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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!

The Frightening Ascendancy of the Christofascists Under Trump

Trump with white supremacist and hate group leader Tony Perkins

I have written about the Christofascists and the threat they pose to America for as long as this blog has existed and first came face to face with individuals like Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed back during the latter phase of my eight (8) year period  as a member of the City Committee for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  These people have a single minded agenda of making their toxic religious beliefs supreme in America.  They seek to end the separation of church and state and mold government policies and laws to their beliefs.  They have contempt for the religious freedom rights of others and, if give the opportunity, would make contraception illegal nationwide.  They are that extreme.  Sadly, most white, Christian heterosexuals are unfamiliar with the Christofascists' agenda. We in the LGBT community have battled them for years.  Now, Der Trumpenführer has surrounded himself with right wing Christofascists and has given easy access to a veritable who's who of hate group leaders who masquerade as proponents of "family values."  Not only are these folks religious extremists, but beneath the surface a majority are white supremacists as well.  The New York Times looks at the ascendancy of this dangerous and toxic element under Der Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights:

The people who filled the pews of St. John’s Episcopal Church for a private service on the morning of the inauguration were a testament to the ascendancy of the religious right in Donald J. Trump’s Washington: James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family; Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council [a certified hate group]; James Robison, the Christian television preacher.

Right after Mr. Dobson blessed Mike Pence, and just before the congregation sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” Mr. Robison took to the pulpit and asked Mr. Trump to rise.

The religious right’s influence is evident in the policies the new administration has prioritized in its first weeks, from Mr. Trump’s clampdown on federal funding that could indirectly support abortion to his directive to give persecuted Christians special dispensation to enter the United States. His pick to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, has written opinions favorable to businesses that have religious objections to government mandates. And the White House has told leaders of the movement that the president will select nominees for the lower courts who are opposed to expanding abortion rights.

A group that has felt shunted aside by the Republican establishment is finding doors open more quickly and willingly than it did even under friendly presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Now that he has the movement’s support, he has good reason to keep its adherents happy. He needs them to preserve his cobbled-together base of voters. And given how few votes put him over the top in the Electoral College — 77,000 total in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where socially conservative Republicans are a key constituency — he may indeed owe them the election.

This close relationship has consequences not only for how policy will be shaped over the next four years on issues like health care, education and free speech, but also for how the federal courts will decide cases for a generation or more.

What the religious right wanted, perhaps above all else, was the nomination of a solidly conservative judge to the Supreme Court. And Mr. Trump delivered with his selection of Judge Gorsuch, whom he picked from a list of 21 candidates blessed by conservative groups.

The Trump administration has moved fast to enact new policies that the religious right considers important, including vowing to “totally destroy” a law known as the Johnson Amendment that restricts the activities of tax-exempt entities like churches in politics.

Mr. Trump’s cabinet is filled with deeply religious people who hold conservative views on religion, morality and social policy.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Methodist, has questioned the wisdom of separating church and state.

Mr. Robison, the televangelist who was among those who spoke at St. John’s, spoke later that day to a crowd gathered for the Faith, Freedom and Future inaugural ball. He told a story of how he had called Mr. Trump’s cellphone just to see if he would still pick up after he had won the election.  Mr. Trump, he said, answered.

Monday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

I’m A Proud Republican And I’ve Joined The Resistance

I left the Republican Party years ago as I saw the Christofascists infiltrating the party and pushing for a Christian Taliban approach to blurring the separation of church and state.  Accompanying this Christofascist infiltration of the GOP was a rise of racism and white supremacist efforts within the party.  Yes, I equate right wing Christians with white supremacy because if one follows the so-called "family values" organizations, just beneath the surface is a strong current of racism.  This effort to "make America white and Christian again" has now fully metastasized within the GOP and the end result is the policies being pushed by Der Trumpenführer.   A piece in Huffington Post by a disheartened Republican demonstrates that some Republicans, but far too few, are waking up belatedly to the evil that now controls the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

On Saturday morning over coffee I read a summary of Donald Trump’s executive order regarding refugees and immigrants. Then I read the order itself. And then I read it again.

And then I went online and my wife and I became members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Sunday night, for the first time in our lives, we became protestors, along with thousands of other Americans, joining a rally in Seattle’s Westlake Park.

Why would a lifelong Republican, who generally chafes at such activity, do such things? I feel guilty saying this, because millions of our neighbors are feeling real fear as a result of Trump’s words and deeds, but I did it because of what I see happening in my party.

Trump is in the process of turning the party of Reagan, who championed growth, free trade and active American leadership in the world, into the party of protectionism and isolationism. And now, with his immigration ban, he is turning the party of Lincoln into the modern-day anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party.

But many Trump supporters want to go much farther and permanently ban Muslims from entering the U.S. and with his executive order, Trump tried to take Step 1 toward doing just that.

And this is the policy intent that will drive that new procedure:

In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law.

This language sounds benign until you consider that many of Trump’s ‘alt-right’ supporters believe that Islam itself is a “violent ideology,” and that all Muslims want to place Islam and Sharia law “over American law.”

I have heard and read this over and over again from “conservatives.” Trump himself has said as much.

This is nonsense, of course. A generation ago religious bigots made the same sorts of claims about my faith, Roman Catholicism.

In a brilliant article in The Atlantic, Eliot Cohen . . . . describes precisely what life is like now for those of us who have spent our careers toiling in the “conservative movement.” It is, Cohen says, a defining moment:

For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time. Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it. … The biggest split will be between those who draw a line and the power-sick, whose longing to have access to power, or influence it, or indeed to wield it themselves, causes them to fatally compromise their values. For many more it will be a split between those obsessed with anxiety, hatred, and resentment, and those who can hear Lincoln’s call to the better angels of our nature, whose America is not replete with carnage, but a city on a hill. Trump made his views crystal clear during the campaign. Since the election, many people, especially Republicans, have tried to pacify themselves by hoping that he didn’t mean what he said, and won’t do what he promised to do. Well, it’s time to wake up and face reality: He meant every word of it, and it is anathema to everything the modern Reaganite GOP has stood for.

On issue after issue, Donald Trump is governing as Donald Trump. All of us, but especially Republicans, need to answer the question: What are you going to do about it?

More Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Trump and His Supporters See Only Whites as Full Citizens

Numerous writers have noted the sense of depression and/or stress that many Americans are experiencing as the regime of Der Trumpenführer rolls out it policies that aim to make white, heterosexual right wing Christians true citizens.  The rest of us are relegated to an inferior status under this selfish and hate driven world view.  Indeed, any restriction on the ability of the preferred class of whites to abuse and marginalize others is described as "persecution of Christians" and/or "white oppression."  It takes a very sick and evil mindset to view not being allowed to abuse and mistreat others as "persecution," but that is now the governing policy template that reigns at the White House. A piece in Salon looks at this toxic reality and what it bodes for many Americans.  Here are excerpts:

Woody Guthrie was one of the United States’ greatest folk singers and activists. Most Americans can recite the following lyrics from memory:

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

These beautiful words were both a slogan and a demand.  Donald Trump does not share such egalitarian values.

Last week, Trump was the featured guest at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. where he outlined a vision of Christian nationalism. A twice-divorced man, repeat adulterer, professed sexual predator who has said he grabs women by their genitals, liar and fraud, guest star in a pornographic video and a person who is neither pious nor modest speaking on matters of God and faith might be seen as comedy gold. Likewise, Trump’s promises to tear down the boundaries between church and state could also be mocked as boilerplate right-wing talking points that only resonate with the ignorant or the politically unhinged.

In this historical moment, these matters are too serious to be greeted with laughter, however. Trump’s comments at the prayer breakfast are part of a much larger and very dangerous pattern.

Donald Trump used overt white racism as well as white racial resentment to secure his victory over Hillary Clinton. The narrative of “economic anxiety” among working-class whites is largely incorrect. White identity politics and ginning up fear about “white oppression” won Trump the White House.

Two of Donald Trump’s most senior and trusted advisers are Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, long associated with white nationalist causes and publications.

Donald Trump has ordered that federal resources be diverted away from tracking white supremacist organizations.

Donald Trump’s administration does not view protecting the civil rights of non-whites as a priority. He has threatened to unleash the police and military on black and brown people who live in cities such as Chicago. Trump’s personal behavior is replete with examples of bigotry and racism.

This is a vision of America as a Herrenvolk society where democracy, freedom and opportunity are centered around the principle that white people are the in-group to be privileged and protected, while nonwhites are to be treated as second-class citizens. This vision of America also embraces what white supremacists and white nationalists have referred to as “ethno-nationalism”: the idea that the modern nation-state should be defined by “ethnicity,” and that there are certain core values that must be protected at all costs against “outsiders.”

But “ethno-nationalism” is no more than racist doublespeak. It is a somewhat more acceptable reframing of the white supremacist belief that America and Europe should be “white” by law, habit and tradition. By implication, people of color (and those who are not Christian — especially Muslims) are pollutants to be expunged, by whatever means necessary, from the white body politic.

Last week, Donald Trump doubled down on his embrace of these racist Herrenvolk and ethno-nationalist values when it was announced that former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Anton would be joining his administration.

Writing for the New Yorker, Jonathan Chait elaborates:

Anton describes the government (pre-Trump) as “the junta.” This cannot be dismissed as mere rhetorical exaggeration. To Anton, the rising share of the nonwhite population is a foreign invasion: “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle,” he writes.

Anton apparently now occupies a central advisory role in the White House and will be helping shape American foreign policy.

In his role as the white nationalist in chief of the United States, Donald Trump wants to make clear that America is a white man’s country and that everyone else permitted to live here is just a guest, permanently “on notice.” This is revanchism of the worst kind, and a desperate effort to turn back the clock to the wrong side of history.

Donald Trump and his minions will soon discover that black and brown people built America. Indeed, many of them were in the United States long before “white” Europeans arrived and tried to claim it exclusively as their own.

Yes, this agenda is similar to the Nazi myth of the Aryan Race.  To my "friends" who voted for Trump/Pence, it may hurt your feelings to call you out, but this mindset is what in my view motivated your vote.  All I can say is shame on you!

Anti-Gay AG Sessions Drops Push for Transgender Protections

Anti-gay bigot, Jeff Sessions with Paul "Reverse Robin Hood" Ryan

As this blog and numerous others pointed out, new Attorney General Jeff Sessions has a documented history of being a racist and homophobe.  Once sworn in, Sessions has wasted no time in proving that he is a menace to the LGBT community.  Indeed, not even 24 hours passed before Sessions directed Justice Department attorneys seeking to narrow an injunction against the Obama administration's efforts to afford protections to transgender students.  Other minorities need to take note that they too will now be targets for Sessions' white supremacist Justice Department.  When added to Der Trumpenführer's promise to sign the foul "First Amendment Defense Act" which would grant special rights to Christofascists, it all equates to open war of LGBT Americans - something I warned "friends" who voted for Trump about repeatedly. Politico looks at this disturbing but expected development.  Here are highlights:

The Trump administration has found a nationwide injunction it can live with.

In the slew of lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump's travel ban executive order, Justice Department lawyers have repeatedly argued that — whatever the alleged legal defects in his order — nationwide injunctions on its enforcement are improper.

However, on Friday night, Justice Department attorneys handling a lawsuit over President Barack Obama's efforts to protect transgender individuals dropped an effort to temporarily rein in a nationwide injunction a Texas federal judge imposed last year. That injunction prohibited the feds from enforcing the Obama administration's view that existing civil rights laws cover discrimination against those who are transgender.

Last November, the Justice Department appealed U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor's ruling to the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Justice Department attorneys urged the appeals court to limit the injunction so it only applied in the 13 states involved in filing the suit challenging the transgender policy.

That request to narrow O'Connor's injunction was set to be argued before a three-judge 5th Circuit panel on Tuesday in Austin, Texas, but on Friday evening the Justice Department withdrew the stay request.

No explanation for the change in position was given to the court. The move came one day after former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) was sworn-in as attorney general.

Dropping the stay request avoids Justice Department lawyers having to appear before the 5th Circuit this week to argue for the stay while likely having little clarity to offer the court on how what stance the Trump administration plans to take on the transgender issues at the heart of the dispute.

The Justice Department has not completely abandoned the position that O'Connor's injunction was too broad. Federal government lawyers could pursue that claim as the appeal goes forward, but with their action Friday they have given up the effort to keep enforcing Obama's interpretation of transgender rights while the appeal proceeds.

The Supreme Court might give some guidance on that issue relatively soon. The justices are set to hear arguments next month on a case involving a transgender Virginia student who was born female but sought to use the boys' room at his public high school.

Normally, the justices would decide the case by June. However, it's possible the court might drop the case altogether, not rule squarely on the transgender rights issue, or even punt the case until they have a ninth colleague on the currently shorthanded high court bench.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty