I know when I publicly rebuke Joy Ann Reid I will be berated as both a racist and misogynist. I am neither. My longtime activism for reform of our racist state and federal drug laws and my determination to treat men and women equally in all respects including criticism say otherwise.

But in a recent rant for fake news site, the failing Daily Beast, Ms. Reid spins a false narrative (sans any evidence that Russian interests aided the election of Donald Trump). But in her wild-ass screed she says, “There was Trump’s longtime crony Roger Stone, Manafort’s old lobbying partner, who pushed Trump to favor the U.S.S.R.’s point of view over Ronald Reagan’s during the 1980s, when Vlad Putin was still a KGB agent….”. This is a bald face lie. I have never offered any such advice to Donald Trump and there is no memo, or public or private comment that would bear this out.

Now I see Ms. Reid losing it on Twitter. Guess she is not used to being challenged. Words matter, Joy Ann, and you are busted.

It is not 1980 and America’s foreign policy has different challenges because of the failure of the neocon adventures of Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2 and Obama. Donald Trump has no illusions about the reality of the Russian gulag and Putin’s days in the KGB. But because Trump favors hard-headed negotiation and detente over war does not make him soft of Russia or Putin.

We’ve had enough costly foreign wars. In Syria, Assad funds Hamas and Hezbollah and is backed by the Russians, while ISIS backed by the Saudis seek to topple him. Hillary promised the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon an expansion of the proxy war in Syria including a US-enforced “no-fly zone” inviting a confrontation with the heavily armed Russians whose bases are nearby while ours are around the globe. Trump’s wants to try for a deal for peace.

Under Obama and Clinton we transferred technology to Russia and did nothing when he rolled into Crimea (where a plebiscite with near universal voter turn-out had 80% wanting to go back to Mother Russia), or Syria. The technology transfers continued. The re-set was a joke.

So, I’m sorry Bill Maher; the entire assault on Donald Trump and the baseless charge that his campaign colluded with the Russians is a storyline pushed by the intelligence agencies apoplectic over the fact that Hillary is not able to deliver the expansion of the proxy war in Syria that she promised them.

In fact this false Russian-Trump collusion storyline was first advanced by John Podesta himself to divert attention from his cozy multi-million dollar business deals with Putin’s clique.

There is no real evidence or proof whatsoever that I knew about the hacking of John Podesta’s email by Wikileaks in advance. My tweet that “Podesta’s time in the barrel will come” means only that his business activities in Russia would come under public scrutiny as indeed they did with over 50 stories on the subject published between August and election day, including the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

The phony charge that I knew anything about the scope, focus or content of Wikileaks’ ultimate disclosures on Hillary Clinton in October despite claims to the contrary by Senator Mark Warner, Congressman Adam Schiff and other Democrats, are not sustained by the facts or the public record.

Any inference that my casual and now totally public exchange with Guccifer 2.0 constitutes collusion with a “Russian Agent” is disproved by the circumstances, content and timing of that exchange. The now-public exchange is both innocuous and benign and it took place 6-weeks after the publication of the DNC material by Wikileaks.

Based on the fact that this is the only communication I had with Guccifer 2.0 (who I do not concede is definitely a Russian asset based on the faulty track record of our intelligence services on such matters and a body of evidence to prove otherwise) does not constitute collusion. A simple on-line search will show there are many differing views on who, if anyone, Guccifer works for, many of them more authoritative and logical than the CIA’s “assessment.”

More troubling is the fact that the New York Times reported on January 20, 2017 that I was the subject of government surveillance, specifically a wiretap in their investigation into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. I demand to know what was the evidence or probable cause presented to a judge to obtain a warrant which allowed the violation of my constitutional right to privacy.

If, however, this surveillance was conducted under the authority of a FISA warrant, then the leak of the wiretaps to the New York Times constitutes a felony. There is also material in the left-wing fake news sites RawStory and Smoking Gun including the very existence of the innocuous direct messages between Guccifer 2.0 and myself that could have only been gleaned from similar leaks. Very clearly someone here has broken the law.

Joy Ann Reid lowers herself when the Daily Beast links her misguided piece to a fake news site, Smoking Gun, that is rife with falsehoods about me and likely to implicated in the violation the law before the truth about Russiagate becomes known.

The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today!