The Russians Aren’t Coming — the Deep State Is (Audio)

The lobby seal at CIA headquarters. (Global Panorama / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Robert Scheer isn’t buying the Russia narrative surrounding Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential election.

On KPFA’s “Sunday Show” this week, the Truthdig editor in chief discussed the allegations of Russian interference in the election and the “Russians did it” hysteria that has followed.

“Donald Trump is a menace … but now we have the deep state destroying a president … and I have not seen any evidence of Russian interference in the election,” Scheer told “Sunday Show” host Philip Maldari. “The methods being used are the methods of the surveillance state, and they are … frightening.”

Scheer continued: “I have not seen any evidence of any significant Russian intrusion into this election. Nobody goes to the substance of it. … Until some evidence comes out that our democratic process has been distorted by foreign interference, of the kind we have routinely done, going to back to the 1948 Italian election, which our CIA intervened in and reversed the results … I could go through the thousands examples of our deep state, secret agencies, overturning elections everywhere in the world. Yes, [the 2016 election] has to be investigated to see what happened. But so far, we haven’t had one really important example of [Russians] distorting this election.

“We know what happened with this election,” Scheer said. “Hillary Clinton failed to address the concerns of working people.”

Scheer views the focus on Russia as a distraction from the heart of the matter.

“The red herring is the new McCarthyism, ‘the Russians are coming,’ and the Russians have been reinvented as if the Communist Party is still in control … which is not the case at all. The whole narrative has been twisted deliberately in a McCarthyite way. That’s the enemy. No one is addressing the real issue here, which is the ability of these secret government agencies to reverse an outcome that the establishment didn’t want — the establishment of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

“Now they’ve got a full-throated assault on anyone working for Trump or around him. They are going to get everything about him. It’s really quite frightening. And the fact that it doesn’t frighten civil libertarians and liberals is even more appalling.

“I know how terrible Trump is, but Trump is a symptom of what’s wrong with this society,” Scheer concluded. “He didn’t create the problem. He’s exploiting it.”

To listen to the whole interview, click here.

—Posted by Eric Ortiz