Interview · moment 4 of 23
Russiagate as a Manufactured Soft Coup
from #259 - Independence Day with Glenn Greenwald | The Tim Dillon Show · #259
6 min
Guest
Discussion of whether Russiagate was a coordinated effort to remove Trump; Greenwald compares Trump's neutralization to how Julian Assange was contained rather than killed, and explains how a small grain of truth about Russian interference was blown into a manufactured conspiracy fed by CIA leaks.
- Tim asks whether Brennan, Clapper, and intelligence officials working to undermine Trump's presidency before inauguration constitutes a soft coup.
- They didn't kill Julian Assange like they used to kill people in the 60s—they just neutralized him by walking him in an embassy for eight years and now holding him in a UK prison without conviction.
- Trump was a weak president who got paralyzed by the concocted Russiagate scandal, which engulfed his presidency for four years and came entirely out of the CIA and FBI.
- Countries do interfere in each other's elections, including the US more than anybody else—Russians wanted to mess with the election, but they took a tiny grain of truth and exploded it into a manufactured conspiracy theory.
- Media outlets decided their duty was no longer to do journalism but to stop Trump, and they got fed leaks by the CIA designed to harm him without any critical analysis.
- Why didn't intelligence agencies just exert influence on Trump through adulation and institutional charm like they did with Obama, instead of dragging the country through Russiagate?
- Obama was an institutionalist who always appeased institutional power and made people feel subversive while actually just aggrandizing institutions of authority, so it was easy to mold him into the existing permanent power structure.