On Friday, October 28th, 2016, FBI Director James Comey dropped a political bombshell just 10 days out from the presidential (s)election.
In a letter to congress, Comey revealed that the FBI was re-opening their investigation in Hillary Clinton’s personal email server:
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.”
The unusual move has had an immediate and profound effect on public sentiment about the (s)election race, with Clinton supporters scrambling to downplay the news and demonize Comey and Trump supporters, who previously denounced Comey, praising him for the act and making definitive statements about what will or will not be found in this email archive.
Many theories have so far been floated about why the FBI director issued this letter just days before a national (s)election. Some of them, including the idea that Comey is struggling against an internal insurrection of agents disgruntled by his earlier decision not to prosecute Clinton, seem to have a basis in reality. Others, including the idea that Comey is an agent of the Russians, working in collusion with Putin and Trump to put a Kremlin puppet in the White House, do not.
But what seemingly everyone has missed with regard to the letter is that it was issued just four days after another bombshell piece of information. On October 24th, just four days before Comey sent his letter to Congress, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Clinton friend [Virginia Governor] Terry McAuliffe donated money to a [senior] FBI investigator’s wife when she ran for office.”
Benign on the surface, the story involves a deeper connection to the Clinton email investigation itself. As the Journal revealed:
“The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.”
This revelation, coupled with the fact that McAuliffe’s donation evidently went unreported, exposed massive impropriety in the dealings of Clinton’s political allies and the FBI’s scuttled investigation of her emails.
As Michel Chossudovsky of The Centre for Research on Globalization notes in a recent article, however, these twin bombshells are notable not for what they reveal about the corruption of the Clinton camp or the FBI, but what they reveal about the behind-the-scenes warfare that seems to be taking place between the powerful media and financial interests that are puppeteering the presidential (s)election itself.
“The trigger mechanism did not originate from FBI Director James Comey’s letter per se. It was the Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece of the US financial establishment, which revealed the fraud and bribery scheme.[…] The WSJ is owned by the News Corp conglomerate, one of the most powerful global media groups owned by the Murdoch Family Trust. Rupert Murdoch is a firm supporter of Donald Trump. Murdoch and Trump met several times in course of last months.[…]
“Until recently, the US mainstream media have largely been involved in camouflaging the crimes committed by Hillary Clinton. Are we dealing with an About Turn?
“The corporate elites are not monolithic. Quite the opposite. There are major divisions and conflicts within the ruling corporate establishment. What seems to be unfolding is a division between competing media conglomerates, with Murdoch’s News Corp Group (which includes the WSJ and Fox News) supporting Trump and the Time Warner -CNN Group supporting Clinton. In turn, these media conglomerates are aligned with powerful and competing factions within the corporate establishment.”
So if there is a rift among the media moguls, and, by extension, in the financial and corporate circles that are aligned with those moguls, then what are they ultimately squabbling over, and what does their alignment with their respective candidates reveal?
The American public and the people of the world would be well-advised to remember that in the intersection of powerful financial and media interests with intelligence operations and covert activities, things are almost never as they seem. There is the possibility that the entire email scandal is itself a smokescreen of sorts, designed to attract attention away from Clinton’s even more pressing and readily demonstrable criminal abuses of power and influence.
In the end, what we are witnessing is not an election in the sense that it is understood by a naive and well-meaning public. Not the election of an all-powerful president who will single-handedly determine the future course of the United States and the American-led global hegemon. What we are seeing is a power struggle of powerful elites who are backing different sides of an already-rigged process to legitimate a foreign policy agenda that is controlled, not from the White House, but from the real centers of power in the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus, Wall Street, and all of the other places where the shadow government resides.
But in this struggle of competing power factions for their preferred candidate, we can start to understand what that agenda entails, and where the United States as a country, and the US-led world order as a whole, is being steered. And as usual, the agenda of that deep state is in complete opposition to everything that the public as a whole actually desires, regardless of the political lens through which they view this selection.
As Professor Chossudovsky recently told The Corbett Report:
“The global ‘elites’ are in the process of preparing the agenda for global warfare. How that will unfold is difficult to foresee, but there’s confrontation between Russia and the United States, there’s an ongoing war in the Middle East, there are trade agreements being negotiated, leading to the formation of large trading blocs which are controlled ultimately by US imperial power; the integration of NAFTA and the European Union is an ongoing process as well; the TPP, the Asia-Pacific project. All of these are inter-related, and the question is: ‘What kind of presidency would be best to endorse that project?’
“Now there are also, I think, important divisions within the elites. There are certainly interest groups who don’t want to follow that course. And what we have to address is: What are the conflicts internally, within those elite groups? Why all of a sudden is there a shift away from Hillary? Is that shift away from Hillary supportive of a Trump presidency, which is also subject to control and manipulation and so on? Or, alternatively, are these elites thinking of something else, which could be the transition (not immediately) towards a martial law situation?”
Foreign wars. Economic disruption. Civil unrest. Martial law. All of these are scenarios that are in the cards. And in the battle over issues like Clinton’s email server, we see the foreshadowing of the issues that will be used to lead the US into further chaos in the years to come.