"The forefathers of de'tente were Republicans," Cohen said. "How the Democrats behaved during this period of de'tente was mixed. There was what used to be called the Henry Jackson wing. This was a very hard-line, ideological wing of the Democratic Party that didn't believe in de'tente. Some Democrats did. I lived many years in Moscow, both Soviet and post-Soviet times. If you talk to Russian, Soviet policymakers, they generally prefer Republican candidates for the presidency."
Democrats are perceived by Russian rulers as more ideological, Cohen said.
"Republicans tend to be businessmen who want to do business in Russia," he said. "The most important pro-de'tente lobby group, created in the 1970s, was called the American Committee for East-West Accord. It was created by American CEOs who wanted to do business in Soviet Russia."
"The single most important relationship the United States has is with Russia," Cohen went on, "not only because of the nuclear weapons. It remains the largest territorial country in the world. It abuts every region we are concerned about. De'tente with Russia -- not friendship, not partnership, not alliance -- but reducing conflict is essential. Yet something happened in 2016."
The accusations made repeatedly by James Clapper, the former director of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, concerning the Kremlin's supposed control of Trump and Russia's alleged theft of our elections are deeply disturbing, Cohen said. Clapper and Brennan have described Trump as a Kremlin "asset." Brennan called Trump's performance at a news conference with the Russian president in Finland "nothing short of treasonous."
Clapper in his memoir, "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence," claims Putin's interference in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump was "staggering."
"Of course, the Russian efforts affected the outcome," writes Clapper. "Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians."
Brennan and Clapper have on numerous occasions been caught lying to the public. Brennan, for example, denied, falsely, that the CIA was monitoring the computers that Senate staff members were using to prepare a report on torture. The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor to accuse Brennan and the CIA of potentially violating the U.S. Constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to spy on and thwart her committee's investigations into the agency's use of torture. She described the situation as a "defining moment" for political oversight. Brennan also claimed there was not a "single collateral death" in the drone assassination program, that Osama bin Laden used his wife as a human shield before being gunned down in a U.S. raid in Pakistan, and insisted that torture, or what is euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation," has produced valuable intelligence. None of these statements are true.
Clapper, who at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for interpreting spy-satellite photos and intelligence such as air particles and soil samples, concocted a story about Saddam Hussein spiriting his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the documents that verified his program to Syria on the eve of the invasion. He blatantly committed perjury before the Senate when being questioned about domestic surveillance programs of the American public. He was asked, "Does the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded, "No, sir. " Not wittingly." It was, as Clapper knew very well, a lie.
Our inability to oversee or control senior intelligence officials and their agencies, which fabricate information to push through agendas embraced by the shadow state, signals the death of democracy. Intelligence officials seemingly empowered to lie -- Brennan and Clapper have been among them -- ominously have in their hands instruments of surveillance, intimidation and coercion that effectively silence their critics, blunt investigations into their activities, even within the government, and make them and their agencies unaccountable.
"We have the Steele dossier that was spookily floating around American media," Cohen said of the report compiled by Christopher Steele.
The report was commissioned by Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Bob Woodward reported that Brennan pushed to include the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment of Russian election interference.
"He [Steele] got it from newspapers," Cohen said. "I don't think he had a single source in Russia. Steele comes forward with this dossier and says, 'I've got information from high-level sources.' The Clinton campaign is funding this operation. But Steele is very important. He's a former U.K. intelligence officer, if he's really former, who had served in Russia and ran Russian cases. He says he has this information in the dossier about Trump frolicking with prostitutes. About Trump having been corrupted decades ago. He got it from 'high-level' Kremlin sources. This is preposterous. It's illogical."
"The theory is Putin desperately wanted to make Trump president," Cohen said. "Yet, guys in the Kremlin, around Putin, were feeding Trump dirt to a guy called Steele. Even though the boss wants -- does it make any sense to you?"
"Why is this important?" Cohen asked. "Right-wing American media outlets today, in particular Fox News, are blaming Russia for this whole Russia-gate thing. They're saying that Russia provided this false information to Steele, who pumped it into our system, which led to Russia-gate. This is untrue."
"Who is behind all this? Including the Steele operation?" Cohen asked. "I prefer a good question to an orthodox answer. I'm not dogmatic. I don't have the evidence. But all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA. Long before it hit America -- maybe as early as late 2015. One of the problems we have today is everybody is hitting on the FBI. Lovers who sent emails. But the FBI is a squishy organization, nobody is afraid of the FBI. It's not what it used to be under J. Edgar Hoover. Look at James Comey, for God's sake. He's a patsy. Brennan and Clapper played Comey. They dumped this stuff on him. Comey couldn't even handle Mrs. Clinton's emails. He made a mess of everything. Who were the cunning guys? They were Brennan and Clapper. [Brennan,] the head of the CIA. Clapper, the head of the Office of [the Director of] National Intelligence, who is supposed to oversee these agencies."
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