late 2019 it clearly identified the lies in the FBI application - including the failure to share the known fact that the Clinton campaign had created the data the FBI was using - as the reason for granting the warrants.
Similarly, McCarthy repeatedly implies that British intelligence was intimately involved in the setting up of low-level, uninvolved, innocents like George Pappadopoulis and Carter Page. In mid-March 2020, this role was supported with more evidence, but still something less than an admission.
Finally, there is this:
"There is absolutely no chance any of the Russian officials charged will ever see the inside of an American courtroom. The indictment is an artifice by which the special counsel hoped to accomplish two objectives. First, Mueller wanted to put to rest the question of Russia’s guilt, because if that is in question, many Americans will rightly demand to know why the country was put through a two-year investigation of the president on suspicion of abetting the Russians. Unfortunately, as we’ve just detailed, the best that can be said about the Kremlin’s culpability has already been said—and not completely convincingly—in the intelligence agencies’ assessment report. Mueller hoped, however, that by having a prosecutor reaffirm the intelligence assessment in a court proceeding, its conclusions would assume the gravitas of judicial findings—i.e., he hopes you won’t notice that he hasn’t actually proved anything, that no one has been or will be convicted. Second, the special counsel wanted to justify his superfluous investigation. It is “superfluous” in the sense that there never was evidence of a Trump–Russia conspiracy and, again, we already had a report about Russia’s clandestine activities, so what did we need a prosecutor’s investigation for? Answer: prosecutors are there to indict, so now we have an indictment—woo-hoo!
Often, no harm comes from publicity stunts.
That can’t be said here. Look at how farcical Russia-gate became: In announcing the indictment of Russia’s intelligence officers, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asserted, “In our justice system, everyone who is charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.”10
So we have to think of the Russians as innocent? After the president of the United States has been a suspect for two years for purportedly conspiring with them?"
Lo and behold, this month - March 2020 - all of the indictments against the Russians were dropped. The whole thing was what McCarthy predicted it would be.
There is a lot of information in this book. It is worth keeping as a reference. Any time anything is said that is near this subject, use this book to fact-check. For example, in one of the debates, Joe Biden explained how he had gone to the intelligence services to warn them about Russian meddling.
I immediately remembered this book and I knew that it wasn't true:
"By late October, the Russian “cyberespionage” effort to meddle in the election was well known. In the same debate in which Clinton rebuked Trump for refusing to concede the election’s legitimacy, she attacked her rival as “Putin’s puppet” and cited the finding of government agencies that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Clinton was not at all concerned that Putin’s shenanigans would have any actual impact on the election. She invoked them because she thought it was helpful to her campaign—an opportunity to portray Trump as ripe for rolling by the Russian regime. And how could she have taken any other position? None other than President Obama himself observed that there was nothing unusual about Russian scheming to influence American elections, which he said “dates back to the Soviet Union.”39 Obama deftly avoided mentioning that past scheming had never gotten much media traction because the Soviets had been more favorably disposed toward Democrats. While he blamed the Putin regime for hacking emails during the 2016 campaign, Obama described this as “fairly routine.” He acknowledged, moreover, that it was publicly notorious well in advance of the election—which, of course, is why Clinton had been able to exploit it in a nationally televised debate three weeks prior to November 8. What happened here is very simple: Russia was unimportant to Democrats, and was indeed avoided by Democrats, until they needed to rationalize a stunning defeat. Prior to the election, Democrats had little interest in mentioning “Russia” or “Putin.” Of course, they sputtered out the words when they had no choice—when, not wanting to address the substance of embarrassing emails, they had to shift attention to the nefarious theft of those emails."
Of course, we know this is true because we were there, but we are often confused by gaslighting and big lies, such as the one that Biden told in the middle of that debate, which was never fact-checked by the media.
Get this book and read it. It's about more than the temporary phenomenon of "Russia Collusion." It is documentation that shows what is dysfunctional about our democracy.
More...