TRUMP DOES NOT CONSPIRE WITH RUSSIA DURING ITS CAMPAIGN.

By Mirta Balea

President Donald Trump was exonerated of any suspicion about a supposed conciliation with Russia so that his hackers could influence in his favor in the 2016 elections.

A report commissioned and released this week by Attorney General William Barr, under the premise of a complaint by former President Barack Obama, before leaving office, concludes that neither the current tenant of the White House, nor his trusted men, conspired with the Russians.

Barr presented his summary of the document prepared by the Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who highlights not having found any signs of undue association with Russia of the members of Trump's campaign to provoke the defeat of his opponent Hillary Clinton, nor in hacks to Democratic dependencies in that same period.

Regarding the possible obstruction of justice, derived from the dismissal in May 2017 of the then head of the FBI, James Comey, who opposed the line marked by Trump to marginalize what is known as Russiagate, the conclusions are not so clear. Always, according to Barr, Mueller does not conclude indications of crime, but neither exonerates the president.

Despite the euphoria provoked by these conclusions in the Republican ranks - after two years of suspicion and investigation -, Democratic legislators remain in the breach and demand access without mediators to the report. Barr has argued for the non-dissemination of key points of the document the use of "sensitive material" subject to restrictions for its preparation. The Attorney General may be right, but it is also true that Obama took advantage of the precise moment of his departure from the White House to publicly expose another reverse report, made by the US Intelligence Services, on the interference of Russia in the form of cyberattacks against the ranks of the Democrats and sheltered to reveal it in that it should be known to the Americans. He was even forced for this reason to amend an executive order of 2015.

Some Republican congressmen demanded more evidence so that the suspicions were not based on a mere corporate report of how such attacks could have been carried out. The press noted an attempt to further undermine relations between Russia and the United States and to question Trump's victory, something that Democrats took a long time to digest.

Obama had been announcing these alleged violations for months without presenting evidence until the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security's report was released when he had barely had a shave left in the White House. Spokesman Josh Earnest admitted that the Democratic Administration was not prepared to make public the manner in which the information was obtained and protect the sources, which is the same as saying that it can not be questioned by the president.

Obama pushed in Congress a new battery of sanctions against Moscow and adopted other measures from the presidency as a non-grata citizen to consider 35 diplomats, close the consulates of Washington and California and two buildings dependent on the diplomatic delegation of the Kremlin shortly before leaving the position. The text released by the ex-president, the basis for initiating Mueller's investigation, says that two groups of the Russian Intelligence Services were responsible for cyber attacks. The first group would have attacked the Democratic Party in the summer of 2015 and the second in the spring of the following year.

This document made known to the American public would be the result of a declassification under the argument of transparency. Earnest insisted on his "credibility" because it was made "by agents of Intelligence, who have dedicated their lives to the protection and security of the United States", with a violin fund included. A phrase with the clear objective of touching the patriotic feeling for its assimilation as authentic.

The text was full of verbs like "we believe", "we consider", without giving a single test, perhaps because it was an open source, which removes everything that is classified and evades all sensitive material. The patriots of the report went for the presidential campaign and for Trump and it was clear in the document.

The United States has been subject to numerous hacking attempts, some long in time such as China and North Korea. When Obama released his particular report, he had known the theft by the Chinese of a water drone and their statements that they were willing to return it. The news went unnoticed until Trump spoke about the incident on his Twitter.

The return would take place, as common sense dictates, after, of course, that reverse engineering technicians seized the secrets of the device. Would the situation have been the same in which case to steal it Russia or Iran? I don `t believe. People often forget that those in charge of the Intelligence Services are political positions at the service of the government of the day and at the moment when they were fighting against Russia it did not seem advisable to do it against China. But remember when George Busch agreed to make known about the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to endorse his vengeful invasion and later turned out to be a lie, which was given, yes, many explanations, without this supposed for the president a fiasco in what he was looking for, to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

The Obama Administration has been the one that has sold the most weapons since World War II and all this despite being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Agreements on arms sales from 2008 to 2015, according to the Congressional Research Service, reach the figure of 265 thousand 471 million dollars. The largest, registered in 2011 with the beginning of the Syrian conflict: 56 thousand 131 million dollars. On Syria and Iraq, according to the same source, 26 thousand bombs fell in 2016, date of departure of the government Democrats.

Accounting in eight years of Obama's management results in a direct interest in switching to regimes that did not like, the Syrian case, for example, with the use of revolutions of a single color and selling weapons to terrorists, in a geo- politician of whom it is spoken rather little.

We all have terrorism always present, we are aware of this new era of violence, but what should take the dream of American society are the cyber attacks of adversaries and I am not referring to the confusing document issued by the former president on Russia. The level of sophistication achieved in the last five years should prepare everyone for the next decade. After September 11, 2001, all the money has been devoted, according to Pentagon sources, to Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, and to a single objective: terrorism, which has made the country vulnerable in other areas, such as technology, the scientist, the financier, among others.

The world society has been demonetized, many people do not carry cash and our money is captive in a numerical way, not on paper, in a few encapsulation nodes. An attack against all this would have very dangerous consequences, as dangerous as the theft of scientific, technological and other secrets.

If there has been an international significance in Trump's triumph, it is that the process of globalization - as it was mounted - has been somewhat slowed down. The most wobbly are the Chinese, who bet everything on that basket. Its economy is going through serious problems because its paradox is in being a communist dictatorship on a capitalist basis.

While the "trumpists" were rubbing their hands with the statement by Barr, the president of the judicial committee of the House tweeted his intentions to call to declare the attorney general about "the worrying discrepancies" in the final decision of the Department of Justice. It should be seen as a wake-up call to his refusal to take into consideration an eventual obstruction of justice by the president. Barr reported that Russia carried out operations to influence the 2016 elections, through misinformation and the use of social networks, and recalled the infiltration of hackers in the email of candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign, in which she exposed her ingenuity as an international political figure, which was unnecessarily exposed to cyber attack. It is hard to believe that the actions of this high-level official, who dismissed her need to protect herself, are not punished as would be the case.

Half a dozen Trump collaborators have been charged and convicted of crimes committed during the campaign, including conspiracy or lying to investigators. Some 25 Russian intelligence officers or experts in the management of social networks were also accused by Barr.

Among those sentenced in this two-year trial are former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort and number two Rick Gates, lawyers linked to the president or his environment Michael Cohen and Alex van der Zwaan, foreign policy advisers George Papadopoulos and National Security, Michael Flynn, and computer programmer Richard Pinedo. The condemned confessed several crimes such as tax evasion, fraud, violation of campaign finance laws, lying to the FBI about contacts with Moscow and selling false identities to the Russians.

Other defendants, though not incriminated, are Robert Stone, Trump's campaign and business adviser, who allegedly lied to Congress, Konstantin Kilimnik, former adviser to Manafort, for obstruction of justice, 12 Russian GRU officials for hacking the Democrats and 13 Russian citizens linked to the Internet Research Agency for conspiring against the United States. They were exonerated Donald Trump Jr., the son-in-law of President Jared Kushner and the Attorney General until November 2018, Jeff Sessions.

The attorney general has said that his determination to rule out the obstruction of the president's justice takes into account constitutional considerations around the accusation or criminal imputation of a president in office, which translated suggests that the matter will have to be addressed in another forum or debate. Here we enter the impeachment, which has been flying over Trump's head since he abruptly dismissed Comey. He was in charge of investigating if the Kremlin had infiltrated the elections.

The impeachment is a political trial to a high public office with the risk of being dismissed. The figure is included in the First Article of the Constitution. To start it, a majority of the House of Representatives is required (238 of 435). The trial takes place in the Senate, under the presidency of the Supreme Court.

The Senate has the last word with a two-thirds majority to decide whether or not to acquit the accused. The Constitution provides for the use of this legal figure in case of treason, bribery or other very serious crimes, so its application could not be immediate on the current tenant of the White House.

The conclusion is that although the Republicans consider Mueller's report a victory - known in the terms given by Barr - the doubts persist. The House - Democrat majority - continues its investigations.