Glenn Greenwald

Senate Democrats Use the Jim Crow Filibuster to Protect the Kremlin

Indeed, few episodes have revealed what utter propagandists and unhinged conspiracy theorists the corporate media are more than the controversy over Nord Stream 2. At exactly the same time these media outlets were insisting that Trump was little more than a treasonous, subservient tool of Putin — controlled through Moscow's blackmail — Trump was doing everything possible to sabotage this pipeline, arguably the most vital interest of Russia (it competes for that title only with Ukraine, which Trump, infuriating the Russians, swamped with lethal arms after Obama largely refused to do so). Trump was threatening, cajoling, and trying to coerce Germany into buying U.S. natural gas rather than from the Russians, arguing that U.S. expenditures on NATO and on Germany's military protection obligated Berlin to buy from the U.S. instead. The Trump administration used sanctions regimes and other tools to prevent completion of that pipeline — an extremely odd act for a Russian-controlled asset, to put it mildly.