On How The Trump Movement Prevailed

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FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS

My column last week on the arrest of Charlie McGonigal, the top level U.S. FBI counterintelligence official who took money of a Russian oligarch prior to the 2016 presidential election and triggered the FBI’s last minute reopening of the Hillary emails case that gave Trump the win, has reopened the conversation about the Russian role in Trump’s fraudulent 2016 presidential election victory. The report and subsequent commentaries on Twitter by Michael Beschloss have been downright explosive.

That is, so they should have. But the story was buried almost as fast as it was reported in the same manner that the Mueller report was shelved almost as soon as possible and the issue of Trump was moved away from that angle. The reason is that while it is OK to pin the blame on Trump for all the terrible things that went on during his watch, it is not ok to expose the much wider range of forces responsible for plotting the current ongoing coup effort against American democracy.

Among other things, this is the story that was also covered up by the final report by the House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection. For reasons that were explained to “maintain focus,” it did not go into reports that would have displayed far wider focus on culpable agencies whose roles helped the insurrection scenario, such as leaders in the Secret Service and arrayed law enforcement and intelligence agencies who otherwise could have easily put down the deadly riot. Nothing on the Jan. 6 Committee report touched on any of that.

But as the Mueller report cites, key revelations show that a Russian television, RT, anniversary celebration in Moscow December 2015 marked a kickoff of a Russian flank of the Trump campaign. Putin sat at a circular head table next to U.S. turncoat Gen. Michael Flynn and others there included the U.S. Green Party candidate and representatives of the American Lyndon LaRouche outfit.

It turns out an extensive report of this meeting was provided that December to FBI Director James Comey, Mueller, U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner and U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff by former Watergate attorney Doug Caddy. Caddy had become a fan of LaRouche in Houston in the 1980s (as sadly so had I) but in 2016 broke away when it became clear that the LaRouche outfit was in fact a covert operation of Moscow. (I disassociated much earlier in the 1980s).

A knowledgeable LaRouche watcher, Caddy wrote that after that Moscow dinner, in January 2016, LaRouche’s Harley Schlanger asked Caddy, still a LaRouche supporter at the time, to arrange a meeting with key Trump operative, Roger Stone, in hopes of making LaRouche’s extensive Moscow networks available to Trump for purposes of establishing a direct “back channel” with Russian intelligence. That meeting occurred in Atlanta in February 2016.

In intelligence reports cited by Caddy in his letter, Putin “both hated and feared,” Clinton and used Wikileaks for “plausible deniability” purposes among Sen. Sanders supporters to switch them to Trump.

Meanwhile, it proved the case that in LaRouche’s marginal U.S. political cult, modes were tested from the early 1970s to convince his cultists that LaRouche never lost a single election, and that LaRouche was right and everyone else wrong about everything, which became very Trumpian formulas, especially when LaRouche shed any leftist tendencies and began appropriating right wing, antisemitic and homophobic beliefs.

LaRouche’s sharp right turn (precipitating my departure) was initiated in the early 1970s as a component of Nixon’s “detente” where the covert deal was to allow thousands of Russian organized crime thugs to come to the U.S. to help Nixon and his reactionary profascist cronies destroy remnants of the anti war, feminist, gay and civil rights movements that developed into major events by the end of the decade such as the elimination of almost 1,000 souls “suicided” at Jonestown and the murder of seminal gay activist Harvey Milk in San Francisco in 1978, much less the advancement of post-modern nihilism and the greed-dominated “Reagan revolution.”

Our Man in Arlington

Most Arlingtonians recall their whereabouts on July 8, 2019, when the flash floods came. (I was walking in the rain along Fairfax Drive toward Central Library when I was astonished to see a manhole cover bobbing up and down from water pressure.)

Among the hardest hit was Westover, where an underground gusher inundated Washington Blvd. and sidewalks. That caused a power outage and severe damage to Westover Market and Beer Garden, Ayers Variety and Hardware, Toby’s Ice Cream, Pete’s Barber Shop and the Italian Store, among others.

Forty-two months later, the county’s concrete response is nearing completion by early spring. On the McKinley Rd. athletic fields at Cardinal School, earth-mover crews from contractor W.B. Hopke have worked since December 2021 (after the new school was finished). They’re installing a 21st century stormwater vault on the Torreyson Run watershed. It comprises 477,775 cubic feet of water storage capacity made up of 670 precast pieces and a smaller system with 54,745 cubic feet of storage capacity and 78 precast pieces. On top, sod for athletic fields will be laid for the fall.

Many, but not all, observers are encouraged.

In response to the flooding, presidents of the Highland Park-Overlee Knolls, Leeway Overlee, Tara Leeway Heights and Westover Village in August 2019 sent the county board a let- ter asking for an intensified drainage effort. They pointed to an increase in impermeable surfaces, loss of trees, and warming atmosphere. They called the current pipe system “woefully inadequate and incoherent.”

County and school boards agreed to spend $16 million, part of at $50 million stormwater bond, with a goal of creating a “flood-resilient Arlington.” “It is an effort to strategically use public land for multi-purpose goals to overcome space constraints and expand the capacity of the stormwater management system,” says Aileen Winquist, stormwater communications manager for the Environmental Services Department. It is among the largest such vaults in the Mid-Atlantic and is “on budget.”

“The hardest part,” said Hopke’s project manager David Steger, “is the logistics of managing the flow of materials into an area with very little space. We could only bring in six trucks at a time to deliver materials.” Added Jim Gesselman, senior project manager for the supplier StormTrap, “The system is the best I have seen from an installation standpoint. They are level, plumb, and the pieces are extremely tight.”

Peter Rousselot, who helped launch the critics’ group Arlingtonians for Our Sustainable Future after the flooding, is awaiting more information on engineering questions and long-term demographic impact. “Part of the issue is the mismatch of pipe sizes, with a larger, newer stormwater-runoff pipe feeding into a much smaller one under the shopping center,” he told me. “If the county has diverted enough runoff into the vault and away from these mismatched mains, then the area may avoid a repeat of that horrific flood. But vaults are finite. Once full, they cannot hold more water.”

Winquist says the notion of a pipe mismatch is “a misconception related to a map labeling error from the Storm Sewer Capacity study.” It mistakenly labeled 7-foot-by-10-foot box culverts as being less than 36 inches in diameter when in fact the entry is seven feet. An apology was sent to neighbors in 2019.

Though only future floods will prove success, “the construction process has been on time with no major missteps,” says neighbor John Ford, who heads the Arlington Civic Federation. “It will be a useful template for other flood mitigation facilities in Arlington.”

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Treavor Wooden, the “always faithful” combat veteran who panhandles at I-66 in East Falls Church, continues his ups and downs.

Last month, he told me of his hospitalization for melanoma and a bone marrow transplant. But that has only delayed—not derailed—his plan to become a commercial truck driver. He proudly showed me the license he earned from a training course. He’s grateful to the 65 donors who helped him with more than $4,000 via the Go Fund Me campaign launched by neighbors Katherine and Genevieve.