Summary: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s walking pneumonia, and the apparent brief spell of illness it occasioned at the 9/11 commemoration ceremonies in New York today has called forth the usual boorish behavior from Donald Trump and his allies. But perhaps Mr. Trump and his allies should be careful what they wish for. Secretary Clinton’s indisposition bears all the hallmarks of a Russian state-sponsored assassination attempt. She is as much a target of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as Anna Politovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko were, and both Ms. Politovskaya and Mr. Litvinenko are now dead. The American counterintelligence apparat and the FBI need to investigate this matter closely. Was Secretary Clinton’s indisposition an act of the Russian state carried out to benefit Donald Trump?
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By: Ivan A. Lopakhin
Special to Cathedral City Observed
While attending the 9/11 commemorations in New York City today, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton apparently suffered a mild case of heat exhaustion secondary to the walking pneumonia she was diagnosed as having last Friday. Was it a naturally occurring phenomenon, or was this something rather darker, perhaps an attempted assassination carried out by Russian operatives acting on behalf of Donald Trump?
Of course, we now find ourselves waiting for the inevitable, ineluctably boorish tweet from Donald Trump, along the lines of something like “crooked Hillary is dying on her feet” or something rather similar. Trump and his Trumpanzees have been assiduously promoting a conspiracy theory that Hillary Rodham Clinton is “too sick” to President, eagerly comparing her health to that of Donald Trump, about whose health we actually have nothing more than the quackish testimony of his gastroenterologist, himself a presumptive quack, contained in a letter dashed off in the space of five minutes while the good doctor was waiting for a limousine to take him to make a house call (!) on The Donald.
And of course, the revelations of late about The Donald’s health itself have been none too savory. Apparently, Trump takes an amphthetamine related stimulant that has verifiable, known, negative effects upon the nervous system and the higher cognitive brain functions. It may certainly go a long way toward explaining Trump’s apparent psychopathic behavior and his own weird fascination with and for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It may also go a long way toward explaining Trump’s bizarre embrace of some of the worst sectors of American society and equally toward explaining his uncritical embrace of conspiracy theorists of the Drudge/Alex Jones/Breitbart ilk.
We also cannot discount the very real possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign is receiving material support from Russian state actors, including the Russian intelligence services and the FSB. Indeed, Trump’s documented plea for assistance to Russian hackers to hack Secretary Clinton’s emails, and the extent to which WikiLeaks’ Clinton-hating criminal of a leader, Julian Assange, has been providing material aid and support to the Trump campaign, largely in the form of acting as a laundromat for emails hacked by Russian intelligence, supports an inference that Trump’s campaign is and always has been orchestrated, if not entirely, then certainly in substantial part, from the Moscow Kremlin. Certainly, Otechestvo (the Russian Fatherland) is watching.
And that leads us to another disturbing question that the FBI should look into rather closely: was Hillary’s sudden illness not a coincidence, but a planned event? In November, 2006, Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned in London by a Russian operative identified by HM Government as Andrey Lugovoy, a member of Russia's Federal Protective Service. After a number of years of investigations and inquiries by HM coroners and by Scotland Yard, HM government announced in January of this year that Litvinenko’s murder had been in operation of the FSB carried out at the personal direction of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin himself.
Given the willingness of Russian state actors to assassinate people on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s enemies list, including a number of Russian journalists, Anna Politovskaya among them, or try to run them out of Russia altogether, we may legitimately ask whether Secretary Clinton’s sudden illness was indeed a natural occurrence. Or was it something more sinister? We know how much Vladimir Vladimirovich wants to see Donald Trump in the White House. After all, a Trump presidency would represent the biggest Russian victory over the United States since the October Revolution of 1917. Trump having made it clear that he would betray NATO and America’s national security interests to the Kremlin, it is not surprising that the Kremlin would like to enable him to do just that.
In which case, if I were Secretary Clinton’s security staff, I should be conducting a careful investigation of the individuals with whom the secretary comes in contact. For the possibility that one or more Russian state actors may have deployed a biological or radiological weapon of some sort against Secretary Clinton cannot be discounted. It would be, given the openness of American society, relatively easy to introduce some such agent agent into the secretary’s food or drink.
The use of poison has always been an engine of Russian tradecraft, dating back to the days of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who attributed to it the death of his tsarita, but who was also notorious for the use of poison as a weapon against his own political adversaries. Certainly, in more recent history, poison has played a role in certain convenient demises in Russia and the Soviet Union. It is rumored, for example, that the Emperors Peter III and Ivan VI were quietly poisoned to make way for more congenial female successors, including the empresses Catherine The Great and Elizabeth. It is also rumored that the Emperor Paul and his son, the Emperor Alexander I were also helped on their way by a judicious draft of something fatal.
In more recent history, rumors of poisoning have surrounded the deaths of Mikhail Frunze, Iosif Stalin, and even of Ilyich himself. In short, the use of poison has an extensive role in the history of both the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union. Given the relative importance of poison as an engine of Russian/Soviet tradecraft and as a strategic weapon, it is not at all unreasonable to believe that Russian state actors may have been behind the illness that has befallen Hillary Rodham Clinton. Russia does not want Hillary Clinton to be president. They have indeed gone so far as to state that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election to the presidency of the United States might constitute a casus belli, a justification for war. And if the Kremlin cannot get its way by terrifying American voters into voting for their preferred candidate, they may try to get what they desire by assassinating their way to that goal.
The FBI and the entire American counterintelligence apparat need to be working from the assumption that Hillary Clinton’s illness today must be assumed to be the result of a deliberate assassination attempt by Russian state actors until the contrary can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. We may be reaching a situation analogous to that which obtained in the state of Maryland during the year 1861, when secessionists and seditionists sought to take the state out of the union, but were forestalled by President Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus within the Old Line State. A wave of arrests followed hard upon Lincoln’s decision, and two years later, former governor and then-Senator Thomas Hicks defended the policy, saying: “I believe that arrests and arrests alone saved the State of Maryland not only from greater degradation than she suffered, but from everlasting destruction." He also said, "I approved them then, and I approve them now....”
We may be at a point in our history where “arrests and arrests alone” will save the United States. We are not living through a situation that is in any way analogous to the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s. During the 1950s, there was a wave of hysteria, of fear of “Reds under our beds.” Of course, as in all moral panics, the red panic of the 1950s was not without some initial factual justification. The treason of the so-called Cambridge Five, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and the “Fifth Man” whose identity was speculated upon but never established, together with the treachery of Klaus Fuchs, who passed the West’s atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, provided at least a partial factual predicate for the red scare of the 50s.
But today’s Kremlin scare is more frightening by orders of magnitude. The Soviets could never hope to achieve a hostile takeover of the United States government; Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin stands a very good chance of being able to mount just such a hostile takeover. The question therefor is do we wanted to become a compliant Russian satellite, or do we want to remain a free, if politically divided, country.
As long as Hillary Clinton remains alive, she stands in the way of Vladimir Vladinirovich’s desire to reduce America to the status of a Russian satellite. And if she is indeed in the way, then Hillary Clinton represents as much of a target as Anna Politovskaya or Alexander Litvinenko. There is a palpable threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s well-being, and the American counterintelligence community should be investigating the activities not only of the Trump campaign, but of the hidden Russian agents assisting it. And if the evidentiary trail leads back to Donald Trump, or to the senior leadership of his campaign, then truly arrests, and arrests alone, will save this country.
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Ivan A. Lopakhin was born 59 years ago in Leningrad, to an American mother and a Russian father. After his father’s death, Ivan accompanied his mother on her return to the United States. A confused Young Pioneer of 14 quickly acclimated himself to life as an immigrant in the United States, mastering the related arts of skateboarding and surfing. Ivan currently works as a “fixer,” helping businesses in the United States and Russia overcome the obstacles occasioned by the snits and quarrels of their respective governments. Though he remains Russian Orthodox, Ivan regularly takes the Sacrament according to the rite of the Episcopal Church.
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