It was January 10, 2017 — just 10 days before President Trump’s inauguration — when Buzzfeed published the text of what came to be called the “Trump-Russia Dossier.” That event set off a tsunami of what easily became thousands of articles in the mainstream press claiming or suggesting that there had been some sort of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia to “hack the election.”

I first commented on the subject a few weeks later in a post on March 2, 2017 titled “What Is With This Weird Obsession With Russia?” In the midst of what were at that moment multiple articles every day in every mainstream press outlet obsessing over the supposed Trump-Russia cabal, that post made the obvious point that the whole idea that Russia had colluded with Trump or his people to help him win the election made no sense whatsoever. One reason the thesis made no sense was that if Russia and Trump’s people had in fact “colluded,” the American security guys would have had recordings that would have quickly leaked. But perhaps the most definitive reason why the thesis made no sense was that Russia’s energy-dependent economy had been crippled by the fall in oil and gas prices that had occurred in about 2014-15, brought about by American fracking, and if Putin was even remotely rational he would prefer the candidate who proposed to restrict American energy development over the candidate who proposed to unleash it.

Two plus years of Russia! Russia! Russia! later, the Mueller Report (released April 18, 2019) finally put the whole thing to rest. Or so we thought. And you would also think that the likes of the NYT/WaPo/CNN/MSNBC/ABC/NBC/CBS would have been so embarrassed by the disaster of two years of the Russia hoax that they would be afraid to go anyway near there again.

But there it was on the front page of the New York Times last Thursday (February 20): “Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump.” Four reporters are on the byline — Adam Goldman, Julian Barnes, Maggie Haberman, and Nicholas Fandos — all veterans of Russia 1.0. (Didn’t any of these people get fired?) “Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said . . . .” The sources? Anonymous, of course.

And the usual suspects immediately piled on. For example, there was CNN on February 21, “Russia is looking to help Trump win in 2020, election security official told lawmakers.” CNN had their own four-reporter team on the case, and claim to have sourced the story independently with “three sources familiar with the matter.” Again, all are anonymous. At the Washington Post, it was a completely delusional column by Max Boot on February 21 headlined “Why the Russians still prefer Trump.” And so forth.

My clear favorite was the tweet from Hillary Clinton on February 21:

Putin’s Puppet is at it again, taking Russian help for himself. He knows he can’t win without it. And we can’t let it happen.

Remember how close this crazy lady came to becoming President.

Really, it’s time to go beyond just saying that this doesn’t make any sense. It is completely preposterous.

There is zero chance that Putin prefers President Trump over any of his potential Democratic opponents. The reason is simple. All of the Democratic candidates propose to hobble and cripple the U.S. fossil fuel industry. Trump supports the expansion of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. The U.S. fossil fuel industry is what has driven down the price of Russia’s oil and gas exports by about half in the last several years, costing Russia and Putin hundreds of billions of dollars, and severely restricting Russia’s ability to continue to be a player on the world stage. The drop in the prices of oil and gas has brought about a drastic shrinkage in Russia’s GDP, and has forced massive reductions in the budgets of Russia’s government and of its defense establishment. Here is a post from March 2018, “How Are Things Going In Russia?”, where I compiled statistics, including on the forced shrinkage of Russia’s defense budget. That has got to be eating away at Putin. CNBC reported in April 2019 that in 2018 Russia had dropped out of the top five spenders on the military (numbers one through five being the U.S., China, Saudi Arabia, India, and France).

Now, whether the intelligence briefing described by the NYT et al. took place as described is another question. There are all kinds of possibilities. The Times et al. could have completely gotten the story wrong in the transmission via the anonymous sources with their own agendas; or the intelligence briefers could be the usual knaves and/or fools from that community; or something else. But as between candidates who propose serious restrictions on fossil fuel development (all Democratic candidates) up to and including an immediate ban on fracking by executive order (at least Sanders and Warren), and a candidate who advocates for unrestricted fossil fuel development (Trump), there is no question which side Putin prefers.