For over five years all wings of the Democratic Party, the FBI, and much of the media have campaigned relentlessly to bring down Donald Trump. One of their central claims, written up in a dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele, was that Trump was in cahoots with the Russian government. Their drive to promote this big lie trampled on rights that workers have an important stake in defending.
The hatred liberals direct at Trump is aimed at the “deplorable” working people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and who they fear will not vote Democratic in 2024. In fact, millions were looking for an alternative to both the parties that have switched places in Washington for decades with nothing but disregard for the worsening conditions working people face. In the absence of a party of labor, many were attracted to Trump, who ran as an outsider and promised to bring back jobs.
On Nov. 4 Igor Danchenko, the Steele dossier’s “primary subsource,” was indicted on five counts of lying to the FBI in 2017. Steele dressed up hearsay about Trump coming from Danchenko and gave it to the FBI.
Danchenko is accused of hiding from the FBI his work with Democratic Party public relations executive Charles Dolan. Dolan was Virginia state chair of Bill Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, and got a job in the State Department under the Clinton administration.
The indictment says Danchenko asked Dolan for information he could use in his “project against Trump.” Dolan replied he’d had a drink with a “GOP friend of mine who knows some of the players.” He later told the FBI that the “GOP friend” didn’t exist and he’d simply passed onto Danchenko some salacious rumors he’d seen in the press. The indictment says Danchenko knew the allegations that Moscow helped the Trump campaign that he passed to Steele were untrue. A transcript in the indictment says FBI officials who grilled Danchenko in 2017 also knew he was lying.
Steele wrote his dossier while he was working for Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research firm. It was funded by the Democratic Party National Committee on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It “should have been called the Clinton dossier,” pointed out Kimberley Strassel in a Nov. 4 Wall Street Journal column.
Despite British spy agencies casting doubt on Steele’s credibility, liberals and the FBI kept pushing his smears. A 2016 article in the liberal magazine Mother Jones touted Steele as a “credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U.S. government.”
Fabrications about Trump’s connections to Moscow were not only to smear him. Steele’s “evidence” was used by the FBI to get courts to rubber stamp a warrant for its agents to wiretap and spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
For decades the FBI, the capitalist rulers’ political police, have spied on militant workers, Black rights fighters, anti-war campaigners and communists. Many of their operations were exposed in the Socialist Workers Party’s successful 14-year political campaign and lawsuit against FBI spying. The spy agency was forced to admit to 204 burglaries of SWP offices and sending 1,300 undercover informers into the party between 1945 and 1966.
In 2016 the Democrats used the FBI and many of these same weapons against a rival capitalist party.
Steele’s malicious smears of Trump have continued to be used since to justify FBI probes, including a nearly two-year-long “investigation” by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who found no proof of Russian collusion; two failed impeachment prosecutions; hounding and prosecution of Trump’s allies; mountains of ink denouncing those who weren’t smart enough to vote against him; banning Trump from Facebook and other social media; and endless claims by Adam Schiff, House Intelligence Committee chair, that his committee has the real evidence of Trump’s collusion with Moscow, which of course he’s never produced.
The charges against Danchenko stem from the probe by special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by then Attorney General William Barr to review decisions made by the FBI while they were investigating Trump. Schiff tried to get Durham’s probe shut down before it led to any indictments.
The sharpness of the liberals’ campaign against Trump is rooted in the rising fear among the rulers and their servants in the middle class that more working people will see that the bosses and their parties will continue offloading the crisis of their profit system onto us. Under these conditions working people will seek ways to defend ourselves, something the rulers are determined to prevent.
The rulers’ scorn toward workers was evident as far back as 2008 in remarks by then presidential candidate Barack Obama. He complained that workers in small towns and rural areas hard hit by unemployment, “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
Liberals have kept their witch hunt against Trump going, through hearings before the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 break-in of Congress, which they pitch as a conspiracy to carry out a “coup.” Prosecutors have been unable to come up with evidence of conspiracies to overthrow the government. Instead, they are going after those involved on charges of trespass, disorderly conduct, and obstruction of an official proceeding.