A Russian national has been charged in Washington accused of being an agent of the Russian Federation at the same time as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were meeting in Helsinki, a summit that has angered American politicians.

Maria Butina was charged Monday by the US Department of Justice with conspiring to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States, a criminal allegation that may be designed to draw attention away from Monday’s meeting between the US and Russian heads of state.

The charges are not related to the Mueller probe that is examining alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election. She allegedly worked at the direction of a high-level Kremlin official. Sputnik spoke to political commentator Joe Quinn about the fallout from the Putin/Trump summit.

Sputnik: What do you make of the arrest situation in Washington of Maria Butina, the accusations and the motivations behind it?

Joe Quinn: Well this is another nothing-burger, like CNN described the Russian hacking of the US election last year. Given the timing, it’s an attempt to push the supposed ‘reality’ of Russian interference in the US election in support of Trump. The story of this Butina woman are two-a-penny in Western politics. What she’s doing is called lobbying: getting access to politicians to push particular policies.

The accusations that she was working for the Kremlin appears to be baseless – it’s the silly idea that any lobbyist in any country, anyone working to influence politicians in any country, only ever work for foreign governments. That’s obvious nonsense.

There’s probably dozens of American citizens in Russia attempting to garner the same kind of influence in exactly the same way as she has done.

Sputnik: The US president has also come under scrutiny in America following the Helsinki summit, how could this impact the President and Washington’s interactions with Moscow?

Joe Quinn: To say he’s come under scrutiny – or that this summit yesterday has come under scrutiny – is a bit of an understatement! This brief meeting of two hours that he had with Putin yesterday has been met with such a level of screaming and baying at the moon, from the usual suspects, that you’d think we’re back in the heyday of McCarthy.

To give you an example, Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted yesterday – in all seriousness – that the football that Putin gave to Trump at the end of their meeting was probably carrying a listening device and should not be taken to the White House! I don’t know what to say to that kind of thing. You just roll your eyes…

I’m sorry to have to say that we can’t really expect the hysteria to diminish. Most of the Western media are now committed to this ridiculous campaign and have internalized the idea that Russia is a threat to the entire globe. Of course, the truth is that this situation has been deliberately provoked by elements of the ‘deep state’ as part of their ongoing war against Russia, who they see as an existential threat to their global power and control. They also seem to be quite happy to have as many people around the world – but particularly in US and Europe – believing complete lies.

Sputnik: The international accusations against Russia are mounting with the US elections, meddling and the Skripal case but with lack of evidence is the Western continuing anti-Russian rhetoric damaging any hope of improving international relations?

Joe Quinn: I don’t think that its damaging any hope – certainly it’s damaging them – but I don’t think it’s damaging any hope. Ultimately I think this campaign that’s been waged is not going to be successful. The problem for them is that history is NOT on their side. They’re not really fighting against Russia but against reality itself. The world has changed radically in the last 20 years – and it’s only just begun. The time is obviously ripe for a new global order based on multi-polarity rather than the sole dominance of a superpower, but the stewards of the empire are VERY reluctant, shall we say, to accept these necessary and inevitable changes, and unfortunately, we have to deal with chaos that they are causing as they try to forestall those changes.

Last week, I had a chat with Andrew Korybko of Sputnik News. Enjoy!

Trump’s been sending signals all week that he plans to either ignore the main principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or pull out of the body entirely, with this possible scenario representing an existential threat to the same liberal globalization model that the US created.

The crescendo of chatter about Trump’s intentions towards the WTO has all the hallmarks of a brewing conflict, one which would exacerbate the Crisis of Liberalism that’s engulfed the world ever since Brexit and the American President’s election.

Joe Quinn, senior editor and political analyst at Sott.net, spoke with Radio Sputnik’s Andrew Korybko about the stand-off.

Full discussion between Andrew Korybko, Joe Quinn and David Hungerford available here: WTO: World Trade Minus America?

Had a quick chat with Press TV recently on the above topic. Sputnik interview coming later.

Iran has summoned the French ambassador to protest France’s move to allow an anti-Iran terror group to hold its annual gathering in Paris. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said the French ambassador was told to prevent the gathering of groups of a terrorist nature. Bahram Qassemi said such gatherings will lead to the promotion of extremism and terrorism. He also said Iran blasted the presence of a number of former U-S radical officials at the event. On Saturday, Mujahedin-e-Khalq terror group held its annual meeting in Paris. A number of U-S officials including Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, participated in the event.

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The Israeli government maintains that it attacked dozens of “Iranian military sites” in Syria late Wednesday night in response to the alleged firing of 20 rockets by Iran at Israeli military bases in the Golan Heights. There is, however, no evidence that Iran or anyone else in Syria launched any “rockets” at Israeli targets in the Golan, although that claim served as a useful justification for the Israeli attack on Syrian air defense positions, which did occur. Read More →

Joe Quinn spoke with PressTV today about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Washington, DC. Distinctly low-key compared with French president Emmanuel Macron’s 3-day love-fest with US president Donald Trump, the US-German summit merely underscored the isolationist approach Trump has taken with respect to its ‘closest partners’.

The US government imposed import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum in March, but it provided a temporary exemption until May 1 for the EU. Judging by both Merkel and Trump’s statements to the media following their meeting, Trump is probably not going to make the exemption permanent. In short, ‘Europe must pay!

Coupled with the EU leaders’ failure to turn Trump back from reneging on the JCPOA Iran deal, this week’s meeting with the leaders of Europe’s two biggest countries serves to underscore a ‘parting of ways’ within the Atlantic alliance.

Behind all the cuddles and bisoux for the cameras, what was French boy-president Macron’s grande visite to the US of A all about? What the US and France can do to retain Western dominance of the Middle East, of course!

Trump is warning Iran not to “restart its nuclear program” while (again) yammering on about the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) multinational agreement on Iranian nuclear development being “an insane, terrible deal that should have never been made.”

Europe’s very own ‘stable genius’ meanwhile spoke out of both sides of his mouth in an attempt to tame Trump’s tantrum while not aggravating the Iranians, telling US officials the Iran deal can be “revisited” but should not be torn up. Iranian president Rouhani is meanwhile warning both of them about “grave consequences” if the 2015 deal is torpedoed.

What does all this bluff-and-bluster mean? And what is Trump’s beef with the JCPOA anyway? Needless to say, it has almost nothing to do with the ‘proliferation of nuclear weapons’…

Joe Quinn yesterday spoke with PressTV, explaining that European countries have a lot more business ventures in the pipeline – no pun intended – with Iran than the US does, something that the corporate owners of the US apparently didn’t bank on when they signed off on the deal in July 2015.

In addition, back then, they all assumed that Syrian president Assad was a dead man walking, and it did indeed, at that point, look that way. With the ‘Shia Crescent’ from Lebanon to Iran broken in two by knocking out Iran’s key ally in Damascus, the Americans, Israelis and Saudis were confident that they could control Iran’s economic development – up to and including dictating the terms of gas/oil and infrastructure deals. They may even have been in the planning stages of next knocking out the Iranian government by spreading proxy war from ‘Islamic State’ across the Iranian border.

But then, three months after the conclusion of the JCPOA, the Russian military – at Assad’s invitation – intervened in Syria, beat ISIS senseless, rescued Assad, strengthened inter-regional cooperation between Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah, and thereby turned the Iran deal – from the perspective of America and its regional allies – into “the worst deal, ever” because now Iran could strengthen ties with Europe through economic partnership while thumbing its nose at the US because Russia had its back.

This was the worst possible development for the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which is why they desperately want to ‘fix’ it, while they still can.

But can they? Again we see just how royally Russia screwed them all by intervening in Syria on September 30th, 2015…

I spoke with PressTV in the immediate aftermath of the F.UK.US. airstrikes against Syria late last week.

I describe Israel as the “quiet elephant in the room” and noted that despite US influence over events in Syria being largely trumped by Russia in recent years, the tripartite alliance of France, the UK and US are continuing military operations at the behest of Israel, which is hysterical about encroaching Iranian influence across the Middle East, and what that entails for Israeli regional hegemony.

But it’s a losing game. All four countries – along with their regional allies – are losing their historical positions in the Middle East, and are desperately trying to do something to stop that new reality from manifesting. At the same time, they are apparently not so desperate that they will risk a ‘hot war’ with Russia.

In the process of ‘projecting their strength’, they have exposed how weak they have become militarily, and their avalanche of lies in the media about how ‘successful’ the event was for them indicates that they are facing an existential war, not with Russia and China, but with reality itself. Who do you think is going to win in the end?

Throughout the 20th century, the US ability to project power and dominate global geopolitics was, to a large extent, based on the general perception that the US was the most powerful military force in the world. In most cases, the mere threat of this military prowess was enough to ‘get things done’ the American, or Western, way. The maintenance of the widespread belief in US military preeminence is therefore extremely important to the US establishment, and any event that might expose a different reality is to be avoided at all costs. When US/Western military might is physically demonstrated, a careful propaganda campaign and media management of the outcome is necessary, up to and including outright lies about the performance of the military tech used. No surprise there. Read More →

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