Eric Zuesse
The core of the neoconservatives’ impeach-Trump argument — the core of the campaign for Vice President Mike Pence to replace President Donald Trump in the U.S. White House — is that the current occupant is a secret agent of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Two investigators, one at AP, and the other at Hudson Institute, are now working on a project to confirm this core allegation. Whether there is coordination between the two is not yet clear. But one of them is the father of the other of them, and both of them are heavily sponsored writers; so, both are worthy of the public’s attention, as subjects to be discussed in their own rights, which will be done here. (NOTE, so that readers can know the perspective from which this news-behind-the’news’ is being reported: The present writer is a political progressive and therefore strongly anti-Trump, and even more strongly against Vice President Mike Pence, and thus personally supports the Republican effort to block Trump’s impeachment by Democrats, since that effort by Democrats would make Pence President and thereby cause existing problems to be even worse than they already are. So: I personally oppose not only Republicans, and not only Democrats, but Trump’s impeachment. Democrats might as well vote for Pence as push him into the White House. That’s the author’s personal position, regarding those partisan matters.)
Here, then, is the story about the AP’s Raphael Satter, and his father, the Hudson Institute’s David Satter:
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On July 26th, AP reporter Raphael Satter headlined “Emails: Lawyer who met Trump Jr. tied to Russian officials”, and he opened:
The Moscow lawyer said to have promised Donald Trump’s presidential campaign dirt on his Democratic opponent worked more closely with senior Russian government officials than she previously let on, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Scores of emails, transcripts and legal documents paint a portrait of Natalia Veselnitskaya as a well-connected attorney who served as a ghostwriter for top Russian government lawyers and received assistance from senior Interior Ministry personnel in a case involving a key client.
The data was obtained through Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s London-based investigative unit, the Dossier Center, that is compiling profiles of Russians it accuses of benefiting from corruption. …
The AP appended this important background, at the end of Satter’s article:
EDITOR’S NOTE — Raphael Satter’s father, David Satter, is a Russia specialist who has been critical of the Kremlin. He was involved in a 2011 arbitration claim against filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov over the production of a documentary. A subsequent film by Nekrasov, which was critical of British investor Bill Browder, was promoted by Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Raphael Satter’s efforts to find evidence against Trump — basically, to advance the Democratic Party’s narrative on the Russia-Trump issue — could be, but isn’t necessarily, coordinated with Satter’s father’s longstanding effort (ever since perhaps that father’s childhood) against Russia, first as an anti-communist and more broadly an anti-atheist, and then (after the end of communism and the return of influence to the Russian Orthodox Church) simply as the Satters’ being propagandists for U.S. military invasions to overthrow nations’ leaders who are either allied with, or even are just friendly toward, Russia.
David Satter is clearly a neoconservative — he’s a Senior Fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, which has been consistently against Russia, and especially against Putin. David Satter’s own career has been devoted to promoting practically every accusation that has been alleged against Putin. (The present writer has no opinion, one way or the other, about the veracity or not of any of those internal-Russian Putin matters.) A neoconservative is a supporter of invasion, conquest, and control, even of countries that never invaded nor even seriously threatened to invade the United States, and this description fits at least David Satter’s extensive career as an anti-Russia propagandist. In other words: David Satter is a longstanding PR agent for firms such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and other U.S.-based corporations whose sales are only to the U.S. Government and to the governments that the U.S. Government labels as “allies,” and whose targets are only countries that the U.S. Government treats as if they were enemies — treats as being targets, instead of as markets. (And, of course, Hudson Institute, like others of David Satter’s employers and benefactors, is funded by those same manufacturers and their founders’ fortunes, and even by American billionaires who have mainly non-‘Defense’ investments — David Satter’s funding seems to be coming entirely from other neoconservatives.)
In other words: David Satter has devoted his career to increasing the sales-volumes specifically of U.S.-based armaments-makers, and to ignoring the corpses and misery that their thousands (or even millions) of victims suffer by the customers’ (America’s allies’) use of these American products and services, which spread far worse than just poverty, into the places that they actually affect the most, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen — and maybe soon, Iran — America’s targets: all being countries whose leaders are/were either friendly toward, or allied with, Russia.
Furthermore, neoconservatives hate Russia more than they hate any other country. So, regarding David Satter, who is a neocon whose specialty, moreover, happens to be the neocons’ bête noire, Russia; nothing that Trump does against Russia — not kicking out their diplomats, nor repeatedly hiking sanctions against Russia, nor surrounding Russia by additional tens of thousands of U.S. troops and missiles and hiking NATO on Russia’s very borders and calling Russia ‘aggressive’ — will satisfy them. Neoconservatives overwhelmingly want Mike Pence as President.
Regarding Raphael Satter, however, not enough of his career is established, as of yet, to know his goals and priorities. But, even if he is not coordinating with his father on this matter, both of them still could be coordinating with one-and-the-same shared sponsor, since they now are writing on the same matter and in the same vein regarding it. Clearly, in any event, the two are advancing the same agenda in this case, no matter how that has happened.
Here is further information on Veselnitskaya, and on (this time) her as a topic of David Satter:
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A year ago, on 25 July 2017, Katie Zavadski, at the neoconservative Democratic Party site The Daily Beast, bannered “How an Anti-Putin Filmmaker Became a Kremlin Stooge”, and she reported that the father of Raphael Satter, David Satter, had sued documentary film-maker Andrei Nekrasov, in 2011, after Nekrasov, who had been influenced by David Satter’s allegations (2004, Darkness at Dawn) against Putin, came no longer to believe some of those allegations. The documentary that Nekrasov was making next — this one with financial backing from Satter, and of which Satter in 2009 wrote that Satter’s own first book (2001) “Age of Deliriumhas been translated into many languages and is now being made into a documentary film by the Russian director Andrei Nekrasov” — produced mutual acrimony between Satter and Nekrasov.
Nekrasov found himself documenting, in his resulting new film (2016, but still politically supressed, instead of released, in The West), The Magnitsky Act Behind the Scenes, the falsehood of some of some of the key anti-Putin allegations. And, so, this film shocked and dismayed many of Nekrasov’s friends. Zavadski wrote, “Satter says they [Nekrasov and U.S. financier Bill Browder] were connected for that taping by Alexander Goldfarb, a Russian opposition figure close to oligarch Boris Berezovsky.” In other words, an opponent of Putin, the Yeltsin-era billionaire Berezovsky, whom Putin had ordered either to pay his legal taxes to the Russian Government or else lose control over his companies (this being a type of demand that enraged America’s billionaires who were Berezovsky’s chief sponsors), was now assisting Satter to block Nekrasov from being able to report that at least some of the allegations against Putin were actually untrue.
The film that Nekrasov was working on, became ultimately an investigation into, and emerged finally as, a report about the George-Soros-connected American Russian investment-fund chief Bill Browder (the source of the Magnitsky Act), and it found important evidence that Browder’s lies and misrepresentations of documents had actually produced the Magnitsky Act, which generated the first set of anti-Russia economic sanctions, which, beginning in 2012, then served as a preparatory stage for the follow-on large-scale initiation, in 2014, of the present ‘New Cold War’. In 2014, the U.S. Government’s scheme (which started being hatched in 2011) to overthrow Ukraine’s Government and turn it rabidly against Russia, caused Crimeans to become intensely against continued (ever since 1954) rule by Ukraine (prior to 1954, Crimea had, for hundreds of years, been part of Russia; and Crimeans hadn’t even been consulted when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily switched them to Ukraine in 1954). Crimeans’ disgust and fear of this imposed new and rabidly anti-Russian Ukrainian Government sparked ‘Cold War II’ and the charge that ‘Putin stole Crimea’, when Crimeans did formally abandon Ukraine, by a referendum, on 16 March 2014. What Crimeans did was fully within their rights to do, under the democratic principle of the right of self-determination of peoples, but the U.S. Government imposes dictatorships (such as in the remaining, rump, Ukraine), no democracies, now — the U.S. Government also tries to impose a dictatorship (to be controlled by the Sauds) in Syria, and in Yemen; and the U.S. is allied with dictatorships, such as in Saudi Arabia and UAE.
All the while, as it invades and occupies foreign countries and slaughters people there and also occasionally overthrows governments via coups, the U.S. Government and its media assert that (like in the Cold War I era), an ideological excuse exists for this, and it’s that the U.S. is imposing its ‘democratic’ and ‘humanitarian’ values. So, that’s what’s left of what used to be America’s anti-‘communism’ (if that’s what it was).
Several articles by Lucy Komisar have connected the Magnitsky case to that 9 June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump’s people and Veselnitskaya, which meeting Robert Mueller investigates in order to find reasons to impeach Trump (i.e., to make Mike Pence President). Not only is Russian President Putin trying to get the Magnitsky Act overturned and nullified, but so too are Russian corporations which have suffered from the U.S. sanctions. Veselnitskaya represents at least one of those corporations, but whether she also represents Russia’s Goverrnment, isn’t yet clear. Of course, the proponents of replacing Trump by Pence are arguing that Veselnitskaya has been representing the Russian Government.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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