Brazil's largest newspaper publishes a devastating op-ed on the five years of Russiagate propaganda perpetrated by the corporate media. Special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko, the principal source for the bogus Steele dossier used by the FBI as a basis for the Trump-Russia investigation, further illustrates how the corporate media is nothing more than the propaganda apparatus of the political establishment and the national security state. For five years, all we heard was the outlandish allegation that Donald Trump and his campaign were clandestine agents of Vladimir Putin. All lies built on a dossier generated by the Clinton campaign. Watch how the shameful US media and corrupt intelligence officials recycled the fabricated claims of the Steele Dossier as fact to the American people: Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha, published a devastating op-ed by, Tulane Professor Idelber Avelar, on the Russiagate lies perpetrated by the US media. How can informed Americans ever trust the corporate media again after four years of promulgating propaganda to derail a duly-elected President? Why should Americans trust the corporate media about US elections or covid-19 if they were willing to spread four years of lies, misinformation, and disinformation? Full Folha article translated from Portuguese into English: [Abstract] Touted over the past five years without any evidence of proof, the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, which would have led to Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, was an unparalleled blow to the credibility of the mainstream press, which was devoted daily coverage on TV and hundreds of pages in print newspapers. The case had the effect of spreading rumors with anonymous sources and guaranteeing political victories for Trump, who remains strong for the next election. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was the greatest journalistic collapse of the 21st century. We are not talking about a factual error by the news anchor at 11 pm or three poorly scored stories in the print newspapers. It took five years of daily coverage on CNN and MSNBC and hundreds of stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post about something that proved to be a hoax, a ghost, a poorly told story whose incongruities have accumulated until it completely collapsed: the Russiagate, the so-called “Russian interference in the 2016 elections”, the result of “Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin”. Let’s get to the facts. On June 12, 2016, five months before the election, Julian Assange announced that Wikileaks would publish a barrage of emails referring to Hillary Clinton. Within three days, Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), already claimed it had evidence that Russia had hacked the party’s server. The narrative was starting to consolidate that whoever dealt with the content of the Wikileaks publication would be playing Russia’s game. The emails were published in July and were of obvious public interest. They revealed DNC corruption and the sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in the primaries, including delivering debate questions to the Clinton campaign in advance. Meanwhile, at the request of Fusion GPS, a company also hired by the DNC and which presents itself as “strategic intelligence”, a former British spy, Christopher Steele, was preparing a dossier on Donald Trump’s alleged relations with Russia. Now discredited, this dossier was the source of the story that in 2013, during the Miss Universe pageant held in Russia, upon learning that a hotel bed had been used by Barack and Michelle Obama, Trump would have hired two prostitutes to urinate on it while he watched. Vladimir Putin would be in possession of a video of this act and, since then, in a position to blackmail Trump with the threat of its publication. The story, which became known as the “pee tape”, was presented without evidence or named sources, in a dossier hired by a political campaign and produced by a former spy — that is, someone who spent his life being paid to lie. More at link.