Gareth Porter — The Kissinger Backchannel to Moscow

Major U.S. media outlets insinuate that President Trump’s advisers are traitors for secretly talking to Russians, but they ignore the history of Henry Kissinger doing the same thing for Richard Nixon, writes Gareth Porter.

Kissinger is at least an informal Trump adviser, which account in part for Trump's foreign policy realism. I would not be surprised if it was his idea. This report casts a whole new light on the matter if Kissinger was actually involved. He had done it himself when named the prospective national security advisor after Nixon was elected and before he was inaugurated.

But the real issue is this:

But Moss warns that the underlying political crisis in American society is a formidable obstacle to any shift by Trump in relations with Russia. Trump “feels he won the election fairly and that unelected bureaucrats are working against him,” Moss observed, but “The people who suspect possible collusion between the Trump and Russian interference in the election may feel Trump is an illegitimate president.”

Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn are obviously no Kissingers. But the insinuations from Brennan and others that Trump’s advisers may have somehow crossed the line into treason is itself the crossing of a dangerous line into McCarthyism. And the mainstream U.S. news media is participating enthusiastically in the campaign to impugn the loyalty of Trump’s advisers, even though there is still no public evidence to support such suspicions.

This is an extra-constitutional crisis in the works, that has morphed into a soft coup.

Consortium News
The Kissinger Backchannel to Moscow
Gareth Porter, independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism