The REAL Russia Scandal
Claims that United States President Donald Trump secretly cooperated with Russia to steal the 2016 United States presidential election have been making headlines for over a year. New allegations seem to come out every week, but none of them are backed up by proof against the president.
WikiLeaks published 19,252 e-mails hacked from the accounts of seven key Democratic National Committee staff members on July 22, 2016. These staff members are chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chief executive officer Amy Dacey, chief financial officer Brad Marshall, communications director Luis Miranda, press secretary Mark Paustenbach, broadcast media director Pablo Manriquez and finance director Jordan Kaplan.
The e-mails revealed that under Schultz’s leadership, key officials within the Democratic Party worked to sabotage the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders so Hillary Clinton would win the party nomination. Many Sanders supporters were outraged. Schultz apologized and resigned in disgrace.
On Oct. 7, 2016, the Obama administration accused the Kremlin of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections by orchestrating this hack. Ever since, Democratic Party officials have been vainly attempting to prove that the Trump campaign secretly cooperated with the Russians to steal the 2016 presidential election from Clinton.
While President Donald Trump admitted that Russia likely conducted the hack against the dnc, no evidence has been produced supporting the claim that the Trump campaign collaborated with the Russians. The case has now become so heated, and many media organizations have become so biased, it is difficult to get reliable information.
But history and Bible prophecy reveal that all of this is a distraction from the real Russia scandal. Russia poses a real danger to the United States, but not for the reasons the major media are reporting.
Subverting America
Russia has sought to undermine the United States for most of the last century; this is a historical fact. Starting in the 1920s, the Soviet Comintern approved a fund for propaganda designed to lure disaffected African-Americans from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Vladimir Lenin. In cooperation with Marxist revolutionaries like Lovett Fort-Whiteman and Claude McKay, Kremlin officials sought to literally divide America by carving out a Soviet-controlled “Negro Republic” in the Southern United States.
After the Great Depression ended, however, communism’s popularity declined among African-Americans. This forced the Kremlin to give up its plan for a “Negro Republic” and shift to a different strategy.
During World War ii, the United States entered a “Strange Alliance” with the world’s most powerful Communist state, the Soviet Union. President Franklin Roosevelt released Communist Party usa leader Earl Browder from prison in 1943 to promote “national unity” between American Communists and the general public.
Browder tried to implement a policy of cooperation with the U.S. Democratic Party.
“Earl Browder concluded that the American-Soviet alliance of World War ii would continue after the defeat of Nazi Germany,” wrote Harvey Klehr for the New York Times. “For this reason, in 1944, he boldly engineered the transformation of the cpusa into a pressure group designed to work within the Democratic Party” (July 3).
Soviet leaders were not yet ready for Browder’s outreach program toward the Democrats. He was sacked as head of the Communist Party usa in 1945 on charges of ideological dissent. Not until 1968 did Soviet leaders offer to fund and support a Democratic Party presidential candidate. That year, Soviet diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin was instructed to offer Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey any form of aid he might need in his campaign against the anti-Communist Republican candidate Richard Nixon. But Humphrey politely declined monetary support, saying it was “more than enough for him to have Moscow’s good wishes.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, documents from the Soviet archives revealed that the Communist Party usa had been receiving millions of dollars a year from the Kremlin from the 1950s through the 1980s. These funds kept the Communist Party usa alive as an agent of the Soviet Union. Still, most Soviet activity in America went not toward traditional espionage but toward infiltrating American education.
According to Soviet defector and former kgb intelligence agent Yuri Bezmenov, the ideological subversion of foreign nations was so important to the Soviet kgb that most of its resources were allocated to it. “Only about 15 percent of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such,” he explained in an interview with G. Edward Griffin in the 1980s. “The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures.’”
Current Russian President Vladimir Putin was a kgb agent from 1975 to 1991. He told his biographers that his attraction to the kgb went beyond a desire to spread the ideals of Marxism. He was attracted to the actual dirty work of espionage. “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,” Putin said. “A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people.”
Americans would be naive to assume that the kgb disappeared along with the Soviet Union. They would likewise be naive to think that a former kgb agent in the Kremlin is not a dangerous enemy. “This man is not just an authoritarian leader,” wrote editor in chief Gerald Flurry in our March 2017 Trumpet issue. “He is an evil, ruthless, vindictive agent with Soviet-style methods of psychological warfare, assassination and war! As one Russian journalist put it, Putin ‘is a supersize model of the kgb.’”
Anti-Fracking Campaign
After the Soviet Union’s collapse, life in Russia changed dramatically. Eastern Orthodox Christianity replaced atheism. Crony capitalism replaced Marxist socialism. Yet kgb agents retained their influence. Actually, former kgb operatives working in Russia’s new Federal Security Service have more power than they did in Soviet times. It used to be said that the kgb was a state within a state. Today the kgb has become the state.
A political class of former kgb agents now govern enormous state-controlled industries like Rosneft, Russia’s largest state-run oil company, and Gazprom, the largest of Russia’s state-run gas companies. These men intimidate former Soviet states by threatening to cut off their energy supplies in the middle of winter. They weaponize state resources to intimidate and destabilize their rivals.
But what if former Soviet states and other European countries had another option for importing energy?
One of the greatest fears these men of the kgb political class have is that the U.S. will break Eastern Europe’s dependence on Russia by exporting natural gas to nations like Poland.
Speaking at a think tank in London in 2014, nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen warned that Russia was using a disinformation campaign to undermine alternative energy sources such as shale gas. “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas,” he said.
The state-run Russian media outlet RT ran at least 62 different anti-fracking television stories and news reports in 2015. And a U.S. Senate report found that the Sea Change Foundation funneled more than $43 million to anti-fracking organizations like the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council. According to the Environmental Policy Alliance and Newsweek magazine, a Bermuda-based shell corporation with direct ties to Vladimir Putin and Russian oil interests heavily funds the Sea Change Foundation. The firm is currently under investigation for offshore money laundering.
President Trump delivered a speech in Warsaw, Poland, in July that Putin and other Russian leaders certainly took note of. “We are committed to securing your access to alternate sources of energy,” President Trump said, “so Poland and its neighbors are never again held hostage to a single supplier of energy.” It is exactly this sort of cooperation, enabling East European nations to wriggle out of Russian economic and political pressure, that has motivated Russia’s disinformation and destabilization efforts.
Kremlin Hacking Strategy
In Soviet times, the Kremlin developed the subversion of a nation into a multistep science. First, intelligence operatives spent 15 to 20 years demoralizing a nation by pumping Communist ideology into the heads of at least one generation of students. Once the sizable numbers of youth were converted, these operatives moved on to stage two: destabilization. They spent two to five years destabilizing the nation by encouraging civil unrest and domestic division. If destabilization proved successful, the nation would plunge into chaos and civil war. The Soviets then stabilized the situation themselves—using the Red Army.
Many developing nations across Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America fell due to this multistep process during the Cold War. And according to Bezmenov, the demoralization process in the U.S. was completed before the Soviet Union fell. But the Soviets were never able to proceed to the destabilization step.
Vladimir Putin would have been well trained in this multistep process during his Cold War years in the kgb. While the Russian president does not seem to be a Soviet ideologue committed to the conversion of other nations to Marxist-Leninism, he can use the kgb subversion tactics to accomplish other goals.
The Kremlin’s current priorities include keeping former Soviet states dependent on Russian gas exports and keeping nato allies pitted against each other. To accomplish these goals, the Russian government has used cyberattacks against Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. It has backed nativist political parties throughout the European Union. And it has signed major pipeline deals with Germany, France and Italy that put pressure on Eastern Europe.
The Kremlin has also employed a strategy of “disaggregation” against several nations. Disaggregation is the process of identifying social and economic splits in rival nations, exacerbating these splits with propaganda, then taking advantage of the civil unrest that results. This is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy.
The idea that Russia successfully “hacked” the U.S. election is a gross exaggeration. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump either because they supported his platform or sincerely believed that the other candidate would be worse for the nation. Russian intelligence operatives undoubtedly noticed the intense social and economic division within the U.S. By hacking the Democratic National Convention and exposing some of the underhanded techniques the Clinton campaign used against Sanders, the Russians might have split the Democratic Party base. But the rationale behind the hack was not to install a pro-Russian president. The motive was to destabilize America by instigating social division.
By keeping political parties bitterly pitted against each other and environmental groups pitted against industry, Russia hopes that Americans will be too busy fighting among themselves to become the next energy superpower.
It seems this strategy is working perfectly.
The Coming Civil War
During and after World War ii, the editor in chief of the Trumpet’s predecessor, the Plain Truth, proclaimed the biblical truth that Russia would not attack America militarily before the return of Christ. Instead, Herbert W. Armstrong revealed, Russia would wage a psychological war of propaganda, infiltration, subversion and demoralization against America. Because of America’s rejection of God, this warfare would weaken the nation to a point where it could be invaded by a revived Holy Roman Empire led by Germany. (For a detailed explanation of the prophecies that prove this, request our free booklet He Was Right.)
“What we fail to grasp, in the struggle with Russia, is this: We are not fighting a single nation in a military war, but a gigantic worldwide, plainclothes army, masquerading as a political party, seeking to conquer the world with an entirely new kind of warfare,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956. “It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence!”
The communism espoused by the old Soviet Union now has deeper roots in the American educational system than it does in the Kremlin! And Russia continues to press toward its goal of spreading further civil unrest in America.
By offering Poland and other East European nations potential independence from Russian energy exports, the United States poses a direct challenge to Putin’s dictatorship. So, the former kgb operative is working fervently to counter this challenge in the best way he knows how: destabilization and disaggregation.
The fact that 1 in 3 Clinton supporters view President Trump’s election victory as illegitimate seems to show that Russian disaggregation is having its desired effect. This ideological divide is wider than at any point in U.S. history since the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era ended in 1877. While the primary blame for this tragedy rests with the American people, Russian subversion has certainly exacerbated the crisis.
What happens when millions of Americans buy into the idea that their government is illegitimate?
“Many Americans are troubled by the divisions and hatreds being expressed right now,” Gerald Flurry wrote in our January 2017 Trumpet. “But they need to be a lot more concerned than they are! The problems are going to get worse and worse until people get the message, and they learn why these disasters are happening! Donald Trump’s win is a prophetic sign of impending civil war and anarchy, followed by America’s worst military defeat ever! But don’t blame the politicians or the race-baiters or the professional rioters. This situation exists in America only because of the sins of the nation—of all Americans! We can no longer ignore what we have reaped by giving ourselves over to sin. This is a reckoning!”
Even mainstream political commentators are now talking about the possibility of a second civil war. History shows that when a nation falls into division and infighting, it quickly becomes consumed by internal crises that leave it vulnerable to attack by foreign enemies.
This is exactly what God prophesies will happen to America in the near future. Why? Because Americans have rebelled against His law. In Ezekiel 5, God reveals that there will be a time of violent rioting in the cities of America just before they suffer a foreign invasion. The dangerous level of ideological division in modern-day America is leading to the fulfillment of this prophecy.
Ultimately, America is hurtling toward this calamity not because of Trump or Clinton or Putin, but because the American people as a whole have turned away from God. The popularization of pornography and premarital sex have led to the undermining of the matrimonial bond that unites families, leading to a deluge of abortions and divorces. Even those children who do grow up with married parents are seldom reared by a faithfully married, family-focused father and mother intent on fulfilling their respective biblical roles. Without strong families to train up children into good citizens, societies unravel and anarchy ensues.
There are dark days ahead, but we must never lose sight of the grand lesson God is trying to teach mankind. After we learn the hard way that mankind does not know the way to peace apart from God, the Bible prophesies that God will gather His people back to their land and teach them the way to true peace and prosperity.