Russiagate conspiracy and its British midwives
Key Markets report for Friday, July 25, 2025
A week ago today, US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard began releasing documents related to Russiagate which implicate a number of Obama administration officials and former president Barack Obama himself in contriving baseless accusations against Donald Trump. The accusation was that Trump was a Russian agent, brought to power and controlled by Vladimir Putin.
The scandal had profound and far-reaching consequences. Among other things, it damaged US-Russia relations, weakened Trump’s first presidency, gave rise to an extensive system of cyber control and surveillance, including a project called “Defending Digital Democracy,” the theft of 2020 election in favor of the third Obama Biden presidency and much more. Some even claim that if it wasn’t for Russiagate, the war in Ukraine would never have happened.
That claim is entirely credible, and the implication is that Russiagate created the smokescreen that facilitated crimes at a colossal scale. However, the aspect of Russiagate that is still not being widely discussed, but which will inevitably blow wide open before the American and world public, is that the scandal was largely the brainchild of British intelligence and foreign policy establishments.
Russia in the crosshairs
For well over a century, an undying, fanatical obsession with destroying Russia has been one of the defining features of the British political class, and it has turned an irrational, rabid Russophobia into something of a cultural constant of British society. If anyone, anywhere in the world wishes to harm Russia, be they head-chopping jihadi terrorists or extreme-right neo-Nazis, Great Britain is always eager to lend a helping hand, not only by arming and training them, but also by conscripting anyone willing to listen to the British clarion call to contribute to the effort.
In April of 2021, well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Chatham House (formerly the Royal Institute for International Affairs and the sister organization to the New York based Council of Foreign Relations) was calling for Europeans and NATO to unite and confront Russia militarily. The report's authors argued that there would have to be a "joint and public recognition that Europe is under attack, and that allies must stand together to confront it." At the time, nobody was under attack, but in politics, what people perceive to be true is more important than what is actually true.
Trump presidency could jeopardize the enterprise
One factor that threatened to derail the march to World War 3 was the American democracy and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which shocked the British establishment. Their anxiety about Donald Trump was laid bare in an August 2023 Financial Times op-ed titled, “U.S. Allies Need To Wake Up to the Trump Question,” by Bronween Maddox. Maddox is not just any random foreign policy pundit: she was the Director and Chief Executive of the same “let’s all come together and go to war against Russia,” Chatham House.
At the time, Maddox was concerned that a second Trump presidency was possible and thought that this "should prompt a foreign policy rethink for the UK and its allies." Similar anxieties were articulated in a December 2018 report by the House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations titled, “U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order.” The Committee determined that if Trump were elected to a second term, the U.K. could no longer rely on the “Special Relationship” with the United States which has been the main force of imperial policy since World War II. (The same report also explored means for the U.K. to contain or control Russia, China and India.)
“British foreign policy," wrote Maddox, "is based on the presumption that the U.S. in some sense always remains the same. Its presidents, its policies, its wars of choice come and go. But America upholds the principle of international institutions... It continues to pick up the giant’s share of the tab for NATO, above all. Those assumptions are confounded if Donald Trump is elected again.” In his second term, Trump,
"would have an utterly different conception of America's role in the world and the nature of its democracy at home, of the rule of law at home and abroad. And so would the US voters who elected him. … At that point, the US becomes, for its allies, a different country altogether. The implications for global institutions, for international law and order, for predictability of a world superpower are stark. That they are barely discussed in published foreign policy is perhaps because of concern about jeopardizing current relationships. But the prospect of the US being led by a president who denies the principles of American democracy is likely enough that this is no longer a good excuse."
Defending democracy from the voters
Indeed, the British were so profoundly concerned about American democracy, they went out of their way to defend it from the American voters and their inclination to elect Donald Trump. The real reason why this is all "barely discussed in published foreign policy" is because Britain's role in the world must be strictly concealed from the public. Even during the Russiagate scandal, which was almost entirely contrived by the Democratic establishment in the US and the British intelligence, British role was almost never discussed or highlighted.
A typical example was the FOX News' host Sean Hannity who covered the scandal closely, with an unconcealed pro-Trump bias. Nevertheless, Hannity scrupulously kept the role of British operatives out of the limelight, railing daily about "Russian lies, Russian propaganda," but labeling the Brits only as "foreign nationals." Those foreign nationals were almost exclusively British intelligence operatives: Robert Hannigan, Christopher Steele, Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Sir Richard Dearlove, Bill Browder, Fiona Hill, Sir Kim Darroch and Jeremy Fleming among others. The only Russian who had a major role was Igor Danchenko, who reported to Christopher Steele. None of this was ever exposed or discussed in any mainstream media outlets.
It's important to appreciate that the British actors in the scandal were not minor, low-calibre players; for example, Sir Kim Darroch was the British ambassador to Washington, and Sir Richard Dearlove was formerly the head of MI6. Robert Hannigan was the Director of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intel agency during the time when Russiagate was cooked up. GCHQ is the sister organization to the US National Security Agency (NSA) and their seamless cooperation forms the intelligence foundation of the "special relationship."
In the summer of 2016, Hannigan flew to the US to meet with the CIA director John Brennan, which was unusual, since Hannigan's counterpart in the US would have been the director of the NSA (Mike Rogers), giving rise to the suspicion that the Russiagate conspiracy was being contrived in a limited circle of players. It blew up in December of 2016 with a slew of accusations against Russia: they hacked the DNC database, released emails to Wikileaks, damaged Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in favor of their own agent, Donald Trump.
GCHQ’s and Hannigan’s hand in the affair was suspicious enough that he left the agency shortly after Trump's inauguration in 2017. But his involvement did not stop there; after leaving GCHQ apparently he felt so strongly about defending US democracy from the evil Russians that he moved to the US to help the fine folks at the DNC and US intelligence community as an advisor. He joined academia as a cyber security expert and moved to the US to help defend American democracy by collaborating with Harvard’s “Defending Digital Democracy” project alongside Hillary Clinton’s former presidential campaign manager Robby Mook. Incidentally, Robert Hanningan was also among the contributors to the above mentioned House of Lords report on UK foreign policy which makes the whole affair quite a Gordian knot for coincidence theorists.
The damage
I suspect that we’ll learn a lot more about Russiagate and its consequences than what we know today, but what we already know for sure, thanks to the documents released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard is that the scandal was indeed a malicious conspiracy, not only to deprive the American people of their democratic choice, damage Donald Trump’s presidency and draw the US into costly imperial wars that never should have been fought. The devastated country and 1,000,000+ casualties in the Ukraine war are only part of the damage.
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