During an interview with “System Update” host Glenn Greenwald, Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy explained how his view of “Russiagate” changed after reading the Durham report.
GLENN GREENWALD: In terms of this Russiagate narrative that really dominated our politics for five or six years, and the two prongs of it were that the Trump campaign collaborated with the Kremlin to hack into the DNC emails and manipulate the outcome of the 20216 election. And the subsidiary claim was that Trump was some kind of a puppet of Vladimir Putin or controlled by the Kremlin due to blackmail or other leverage. What is your view now of the veracity of those two claims?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR,: I think there was a period in which you’re correct about that I just accepted the mainstream narrative. Part of that is just my own fault for not being skeptical about it. And part of it also may have been my natal bias against Donald Trump. I was like most Democrats, I was just happy to hear anything that confirmed my own notion of Donald Trump. The first time that I had any kind of inkling that that narrative may not be completely accurate was when I was having dinner with Oliver Stone, and Oliver Stone lives about a half a mile from where I live… and he had Cherryl and i for dinner one night with his sons Sean, who was a podcaster and political critic. And the two of them, I don’t know how it came up, maybe one of us mentioned it, but he scoffed in a way that was very dismissive and had a sort of brief monologue about how there was nothing to that story.
And it seemed to me, of course, you’re with Oliver Stone, so you think here’s a guy who is embracing fringe theories anyway, and you just don’t know. But it put the first seed of doubt into my head.
In 2020, when people started criticizing, including myself, the methodology that was being used to prove the Covid vaccines, I all of a sudden began seeing these propaganda tropes that were appearing all the time saying anybody who criticized vaccines is probably a Russian bot, or a stooge of Putin. So then I thought, “Oh, OK, here’s what they’re doing.” And it may be orchestrated.
I think at that point, I was open to hearing a different story, and then i started seeing the piles of evidence, but I still was neutral on it. In my mind, the jury was out on this stuff until I saw the recent disclosures, the Durham report, etc. That makes it look like the entire thing was fake, the entire thing was fabricated from whole cloth.
R&I ~ MJM