It's about Russia, not Ukraine

I'm not entirely sure why, but the corporate media has focused almost exclusively on the attempt to extort a smear of Joe and Hunter Biden and has entirely ignored an even more bizarre part of the phone conversation between the Resident and Volodymyr Zelensky. David Atkins gives a good rundown.

Early in the call, the Resident asked Zelensky for information about the Internet security firm Crowdstrike and a DNC server that was purportedly hidden in Ukraine. In case you didn't know, this about  a nutjob conspiracy theory in the same class as Q Anon and Pizzagate. It's so out there it hasn't even made it onto Hannity. The actual fact is that the DNC hired Crowdstrike to figure out who hacked their computer network and Crowdstrike concluded, along with the FBI, CIA, NSA, and of course Robert Mueller, that it was people in the employ of the Russian state. The conspiracy is that Crowdstrike manufactured this accusation in order to discredit the 2016 election and that a DNC "server," which should have been handed over to the FBI, had been hidden in Ukraine. The Ukraine connection is that Crowdstrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is supposedly Ukrainian. He's actually a Russian-born U.S. citizen. Also, too, there is no such server. The DNC network consisted of many servers and other nodes that had to be rebuilt because of the hacking.

As Atkins concludes, "One might think that Trump got the information from random corners of the internet. But the problem there is that the president barely knows how to use a computer, and has to have articles printed out for him and put on his desk. So who was feeding him these conspiracies? Why did he continue to believe them even as his own intelligence services and White House staff were attempting to disabuse him of them?" Which they were. As Laura Clawson recounts, presidential advisers repeatedly told him that the claims were nonsensical, but he refuses to believe them.


Anyhoo . . .

As Lucian Truscott makes clear, it has been obvious that Trump is Vladimir Putin's stooge from before he ever took office. And by the way, amid all the craziness and chaos does anybody even remember Helsinki any more? Feeding the orange bozo this particular mishegoss makes a lot of sense for Vlad. Remember that Vlad is waging a low-grade war against Ukraine because it turned away from Russia and toward the European union. Vlad has enlisted Trump to undermine the European alliance and is also using him to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine. Oh yeah, what else have we forgotten? The Trump campaign sent an emissary to the platform committee during the Republican National Convention with one and only one demand: remove the platform plank calling for military aid to Ukraine.

The reason Orange Julius is losing what was left of his mind is because he knows he a traitor, and he knows he's about to be caught. Actually he has been, it just hasn't been made official yet.

Update: Here's Digby, but I got there first. (Her time stamp is west coast.)

All that said, Dr. Black is correct. We have to expose everything this schtickdreck has done (BTW shana tovah) and bring all of his co-conspirators to account. If this is what it takes to pry the box open, fine, but it can't stop here.

Update: John Solomon's "reporting" in The Hill has long since been shown to be a hoax, but it is indeed the origin of much of the current hoohah. I'll have more to say about that, but meanwhile you can read more about it here,and here.