Former top U.S. spy James Clapper is coming under fire over allegations he leaked information to CNN during his time as director of National Intelligence. One America’s Jack Posobiec has more from Washington.
The post Former Top Spy Accused of Leaking to CNN appeared first on Oath Keepers.
In what the entire mainstream media is reporting as a “bombshell”, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has been charged with lying to the FBI about a series of legal conversations he had with the Russian ambassador that included talk on how better to take out ISIS.
“The charging document states that Flynn made a false statement to the FBI when he stated that in December 2016 he did not ask Kislyak “to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia that same day; and Flynn did not recall the Russian ambassador subsequently telling him that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of his request,” reported CNN.
In comparison, Obama and deep state operative James Clapper has committed open perjury multiple times over the years and literally nothing has happened to him. I guess being a globalist operative has its perks.
As Paul Joseph Watson reported:
During testimony in 2013 in front of a congressional inquiry, Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden if the NSA was collecting “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
“No, sir,” responded Clapper.
Senator Wyden asked “It does not?”
Director Clapper responded “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
This was proven to be completely fraudulent three months later when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was deliberately collecting tens of millions of Americans’ phone call records as well as browsing histories, chat logs, email usage, as well as their physical locations.
Clapper would have had a level of security clearance to know that this was taking place. He committed clear perjury by lying under oath, yet faced no consequences at all.
That’s right, there is clear and obvious evidence that Clapper broke the law and committed perjury yet he remains untouched by anyone within the FBI. This is clear bias on the part of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and should be immediately investigated.
“In summary, it appears that lying under oath is perfectly acceptable if you’re a member of the deep state, and Clapper, unlike General Flynn, is enjoying the privilege of having that special distinction.”
(CN) — If the bloody debacle in Iraq should have taught Americans anything, it is that endorsements by lots of important people who think something is true don’t amount to evidence that it actually is true. If endorsements were the same as evidence, U.S. troops would have found tons of WMD in Iraq, rather than come up empty.
So, when it comes to whether or not Russia “hacked” Democratic emails last year and slipped them to WikiLeaks, just because a bunch of people with fancy titles think the Russians are guilty doesn’t compensate for the lack of evidence so far evinced to support this core charge.
But the reaction of Official Washington and the U.S. mainstream media to President Trump saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed sincere in denying Russian “meddling” was sputtering outrage: How could Trump doubt what so many important people think is true?
Yet, if the case were all that strong that Russia did “hack” the emails, you would have expected a straightforward explication of the evidence rather than a demonstration of a full-blown groupthink, but what we got this weekend was all groupthink and no evidence.
For instance, on Saturday, CNN responded to Trump’s comment that Putin seems to “mean it” when he denied meddling by running a list of important Americans who had endorsed the Russian-guilt verdict. Other U.S. news outlets and politicians followed the same pattern.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a big promoter of the Russia-gate allegations, scoffed at what Trump said: “You believe a foreign adversary over your own intelligence agencies?”
The Washington Post’s headline sitting atop Sunday’s lede article read: “Trump says Putin sincere in denial of Russian meddling: Critics call that ‘unconscionable.’”
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and another Russia-gate sparkplug, said he was left “completely speechless” by Trump’s willingness to take Putin’s word “over the conclusions of our own combined intelligence community.”
Which gets us back to the Jan. 6 “Intelligence Community Assessment” and its stunning lack of evidence in support of its Russian guilty verdict. The ICA even admitted as much, that it wasn’t asserting Russian guilt as fact but rather as opinion:
“Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”
Even The New York Times, which has led the media groupthink on Russian guilt, initially published the surprised reaction from correspondent Scott Shane who wrote: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”
In other words, the ICA was not a disposition of fact; it was guesswork, possibly understandable guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. And guesswork should be open to debate.
But the debate was shut down earlier this year by the oft-repeated claim that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concurred in the assessment and how could anyone question what all 17 intelligence agencies concluded!
However, that canard was finally knocked down by President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who acknowledged in sworn congressional testimony that the ICA was the product of “handpicked” analysts from only three agencies – the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.
In other words, not only did the full intelligence community not participate in the ICA but only analysts “handpicked” by Obama’s intelligence chiefs conducted the analysis – and as we intelligence veterans know well, if you handpick the analysts, you are handpicking the conclusions.
For instance, put a group of analysts known for their hardline views on Russia in a room for a few weeks, prevent analysts with dissenting viewpoints from weighing in, don’t require any actual evidence, and you are pretty sure to get the Russia-bashing result that you wanted.
So why do you think Clapper and Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan put up the no-entry sign that kept out analysts from the State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency, two entities that might have significant insights into Russian intentions? By all rights, they should have been included. But, clearly, no dissenting footnotes or wider-perspective views were desired.
If you remember back to the Iraq WMD intelligence estimate, analysts from the State Department’s intelligence bureau, known as INR, offered unwelcome dissenting views about the pace of Iraq’s supposed nuclear program, inserting a footnote saying they found it too difficult to predict the fruition of a program when there was no reliable evidence as to when – not to mention if – it had started.
DIA also was demonstrating an unusually independent streak, displaying a willingness to give due consideration to Russia’s perspective. Here’s the heterodox line DIA took in a major report published in December 2015:
“The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and the Arab Spring and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts.”
So, not only did the Jan. 6 report exclude input from INR and DIA and the other dozen or so intelligence agencies but it even avoided a fully diverse set of opinions from inside the CIA, FBI and NSA. The assessment – or guesswork – came only from those “hand-picked” analysts.
It’s also worth noting that not only does Putin deny that Russia was behind the publication of the Democratic emails but so too does WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange who has insisted repeatedly that the material did not come from the Russians. He and others around WikiLeaks have strongly suggested that the emails came as leaks from Democratic insiders.
In the face of Official Washington’s evidence-free groupthink, what some of us former U.S. intelligence analysts have been trying to do is provide both a fuller understanding of Russian behavior and whatever scientific analysis can be applied to the alleged “hacks.”
Forensic investigations and testing of relevant download speeds, reported by members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), have undermined the Russia-did-it groupthink. But this attempt to engage in actual evaluation of evidence has been either ignored or mocked by mainstream news outlets.
Still, the suggestion in our July 24 VIPS memo that President Trump ask current CIA Director Mike Pompeo to take a fresh look at the issue recently had some consequence when Pompeo contacted VIPS member William Binney, a former NSA Technical Director, and invited him to explain his latest research on the impossibility of the Russians extracting the Democratic emails via an Internet hack based on known download speeds.
In typically candid terms, Binney explained to Pompeo why VIPS had concluded that the intelligence analysts behind the Jan. 6 report had been making stuff up about Russian “hacking.”
When news of the Binney-Pompeo meeting broke last week, the U.S. mainstream media again rejected the opportunity to rethink the Russia-did-it groupthink and instead treated Binney as some sort of “conspiracy theorist” with a “disputed” theory, while attacking Pompeo’s willingness to discuss Binney’s findings as “politicizing intelligence.”
Despite the smearing of Binney, President Trump appears to have taken some of this new evidence to heart, explaining his dispute with open-mouthed White House reporters on Air Force One who baited Trump with various forms of the same question: “Do you believe Putin?” amid the new jeering about Trump “getting played” by Putin.
Trump’s demeanor, however, suggested increased confidence that the Russian “hacking” allegations were the “witch hunt” that he has decried for months.
Trump also jabbed the press over its earlier false claims that “all 17 intelligence agencies” concurred on the Russian “hack.” And Trump introduced the idea of a different kind of “hack,” i.e., Obama’s political appointees at the heads of the agencies behind the Jan. 6 report.
Trump said, “You hear it’s 17 agencies. Well it’s three. And one is Brennan … give me a break. They’re political hacks. … I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper, you have [FBI Director James] Comey. Comey is proven to be a liar and he’s proven to be a leaker.”
Later, in deference to those still at work in intelligence, Trump said, “I’m with our [intelligence] agencies as currently constituted.”
While Trump surely has a dismal record of his own regarding truth-telling, he’s not wrong about the checkered record of the triumvirate of Clapper, Brennan and Comey.
Clapper played a key role in the bogus Iraq-WMD intelligence when he was head of the National Geo-spatial Agency and hid the fact that there was zero evidence in satellite imagery of any weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq invasion. When no WMDs were found, Clapper told the media that he thought they were shipped off to Syria.
In 2013, Clapper perjured himself before Congress by denying NSA’s unconstitutional blanket surveillance of Americans. After evidence emerged revealing the falsity of Clapper’s testimony, he wrote a letter to Congress admitting, “My response was clearly erroneous – for which I apologize.” Despite the deception, he was allowed to stay as Obama’s most senior intelligence officer for almost four more years.
Clapper also has demonstrated an ugly bias about Russians. On May 28, as a former DNI, Clapper explained Russian “interference” in the U.S. election to NBC’s Chuck Todd on May 28 with a tutorial on what everyone should know about “the historical practices of the Russians.” Clapper said, “the Russians, typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique.”
Brennan, who had previously defended torture as having been an effective way to gain intelligence, was CIA director when agency operatives broke into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee when it was investigating CIA torture.
Former FBI Director Comey is infamous for letting the Democratic National Committee arrange its own investigation of the “hacking” that was then blamed on Russia, a development that led some members of Congress to call the supposed “hack” an “act of war.” Despite the risk of nuclear conflagration, the FBI didn’t bother to do its own forensics.
And, by his own admission, Comey arranged a leak to The New York Times that was specifically designed to get a Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate Russia-gate, a job that fell to his old friend Robert Mueller, who has had his own mixed record as the previous FBI director in mishandling the 9/11 investigation.
There are plenty of reasons to want Trump out of the White House, but there also should be respect for facts and due process. So far, the powers-that-be in Washington – in politics, the media and other dominant institutions, what some call the Deep State – have shown little regard for fairness in the Russia-gate “scandal.”
The goal seems to be to remove the President or at least emasculate him on a bum rap, giving him the bum’s rush, so to speak, while also further demonizing Russia and exacerbating an already dangerous New Cold War.
The truth should still count for something. No one’s character should be assassinated, as Bill Binney’s is being now, for running afoul of the conventional wisdom that Trump – like bête noire Putin – never tells the truth, and that to believe either is, well, “unconscionable,” as The Washington Post warns.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA intelligence analyst for 27 years and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
By Ray McGovern / Republished with permission / Consortium News / Report a typo
This article was chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers. Anti-Media republishes stories from a number of other independent news sources. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Anti-Media editorial policy.
One day after Trump caused the latest round of broad media outrage when he reportedly sided with Putin over Russia"s alleged "election interference", while slamming US intel agencies, and repeating his allegation that the investigation is a ‘hoax’, and the FBI a “bunch of hacks,” Trump reversed himself and "cleared up confusion" over whether he accepts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of meddling in the U.S. election last year.
Speaking at a news conference in Vietnam with President Tran Dai Quang on Sunday morning local time, Trump distanced himself from remarks he made one day earlier in which he suggested he believed Putin when he said there had been no Russian meddling in the election that took him to the White House. The comments drew a backlash of criticism at home because US intelligence agencies have long since "concluded" there was Russian meddling.
Trump clarifies his comments on Putin + election hacking: "I believe that he feels that he and Russia did not meddle in the election. As to whether or not I believe it or not, I"m with our agencies" pic.twitter.com/nDqJqeytkk
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 12, 2017
As a result, Trump was careful to make clear he sided with the intelligence agencies under his own leadership: "What I said is, I believe Putin believes that," Trump told reporters in Hanoi, Vietnam. "I believe that he feels that he and Russia did not meddle in the election. What he believes is what he believes."
Trump then added that "as to whether I believe it or not, I"m with our agencies, especially as currently constituted, with their leadership. I believe in our intel agencies. I"ve worked with them very strongly."
The comment was made shortly after Trump tweeted that "When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There always playing politics - bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!"
When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. There always playing politics - bad for our country. I want to solve North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, terrorism, and Russia can greatly help!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2017
Still, despite the backlash driven clarification, Trump has repeatedly called allegations of campaign collusion with Moscow a hoax, angering US intel chiefs. U.S. intelligence agencies have also concluded Russians interfered to tip the election in Trump’s favour through hacking and releasing emails to embarrass Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and spreading social media propaganda, in a year-long attempt to deflect attention from Hillary Clinton"s shocking loss, and scapegoat it on outside actors.
On Saturday, former U.S. intelligence director James Clapper told Reuters: “the fact the president of the United States would take Putin at his word over that of the intelligence community is quite simply unconscionable.”
As noted above, Trump"s comments siding with intel agencies bizarrely also come after he hit former U.S. intelligence officials by name, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey.
"I mean, give me a break, they are political hacks," Trump said on Air Force One, according to White House pool reports. He was discussing the U.S. intelligence community"s conclusion that Russia sought to influence the 2016 election in favor of Trump. "So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey," he continued. "Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker.”
Separately, also during his meeting with the Vietnam president, Trump offered to mediate and arbitrate in the dispute over the South China Sea, where four Southeast Asian countries and Taiwan contest China’s sweeping claims to the busy waterway. “I am a very good mediator and a very good arbitrator,” President Trump said during his meeting with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang in Hanoi. “If I can be of help in any way let me know.”
Trump also said that U.S. and Vietnam “will be great trade partners" and added that "we’re going to do a tremendous amount of trade...billions and billions."
CNN"s Don Lemon and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper linked up for an epic tag-team attack on President Trump last night in which Lemon masterfully teed up one leading question after another and Clapper knocked them all out of the park with provocative sound bites that will undoubtedly be played throughout the day.
Bravo, team! Beautiful performance and seamless transition from the fake "Russian collusion" narrative to the new, yet equally fake, "Trump is a racist and unfit for office" narrative.
Here is a small sample of last night"s master class on journalism:
Lemon: "What did you think of tonight"s performance by President Trump?"
Clapper:"I don"t know when I"ve listened and watched something like this from a President that I found more disturbing."
"Having some understanding of the levers of power that are available to a President, if he chooses to exercise them, I found this downright scary and disturbing."
Lemon: "Are you questioning his fitness?"
Clapper: "Yes, I do."
"I really question his ability, his fitness to be in this office and I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it. Maybe he is looking for a way out."
"I do wonder, as well about the people that attracted to this -- to this rally as others. You know, what are they thinking? Or why am I so far off base? Because I don"t understand the adulation. Of course, that"s why I think he gravitated to having this rally as ill-timed as it is."
Lemon: "You said you questioned his fitness. Is he a threat to national security? The president?"
Clapper: "Well, he certainly could be. Again, having some understanding of the levers that a president can exercise, I worry about, frankly, you know, the access to the nuclear codes."
And here is the full interview should you have the stomach for it:
Of course, one exchange that you likely won"t see replayed throughout the day on CNN is the one in which Clapper again said he has no evidence of any collusion between Russia and Trump.
Lemon: "The New York Times is reporting tonight about the falling out between the President and Mitch McConnell over Russia"s interference in the 2016 election. The report is that the President is furious that McConnell failed to protect him. You called the accusation of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia "worse than watergate." What do you think is going on with the President?"
Clapper: "First, to be clear Don, when I left certainly on the 20th of January I had not seen any evidence of direct collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians."
WATCH: During Don Lemon & James Clapper"s ranting on #PhoenixRally, they AGAIN admit that there"s no evidence of Trump/Russian Collusion... pic.twitter.com/OySpNHbMHB
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) August 23, 2017
Come on, Clapper...facts have no place in a narrative-building segment...
In the most vocal opposition to president Donald Trump yet, former CIA Director John Brennan said that if the White House tries to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, government officials should refuse to follow the president orders, as they would be - in his view - “inconsistent” with the duties of the executive branch.
"I think it"s the obligation of some executive branch officials to refuse to carry that out. I would just hope that this is not going to be a partisan issue. That Republicans, Democrats are going to see that the future of this government is at stake and something needs to be done for the good of the future," Brennan told CNN"s Wolf Blitzer at the Aspen Security Forum, effectively calling for a coup against the president should Trump give the order to fire Mueller.
The exchange is 43 minutes into the clip below:
Brennan appeared alongside his former colleague, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and both men who served in the Obama administration, told Blitzer they have total confidence in Mueller. "Absolutely. It was an inspired choice- they don"t come any better, " Brennan said adding that "If Mueller is fired, I hope our elected reps will stand up and say enough is enough." Some have responded with questions where Brennan"s devotion to the Constitution was in the aftermath of the events in Benghazi.
Falling back on his neocon roots, James Clapper, who has waged a long-running vendetta with Trump, once again warned about Russian interference in US affairs. When asked about the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer and others, he responded: "I"m an old school, Cold War warrior and all that - so I have, there"s truth in advertising, great suspicions about the Russians and what they do. A lot of this to me had kind of the standard textbook tradecraft long deployed by Russians. It would have been a really good idea maybe to have vetted whoever they were meeting with."
Clapper was also asked about Trump"s comparison of the intelligence community to Nazi Germany. Clapper said he called the President-elect nine days before he left the Obama administration saying he "couldn"t let that reference pass" and it was an insult to him, CIA Director John Brennan and the workforce. "That was a terrible, insulting affront, not just to me or John, we get paid the big bucks, but I"m talking about the rank and file, men and women, patriots and intelligence community -- that was completely inappropriate and over the top - I had to do something about it."
And so he did: on the call Clapper said Trump asked him to "to put out a statement rebutting the contents of the dossier which I couldn"t and wouldn"t do. It was kind of transactional" referring to a dossier that alleged ties between President Donald Trump"s campaign and Russia. It was not clear if he wouldn"t and couldn"t do it because the contents were legitimate, in his view, or because the dossier is what started the whole "Russian collusion" narrative in the first place. Curiously, Clapper saw it as a favor to Trump not to issue a statement: Clapper was asked by Blitzer why he didn"t put out a statement replying: "The whole point of the dossier by the way was we felt an obligation to warn him to alert him to the fact it was out there. That was the whole point."
It was not clear if James Comey, whose subsequent leak to the NYT led to the appointment of Mueller, would have applied the same reasoning when asked by Trump to rebut the dossier"s contents.
Update: We have a fourth Trump attack story as MSNBC"s Rachel Maddow claims that "someone is shopping a carefully forged, fairly convincing fake NSA document" to news organizations pointing to Trump campaign collusion with Russia... "we don"t know who is doing it but we"re wroking on it."
* * *
It"s been relatively quiet in the last few weeks on the "the Russians did it, and Trump"s Putin"s best-buddy" propaganda-fest, but it appears the Deep State had three stories tonight - just hours ahead of Trump"s face-to-face with Putin - claim Russian hackers are targeting US nuclear facilities, the Russians are nonchalantly stepping up their spying, and that Russia alone interfered with the US election.
With all eyes on the "handshake" as Putin and Trump come face-to-face for the first time as world leaders, it seems the Deep State is desperately fearful of some rapprochement, crushing the need for NATO, and destroying the excuses for massive, unprecedented military-industrial complex spending.
And so, three stories (2 anonymously sourced and one with no facts behind it) in The New York Times (who recently retracted their "17 intelligence agencies" lie) and CNN (where do we start with these guys? let"s just go with full retraction of an anonymously sourced lie about Scaramucci and Kushner and the Russians) should stir up enough angst to ensure the meeting is at best awkward and at worst a lose-lose for Trump (at least in the eyes of the media).
First off we have the "news" that hackers have reportedly been breaking into computer networks of companies operating United States nuclear power stations, energy facilities and manufacturing plants, according to a new report by The New York Times.
The origins of the hackers are not known. But the report indicated that an “advanced persistent threat” actor was responsible, which is the language security specialists often use to describe hackers backed by governments.
The two people familiar with the investigation say that, while it is still in its early stages, the hackers’ techniques mimicked those of the organization known to cybersecurity specialists as “Energetic Bear,” the Russian hacking group that researchers have tied to attacks on the energy sector since at least 2012.
And Bloomberg piled on...
The chief suspect is Russia, according to three people familiar with the continuing effort to eject the hackers from the computer networks.
So that"s that 5 people - who know something - suspect it was the Russians that are hacking US nuclear facilities (but there"s no proof).
Next we move to CNN who claim a "current and former U.S. intelligence officials" told them that Russian spies have been stepping up their intelligence gathering efforts in the U.S. since the election, feeling emboldened by the lack of significant U.S. response to Russian election meddling.
"Russians have maintained an aggressive collection posture in the US, and their success in election meddling has not deterred them," said a former senior intelligence official familiar with Trump administration efforts.
"The concerning point with Russia is the volume of people that are coming to the US. They have a lot more intelligence officers in the US" compared to what they have in other countries, one of the former intelligence officials says.
But, according to Steve Hall, retired CIA chief of operations, the Russians could also be seeking more information on Trump"s administration, which is new and still unpredictable to Moscow
"Whenever there is a deterioration of relations between countries — the espionage and intelligence collection part becomes that much more important as they try to determine the plans and intentions of the adversarial government,"
So that"s more anonymous sourcing about Russian spies... doing what they would normally do during a presidential transition.
And so finally, a third story - with CNN trotting out former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, to pin the "Russians did it" tail on the "this is why we lost the election" donkey...
Former DNI James Clapper: I think Russia’s goal here is to “prep the battlefield” for the 2018 elections https://t.co/lkEj7yTPQd
— CNN (@CNN) July 6, 2017
Claiming that the Russians alone were responsible for interference...
"As far as others doing this, well that"s new to me," Clapper, who served under former President Barack Obama, said during an interview on CNN"s "The Situation Room."
"We saw no evidence whatsoever that [there] was anyone involved in this other than the Russians," he said.
Clapper"s comments draw a contrast from Trump, who declined earlier Thursday to single out Russia for interference in the 2016 White House race.
So in summary - 3 stories pinning Russia for shameful acts against "Murica that just happen to hit hours before Trump shakes hands with Putin... ensuring that unless Trump slams Putin to the ground like a wrestling-CNN-logo, he will be adjudged as being soft... and therefore clearly in cahoots with the Russian leader. Seriously, do the Deep State realy think Americans are that dumb? (rhetorical question)
Both so-called “scandals” are similar, wanting a US president removed from office for the wrong reasons – the real scandals media scoundrels suppress.
What’s most scandalous about Trump’s agenda is ignored – continuing wars of aggression his predecessors began, escalating them, serving privileged interests exclusively, harming ordinary people enormously while pretending to be a populist president.
Speaking in Australia, James Clapper said “I lived through Watergate. I was on active duty in the air force. I was a young officer. It was a scary time.”
He expressed concern about nonexistent Trump sharing of sensitive intelligence with Russia, along with sacking FBI director Comey, calling it “egregious and inexcusable.”
Administration officials serve at the pleasure of the president. Replacing them, if he wishes, is his prerogative – not something “egregious and inexcusable.”
Clapper is part of the anti-Trump chorus, saying “if you compare the two…Watergate pales…compared to what we’re confronting now.”
He lied claiming Trump interfered with the FBI’s independence and autonomy. No evidence suggests it. Comey’s prepared Senate remarks disproved any interference.
Clapper: “I am very concerned about the assault on our institutions coming from both an external source, read Russia, and an internal source, the president himself.”
Fact: No evidence suggests Russian interference in America’s internal affairs, including last year’s presidential election. Claims otherwise are Big Lies – combining Russia bashing with vilifying Trump for the wrong reasons.
Fact: He represents no assault on US institutions – just the opposite. His actions show he supports them – a diabolical agenda Clapper and others like him endorse.
Nothing suggests Trump sacked Comey to quash the FBI’s investigation into contacts or alleged ties of Trump’s team with Moscow. Nor to interfere in the witch-hunt investigation into nonexistent Russian US election hacking.
After months of accusations and allegations, not a shred of evidence suggests any of them hold water.
Clapper: “I think it will be very significant to see both what (Comey) says and what he is asked about and doesn’t respond to.”
We know in advance what he’ll say, no startling revelations or blockbuster comments in his prepared remarks – published on Wednesday.
It’s unknown what Senate Intelligence Committee members will ask or how he’ll respond. He won’t like refute or diverge significantly from what we already know he’ll say.
Clapper like his successor, Washington’s entire intelligence establishment, and virtually all members of Congress and administration officials are extremely hostile to Russia.
Trump’s actions so far show he’s not “inexplicably so solicitous” of Moscow as Clapper claimed – just the opposite in most respects, at least publicly.
Clapper: “Then President-elect Trump disparaged the intelligence community’s highly-confidential assessment of the magnitude and diversity of this Russian interference…”
“This was prompted…I realized later, by his and his team’s extreme paranoia about and resentment of any doubt cast on the legitimacy of his election which, of course, our assessment did.”
“I tried…to appeal to his higher instincts by pointing out that the UN intelligence community he was about to inherit is a national treasure…committed to supporting him and making him successful.”
Fact: America’s intelligence community, like most everything else in Washington, is a force for pure evil, a scourge threatening world peace.
Fact: Trump faces a deep state plot to remove him from office, unsurprising he’d feel paranoid.
Clapper: The Russians “tried to interfere in our elections going back to the 60s but, let me stress, never like they did in 2016.”
“Apart from the infamous hacking of the Democratic National Committee, their campaign had many other dimensions – social media trolls planting false information, orchestrated fake news which many other news outlets picked up and amplified either wittingly or unwittingly, and a very sophisticated campaign by the regime-funded propaganda arm, the RT, broadcasting arm, against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump.”
“The Russians are not our friends. They and (Vladimir) Putin specifically, despite his disingenuous denials, are opposed to our democracy and values and see us, particularly the United States, as the cause of all their problems and frustrations.”
Fact: No evidence suggests Russian interference in any US elections, not 2016 or earlier ones.
Fact: No Russian DNC hacking occurred, no hacking by anyone.
Fact: RT and Sputnik News produce real news, information and analysis – polar opposite consistent rubbish by Western media scoundrels.
Fact: The NYT and other major US media operate as press agents for wealth, power and privilege. They one-sidedly supported Hillary throughout the 2015-16 political season. RT and Sputnik News expressed no support for any US candidate.
(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) Given the tone of political reportage over the last month and the breathless coverage of James Comey’s hearing yesterday, you would have thought President Donald Trump had diminished the power of a co-equal branch of government or violated some basic protection in the Bill of Rights, upsetting the delicate balance that renders the United States a nation governed by laws and not men.
What was Trump’s transgression? Had he levied new wars abroad without congressional authorization? Had he ordered mass surveillance of the American people in contravention of their 4th amendment rights? Had he cracked down on free speech or assumed the power to issue new laws from the presidential chair ex-cathedra? Had he locked people up in internment camps, confiscated people’s gold, suspended habeas corpus, or ordered prisoners of war to be tortured?
No, at least not more than other presidents before him. Rather, Donald Trump had done something much worse. He fired a man, one James Comey, upsetting the “constitutional requirement” that the Director of the FBI be independent of the president of the United States. Days after Comey’s ouster, the former director of National Intelligence and “unwitting” voyeur into Americans’ private lives, James Clapper, had this to say:
“The founding fathers in their genius created a system of co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances, and I feel as though that is under assault and is eroding.”
However, despite Clapper’s earnest worry and woe, the FBI is not a co-equal branch of government able to “check and balance” the executive branch. Despite James Comey’s defense of the FBI’s independence at his hearing yesterday, there is no constitutional requirement that the FBI be independent of the presidency. Comey even admitted as much amid his defense of FBI independence. Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz writes:
“Comey confirmed that under our Constitution, the president has the authority to direct the FBI to stop investigating any individual. I paraphrase, because the transcript is not yet available: the president can, in theory, decide who to investigate, who to stop investigating, who to prosecute and who not to prosecute. The president is the head of the unified executive branch of government, and the Justice Department and the FBI work under him and he may order them to do what he wishes.
“As a matter of law, Comey is 100 percent correct. As I have long argued, and as Comey confirmed in his written statement, our history shows that many presidents—from Adams to Jefferson, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Bush 1, and to Obama – have directed the Justice Department with regard to ongoing investigations. The history is clear, the precedents are clear, the constitutional structure is clear, and common sense is clear.”
Indeed, the FBI’s independence is merely an establishment tradition; and though it may be a well-intentioned tradition meant to curtail political influence in law enforcement, traditions are not laws no matter how much they aspire to bolster the largely mythical “rule of law.” Such aspirational traditions may, in fact, be counterproductive to protecting people’s liberties, giving the fleeting appearance of checks on presidential power even as the executive branch assumes more and more power and authority all the same.
Maybe this is how the establishment wanted it until recently — to give the appearance of propriety while conning Americans out of their liberties behind the scenes. But now Donald Trump is giving the game away. Apparently, all it takes is one power-hungry fool to upset the rule of law and send the established political class into meltdown mode.
To me, all this high dudgeon and partisan prattle that executive branch agencies should be independent of the president is essentially a confession that the executive branch is too powerful and corrupt. Either people naively believe executive agencies are independent of the chief executive or they are cynically trying to conceal from the public how much power the president has at his disposal.
Keeping up appearances that the FBI or NSA or DOJ are independent of presidential politics and abuses of power doesn’t solve this problem; it only obscures the problem that the president of the United States can, for instance, start wars abroad without congressional consent, kill American citizens with drones, spy on millions of Americans, and more generally, has the vast legal discretion to direct the many agencies of the unified executive branch to manipulate Americans in almost every aspect of our lives.
What fools “we” must be to think a reliance on non-binding political traditions can keep us immune from political abuses and corruption. If Congress and the courts continue to grant immense powers to the executive branch to carry out their wars abroad and social engineering at home while hoping tradition and the occasional congressional investigation or court injunction will restrain that power, we will soon discover (if we haven’t already) that the elected and unelected men and women in government are not angels. We will soon discover a government with too many laws becomes a government of men’s selective whims and not sound common law.
As George Orwell correctly assessed while reviewing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, “By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it.”
If Donald Trump did indeed fire James Comey for corrupt reasons, the only remedy is impeachment, but whether or not that day comes, let us not be fooled into thinking that will set us free from law enforcement carrying out the whims of power-hungry politicians and partisan interest groups. No, the only solution is to shrink the power and province of the federal government, first back to the states but eventually back to each individual to live free as long as he allows others to be free as well.
Opinion / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo
Authored by Paul Sperry, op-ed via NYPost.com,
New revelations have surfaced that the Obama administration abused intelligence during the election by launching a massive domestic spy campaign that included snooping on Trump officials.
The irony is mind-boggling: Targeting political opposition is long a technique of police states like Russia, which Team Obama has loudly condemned for allegedly using its own intelligence agencies to hack into our election.
The revelations, as well as testimony this week from former Obama intel officials, show the extent to which the Obama administration politicized and weaponized intelligence against Americans.
Thanks to Circa News, we now know the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama routinely violated privacy protections while snooping through foreign intercepts involving US citizens — and failed to disclose the breaches, prompting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a month before the election to rebuke administration officials.
The story concerns what’s known as “upstream” data collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the NSA looks at the content of electronic communication. Upstream refers to intel scooped up about third parties: Person A sends Person B an email mentioning Person C. Though Person C isn’t a party to the email, his information will be scooped up and potentially used by the NSA.
Further, the number of NSA data searches about Americans mushroomed after Obama loosened rules for protecting such identities from government officials and thus the reporters they talk to.
The FISA court called it a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue” that NSA analysts — in violation of a 2011 rule change prohibiting officials from searching Americans’ information without a warrant — “had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”
A number of those searches were made from the White House, and included private citizens working for the Trump campaign, some of whose identities were leaked to the media. The revelations earned a stern rebuke from the ACLU and from civil liberties champion Sen. Rand Paul.
We also learned this week that Obama intelligence officials really had no good reason attaching a summary of a dossier on Trump to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave to Obama just weeks before Trump took office.
Under congressional questioning Tuesday, Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan said the dossier did not “in any way” factor into the agency’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election. Why not? Because as Obama intel czar James Clapper earlier testified, “We could not corroborate the sourcing.”
But that didn’t stop Brennan in January from attaching its contents to the official report for the president. He also included the unverified allegations in the briefing he gave Hill Democrats.
In so doing, Brennan virtually guaranteed that it would be leaked, which it promptly was.
In short, Brennan politicized raw intelligence. In fact, he politicized the entire CIA.
Langley vets say Brennan was the most politicized director in the agency’s history. Former CIA field operations officer Gene Coyle said Brennan was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election. I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that the man says.”
Coyle noted that Brennan broke with his predecessors who stayed out of elections. Several weeks before the vote, he made it very clear he was pulling for Hillary. His deputy Mike Morell even came out and publicly endorsed her in the New York Times, claiming Trump was an “unwitting agent” of Moscow.
Brennan isn’t just a Democrat. He’s a radical leftist who in 1980 — during the height of the Cold War — voted for a Communist Party candidate for president.
When Brennan rants about the dangers of strongman Vladimir Putin targeting our elections and subverting our democratic process, does he not catch at least a glimpse of his own reflection?
What he and the rest of the Obama gang did has inflicted more damage on the integrity of our electoral process than anything the Russians have done.
Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,
Amid the chaos of James Comey"s firing, new questions about the timeline of his fateful investigation
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on This Week Sunday, and said some head-scratching things.
Clapper back in March told Meet the Press that when he issued a January 6th multiagency intelligence community assessment about Russian interference in the election, the report didn"t include evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, essentially saying he hadn"t been aware of any such evidence up through January 20th, his last day in office.
On Sunday, he said that didn"t necessarily mean there was no such evidence, because sometimes he left it up to agency chiefs like former FBI Director James Comey to inform him about certain things.
"I left it to the judgment [of] Director Comey," Clapper said, "to decide whether, when and what to tell me about counterintelligence investigations."
Clapper said something similar when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Monday. In prepared remarks, he essentially said that there was nothing odd about his not being informed about the existence of an FBI counterintelligence investigation involving Donald Trump"s campaign.
Speaking generally, Clapper seemed to imply that the Trump-Russia-collusion scandal, the thing colloquially known as #Russiagate all over the world now, may have originated in information gleaned by the intelligence community, who in turn may have tipped off the FBI.
"When the intelligence community obtains information suggesting that a U.S. person is acting on behalf of a foreign power," he said, "the standard procedure is to share that information with the lead investigatory body, which of course is the FBI."
He went on, explaining that in such a situation, it wouldn"t be unusual for the DNI to not be informed about an FBI counterintelligence investigation.
"Given its sensitivity," he said, "even the existence of a counterintelligence investigation"s closely held, including at the highest levels."
In his Senate testimony, Clapper went out of his way to say this didn"t contradict his earlier statements. But if he"s not contradicting himself, he"s certainly added a layer of confusion to what is already the most confusing political scandal ever.
Back on March 5th, when Clapper gave that interview to Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, he sounded definitive on a number of counts.
Todd for instance asked Clapper if he would know if the FBI had a FISA court order for surveillance. Clapper answered unequivocally: "Yes."
Clapper made it clear that he would have known if there were any kind of surveillance authority against "the president elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign."
Todd realized this was an important question and re-asked it, to make sure Clapper heard it right.
"You would be told this?" he asked.
"I would know that," Clapper answered.
Todd asked again: Are you sure? Can you confirm or deny that a FISA warrant exists?
"I can deny it," Clapper said flatly.
It wasn"t until the fourth time Todd asked the question that Clapper finally added the caveat, "Not to my knowledge."
Even so, there was no way to listen to the March 5th interview and not come away feeling like Clapper believed he would have known of the existence of a FISA warrant, or of any indications of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, had they existed up until the time he left office on January 20th of this year.
Todd went out of his way to hammer at the question of whether or not he knew of any evidence of collusion. Clapper again said, "Not to my knowledge." Here Todd appropriately pressed him: If it did exist, would you know?
To this, Clapper merely answered, "This could have unfolded or become available in the time since I left the government."
That"s not an unequivocal "yes," but it"s close. There"s no way to compare Clapper"s statements on March 5th to his interviews last week and not feel that something significant changed between then and now.
Clapper"s statements seem even stranger in light of James Comey"s own testimony in the House on March 20th.
In that appearance, Comey – who by then had dropped his bombshell about the existence of an investigation into Trump campaign figures – was asked by New York Republican Elise Stefanik when he notified the DNI about his inquiry.
"Good question," Comey said. "Obviously, the Department of Justice has been aware of it all along. The DNI, I don"t know what the DNI"s knowledge of it was, because we didn"t have a DNI – until Mr. Coats took office and I briefed him his first morning."
Comey was saying that he hadn"t briefed the DNI because between January 20th, when Clapper left office, and March 16th, when former Indiana senator and now Trump appointee Dan Coats took office, the DNI position was unfilled.
But Comey had said the counterintelligence investigation dated back to July, when he was FBI director under a Democratic president. So what happened between July and January?
If Comey felt the existence of his investigation was so important that he he had to disclose it to DNI Coats on Coats" first day in office, why didn"t he feel the same need to disclose the existence of an investigation to Clapper at any time between July and January?
Furthermore, how could the FBI participate in a joint assessment about Russian efforts to meddle in American elections and not tell Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs about what would seemingly be a highly germane counterintelligence investigation in that direction?
Again, prior to last week, Clapper had said he would know if there was a FISA warrant issued on this matter. But then on April 11th, law enforcement and government officials leaked – anonymously, as has been the case throughout most of this story – that the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant for surveillance of Trump associate Carter Page.
So what"s going on here? In talking to people on the Hill last week, I heard a number of theories.
One interpretation is that the FBI, concerned about operational security, conducted a secret investigation during the last months of Barack Obama"s presidency without informing the likes of Clapper and other agency chiefs.
But why hide your investigation in Obama"s administration, only to tell superiors about it under Trump? Why keep a secret from Clapper and not Coats? Moreover, why hide it from the voting public before the election, but announce it on live TV on March 20th?
Another interpretation is that Clapper was simply not telling the whole truth, either on March 20th or last week. In this version of events, he knew of the FBI investigation all along. More than one person I spoke with found it implausible that Clapper could have been ignorant of any investigation, especially following the issuance of the reported FISA warrant against Page.
But the context of these interviews still makes Clapper dissembling in his March interview a strange and unlikely possibility. Clapper has not been in the habit of doing Trump political favors this season. And if indeed it"s standard practice for a DNI to not know what counterintelligence operations the FBI might be up to, it would have made a lot more sense for Clapper to say that on Meet the Press on March 5th.
Instead, he did Trump a solid by stating unequivocally that there were no FISA warrants out, and that he would have known if there were, adding he had seen no evidence of collusion. Why?
When James Comey was fired last week, I didn"t know what to think, because so much of this story is still hidden from view.
Certainly firing an FBI director who has announced the existence of an investigation targeting your campaign is going to be improper in almost every case. And in his post-firing rants about tapes and loyalty, President Trump validated every criticism of him as an impetuous, unstable, unfit executive who additionally is ignorant of the law and lunges for authoritarian solutions in a crisis.
But it"s our job in the media to be bothered by little details, and the strange timeline of the Trump-Russia investigation qualifies as a conspicuous loose end.
What exactly is the FBI investigating? Why was it kept secret from other intelligence chiefs, if that"s what happened? That matters, if we"re trying to gauge what happened last week.
Is it a FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) case involving former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn or a lower-level knucklehead like Carter Page?
Since FARA is violated more or less daily in Washington and largely ignored by authorities unless it involves someone without political connections (an awful lot of important people in Washington who appear to be making fortunes lobbying for foreign countries are merely engaged in "litigation support," if you ask them), it would be somewhat anticlimactic to find out that this was the alleged crime underlying our current white-hot constitutional crisis.
Is it something more serious than a FARA case, like money-laundering for instance, involving someone higher up in the Trump campaign? That would indeed be disturbing, and it would surely be improper – possibly even impeachable, depending upon what exactly happened behind the scenes – for Trump to get in the way of such a case playing itself out.
But even a case like that would be very different from espionage and treason. Gutting a money-laundering case involving a campaign staffer would be more like garden-variety corruption than the cloak-and-dagger nightmares currently consuming the popular imagination.
However, let"s say the FBI is actually investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian state. That"s the most serious possibility, and the one exciting so much public dread.
If it"s that, what"s at the heart of that case? Why can"t we be told what"s going on? Operational secrecy would be a believable excuse, were it not for the fact that so much else has been leaked. Intelligence sources even appeared to give up their ability to capture Russian officials celebrating Trump"s election win. If something like that can be leaked, and if even foreign governments can be told about "leverages of pressure" Russia allegedly has on Trump, it stands to reason that the American public should have heard what"s behind the Trump-Russia investigation by now.
Trump easily could have committed some disqualifying act in response to this scandal. The worry about that is why we"ve always needed an independent investigation.
Such an investigation into Trump"s campaign might very well uncover a range of improprieties and shady dealings by some of the campaign "associates" who"ve figured into news reports. This wouldn"t be surprising, I don"t think, even to some of the people in the White House.
But when it comes to the collusion investigation, there are serious questions. A lot of our civil liberties protections and rules of press ethics are designed to prevent exactly this situation, in which a person lingers for extended periods of time under public suspicion without being aware of the exact nature, or origin, of the accusations.
It"s why liberal thinkers have traditionally abhorred secret courts, secret surveillance and secret evidence, and in the past would have reflexively discouraged the news media from printing the unverified or unverifiable charges emanating from such secret sources. But because it"s Donald Trump, no one seems to care.
We should care. The uncertainty has led to widespread public terror, mass media hysteria and excess, and possibly even panic in the White House itself, where, who knows, Trump may even have risked military confrontation with Russia in an effort to shake the collusion accusations. All of this is exacerbated by the constant stream of leaks and hints at mother lodes of evidence that are just around the corner. It"s quite literally driving the country crazy.
The public deserves to know what"s going on. It deserved to know before the election, it deserved to know before the inauguration, and it deserves to know now.
Earlier in the year, a number of non-mainstream media outlets noted the fact that an unusual number of high-ranking Russian diplomats were turning up dead. Mainstream media shunned the narrative as "conspiracy" or "fake news", which makes the fact that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pointing out to CNN that there is a "curious pattern" of deaths even more intriguing.
As we noted previously, seven Russian diplomats have died in the last 3 months - all but one died on foreign soil. Some were shot, while other causes of death are unknown. Note that a few deaths have been labeled "heart attacks" or "brief illnesses."
1. You probably remember Russia"s Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov — he was assassinated by a police officer at a photo exhibit in Ankara on December 19.
2. On the same day, another diplomat, Peter Polshikov, was shot dead in his Moscow apartment. The gun was found under the bathroom sink but the circumstances of the death were under investigation. Polshikov served as a senior figure in the Latin American department of the Foreign Ministry.
3. Russia"s Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, died in New York this past week. Churkin was rushed to the hospital from his office at Russia"s UN mission. Initial reports said he suffered a heart attack, and the medical examiner is investigating the death, according to CBS.
4. Russia"s Ambassador to India, Alexander Kadakin, died after a "brief illness January 27, which The Hindu said he had been suffering from for a few weeks.
5. Russian Consul in Athens, Greece, Andrei Malanin, was found dead in his apartment January 9. A Greek police official said there was "no evidence of a break-in." But Malanin lived on a heavily guarded street. The cause of death needed further investigation, per an AFP report. Malanin served during a time of easing relations between Greece and Russia when Greece was increasingly critiqued by the EU and NATO.
6. Ex-KGB chief Oleg Erovinkin, who was suspected of helping draft the Trump dossier, was found dead in the back of his car December 26, according to The Telegraph. Erovinkin also was an aide to former deputy prime minister Igor Sechin, who now heads up state-owned Rosneft.
7. The top official of Russia"s space agency, 56-year-old Vladimir Evdokimov, was found dead in his prison cell (where he was being questioned on charges of embezzlement). Investigators found two stab wounds on Evdokimov"s body, but no determination had been made of whether they were self-inflicted.
If we go back further than 3 months...
8. On the morning of U.S. Election Day, Russian diplomat Sergei Krivov was found unconscious at the Russian Consulate in New York and died on the scene. Initial reports said Krivov fell from the roof and had blunt force injuries, but Russian officials said he died from a heart attack. BuzzFeed reports Krivov may have been a Consular Duty Commander, which would have put him in charge of preventing sabotage or espionage.
9. In November 2015, a senior adviser to Putin, Mikhail Lesin, who was also the founder of the media company RT, was found dead in a Washington hotel room according to the NYT. The Russian media said it was a "heart attack," but the medical examiner said it was "blunt force injuries."
10. If you go back a few months prior in September 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s driver was killed too in a freak car accident while driving the Russian President’s official black BMW to add to the insanity.
If you include these three additional deaths that’s a total of ten Russian officials that have died over the past 2 years.
Many have questioned whether this rash of deaths was being undertaken by the deep state in retaliation for Putin"s defiance... former acting director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Morell openly conspired to “covertly” kill Russians and Iranians in Syria in an August 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. While Morell was talking about killing Russian and Iranian soldiers it is definitely a strange piece to add to this puzzle.
Are we witnessing a battle between the deep state and Russia in a spy versus spy plotline or is this all just a freak coincidence?
Well, as The Hill reports, James Clapper, speaking to host Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN"s "State of the Union", is here to set things straight...
"Well, this obviously has been a curious pattern."
"We have had difficulty, though, in actually generating an evidentiary trail that could equate convincingly and compellingly in a court of law a direct connection between certain figures that have been eliminated who apparently ran afoul of Putin."
Aha... So that"s the narrative - back to the "Putin is a killer" meme.
Clapper said it is an “interesting pattern. I will put it that way."
The wife of one of Putin’s most prominent critics, activist and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, said her husband had been poisoned again, after experiencing kidney failure and being put in a medically induced coma in February. She reportedly said the doctors diagnosed him with an “acute poisoning by an unidentified substance."
President Trump, during an interview in early February with then-Fox News anchor Bill O"Reilly, defended Putin and objected to him being called "a killer."
“We have a lot of killers,” Trump said at the time. “You think our country is so innocent?”
Of course, Clapper was not done, he had plenty more to say on Trump...
"I think in many ways our institutions are under assault both externally -- and that"s the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system -- and I think as well our institutions are under assault internally,"
"The founding fathers, in their genius, created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances," Clapper said. "I feel as though that is under assault and is eroding."
Presumably Clapper was upset at being the man Trump pointed to as clarifying the lack of evidence of a Trump-Russia collusion?
After hours of testimony, repetitive questions, and endless speculative grandstanding at today"s "Russian Hacking" allegations hearing, President Trump has weighed in...
The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
Noting that there was nothing new...
Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today --- she said nothing but old news!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
And in fact thanking Director Clapper for confirming "no evidence" of Russian collusion...
James Clapper today at the hearing!! NO EVIDENCE OF TRUMP AND RUSSIA COLLUSION pic.twitter.com/YUUkjyH82j
— JenPal4Trump (@Pal4Trump) May 8, 2017
Of course, the media chose to ignore that...
Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows- there is "no evidence" of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
Finally, Trump took another swing at the mainstream media...
Biggest story today between Clapper & Yates is on surveillance. Why doesn"t the media report on this? #FakeNews!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017
Certainly seems like the media had its narrative all prepared...
Authored by Eric Zuesse,
I have worked with the intelligence community in the past, and I have grave concerns about the politicization of intelligence that seems to be occurring with more frequency in recent times – but I know that the intelligence community has highly capable analysts in it. And if those analysts were properly consulted about the claims in the White House document they would have not approved the document going forward.
I am available to expand on these comments substantially. I have only had a few hours to quickly review the alleged White House intelligence report. But a quick perusal shows without a lot of analysis that this report cannot be correct, and it also appears that this report was not properly vetted by the intelligence community.
This is a very serious matter.
President Obama was initially misinformed about supposed intelligence evidence that Syria was the perpetrator of the August 21, 2013 nerve agent attack in Damascus. This is a matter of public record.
President Obama stated that his initially false understanding was that the intelligence clearly showed that Syria was the source of the nerve agent attack. This false information was corrected when the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, interrupted the President while he was in an intelligence briefing. According to President Obama, Mr. Clapper told the President that the intelligence that Syria was the perpetrator of the attack was “not a slamdunk.”
The question that needs to be answered by our nation is how was the president initially misled about such a profoundly important intelligence finding?
The U.S. ‘news’media hid from the public Dr. Postol’s disproof of the Obama regime’s still-continuing assertions that the 21 August 2013 sarin attack was from Syria’s government instead of from the ‘moderate rebels’ (jihadists) whom the U.S. supported. Will they hide from the U.S. public his disproof of the U.S. regime’s latest such scam backing the actual perpetrators of a war-crime — will they do now as they did then?
This issue presents a challenge to the U.S. ‘news’ media, to finally show some integrity, some honor, and expose the operations of the gang at the U.S. government’s top, instead of simply continuing to pump that gang’s propaganda. Without the continuing cooperation of America’s ‘news’media, we would not now be heading toward World War III — global nuclear war. What would be the time when these ‘news’media will do their job, instead of do what they’re being paid to do, if that time is not now.
If not now, then when?
Will this report by Dr. Postol receive the attention from America’s ‘news’ media that they denied to his previous report demonstrating the gangsterism at the top of America’s federal government? (It exposed Obama’s lie, which America’s ‘news’media simply continued to trumpet.)
This news report-and-commentary is being submitted free-of-charge for publication, to all of America’s major media. It is a challenge to all of them.
* * *
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
BuzzFeed faced ridicule and biting criticism after publishing a flimsy and unsubstantiated dossier linking President-elect Donald Trump with the Russian government and cataloguing putatively lewd behavior — without any solid evidence or investigation of the startling accusations.
Now, it appears the decision may be even more foolhardy than it first seemed, as Trump wrote in his first tweet of the day:
“James Clapper called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated. Made up, phony facts.Too bad!”
James Clapper called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated. Made up, phony facts.Too bad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2017
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did, indeed, discuss the contentious report with the president-elect on Wednesday evening, and released a press statement, in essence, condemning mainstream media’s careless handling of unsubstantiated and sensitive information:
“This evening, I had the opportunity to speak with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss recent media reports about our briefing last Friday. I expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press, and we both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.
“We also discussed the private security company document, which was widely circulated in recent months among the media, members of Congress and Congressional staff even before the IC became aware of it. I emphasized that this document is not a U.S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC. The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.”
Although Clapper’s statement doesn’t exactly denounce the dossier as “phony facts,” his criticism and the fact intelligence officials have not deemed it “reliable” erode even further BuzzFeed’s feckless and inexplicable choice to run the report.
CNN first alluded to the allegations contained in the dossier, but did not provide the actual pages — but BuzzFeed somehow took that as a cue to print the dossier in full, despite editor-in-chief Ben Smith publicly doubting whether the ruinous information was factual.
Mainstream media outlets rushed to ride the viral wave of controversy sparked by BuzzFeed’s report, though none of the rest provided the actual document. According to the corporate media, this dossier — an unofficial, 35-page compilation of alleged tawdry acts and suggestions Trump maintained communication with Russian government throughout the election — had been produced by a former British intelligence officer and thus must be at least somewhat legitimate.
However, the audacious and abrupt rush to publish the document without a thorough investigation to vet the contents quickly unraveled as the corporate press — who had essentially done as much damage as BuzzFeed by reporting the story without providing the document for the public to evaluate — began lobbing Fake News accusations at each other.
As this study in irony and pitfalls of irresponsible journalism unfolded, Trump held a press conference, his first of the year, to attempt damage control, calling mainstream media’s reporting of “false” and “fake” information “a disgrace.”
That press conference furthered the unseemliness of the day’s events, and was most aptly described by Zero Hedge as “an epic (mutual) trolling between president-elect Trump on one hand and BuzzFeed and CNN, on the other.”
Understandably riled by the brash departure by the press from journalism to articles befitting a tabloid, Trump taunted,
“Buzzfeed, which is a failing pile of garbage … will suffer the consequences, and they already are.”
CNN reporter Jim Acosta, however, bore the brunt of the president-elect’s rage over the salacious allegations, after he repeatedly failed to get Trump’s attention and finally blurted out,
“Since you are attacking us, can you give us a question?”
“Not you,” Trump replied. “Your organization is terrible!”
Unsatisfied, Acosta pressed further, “You are attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance to ask a question, sir?”
“Don’t be rude,” Trump retorted. “I’m not going to give you a question.”
Acosta continued loudly pressing to be granted a question, but Trump sharply rebuked,
“Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question. You are fake news!”
Without the backing of the U.S. Intelligence Community or the findings of its own investigations of the allegations concerning the incoming president, CNN and BuzzFeed — and the New York Times, Washington Post and others who followed suit — did, indeed, publish the exact Fake News all those same outlets have been condemning for months.
Now, the head of U.S. Intelligence has essentially said the same. However you characterize the ill-considered choice to print baseless accusations, it’s now clear the corporate media can no longer be considered a reliable source.
