The publication of the Republican House Committee memo and reports of other documents increasingly suggest not only a "Russiagate" without Russia but also something darker: The "collusion" may not have been in the White House or the Kremlin.

Referring to the memo whose preparation was overseen by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes and whose release was authorized by President Trump, and to similar reports likely to come, Cohen, having for years researched Soviet-era archive materials (once highly classified), understands the difficulties involved in summarizing such secret documents, especially when they have been generated by intelligence agencies. They must be put in the larger political context of the time, which can be fully understood only by using other sources as well, including open ones; and they may be contradicted by other classified materials not yet available.

Nonetheless, the "Republican memo," as it has become known while we await its Democratic counterpart, indicates that some kind of operation against presidential candidate and then President Trump, an "investigation," has been under way among top officials of US intelligence agencies for a long time. The memo focuses on questionable methods used by Obama's FBI and Justice Department to obtain a warrant permitting them to surveil Carter Page, a peripheral and short-tenured Trump foreign-policy adviser, and the role played in this by the anti-Trump "dossier" complied by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer whose career specialization was Russia. But the memo's implications are even larger.

US Treasury admits further sectoral sanctions against Russia's sovereign debt would backfire

In a recent article for RussiaFeed I discussed the possible additional sectoral sanctions against Russia which were being discussed in the US, and I said that none of them would do significant long term harm to Russia, but all of them risked doing real harm to the US.

As a self-sufficient continental economy sanctions on Russia almost by definition can have only a limited impact, and one which over time must diminish anyway.

As it happens the most effective sanctions the West could have imposed on Russia, both in terms of their impact on the Russian economy and their limited impact on the economies of the West, were the sectoral sanctions which were imposed in 2014.

Those sanctions did stop for a time the flow of capital from the West into Russia at a time when Russia was facing heavy debt repayments and when the price of its main export products - oil and gas - was collapsing. The result was to deepen the recession caused by the collapse of oil and gas prices whilst further lowering the value of the rouble in a way which intensified the inflation spike.

With oil prices now rising, most short term Russian foreign debt repaid, and with the rouble floating, none of the sanctions discussed in this article look like they can have anything like the impact on Russia that the sanctions imposed in 2014 did.

The fact that the Russian economy successfully - in fact almost effortlessly - adjusted to those sanctions despite the difficult conditions ought to serve as a warning that further sanctions against Russia will not work, and if they are of the sort discussed in this article are counter-productive.

After the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebrand of Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate, claimed responsibility for the dramatic downing of a Russian Su-25 fighter jet over Idlib in northwest Syria on Saturday - the first Russian plane downed in Syria since 2015 - a number of analysts have published articles asking the obvious million dollar question: where did al-Qaeda get the portable anti-aircraft missile system used in the attack?

Once such article in Al Monitor speculates on the following: "The three immediate questions that arose from the attack were how the downing was made possible, how the militants acquired the arms and whether there was a bigger-level player behind the attack."

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele, according to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.

"We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country," Warner texted the lobbyist, Adam Waldman, on March 22, 2017.

"I'm in," Waldman, whose firm has ties to Hillary Clinton, texted back to Warner.

Steele famously put together the anti-Trump dossier of unverified information that was used by FBI and Justice Department officials in October 2016 to get a warrant to conduct surveillance of former Trump adviser Carter Page. Despite the efforts, Steele has not agreed to an interview with the committee.

We'll bring you Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel's tweetstorm in a moment, but I'll take a stab at answering her question about the media right out of the gate. Three possibilities:

1. The GOP hyped the Nunes memo, which quickly became the center of this whole firestorm -- replete with counter-memos, FBI objections, etc. The press followed the spotlight.
2. As we've been saying, there are so many complex pieces of this larger puzzle, following the plot is difficult. It's not just news consumers wondering, "which memo is this now?" -- it's many of the people trying to cover this drama, too. The document in question here is a second, less redacted, version of a Senate memo that few people have even heard of.
3. The Senate memo, produced by non-bomb-throwers Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, is substantially more disruptive to the Democrats' narrative than the Nunes document. And the press generally prefers Democratic narratives to Republican ones because most journalists are liberals.

As Democrats and Republicans target each other with accusations of 'Russian collusion,' they seize on evidence of the other's alleged wrongdoing, no matter how flimsy. The latest such case is the Uranium One controversy.

Though Democrats have accused President Donald Trump of "colluding" with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, which they thought Hillary Clinton was sure to win, they have offered little to no evidence to prove the claim. Meanwhile, Trump has said the real collusion was between Clinton and the Russians on Uranium One, a Canadian-based mining company that owns 20 percent of US uranium deposits.

In 2010, the Obama administration approved the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, a Russian state energy company. This was the era of the infamous "reset" in US-Russian relations, when Hillary Clinton was the US secretary of state. An FBI informant who worked with the companies involved now says Moscow greased the deal with millions of dollars intended for the Clintons' charity.

Congressional investigators are puzzling over a December 2016 text message that suggests the Justice Department sought to grant immunity to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

In a Dec. 13, 2016 text exchange, FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok sent his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, a text message referring to a conversation he had with the Justice Department discussing immunity and potential grand jury testimony.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released the text message along with 384 pages of additional records on Wednesday.

"Talked with DoJ about HA interview," Strzok wrote to Page.

"Told them we had to interview, no immunity. They said they thought that would get counsel to the point of saying she's either taking the 5th in the Gj or you need to give her immunity. I said that's fine, please have discussions to get the decision to that point and I would run it up the chain."

As a primary candidate, Donald Trump championed a quasi-isolationist foreign policy. At one Republican primary debate, Trump argued that America had "done a tremendous disservice to humanity" in the Middle East.

"The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away - and for what?" the mogul asked. "The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!"

Trump still insisted that America must defend itself against attack (or, potentially, disrespect) with overwhelming force, up to and including deliberate war crimes. But his overriding foreign policy message was, nevertheless, that America should trim its imperial sails, and reallocate resources to the home front.

President Trump's foreign policy has been decidedly different. Since taking office he has escalated American involvement in virtually every foreign conflict while calling for cuts to domestic spending and massive increases in the Pentagon's budget. He regularly touts the necessity of a global military presence and preemptive wars with bromides like, "Past experience has taught us that complacency and concessions only invite aggression and provocation." If the budget currently before Congress is passed, we will spend $716 billion on our military next year.

Militants from the Islamic State terror group (outlawed in Russia) feel at ease near the US military base located on the outskirts of Syria's Al-Tanf, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakahrova said on Thursday.

"The United States' illegal military presence in Syria remains a serious challenge hampering efforts to promote the peace process, maintain Syria's unity and territorial integrity," she said.

The U.S.-led coalition conducted air and artillery strikes against pro-regime forces in Syria on Wednesday, killing over 100 pro-government fighters, CNN reports.

According to the coalition's statement, the strikes were carried out after forces allied with the Syrian government "initiated an unprovoked attack" against what CNN termed "a well-established Syrian Democratic Forces headquarters where coalition advisers were working with US-backed Syrian fighters."

CNN dubbed the U.S.-led strike "defensive" even though U.S. forces have no legal authority to be in Syria in the first place, something the New York Times was forced to admit a few weeks ago. According to official numbers, there are some 2,000 U.S. troops embedded with SDF forces in Syria, and Syria has deemed these U.S. troops to be an invading force. Technically, the act of violating Syria's sovereignty and killing over 100 of its troops in a flagrant act of war makes the U.S. the aggressor - not the defender - in this scenario. (If you are having trouble understanding this, try reversing the U.S. and Syria in the scenario and seeing how you would feel if the shoe were on the other foot).