Some might ask how a seemingly random email in John Podesta’s collection could be so important. It is a fair question. The answer is that it marks the origin of a hoax that not only consumed a presidency but also irreversibly altered the geopolitical landscape. Everything we see happening today can be traced back to that hoax.
To understand why, we have to go back to the days of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. She claimed she wanted to reset relations with Russia. On its own, that was a reasonable idea. Russia shares large parts of our culture, history, and religion. Relations had been patchy, but there was no inherent reason they could not be improved.
But then, whether by accident or design, she bungled it. After that, she and Western elites went fully anti-Russia in support of Ukraine. This was at least partly fueled by a massive racket laundering USAID and other funds through Ukraine into the pockets of people like the Biden family, NGOs, and various politicians. In 2014, the U.S. government, as confirmed in the Nuland tape, replaced Ukraine’s neutral, democratically elected president with their own puppet. Unsurprisingly, this did not sit well with Russia.
When Trump came along in 2015, he recognized and called out Western deceit, from NATO expansion to “Euromaidan,” and rightly asked why the U.S. could not try to get along with Russia. He consistently argued that while relations had been strained, nothing inherently prevented improvement.
In early 2016, the Russia collusion plot was cooked up, as evidenced in the Podesta emails, to portray Trump as a Russian agent. Had Trump lost, the scheme would have ended there. But after his miraculous victory, Obama seized the Clinton hoax and weaponized it through the U.S. intelligence community. What started as a campaign trick became a full government effort to sabotage and remove a sitting president.
The consequences were devastating. The criminalization of diplomacy with Russia ensured Trump had no chance of improving relations. His presidency was overshadowed by the constant cloud of “Mueller” investigations and allegations of treason. There were no rapprochements, no peace talks with Ukraine, no chance to rein in Russia on Iran, and countless other missed opportunities. Russia, seeing the hostility, pivoted to China, giving the world’s most dangerous country access to unlimited raw materials and strategic advantages.
That is how we ended up here, and it all traces back to what could have been, had it not been for one of
Hans Mahncke
