If Donald Trump had any kind of presidential strategy and propensity to take command, he would have had all the intercepts of Russian chatter gathered up weeks ago. He would then have had them declassified and made public, even as he launched a criminal prosecution against Obama’s hit squad-John Brennan,
Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett for illegally unmasking and leaking classified information.
Such a course of action would have crushed the Russian interference hysteria in the bud.
.. At bottom, the latter was a rearguard invention of the Deep State and Democratic partisans. They became literally shocked and desperate for a scapegoat early last fall by the prospect that the unthinkable was happening.
Namely, the election by the unwashed masses of an outsider and insurrectionist who could not be counted upon to serve as a “trusty” for the status quo; and whose naïve but correct instinct to seek a rapprochement with Russia was a mortal threat to the very modus operandi of the Imperial City.
.. After all, it didn’t take a Kremlinologist from the old Soviet days to figure out that Putin did not favor Clinton, who had likened him to Hitler. And that he welcomed Trump, who had correctly said NATO was obsolete, that he didn’t want to give lethal aid to the Ukrainians, and had expressed a desire to make a deal with Putin on Syria and numerous other areas of unnecessary confrontation.
.. Given that he is up against a Deep State/Dem/Neocon/ mainstream media prosecution, the Donald has no chance of survival short of an aggressive offensive of the type described above.
But that’s not happening because the man is clueless about what he is doing in the White House and is being advised by a cacophonous coterie of amateurs and nincompoops. So he has no action plan except to impulsively reach for his Twitter account.
.. “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”
So alone with his Twitter account, clueless advisors and pulsating rage, the Donald is instead laying the groundwork for his own demise. Were this not the White House, it would normally be the point at which they send in the men in white coats with a straight jacket.
.. Mueller is a card-carrying apparatchik of the Deep State, who was there at the founding of today’s surveillance monster as Director of the FBI in the aftermath of 9/11. Since the whole $75 billion apparatus that eventually emerged was based on a vastly exaggerated threat of global Islamic terrorism that doesn’t exist, Russia had to be demonized into order to keep the game going-a transition that Mueller fully subscribed to.
.. To wit, Mueller’s #1 hire was the despicable Andrew Weissmann. The latter had led the fraud section of the department’s Criminal Division, served as general counsel to the F.B.I. when Mueller was its director, and, more importantly, was the driving force behind the Enron task force the most egregious exercise in prosecutorial abuse and thuggery since the Palmer raids of 1919.
.. Exactly four years ago in June 2013, no one was seriously demonizing Putin or Russia. In fact, the slicksters of CNN were still snickering about Mitt Romney’s silly claim during the 2012 election campaign that Russia was the greatest security threat facing America.
.. But then came the Syrian jihadist false flag chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus in August 2013 and the US intelligence community’s flagrant lie that it had proof the villain was Bashar Assad.
.. To the contrary, it subsequently became evident that the primitive rockets that had carried the deadly sarin gas, which killed upwards of 1500 innocent civilians, could not have been fired from regime-held territory; the rockets examined by UN investigators had a range of only a few kilometers, not the 15-20 kilometers from the nearest Syrian base.
.. in the eyes of the neocon War Party, this constructive act of international statesmanship by Putin was the unforgivable sin. It thwarted the next target on their regime change agenda-removal of the Assad government in Syria as a step toward an ultimate attack on its ally, the Shiite regime of Iran.
.. the entire apparatus of Imperial Washington–the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department and a long string of Washington funded NGOs-was on the ground in Kiev midwifing the putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s constitutionally elected President and Russian ally.
.. the Ukrainian civil war and partition of Crimea inexorably followed, as did the escalating campaign against Russia and its leader.
.. Indeed, given the Stalin-era animosity between the Russian-speaking Donbas and Crimean regions of the confected state of Ukraine and the virulent anti-Russian populations elsewhere – including descendants of the Nazi collaborators with Hitler during WWII – there could have been no other outcome. And that was especially the case after Washington designated “Yats”, a neo-Nazi sympathizer named Arseniy Yatseniuk, as the guy to takeover the Ukrainian government at the time of the Kiev uprising.
.. Russia moved to protect its legitimate interests in its own backyard resulting from the Washington-instigated civil war in Ukraine, including protecting its 200-year old Naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. The War Party simply characterized these actions falsely as acts of aggression by a potential sacker of the peace and territorial integrity of its European neighbors.
Can Britain Really Do Much More to Tighten Security?
British police and security services already have some of the most powerful surveillance laws in the world, with weak judicial oversight and little criticism on privacy issues from a public that generally trusts its government and Civil Service.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere, especially in cities, and there are relatively few restrictions on the mass collection of telephone and internet data by the government.
All of which raises the uncomfortable question of what more can be done to prevent the kind of terrorist attack that killed seven people in central London over the weekend.
.. Despite the huge armed presence in public spaces and new detention and surveillance powers, the impact has been limited, and, if anything, it may be further alienating already marginalized communities.
.. “It will only be defeated when we turn people’s minds away from this violence,” she said, and make young people “understand that our values, pluralistic British values, are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.”
.. For the last decade, he said, the British have promoted a policy of getting Muslim communities to cooperate with security forces, “which is pretty much the opposite of the French approach.”
Mrs. May is acknowledging that “the communities are not so good at policing themselves,” Mr. Heisbourg said.
.. “You can’t eradicate the internet,” he said. “These people have not gone away but gone to a different platform, one much more difficult for intelligence agencies to monitor.”
.. On Sunday, Mrs. May’s successor as home secretary, Amber Rudd, said that technology companies could do “so much more” to restrict extremism online.
.. she also said that social media giants should limit end-to-end encryption, which many extremist groups use to plot attacks.
.. the British government passed some of the most far-reaching legislation in the world, giving law enforcement agencies widespread powers to monitor both internet and phone traffic. Britain currently has access to the metadata of online communications without a warrant, but not to the content of individual messages.
.. “In terms of surveillance power, Britain is already better equipped than any other European country,” said Mr. Neumann of King’s College London. “There is no real judicial oversight
.. “The British have no trouble listening in to anyone’s phone or going into anyone’s house,” he said. “But the government uses those powers very carefully, which shows how the unspoken consensus here works,” he added, noting that the country has no written Constitution.
.. Anjem Choudary, a lawyer who managed to avoid breaking the law while spending nearly two decades preaching jihadist views. He was convicted in 2016, only when film emerged of him pledging allegiance to the Islamic State
.. “He was a real life radical preacher who recruited people face to face,” he said, “and much more important for jihad in Britain than Twitter or Facebook.”
.. “Choudary was for years the single person most responsible for Islamist recruiting and propaganda, but he wasn’t charged until 2015, when May had been home secretary for five years,” Mr. Neumann said.
Trump Warning to Comey Prompts Questions on ‘Tapes’
No president in the past 40 years has been known to regularly tape his phone calls or meetings because, among other reasons, they could be subpoenaed by investigators as they were during the Watergate investigation that ultimately forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign.
.. “For a president who baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping him, that Mr. Trump would suggest that he, himself, may have engaged in such conduct is staggering,”
.. He denied that the president was threatening the former F.B.I. director. “That’s not a threat,” Mr. Spicer said. “He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself. I’m moving on.”
.. Mr. Trump suggested he was seriously thinking about canceling the briefings. “Unless I have them every two weeks and I do them myself, we don’t have them,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea.”
.. Every president in modern times has been frustrated with the news media at points, but they all preserved the tradition of the daily briefing, if for no other reason than to get their message out. Mr. Trump, with Twitter as his own trumpet, may feel less need for that.
.. Mr. Trump has long been said by allies and former employees to have taped some of his own phone calls
.. But the implicit threat to Mr. Comey was ripped from a familiar playbook that Mr. Trump relied on during the campaign to silence critics or dissent.
- he read aloud the mobile telephone number of one rival, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, from the stage at a rally and encouraged people to flood his phone with calls.
- he threatened on Twitter to tell stories about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the co-hosts of the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” after they criticized him.
- He also railed against the wealthy Ricketts family as it was funding anti-Trump efforts, threatening to air some unspecified dirty laundry.
while competing with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for the Republican presidential nomination, he threatened to expose something unflattering about his opponent’s wife. “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” he said.
.. Mr. Trump’s warning on Twitter to quiet Mr. Comey could be viewed as an effort to intimidate a witness for any current or future investigation into whether the firing of the F.B.I. director amounted to obstruction of justice.
“If this were an actual criminal investigation — in other words, if there were a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in the picture — this would draw a severe phone call to counsel warning that the defendant is at serious risk of indictment if he continues to speak to witnesses,” Mr. Buell said. “Thus, this is also definitive evidence that Trump is not listening to counsel and perhaps not even talking to counsel. Unprecedented in the modern presidency.”
.. This is not the first time an administration has challenged Mr. Comey’s version of a prominent conversation. During President George W. Bush’s administration, White House officials disputed Mr. Comey’s account of a hospital room standoff in which Mr. Bush’s top aides tried to pressure John D. Ashcroft, the ailing attorney general, to reauthorize a controversial surveillance program.
Mr. Comey, then the deputy attorney general, was eventually vindicated because the F.B.I. director at the time, Robert S. Mueller III, kept his notes from the encounter — a reminder that note-taking is steeped in the F.B.I. culture.
.. A couple of Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Schiff and Representative Eric Swalwell of California, have said there is at least some evidence of collusion, but when Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was asked last week if there was, she said, “Not at this time.”
y Flynn was warned by Trump transition officials about contacts with Russian ambassador
Flynn was told during a late November meeting that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s conversations were almost certainly being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said, a caution that came a month before Flynn was recorded discussing U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak
.. Officials were so concerned that Flynn did not fully understand the motives of the Russian ambassador that the head of Trump’s national security council transition team asked Obama administration officials for a classified CIA profile of Kislyak, officials said. The document was delivered within days, officials said, but it is not clear that Flynn ever read it.
.. Providing the Kislyak bio was seen by Obama officials as part of an effort “to make sure the new team had a full appreciation of the extent of the threat from Russia,” a former U.S. official said.
.. But Trump has pointedly refused to employ such language himself and this week renewed his skepticism that Russia was responsible for a hacking and propaganda campaign targeting last year’s presidential race — a position held by the president that is at odds with the unanimous view of U.S. intelligence agencies.
.. Asked during a recent CBS interview whether he believed the allegations of Russian meddling, Trump said, “I’ll go along with Russia. Could’ve been China, could’ve been a lot of different groups.”
.. Billingslea warned Flynn that Kislyak was likely a target of U.S. surveillance and that his communications — whether with U.S. persons or superiors in Moscow — were undoubtedly being monitored by the FBI and National Security Agency, according to officials familiar with the exchange. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, would presumably have been aware of such surveillance.
.. After denying for weeks that he had discussed the sanctions with Kislyak, Flynn altered his story in early February when told that The Washington Post planned to publish a story saying he had done so, citing multiple sources familiar with the contents of the Kislyak call.
.. Flynn is also under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over $45,000 he accepted for appearing at a 2015 event in Russia and $530,000 his former consulting firm was paid for work tied to the Turkish government.