Richard Grenell’s Frightening Appointment as DNI

Trump's new toady who will subvert
America's intelligence agencies.

Many homocons - gays who loyally support the GOP despite its virulent anti-gay agenda and harm that it does to the larger LBGT community - are likely applauding the appointment of Richard Grenell who is gay and a homocon if there ever was one  to the position of acting Director of National Intelligence.  Never mind that Grenell has zero experience in the field of intelligence.  His appointment bf Trump stems from two things: his ultra-right wing ideology, and his willingness to do whatever Trump tells him to do.  In some old movies gays were depicted as scary and dangerous characters or those willing to betray their country.  Grenell frighteningly fits that mold and will likely work to turn America's intelligence agencies into Trump's personal tools to further enrich himself while blocking any investigations into Trump's betrayal of the national interest.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this very disturbing appointment while the Washington Post slams Grenell's appointment here.  Here are highlights from the NYM article: 

After 9/11, reformers created the position of director of National Intelligence to improve coordination between America’s sprawling intelligence bureaucracies, and prevent the kinds of oversights that allowed U.S. spies to miss an imminent terror attack.

It’s fair to say they weren’t thinking that the person who held the job should also be coordinating the embassy in Berlin and American efforts to help keep the peace between Serbia and Kosovo — while simultaneously aiding a sitting president’s efforts to squeeze foreign governments to investigate his rivals. But, like the product of some late-night infomercial, Ambassador Richard Grenell now seems poised to do all that and more for the Trump White House.

Grenell’s tenure as ambassador to Germany has been rocky, at least from Berlin’s perspective. He has palled around with far-right groups, spoken openly of a desire to change Angela Merkel’s government, and made statements about U.S. views that sounded like direct orders to sensitive German ears. Last spring, leaders of two German political parties called him a “brat” and a “failure” and urged his ouster. Even in the annals of awkward things done by Trump appointees overseas, this was unprecedented. But if anything, those controversies have only helped Grenell’s reputation in the eyes of President Trump.

He popped up in all kinds of places you wouldn’t expect for someone in his position. . . . . He also made appearances in the scheming of Rudy Giuliani and his allies, according to now-indicted Giuliani associate Lev Parnas. Parnas told the Daily Beast that he was told to ask Grenell for advance notice if the Department of Justice were to move to extradite an indicted Ukrainian oligarch, Dmytro Firtash, from whom Giuliani hoped to get compromising information. Parnas also claims Grenell said he would comply. It would, to put it mildly, not be normal or legal for an ambassador to tip off a private citizen to a law-enforcement move. It would also be odd, because Firtash was not in Germany, and so one wouldn’t have expected the U.S. ambassador there to know anything about criminal procedures involving him.

Media coverage so far has focused on the concerns of intelligence professionals, allied countries, and Democrats that Grenell lacks intelligence qualifications. But that line of critique misses the point. One might argue that Grenell has been serving, unrecognized, as Trump’s high commissioner to Europe, and this Cabinet-level appointment gives him more authority in that role. But it also places an absolute loyalist in a position to, from Trump’s perspective, manage the intelligence community so that it cannot do him harm.

[Trump] The president has made it clear, again and again, that he seeks to remake the national security infrastructure so that it does his bidding and promotes his ends. He does not recognize the idea — sacred to national security professionals — of a higher national interest to which even a president must subordinate her or himself.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Joseph Maguire, a previous favorite for the job, was dropped by Trump because of his perceived personal disloyalty. It has been reported that Grenell will hold the job only in an acting role because he is too controversial to be confirmed.

But in fact, the Senate has already given its advice and consent to this future for our security bureaucracy, by voting to acquit Trump of charges stemming from his misuse of U.S. power in Ukraine.

Apparently the many Republican senators who created the director of National Intelligence position in order to have a senior, impartial leader enabling U.S. intelligence agencies to speak with one, non-politicized voice, also think it is fine to have a president who openly and repeatedly turns the tools of intelligence, law enforcement, and national security to his personal ends.

Trump's Lies and Disingenuous Claims of Treason

If there is anyone betraying the best interest of the United States, I would argue that it is Donald Trump who is shredding our alliances and violating the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution daily.  Yet like Hitler did with his opponents who recognized him for the threat that he posed to Germany, Trump is wildly claiming the it is U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI that are the traitors.  Trump seemingly views himself as the government in the form of a monarch and thereby any investigation of him and his dirty business dealings is "treason."  While James Comey is hardly among my favorite individuals - his bungling of the Clinton email red herring  helped elect Trump - in a column in the Washington Post he reminds us that facts matter and that Trump's baseless lies need to be confronted.  One can only hope that the media listens and goes after Trump and his minions accordingly. Here are op-ed highlights:

It is tempting for normal people to ignore [Trump] our president when he starts ranting about treason and corruption at the FBI. I understand the temptation. I’m the object of many of his rants, and even I try to ignore him.

But we shouldn’t, because millions of good people believe what a president of the United States says. In normal times, that’s healthy. But not now, when the president is a liar who doesn’t care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.

Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Near as I can tell, there is only one U.S. leader who still denies that fact. The FBI saw the attack starting in mid-June 2016, with the first dumping of stolen emails. In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the effort, we learned that one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.

Of course, nobody from the Trump campaign told us this (or about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.

But when we finally learned of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate. . . . If there was something to it, we didn’t want to let corrupt Americans know we were onto them. So, we kept it secret. That’s how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.

And there’s the first problem with Trump’s whole “treason” narrative. If we were “deep state” Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret? Why wouldn’t the much-maligned FBI supervisor Peter Strzok — the alleged kingpin of the “treasonous” plot to stop Trump — tell anyone? He was one of the very few people who knew what we were investigating.

We didn’t “spy” on anyone’s campaign. We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help. By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government.

There is a reason the non-fringe media doesn’t spend much time on this “treason” and “corruption” business. The conspiracy theory makes no sense. The FBI wasn’t out to get Donald Trump. It also wasn’t out to get Hillary Clinton. It was out to do its best to investigate serious matters while walking through a vicious political minefield.

But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, you will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.

Sadly, Attorney General William Barr is acting more like the consigliere to a Mafia crime boss than attorney general of the United States.  Rather than protect the American people and the justice system, his sole allegiance appears to be to Trump. 

Did Trump Direct Intelligence Agencies to Create Support for Wiretap Claims?

Yesterday was a good day: Rep. Jason Chaffez announced that he will not seek reelection in 2018 and Bill O'Reilly was fired by Fox News. News in a different category is a story at Talking Points Memo that indicates that sources in the American intelligence agencies were directed by the White House - read Der Trumpenführer acting through flunkies - to find or create "evidence" that would support Trump's false claims (lies is a more apt description) that Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower.  In the sea of malfeasance that is the Trump administration - and that doesn't include the growing stories seemingly backing up collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives - this story, if proven true, underscores why Trump needs to be removed from office.  Here are excerpts from Talking Points Memo's piece:  

The intelligence community was allegedly directed to provide cover for President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that Trump Tower was wiretapped by his predecessor, the New Yorker reported Tuesday.

An anonymous intelligence source told the magazine’s Ryan Lizza that “the White House said, ‘We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the President’s tweet that he was being surveilled.’”

Asking for an “all-points bulletin,” or a request to look through intelligence reports, White House officials said, “We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower,” according to Lizza’s source.

The alleged effort to justify the President’s outlandish wiretapping claim sparked a month-long goose chase that culminated with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) temporarily recusing himself from the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election.

Trump administration officials first said the President didn’t mean that he was literally being wiretapped, or that this alleged surveillance happened at Trump Tower before the election, as his tweets claimed. Three White House staffers were later identified in news reports as having provided Nunes with documents that led him to publicly claim that Trump staffers’ identities had been unmasked in appropriately in transcripts of conversations swept up in routine foreign surveillance.

National security experts said such unmasking requests were sometimes necessary to understand the context of intelligence reports, but Nunes added fuel to the fire by strongly suggesting such requests were improper. He ended up stepping aside from the Russia investigation over allegations that he revealed classified information in his many press conferences on the topic, which he dismissed as “politically motivated.” The House Committee on Ethics is currently investigating whether Nunes made any “unauthorized disclosures of classified information.”

Multiple publications have since cited Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides who viewed the same documents as Nunes and found nothing unusual to report.

The two unnamed intelligence sources Lizza spoke to said the same, with one calling them “about as plain vanilla as can be” and the other saying “there’s absolutely nothing there.”

Mexico’s Revenge on Trump - and His Supporters

While Donald Trump's attacks on Hispanics and non-whites in general has played well with the most most ignorant - evangelical Christians are the least educated of any religious group in America - and racist/xenophobic elements of his base, the economic results could prove catastrophic if Mexico decides to exact revenge against Trump's America.  Already, talk of Mexico shifting its agricultural purchases to Argentina and Brazil has Mid-West farmers sweating bullets at the prospect of severe economic and financial damage.  Indeed, the repeal of NAFTA, one of Trump's favorite whipping boys, does not play well in these farming states. But Mexico's revenge could prove even more damaging.  In addition to Mexican intelligence services ending their cooperation with their American counterparts - something that could increase illegal immigration into America - Mexico could tilt toward China as its new found favorite trading partner.  Needless to say, the ignorant, loud mouthed, bullying, narcissist in the White House has never thought of these types of  consequences.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at the Mexican revenge Trump may be setting into motion. Here are highlights:

When donald trump first made sport of thumping Mexico—when he accused America’s neighbor of exporting rapists and “bad hombres,” when he deemed the country such a threat that it should be contained by a wall and so clueless that it could be suckered into paying for its own encasement—its president responded with strange equilibrium. 

Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly.

The Mexico–U.S. border is long, but the history of close cooperation across it is short. As recently as the 1980s, the countries barely contained their feelings of mutual contempt. Mexico didn’t care for the United States’ anticommunist policy in Central America, especially its support of Nicaraguan rebels. In 1983, President Miguel de la Madrid obliquely warned the Reagan administration against “shows of force which threaten to touch off a conflagration.” 

The grandiose promise of trade is that it binds countries together, breeding peace and cooperation. This is a risible overstatement when applied generally to the world. But in the case of the countries separated by the Rio Grande, it has proved wondrously true. A generation after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States and Mexico couldn’t be more interdependent. Anti-Americanism, once a staple of Mexican politics, has largely faded. The flow of migrants from Mexico to the U.S. has, more or less, abated. Economic ties have fostered greater intimacy between intelligence services and security agencies, which are today deeply enmeshed in each other’s business. 

But the Trump administration has come dangerously close to trashing the relationship—and, in the process, unleashing a terrifying new reality.

The Chinese invested heavily in places like Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, discreetly flexing soft power as they funded new roads, refineries, and railways. From 2000 to 2013, China’s bilateral trade with Latin America increased by 2,300 percent, according to one calculation. A raft of recently inked deals forms the architecture for China to double its annual trade with the region, to $500 billion, by the middle of the next decade. Mexico, however, has remained a grand exception to this grand strategy. 

Mexico also happens to be the one spot in Latin America where the United States would respond with alarm to a heavy Chinese presence.

That sort of alarm is just the thing some Mexicans would now like to provoke. What Mexican analysts have called the “China card”—a threat to align with America’s greatest competitor—is an extreme retaliatory option. Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda told me he considers it an implausible expression of “machismo.” Unfortunately, Trump has elevated machismo to foreign-policy doctrine . . . And while a tighter Chinese–Mexican relationship would fly in the face of recent economic history, Trump may have already set it in motion.

The painful early days of the Trump administration have reminded Mexico of a core economic weakness: The country depends far too heavily on the American market. “Mexico is realizing that it has been overexposed to the U.S., and it’s now trying to hedge its bets,” says Kevin Gallagher, an economist at Boston University who specializes in Latin America. “Any country where 80 percent of exports go to the U.S., it’s a danger.” . . . . The presence of Trump, with his brusque talk of tariffs and promises of economic nationalism, makes that an urgent task.

Until recently, a Mexican–Chinese rapprochement would have been unthinkable. . . . . But China has played the long game, and its patience has proved farsighted. The reason so many Chinese are ascending to the middle class is that wages have tripled over the past decade. The average hourly wage in Chinese manufacturing is now $3.60. Over that same period of time, hourly manufacturing wages in Mexico have fallen to $2.10. Even taking into account the extraordinary productivity of Chinese factories—not to mention the expense that comes with Mexico’s far greater fidelity to the rules of international trade—Mexico increasingly looks like a sensible place for Chinese firms to set up shop, particularly given its proximity to China’s biggest export market.

Let’s pause to consider the illogic. Trump says that China is a grave threat, both militarily and economically. He has accused China of “rap[ing] our country.” That’s not the way most analysts would put it, but a fairly broad bipartisan consensus holds that China’s expansionism should be contained and its mercantilism checked. Barack Obama’s vaunted “pivot” to Asia tried to keep China’s neighbors from succumbing to its gravitational pull. Thanks to Donald Trump, China is now better positioned to execute the most difficult maneuver in its own, North American pivot—pushing the U.S. and Mexico further apart.

What seems more likely is that relations between the security agencies will slowly decay, as trust between the two countries evaporates and warm feelings give way to tensions.

Trump’s rush toward hard-line immigration policies could yield a grim bonanza of other unintended consequences. Mass deportations of Mexicans could uproot hundreds of thousands and deposit them on the other side of the border, forcing their reintegration into lives they left, many of them long ago. Perhaps the Mexican economy, the 15th-largest in the world, has the capacity to absorb these refugees from Trump’s America. But it’s equally easy to imagine a scenario in which they inundate the labor market. And even that possibility doesn’t begin to capture the likely economic costs of deportation. The Mexican economy would be deprived of the remittances that immigrants send back to their relatives. It’s hard to speak hyperbolically about the importance of these transfers—in 2016, Mexican Americans sent $27 billion back to their Mexican families, more than the value of the crude petroleum Mexico exports annually. 

[W]ith Trump’s angry talk and the Mexican resentment it stirs, the best hope for the persistence of this improved relationship is inertia—the interlocking supply chain that crosses the border and won’t easily pull apart, the agricultural exports that flow in both directions, all the bureaucratic cooperation. Unwinding this relationship would be ugly and painful, a strategic blunder of the highest order, a gift to America’s enemies, a gaping vulnerability for the homeland that Donald Trump professes to protect, a very messy divorce.

The perverse part of me would love to see Mexico shift its agricultural product purchases from Mid-West sources.  The cretins in these states who put Trump in office deserve to suffer greatly.  As for the rise of China-Mexico relations, if it happens, it will be the fault of Der Trumpenführer.

Trump Lies and Claims Obama Wire Tapped His Phones

Apparently the ongoing disclosures of a large network of contacts between his campaign officials and other henchmen with Russian agents is beginning to unsettle Der Trumpenführer who let loose with tweets claiming the Barack Obama had Trump's phones wire tapped.  Of course, in typical fashion, he offers no proof backing up his allegations which are seemingly yet another attempt to distract the media and change the political topic of conversation.  It's yet another example of Trump's use of the Nazi propaganda playbook. Sadly, Trump's base will eat it up since their racism inclines them to believe anything negative about the nation's first black president.  This bigotry combined with the alternate universe spun by Fox News will no doubt have the right wing fringe foaming at the mouth.  Here are highlights from the New York Times on Der Trumpenführer's campaign of lies:

President Trump on Saturday accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower the month before the election, taking to Twitter to call his predecessor a “bad (or sick) guy.”

Without offering any evidence or providing the source of his information, Mr. Trump fired off a series of Twitter messages claiming that Mr. Obama “had my ‘wires tapped.’ ”

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Kevin Lewis, issued a statement dismissing the claims. “A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” he said. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Officials from the Obama administration called Mr. Trump’s accusation shocking and untrue. They pointed to longstanding laws and procedures intended to ensure that presidents cannot wiretap a rival for political purposes.

Mr. Trump’s decision to lend the power of his office to such a claim — without offering any proof — was remarkable, even for a leader who has repeatedly shown himself willing to make assertions that are false or based on rumors.

It would have been difficult for federal agents, working within the law, to obtain a wiretap order to target Mr. Trump’s phone conversations. It would have meant that the Justice Department had gathered sufficient evidence to persuade a federal judge that there was probable cause to believe he had committed a serious crime or was an agent of a foreign power, depending on whether it was a criminal investigation or a foreign intelligence one.

Speculation online quickly turned to the possibility that Mr. Trump had been reading an article on the Breitbart News site or listening to the conservative radio host Mark Levin; both have embraced the theory in recent days. 

Ben Rhodes, a former top national security aide to Mr. Obama, said in a Twitter message directed at Mr. Trump on Saturday that “no president can order a wiretap” and added, “Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.”

It has been widely reported that there is a federal investigation, which began during the 2016 presidential campaign, into links between Trump associates and the Russians.

Mr. Trump’s mood was said to be explosive before he departed for his weekend in Florida, with an episode in which he vented at his staff. The president’s ire was trained in particular on Donald F. McGahn, his White House counsel, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump was said to be frustrated about the decision by Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, to recuse himself from participating in any investigations of connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr. Trump has said there were no such connections.

 As I said, he doth protest too much.  Let's hope the intelligence agencies come up with conclusive proof of collusion with the Russian very soon so that Trump can not only be impeached but also face treason charges.

Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking

The New York Times is carrying a piece that ought to concern truly patriotic Americans.  It concerns the issue of Russian efforts to throw the 2016 presidential election to Der Trumpenführer and the steps taken by the Obama administration to protect information on possible treason so that it would not be destroyed by Der Trumpenführer's henchmen once they took over control of the executive branch.  The risk remains, of course, that Republicans in Congress will kill any meaningful investigation to get to the truth about Trump/Putin ties.  To far too many Republicans, political party now takes precedence over the good of the nation.  As often noted, I have little doubt that Trump would have rejected Russian assistance.  The man is a dangerous narcissist who throughout his career has deemed himself above the law and willing to engage in corrupt and illegal practices to further his interests. Why anyone would expect him to change is dumbfounding.  Here are article highlights:

In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates.

Then and now, Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials,  . . . .Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

As Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not. Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators — including the Senate Intelligence Committee, which in early January announced an inquiry into Russian efforts to influence the election.

At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low level of classification to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government — and, in some cases, among European allies. This allowed the upload of as much intelligence as possible to Intellipedia, a secret wiki used by American intelligence analysts to share information.

More than a half-dozen current and former officials described various aspects of the effort to preserve and distribute the intelligence, and some said they were speaking to draw attention to the material and ensure proper investigation by Congress.

Some Obama White House officials had little faith that a Trump administration would make good on such pledges, and the efforts to preserve the intelligence continued until the administration’s final hours. This was partly because intelligence was still being collected and analyzed, but it also reflected the sentiment among many administration officials that they had not recognized the scale of the Russian campaign until it was too late.

But it wasn’t until after the election, and after more intelligence had come in, that the administration began to grasp the scope of the suspected tampering and concluded that one goal of the campaign was to help tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.

Beyond leaving a trail for investigators, the Obama administration also wanted to help European allies combat a threat that had caught the United States off guard. American intelligence agencies made it clear in the declassified version of the intelligence assessment released in January that they believed Russia intended to use its attacks on the United States as a template for more meddling.

“We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned,” the report said, “to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies.”

#NotMyPresident

Inelligence Services Withhold Intel From Trump: Kremlin “Has Ears” Inside White House

Former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer John Schindler has a piece in The Observer - the paper is owned by Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner - that ought to terrify patriotic Americans. In the piece the author describes how U.S. Intelligence services are withholding information from Der Trumpenführer out of concerns that anything shred with the White House will be shared with the Kremlin.  Despite this reality, many of the "America first" crowd in the rabid dog GOP party base continue to rally around a possible traitor and denigrate those who voice concerns over the likely Russian ties.  Here are excerpts from the article:  

In a recent column, I explained how the still-forming Trump administration is already doing serious harm to America’s longstanding global intelligence partnerships. In particular, fears that the White House is too friendly to Moscow are causing close allies to curtail some of their espionage relationships with Washington—a development with grave implications for international security, particularly in the all-important realm of counterterrorism.

Now those concerns are causing problems much closer to home—in fact, inside the Beltway itself. Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump—that it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.

The president has repeatedly gone out of his way to antagonize our spies, mocking them and demeaning their work, and Trump’s personal national security guru can’t seem to keep his story straight on vital issues.

That’s Mike Flynn, the retired Army three-star general who now heads the National Security Council. Widely disliked in Washington for his brash personality and preference for conspiracy-theorizing over intelligence facts, Flynn was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for managerial incompetence and poor judgment—flaws he has brought to the far more powerful and political NSC.

Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has bluntly asked for the national security adviser’s ouster. Republicans on the Hill who would prefer that the White House stop lying to the public about its Kremlin links ought to get behind Schiff’s initiative before the scandal gets worse.

In truth, it may already be too late. A new report by CNN indicates that important parts of the infamous spy dossier that professed to shed light on President Trump’s shady Moscow ties have been corroborated by communications intercepts. In other words, SIGINT strikes again, providing key evidence that backs up some of the claims made in that 35-page report compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official with extensive Russia experience.

I can confirm from my friends still serving in the IC that the SIGINT, which corroborates some of the Steele dossier, is damning for the administration. Our spies have had enough of these shady Russian connections—and they are starting to push back.

Our spies have never liked Trump’s lackadaisical attitude toward the President’s Daily Brief, the most sensitive of all IC documents, which the new commander-in-chief has received haphazardly. The president has frequently blown off the PDB altogether, tasking Flynn with condensing it into a one-page summary with no more than nine bullet-points. Some in the IC are relieved by this, but there are pervasive concerns that the president simply isn’t paying attention to intelligence.

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.

This is a risky situation, particularly since President Trump is prone to creating crises foreign and domestic with his incautious tweets. In the event of a serious international crisis of the sort which eventually befalls almost every administration, the White House will need the best intelligence possible to prevent war, possibly even nuclear war. It may not get the information it needs in that hour of crisis, and for that it has nobody to blame but itself.

Be very, very afraid!

Trump's War on the Media and Reality

One of the first things that would be dictators do is to discredit and undermine the free press since it represents the greatest threat to their quest for power.  The ultimate goal is to eventually control the press and change reality in the minds of the public to fit the fake reality that the dictator wants to impose.  Frighteningly, Donald Trump has already begun this process as demonstrated by his repeated lies, constant attacks on any portions of the media not pumping out his propaganda and lies. One can only hope that while there is still time, the media will ferret out enough truth and facts to destroy Trump before he destroys American democracy.  Indeed, as Der Fuhrer increasingly shows himself as a threat to world order, perhaps allied nation intelligence services will find and release bombshell information that will force even traitorous and power mad Republicans to flee Trump. A piece in Vanity Fair looks at Trump's war on the media.  Here are highlights:

So, who won this week? So far, Donald Trump. During a press conference, his first since winning the election, he sounded entirely unruffled by BuzzFeed’s disclosure of unverified opposition research alleging ties between himself and Russia. Trump said that he was always hyper-aware of surveillance when he was traveling abroad and suggested that he would never do something as stupid as hiring local prostitutes to relieve themselves on the bed of a Moscow hotel suite—and he said it in a way that managed to make the charge look silly, as indeed it probably is. He openly insulted BuzzFeed as a “failing pile of garbage” and insulted CNN as a purveyor of “fake news,” passing over its reporter Jim Acosta and telling him to be quiet when Acosta kept talking anyway. Trump also used the news of the hour to take attention off of what appeared to be inadequate measures to protect against conflicts of interest between his business and his new day job.

Trump is now as powerful as ever, and if you want to topple him, you’d better have your army in order. This is a good lesson and a bad lesson. It’s good because, if a truly scandalous story emerges, journalists have to do it properly. It’s bad because it feeds into what seems to be a tacit assumption that the criterion for journalism in the Trump administration will be its power to shake the foundations of the presidency.

Journalists also learned to withhold documents from the public unless the claims within them have been thoroughly investigated. This, again, is both a good lesson and bad lesson. It’s a good lesson, because nothing good can come of reputable publications trafficking in rumor and gossip as if they’re In Touch. But it’s a bad one, too, because journalists are also way too willing to hide their work, as if readers must be shielded from the bright light of primary sources. When BuzzFeed disclosed the document in full, ordinary readers got to see an ill-kept secret that had been circulating all through the halls of journalism and government. Regular Americans at this point deserved to see it, too, and they’re probably better off for it, even if BuzzFeed isn’t. Better lesson: when you make a call to disclose the raw evidence, try to give a detailed annotation on what we know and don’t, and don’t just toss out a facile line about doing it so that “Americans can make up their own minds about [the] allegations.”

All of this has been distracting from more important troubles, like Trump’s conflicts of interest or his more dubious nominees. Mike Pompeo is a genuinely disconcerting nominee for heading up the C.I.A., far too inclined, it seems, to overestimate threats. Ben Carson is almost certain to be bad news at H.U.D., not because of his convictions, but because of his lack of knowledge.

We learned, too, that holding Trump accountable will be very, very hard, and the blame for that rests with far more than just Trump. Mainstream journalists have been asking why they’ve been losing credibility with the public, often blaming right-wing media and fake news. Rarely considered is the possibility that we’ve lost the trust of readers because we’re not trustworthy. . . . Instead, the issue is just that the media increasingly sees only what it wants to see. . . . Much of the work of mainstream watchdogging will depend on buy-in from the right if it’s going to matter. That’s just the way of it.

Finally, we learned this week that the intelligence community may well be going to war with our incoming president. . . . . For the moment, our press outlets and our intelligence agencies seem to be mounting nothing organized, just running stray sorties. But if something more coordinated emerges, with the intelligence world joining forces with reporters to mount a serious effort to remove Trump from power, things could very ugly. It would also be very dangerous.

CIA Assessment: Russia Sought to Help Trump Win

One of the sad and frightening ironies is that many in rural America who seemingly have less intelligence than Sarah Palin, the idiot of Wasilla, and who view themselves as "real Americans" allowed themselves to be played by a former KGB operative who now sees himself as Russia's new tsar.  As the New York Times and other real news outlets report, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have concluded "that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump."  That Vladimir Putin sought to see Donald Trump elected ought to have been a blaring clarion to anyone rational that Trump is toxic to both the best interest of America and to the survival of democracy itself.  At an LGBT holiday party last evening in Williamsburg heavily populated by LGBT activists, professionals and academics from William & Mary University, the shock at the stupidity/idiocy of Trump voters was a common theme - along with much discussion of how to form a resistance to Trumpism and the coming onslaught against LGBT rights and civil rights in general.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials. . . . Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks. 

“We now have high confidence that they hacked the D.N.C. and the R.N.C., and conspicuously released no documents” from the Republican organization, one senior administration official said, referring to the Russians.

It is unclear how many files were stolen from the Republican committee; in some cases, investigators never get a clear picture. It is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help Mr. Trump was first reported by The Washington Post.

In briefings to the White House and Congress, intelligence officials, including those from the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, have identified individual Russian officials they believe were responsible. Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)

The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

Salon pick up on the disturbing story line.  Note how many Republicans seem only too willing to allow a foreign enemy to interfere with our election results so long as their party is the beneficiary. Here are more highlights:

The Washington Post today reported that the CIA now is sure of Russia’s deliberate efforts to help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States. According to the story, “Agency briefers told the senators it was now ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal.”

In a report by the Washington Post, officials are named who say they have information related to those connected to the Russian government — the same persons who provided Wikileaks emails that were hacked from the DNC and John Podesta.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

According to several officials, [Senator Mitch] McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

 

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.

 

Trump’s transition team dismissed the findings in a statement Friday, claiming, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

          Read the full story at the Washington Post.

America democracy died on November 8, 2016. Sadly, like a patient with an as yet un-diagnosed terminal cancer, most Americans do not grasp what has happened or, in the case of Trump voters, that they have betrayed the nation and done the bidding of enemy agents.  Perhaps instead of wearing their "Make America Great Again" hats they should wear hats that say "American Traitor."  Be very, very afraid.

Dick Cheney Still Doesn't Get It

One of the worse figures of the Bush/Cheney years of misrule and the attendant destruction of American values is Emperor Palpatine Cheney, a man I truly view as evil. Indeed, the man needs to be prosecuted for war crimes, convicted and dealt with accordingly. In addition to his unbridled greed and lack of compassion for virtually anyone, Cheney suffers from an insufferable hubris. The man has a heart of stone and is incapable of admitting error no matter how many deaths he caused or how much torture he authorized. Bob Woodward has a column in the Washington Post that looks at Cheney's arrogance and hubris and the fact that he learned nothing from the Iraq War fiasco. Here are some highlights:

A key lesson of the 9/11 decade for presidents and other national security decision makers is the importance of rigorously testing intelligence evidence: poking holes in it, setting out contradictions, figuring out what may have been overlooked or left out. It is essential to distinguish between hard facts and what is an assessment or judgment.

The so-called slam-dunk case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction illustrates the failure. If anyone should have learned this, it is former president George W. Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney.

Yet in his new memoir, “In My Time,” Cheney shows he has not fully absorbed that lesson when he writes about the administration’s response to the 2007 discovery of a nuclear reactor in Syria that the North Koreans had helped build.

Bush didn’t reveal, however, that his vice president wanted a military strike in the face of “low confidence” intelligence that the reactor was part of a nuclear weapons program. Cheney said he wanted the United States to commit an act of war to send a message, demonstrate seriousness and enhance credibility — a frightening prospect given the doubts.

Two participants in the key National Security Council meeting in June 2007 said that after Cheney, the “lone voice,” made his arguments, Bush rolled his eyes.

At the CIA afterward, the group of specialists who had worked for months on the Syrian reactor issue were pleased they had succeeded in avoiding the overreaching so evident in the Iraq WMD case. So they issued a very limited-circulation memorial coin. One side showed a map of Syria with a star at the site of the former reactor. On the other side the coin said, “No core/No war.”

Arrogance, hubris, and a total lack of empathy for others or other views sums up what is so wrong with many in the USA today. Cheney and, of course, hate-filled Christianists and the neo-cons bear as much responsibility for what the USA has become as do the Al Qaeda terrorists of 9-11.

Britain's MI5 Recruiting Gay Spies

In stark contrast to the lunacy in the USA that bars gays from serving in the military - principally in order to pander to deranged Christianists like Elaine Donnelly, Tony Perkins, Daddy Dobson, and similar hate merchants - the United Kingdom is now recruiting gay spies. The UK already allows openly gay individuals to serve in its military and has had none of the problems that cause Ms. Donnelly to have near orgasms. Obviously, having openly gay spies totally eliminates the old fears and myths that gays would be subject to blackmail and, therefore, should not serve in sensitive intelligence positions. Here are some highlights from Yahoo News:

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LONDON (AFP) - The Security Service is actively recruiting gay spies and wants its staff to be more open about their sexuality, the Financial Times reported Monday. The chief executive of Stonewall, a gay rights lobby group, told the business daily it had been hired by the Security Service -- better known as MI5 -- to help the agency encourage more gay applicants for positions.

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"This (move by MI5) is recognition that the establishment is changing and slowly becoming more reflective of wider society." The intelligence agencies have in recent years attempted to cast a wider net when it comes to recruiting -- the country's foreign intelligence service MI6 placed its first-ever advertisement for jobs in a newspaper in May 2007, and in recent years, it has launched its own website.

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365gay.com also has these further highlights that set the wider context for the change:

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The British military long ago abandoned its ban on gays serving openly and also recently asked Stonewall for help in recruitment. M16, the country’s foreign intelligence service, ended its ban on gay spies a year ago.

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Homosexuality was decriminalized in the UK in 1967 but gays and lesbians were barred from working in sensitive jobs in the diplomatic or security services until the early 1990s, over concerns that gay spies could be vulnerable to blackmail.