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Sean Spicer Resigns as White House Press Secretary

Posted on Jul 21, 2017

By Ken Thomas and Julie Pace / Associated Press

Sean Spicer during President Trump's visit to the Pentagon on Thursday. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

Editor's note: This story is developing. In addition to the news of Spicer's resignation, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been named as the next White House press secretary.
WASHINGTON White House press secretary Sean Spicer abruptly resigned his position Friday, ending a rocky six-month tenure that made his news briefings must-see TV. He said President Donald Trump's White House "could benefit from a clean slate."
Spicer quit in protest over the hiring of a new White House communications director, New York financier Anthony Scaramucci, objecting to what Spicer considered his lack of qualifications and to the direction of the press operation, according to people familiar with the situation.
Spicer said during a brief phone conversation with The Associated Press that he felt it would be best for Scaramucci to be able to build his own operation "and chart a new way forward."He tweeted that it had been an "honor" and "privilege" to serve Trump and he would remain in his post through August.
Spicer had long sought the strategic communications job for himself and had been managing that role along with his press secretary duties for nearly two months.
His decision to quit was sudden and took advisers inside and outside the White House by surprise, according to the people with knowledge of the decision. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the personnel matter publicly.
Spicer's daily press briefings had become must-watch television until recent weeks when he took on a more behind-the-scenes role. Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has largely taken over the briefings, turning them into off-camera events.
Spicer spent several years leading communications at the Republican National Committee before helping Trump's campaign in the general election. He is close to White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the former RNC chair, and several of the lower-ranking aides in the White House communications shop.
Priebus told The Associated Press that he supports Scaramucci "100 percent," despite reportedly trying to prevent the financier from getting multiple administration positions.
"We go back a long, long way and are very good friends," Priebus said of Scaramucci. "All good here."
Spicer also complimented Scaramucci, a New York financier and frequent defender of the president who was a staple at Trump Tower during the president's transition, saying "It'll be great, he's a tough guy."
Scaramucci is expected to play a visible role as one of Trump's defenders on television. But Spicer and other officials questioned his hiring as communications director ahead of the president's push to overhaul the tax system and other policy issues.
Spicer and other press staffers had been feeling that they finally had the press shop operating effectively, aside from matters related to the Russia investigation, said one of the people familiar with the situation.
News of Spicer's resignation set off a chaotic scene at the White House.
Inside the West Wing, a gaggle of reporters more than a dozen deep crowded around a doorway leading to the press offices seeking more information on Spicer's departure and other potential staffing moves. White House officials announced that Sanders would hold the daily briefing the first on camera since June 29 on Friday afternoon.
Scaramucci's hire was a surprise. He had been told by the administration that he would be nominated as U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental economic organization that includes the world's better-off countries.
A senior foreign official, who demanded anonymity to discuss private personnel discussions, said Scaramucci had been meeting with various foreign diplomats as recently as last week in anticipation of his new role as ambassador to the OECD.
Spicer's tenure got off to a rocky start. On Trump's first full day in office, he lambasted journalists over coverage of the crowd size at the inauguration and stormed out of the briefing room without answering questions.
Spicer, who often displayed a fiery demeanor in tense on-camera exchanges with reporters, became part of culture in the way few people in his job have, particularly through an indelible impersonation by Melissa McCarthy on NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
She portrayed Spicer as a hostile figure who tore through the briefing room on a portable podium, willing to attack the press.
A Roman Catholic, Spicer was dealt a blow when Trump excluded him from a group of White House staffers and Trump family members who got to meet Pope Francis when Trump visited the Vatican during his first foreign trip in May.
Spicer remained loyal to Trump but frequently battled perceptions that he was not plugged in to what the president was thinking, and had to worry that Trump was watching and critiquing his performance from the Oval Office.
Throughout the start of the administration, there was always the possibility that Trump would undermine something Spicer said by simply sending out a tweet.
Spicer is a Rhode Island native and a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve.
He apologized in April after he attempted to compare the Holocaust and Syrian President Bashar Assad's use of chemical weapons, saying it was "inexcusable and reprehensible."
The resignation comes a day after Mark Corallo, the spokesman for the president's outside legal team, left his post. And in a separate move, former White House aide Katie Walsh is returning to the RNC, spokesman Ryan Mahoney said. Walsh will serve as an adviser on data and digital issues, and the appointment is unrelated to the White House personnel changes, he said.

EVANGELICALS AND THE GOP AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE

Peter Lemkin Wrote:If my reading of what Trump is now 'exploring' [finding a way to fire Mueller and then prevent further investigation of his and his family businesses; as well as giving pardons to himself and his family (not kosher, but being explored!)], then all this was never really about Trump or his family or his campaign trying to hide Trump-Russian political collusion per se, it always was about trying to hide decades of Trump-Russian MONEY floating through his and his family businesses. It seems they were mostly illegal, money-laundering type deals, US-mob and Russian-mob related, violated RICO and other laws, violate tax laws, involved many quid pro quos that were not legal and would disqualify him from being in high political office [and not in prison], etc. I think now, it is not a matter of IF, but only a matter of WHEN this is clear to all and Trump knows and fears this. [Obstruction of justice is minor compared to what he is trying to obstruct being exposed!] My greatest fear is not that he gets impeached or resigns, but that to deflect all this looking around under his covers he will find [or have suggested to him] very soon that there is really only one option he has - and that would be a Major WAR or new '911'...not the small horrible ongoing wars and occasional false-flag ops we have had under all Presidents since they killed JFK. Such a major war or false-flag op would likely 'call for' some kind of invocation of COG and/or martial law. THIS it the nightmare scenario I see coming out of Trump - and could be coming very soon. I hope I'm wrong, but his 'legal' and 'political' options are slim, and can only buy him a little time at this point. If he were to be impeached or resign he knows that the investigations would continue somewhere and he'd either go to jail or be penniless after a plea deal [and some of the unsavory people he has dealt with might try to kill him to not have their names come up]. I don't see something like the Ford pardon of Nixon, with Pence pardoning Trump for decades of money laundering and illegal and unethical business dealings. That leaves only, IMHO, the WAR/major false-flag op option. The Empire is declining faster than I thought. Again, I hope to be wrong, but given the sick state of the polity.......and his intemperate vainglorious personality.........::face.palm::

Ironically, the only good idea this administration had was better relations with Russia [a good idea and one that would make a more stable World], but it seems that was not based on any political, ethical, philosophical or idealistic premises - but to keep friendly with those who had loaned Trump money and used his properties for money-laundering, so as to not bring any of this out into the open and possibly to allow it to continue in the future. Yes, from the Democrats and much of the Intelligence community, Military, etc. one sees a kind of blind and rabid Russophobia. However, it seems clear that Trump had some unsavory business dealings and some of them involved Russians and Russian banks, etc.

It is hard to see something good coming out of this. If he resigns or is impeached we have an even worse President IMO in Pence, and the Democrats are hardly the antidote to this poison - only a slower-acting form of the same poison. Only this causing an awakening of the zombie nation from its zombiehood could possibly break the [slightly faster under the Republicans; slightly slower under the Democrats] relentless push toward a neo-fascist, oligarchic, police, surveillance, permanent-war state, which has been under construction bi-partisan since the end of WWII (and is neigh complete). Trump is not the problem (only a problem); he is resultant of where the nation has fallen to.....that two such horrible candidates were 'on offer', with their real agendas and demons/backers hidden behind the facades of propaganda, mythology, lies, vote-suppression/rigging, and worse. One only has to look at all the other branches of government on the Federal or State levels, generally; not to mention the secret/deep state structures! Most Trump-haters think Trump 'getting his' will solve most of our problems. It will only get rid of a very ugly tumor, but without a MAJOR change/restructuring outside of the current paradigms the cancer will remain and endlessly spread.

Wake up USA!...all along the watchtower, the 'hour' is very late!

Quote:Wake up USA!...all along the watchtower, the 'hour' is very late!

Trump and the Christian Fascists

Posted on Jul 23, 2017

Donald Trump with the Rev. Pat Robertson in 2016 at Virginia's Regent University, founded by Robertson. This month Robertson was granted a White House interview with the president for the Christian Broadcasting Network, also founded by the televangelist. (Steve Helber / AP)

Donald Trump's ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power for decades. If the nation suffers another economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or a new war, President Trump's ability to force the Christian right's agenda on the public and shut down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had 81 percent of white evangelicals behind him.Trump's moves to restrict abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, permit discrimination against LGBT people in the name of "religious liberty" and allow churches to become active in politics by gutting the Johnson Amendment, along with his nominations of judges championed by the Federalist Society and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, have endeared him to the Christian right. He has rolled back civil rights legislation and business and environmental regulations. He has elevated several stalwarts of the Christian right into powerMike Pence to the vice presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Justice Department, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom Price to Health and Human Services and Ben Carson to Housing and Urban Development. He embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger and racism that define the Christian right.
Click here for a 2007 video of Chris Hedges speaking about his book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."
More important, Trump's disdain for facts and his penchant for magical thinking and conspiracy theories mesh well with the worldview of the Christian right, which sees itself as under attack by the satanic forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood and the Democratic Party. In this worldview, climate change is not real, Barack Obama is a Muslim and millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election.
The followers of the Christian right, like Trump and his brain trust, including Stephen Bannon, are Manicheans. They see the world in black and white, good and evil, them and us. Trump's call in his speech in Poland for a crusade against the godless hoards of Muslims fleeing from the wars and chaos we created replicates the view of the Christian right. Christian right leaders in a sign of support went to the White House on July 10 to pray over Trump. Two days later Pat Robertson showed up there to interview the president for his Christian Broadcasting Network.If the alliance between these zealots and the government succeeds, it will snuff out the last vestiges of American democracy.
On the surface it appears to be incongruous that the Christian right would rally behind a slick New York real estate developer who is a very public serial philanderer and adulterer, has no regard for the truth, is consumed by greed, does not appear to read or know the Bible, routinely defrauds and cheats his investors and contractors, expresses a crude misogyny and an even cruder narcissism and appears to yearn for despotism. In fact, these are the very characteristics that define most of the leaders of the Christian right. Trump has preyed on desperate people through the thousands of slot machines in his casinos, his sham university and his real estate deals. Megachurch pastors prey on their followers by extracting "seed offerings," "love gifts," tithes and donations and by selling miracle healings along with "prayer clothes," self-help books, audio and video recordings and even protein shakes. Pastors have established within their megachurches, as Trump did in his businesses, despotic fiefdoms. They cannot be challenged or questioned any more than an omnipotent Trump could be challenged on the reality television show "The Apprentice." And they seek to replicate their little tyrannies on a national scale, with white men in charge.
The personal piety of most of the ministers who lead the Christian right is a facade. Their private lives are usually marked by hedonistic squalor that includes mansions, private jets, limousines, retinues of bodyguards, personal assistants and servants, shopping sprees, lavish vacations and sexual escapades that rival those carried out by Trump. And because they run "churches," in many cases church funds pay for their tax-free empires, including their extravagant lifestyles. They also engage in the nepotism found in the Trump organization, elevating family members to prominent or highly paid positions and passing on the businesses to their children.
The Christian right's scandals, which give a glimpse into the sordid lives of these multimillionaire pastors, are legion. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Praise the Lord Club, for example, raked in as much as $1 million a week before Jim Bakker went to prison for nearly five years. He was convicted of fraud and other charges in 1989 because of a $158 million scheme in which followers paid for vacations that never materialized. As the Bakker empire came apart, there also were accusations of drug use and rape. Tammy Faye died in 2007, and now Jim Bakker is back, peddling survival food for the end days and telling his significantly reduced television audience that anyone who opposes Trump is the Antichrist.

Paul and Jan Crouch, who gave the Bakkers their start, founded Trinity Broadcasting, the world's largest televangelist network, now run by their son Matt and his wife, Laurie. Viewers were encouraged to call prayer counselors at the toll-free number shown at the bottom of the TV screen. It was a short step from talking with a prayer counselor to making a "love gift" and becoming a "partner" in Trinity Broadcasting and then sending in more money during one of the frequent Praise-a-Thons.
The Crouches reveled in tasteless kitsch, as does Trump. They sat during their popular nightly program in front of stained glass windows that overlooked Louis XVI-inspired sets awash in gold rococo and red velvet, glittering chandeliers and a gold-painted piano. The network emblem, which Paul Crouch wore on the pocket of his blue double-breasted blazer, featured a crown, a lion, a horse, a white dove, a cross and Latin phrases among other elements. The Crouches would have been at home in Trump Tower, where the president has a faux "Trump crest"allegedly plagiarizedand has decorated his penthouse as if it was part of Versailles.
The Crouches were masters of manipulation. They exhorted viewers to send in checks for $1,000, even if they could not afford it. Write the check anyway, Paul Crouch, who died in 2013, told them, as a "step of faith" and the Lord would repay them many times over. "Do you think God would have any trouble getting $1,000 extra to you somehow?" he asked during one Praise-a-Thon broadcast. Viewers, many of whom struggled with deep despair and believed that miracles and magic alone held them back from the abyss, often found it impossible to resist this emotional pressure.
Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is home to many of the worst charlatans in the Christian right, including the popular healer Benny Hinn, who says that Adam was a superhero who could fly to the moon and claims that one day the dead will be raised by watching TBN from inside their coffins. Hinn claims his "anointings" have cured cancer, AIDS, deafness, blindness and numerous other ailments and physical injuries. Those who have not been cured, he says, did not send in enough money.
These religious hucksters are some of the most accomplished con artists in the country, a trait they share with the current occupant of the Oval Office.
I wrote a book on the Christian right in 2007 called "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." I did not use the word "fascist" lightly. I spent several hours, at the end of two years of reporting, with two of the country's foremost scholars on fascismFritz Stern and Robert O. Paxton. Did this ideology fit the parameters of classical fascism? Was it virulent enough and organized enough to seize power? Would it go to the ruthless extremes of previous fascist movements to persecute and silence dissent? Has our deindustrialized society replicated the crippling despair, alienation and rage that always feed fascist movements?
The evangelicalism promoted by the Christian right is very different from the evangelicalism and fundamentalism of a century ago. The emphasis on personal piety that defined the old movement, the call to avoid the contamination of politics, has been replaced by Christian Reconstructionism, called Dominionism by some. This new ideology is about taking control of all institutions, including the government, to build a "Christian" nation. Rousas John Rushdoony in his 1973 book, "The Institutes of Biblical Law," first articulated it. Rushdoony argued that God gives the elect, just as he gave Adam and Noah, dominion over the earth to build a Christian society. Their state will come about with the physical eradication of the forces of Satan. It is the duty of the church and the elect to "rescue" the world so Christ can return.
This is an ideology of death. It promises that the secular, humanist society will be physically destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of our legal system. Creationism or "Intelligent Design" will be taught in public schools. People who are considered social deviants, including homosexuals, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals and those dismissed as "nominal Christians"meaning Christians who do not embrace the Christian right's perverted and heretical interpretation of the Biblewill be silenced, imprisoned or killed. The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, "homeland" security and waging war. Church organizations will be funded and empowered by the government to run social-welfare agencies. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and sinfulness, will be denied government assistance. The death penalty will be expanded to include "moral crimes," including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. Women will be subordinate to men. Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens and eventually outcasts. The wars in the Middle East will be defined as religious crusades against Muslims. There will be no separation of church and state. The only legitimate voices will be "Christian." America will become an agent of God. Those who defy the "Christian" authorities will be branded as agents of Satan.
Tens of millions of Americans are already hermetically sealed within this bizarre worldview. They are given a steady diet of conspiracy theories and lies on the internet, in their churches, in Christian schools and colleges and on Christian television and radio. Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote "The Red Network" and was a Nazi sympathizer, is required reading. Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of church and state, is ignored. This Christian propaganda hails the "significant contributions" of the Confederacy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, is rehabilitated as an American hero. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, is defined as part of the worldwide battle against satanic Islamic terror. Presently, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. public believes in Creationism or "Intelligent Design." And nearly a third of the population, 94 million people, consider themselves evangelical.

Those who remain in a reality-based universe often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons. They do not take seriously the huge segment of the public, mostly white and working class, who because of economic distress have primal yearnings for vengeance, new glory and moral renewal and are easily seduced by magical thinking. These are the yearnings and emotions Trump has exploited politically.
Those who embrace this movement need to feel, even if they are not, that they are victims surrounded by dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They need to elevate themselves to the role of holy warriors, infused with a noble calling and purpose. They need to sanctify the rage and hypermasculinity that are the core of fascism. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief, which includes being anointed for a special purpose in life by God, are potent weapons in the fight against their own demons and desire for meaning.
"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty," Simone Weil wrote.
These believers, like all fascists, detest the reality-based world. They condemn it as contaminated, decayed and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they suddenly discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to be rich, powerful and happy.
The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and evidence, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into "the culture of death" that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem. They need to live in a society that is not predatory but instead provides well-funded public schools, free university education and universal health care, a society in which they and their families can prosper.Let us not stand at the open gates of the city waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching towards Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for economic reparations for the poor and the working class. Let us give all Americans a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance, united behind the ludicrous figure of Donald Trump, will ride this rage to power.

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USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 26-07-2017

U.S. Intelligence Veterans Believe the Russian Hack' of DNC Computers May Have Been an Inside Job

Posted on Jul 24, 2017

By VIPS / Consortiumnews

Forensic analysis of metadata from the "Guccifer 2.0" July 5, 2016, intrusion into the Democratic National Committee server. (The Forensicator)

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Was the "Russian Hack" an Inside Job?
Executive SummaryForensic studies of "Russian hacking" into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computers, and then doctored to incriminate Russia.
After examining metadata from the "Guccifer 2.0" July 5, 2016, intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device, and that "telltale signs" implicating Russia were then inserted.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying and doctoring were performed on the East Coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].
Independent analyst Skip Folden, a retired IBM Program Manager for Information Technology U.S., who examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He has drafted a more detailed technical report titled "Cyber-Forensic Investigation of Russian Hack' and Missing Intelligence Community Disclaimers," and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA "alumni" in VIPS attest to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.
The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original "Guccifer 2.0" material remains a mysteryas does the lack of any sign that the "hand-picked analysts" from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the "Intelligence Community Assessment" dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.
NOTE: There has been so much conflation of charges about hacking that we wish to make very clear the primary focus of this Memorandum. We focus specifically on the July 5, 2016, alleged Guccifer 2.0 "hack" of the DNC server. In earlier VIPS memoranda, we addressed the lack of any evidence connecting the Guccifer 2.0 alleged hacks and WikiLeaks, and we asked President Obama specifically to disclose any evidence that WikiLeaks received DNC data from the Russians [see here and here].
Addressing this point at his last press conference (January 18), he described "the conclusions of the intelligence community" as "not conclusive," even though the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6 expressed "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the DNC … to WikiLeaks."
Obama's admission came as no surprise to us. It has long been clear to us that the reason the U.S. government lacks conclusive evidence of a transfer of a "Russian hack" to WikiLeaks is because there was no such transfer. Based mostly on the cumulatively unique technical experience of our ex-NSA colleagues, we have been saying for almost a year that the DNC data reached WikiLeaks via a copy/leak by a DNC insider (but almost certainly not the same person who copied DNC data on July 5, 2016).
From the information available, we conclude that the same inside-DNC, copy/leak process was used at two different times, by two different entities, for two distinctly different purposes:
-(1) an inside leak to WikiLeaks before Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, that he had DNC documents and planned to publish them (which he did on July 22)the presumed objective being to expose strong DNC bias toward the Clinton candidacy; and
-(2) a separate leak on July 5, 2016, to pre-emptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack."
* * *
Mr. President:
This is our first VIPS Memorandum for you, but we have a history of letting U.S. Presidents know when we think our former intelligence colleagues have gotten something important wrong, and why. For example, our first such memorandum, a same-day commentary for President George W. Bush on Colin Powell's U.N. speech on March 5, 2003, warned that the "unintended consequences were likely to be catastrophic," should the U.S. attack Iraq and "justfy" the war on intelligence that we retired intelligence officers could readily see as fraudulent and driven by a war agenda.
The January 6 "Intelligence Community Assessment" by "hand-picked" analysts from the FBI, CIA, and NSA seems to fit into the same agenda-driven category. It is largely based on an "assessment," not supported by any apparent evidence, that a shadowy entity with the moniker "Guccifer 2.0" hacked the DNC on behalf of Russian intelligence and gave DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
The recent forensic findings mentioned above have put a huge dent in that assessment and cast serious doubt on the underpinnings of the extraordinarily successful campaign to blame the Russian government for hacking. The pundits and politicians who have led the charge against Russian "meddling" in the U.S. election can be expected to try to cast doubt on the forensic findings, if they ever do bubble up into the mainstream media. But the principles of physics don't lie; and the technical limitations of today's Internet are widely understood. We are prepared to answer any substantive challenges on their merits.
You may wish to ask CIA Director Mike Pompeo what he knows about this. Our own lengthy intelligence community experience suggests that it is possible that neither former CIA Director John Brennan, nor the cyber-warriors who worked for him, have been completely candid with their new director regarding how this all went down.
Copied, Not Hacked
As indicated above, the independent forensic work just completed focused on data copied (not hacked) by a shadowy persona named "Guccifer 2.0." The forensics reflect what seems to have been a desperate effort to "blame the Russians" for publishing highly embarrassing DNC emails three days before the Democratic convention last July. Since the content of the DNC emails reeked of pro-Clinton bias, her campaign saw an overriding need to divert attention from content to provenanceas in, who "hacked" those DNC emails? The campaign was enthusiastically supported by a compliant "mainstream" media; they are still on a roll.
"The Russians" were the ideal culprit. And, after WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, "We have emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication," her campaign had more than a month before the convention to insert its own "forensic facts" and prime the media pump to put the blame on "Russian meddling." Mrs. Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri has explained how she used golf carts to make the rounds at the convention. She wrote that her "mission was to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton."
Independent cyber-investigators have now completed the kind of forensic work that the intelligence assessment did not do. Oddly, the "hand-picked" intelligence analysts contented themselves with "assessing" this and "assessing" that. In contrast, the investigators dug deep and came up with verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of the alleged Russian hack.
They found that the purported "hack" of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage devicea thumb drive, for example) by an insider. The data was leaked after being doctored with a cut-and-paste job to implicate Russia. We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.
The Time Sequence
June 12, 2016: Assange announces WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to Hillary Clinton."
June 15, 2016: DNC contractor Crowdstrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: On the same day, "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the "hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
We do not think that the June 12 & 15 timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it suggests the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.
The Key Event
July 5, 2016: In the early evening, Eastern Daylight Time, someone working in the EDT time zone with a computer directly connected to the DNC server or DNC Local Area Network, copied 1,976 MegaBytes of data in 87 seconds onto an external storage device. That speed is many times faster than what is physically possible with a hack.
It thus appears that the purported "hack" of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 (the self-proclaimed WikiLeaks source) was not a hack by Russia or anyone else, but was rather a copy of DNC data onto an external storage device. Moreover, the forensics performed on the metadata reveal there was a subsequent synthetic insertiona cut-and-paste job using a Russian template, with the clear aim of attributing the data to a "Russian hack." This was all performed in the East Coast time zone.
"Obfuscation & De-obfuscation"
Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled "Vault 7." WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovationa growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015.
Scarcely imaginable digital toolsthat can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TVwere described and duly reported in The New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as "news fit to print" and was kept out of the Times.
The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, "did not get the memo" in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: "WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations."
The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use "obfuscation," and that Marble source code includes a "deobfuscator" to reverse CIA text obfuscation.
More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a "forensic attribution double game" or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
The CIA's reaction was neuralgic. Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting, "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."
Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review.
Putin and the Technology
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly, he seemed quite willingperhaps even eagerto address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be "masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin" [of the hack] … And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack."
"Hackers may be anywhere," he said. "There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? … I can."
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times. This is our 50th VIPS Memorandum since the afternoon of Powell's speech at the U.N. Live links to the 49 past memos can be found at https://consortiumnews.com/vips-memos/.
FOR THE STEERING GROUP, VETERAN INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center
Skip Folden, independent analyst, retired IBM Program Manager for Information Technology US (Associate VIPS)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Michael S. Kearns, Air Force Intelligence Officer (Ret.), Master SERE Resistance to Interrogation Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer and former Senior Investigator, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.)
Lisa Ling, TSgt USAF (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Edward Loomis, Jr., former NSA Technical Director for the Office of Signals Processing
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former U.S. Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and CIA analyst
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Cian Westmoreland, former USAF Radio Frequency Transmission Systems Technician and Unmanned Aircraft Systems whistleblower (Associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Sarah G. Wilton, Intelligence Officer, DIA (ret.); Commander, US Naval Reserve (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. Diplomat

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USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 26-07-2017

JULY 24, 2017 | MARTIN J. SHEIL

IRAKLY KAVELADZE THE EIGHTH PERSON IN TRUMP TOWER MEETING

Shell Master at Shell Heaven Photo credit: Twitter / Oliver Dunkley / Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Editor's note: Martin J. Sheil is a retired branch chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation division.
Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze is, or at least has been, a suspected money launderer in the employ of one of Russia's most powerful oligarchs. His boss is Aras Agalarov, a Russian real estate mogul known in some circles as the "Russian Donald Trump," reputedly the 57th richest person in Russia and a close friend of Vladimir Putin. Ike is currently a senior VP in charge of real estate/finance in Agalarov's firm Crocus Group, where he started working in the early 90s.
In a 2013 Las Vegas videotape of Donald Trump talking with Agalarov's son Emin a pop singer in Russia there is Ike lurking behind Emin, listening in. Tall, thin, wearing glasses and unremarkable-looking in every way, Ike serves as Aras Agalarov's operative. In so doing, he serves as a Russian government operative, which means Putin's operative.

Clearly, the American bank accounts were being used as a conduit to move money out of Russia during a period of upheaval in that country.

Aras paid Trump $14M to bring the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013, and engaged in multiple discussions and plans to enter into a partnership with Trump to build Trump-type towers in Moscow. Ivanka made several trips to Moscow to explore appropriate sites.

Ike was born in Georgia, which was then a province of the Soviet Union. He immigrated to the US in 1991 after earning his college degree from the Moscow Finance Academy. Once in the US he opened a corporation in Delaware called International Business Creations (IBC) and served as its president. He also opened a sister Delaware corporation called Euro-American Corporate Services in 1996.
Delaware requires little identification and provides some ownership anonymity for its corporations, making it the perfect state to form corporate shells for folks and entities that want to cloak their financial maneuvers with a veil of secrecy.
After creating an estimated 2,000 shell Delaware corporations under anonymous ownership, Ike opened up bank accounts for approximately 50 Moscow-based Russian "brokers," using the shell companies already established in Delaware. Ike also opened 236 bank accounts at Citibank and Commercial Bank of San Francisco. Almost immediately upon the opening of the accounts, funds started moving in via wire transfer.

… the early use of Latvian bank accounts to secrete monies out of Russia likely portended what has become known as "the Russian Laundromat" the conduit that funneled a reported $20 billion-plus out of Russia and into banks in Latvia and Moldova between 2010 and 2014.

As quickly as the money came in from Russia and Eastern Europe, it moved on to bank accounts in places like Latvia, according to a GAO report filed in 2000. This report accounted for over $1.4B moving through accounts set up by IBC and Euro-American under shell-company names between 1991 and 2000. Clearly, the American bank accounts were being used as a conduit to move money out of Russia during a period of upheaval in that country.
Multiple Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) were filed with the Treasury Department by Commercial Bank of San Francisco due to the lack of information provided by their customers, and the movement of large volumes of currency through their accounts. Ultimately, Commercial Bank of San Francisco shut down its International Banking Department in 2000 and the bank was sold.
Welcome to Shellaware LLC Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Ken Lund / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

While a criminal investigation was recommended with regard to the above-noted suspicious financial activity, no criminal indictments were issued. Ike was never indicted or convicted of any criminal financial wrongdoing. The entire case shined a spotlight on the inadequacy of the involved bank's Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols.

So what was a guy like Ike doing in a meeting at Trump Tower on the 25th floor in June 2016 in the offices of Donald Trump Jr.?

The identity of the Russian brokers who sourced so much money through the 236 shell-corporation bank accounts that Ike had set up was never established. But Ike maintained employment with Aras Agalarov's Crocus Group throughout this time. It should also be noted that the early use of Latvian bank accounts to secrete monies out of Russia likely portended what has become known as "the Russian Laundromat" the conduit that funneled a reported $20 billion-plus out of Russia and into banks in Latvia and Moldova between 2010 and 2014.

Akhmetshin allegedly specialized in "active measures campaigns," i.e., subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda…

After immigrating to the US in 1991, Ike became an American citizen, received his MBA from the University of New Haven and was promoted to senior vice president at Crocus International in Moscow by the Russian Trump Aras Agalarov.
So what was a guy like Ike doing in a meeting at Trump Tower on the 25th floor in June 2016 in the offices of Donald Trump Jr.? Remember that the stated purpose of this meeting was for the Russians to provide information to the Trump team regarding the "flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee."
In fact, Natalia Veselnitskaya left with Trump Jr. a folder of "corporate stuff, lawyerly stuff," about those purported "illicit funds." Veselnitskaya is the mysterious Russian lawyer with alleged ties to the "Crown Prosecutor," according to Goldstone, Emin Agalarov's agent who initiated the Trump Tower meeting with his infamous emails to Trump Jr.

At the time of the Trump Tower meeting, Trump's campaign was far behind in the polls to Hillary Clinton and in dire need of financial support. Clinton's campaign war chest far exceeded that of her opponent.

In fact, Veselnitskaya alleges that she has won 300 cases in Russian courts without suffering defeat, which seems to confirm her close association with Yuri Chaika, Russia's Prosecutor-General, who is also known to be closely associated with Aras Agalarov. Chaika is part of the bloc in Russia known as "siloviki," or people allied with security services literally the people who settle disputes through force inside the Kremlin.
At least eight people attended the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower: Donald Trump Jr; Trump's son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner; Trump's then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; Rob Goldstone Emin Agalarov's agent; a Russian attorney close to Russia's Chief Prosecutor, Natalia Veselnitskaya; her translator, Anatoli Samochornov; Rinat Akhmetshin, who has admitted to having been a Soviet counterintelligence officer and reportedly worked for Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU the country's largest foreign intelligence unit; and Ike.

It is possible that Ike was at the meeting as a representative of Aras Agalarov to facilitate the transfer of funds from the oligarch and the Russian government to the campaign of Donald Trump.

Akhmetshin allegedly specialized in "active measures campaigns," i.e., subversive political influence operations often involving disinformation and propaganda, according to a letter Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent to Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Radio Free Europe described Akhmetshin as a Russian gun-for-hire and Bill Browder, an American businessman with extensive experience in Russia, filed a formal complaint with the US Department of Justice noting that Akhmetshin was acting as an unregistered agent for Russian interests.
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner. Photo credit: Watch the video on C-SPAN, Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs / Flickr.

Why was Ike at the Trump Tower meeting? We need to scrutinize Rob Goldstone's emails with regards to the purpose of the meeting which Goldstone also attended. The key email of course was dated June 3, 2016 @ 10:36AM, when Rob Goldstone wrote to Donald Trump Jr.:
Emin [Agalarov] just called and … the Crown [sic] Prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
The above sentence has gotten most of the media attention and for good reason, along with Donald Trump Jr.'s response: "if true love it." But I draw the reader's attention to the next sentence of the email:
This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump helped along by Aras and Emin. (emphasis added)
At the time of the Trump Tower meeting, Trump's campaign was far behind in the polls to Hillary Clinton and in dire need of financial support. Clinton's campaign war chest far exceeded that of her opponent. While the campaign was going a "hundred miles an hour," Trump and his amateur-hour consiglieres were desperate for both dirt and dollars to catch up to Hillary.
Given the appearance of Rinat Akhmetshin at this meeting, it is possible that the inflammatory quote in Goldstone's email, "information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia…" was actually disinformation and misdirection. Providing dirt on Clinton was the pretext for the meeting, which prompted Trump Jr.'s "love it" response; and this pretext was at first dragged out of Donald Trump Jr., but then he dismissed that aspect of the meeting as "vague and meaningless"and claimed the entire meeting was just about "adoption," and the Russian children who need homes.
But as The NY Times has pointed out, when "the Kremlin talks about adoption' they mean sanctions.'" (In retaliation for the Magnitsky Act a 2012 American law that freezes all assets held in the US by Russian officials responsible for human rights abuses the Russians halted all adoption of Russian children by Americans.)
It is easy to see the hand of Rinat Akhmetshin here, but what was the real purpose of Irakly Kaveladze's attendance at this meeting? The recent excuse offered, that he showed up because he thought he would translate for the Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, is pretty lame. But some illumination is possible if we focus on the second sentence of the Goldstone email "…but is part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump helped along by Aras and Emin."
It is possible that Ike was at the meeting as a representative of Aras Agalarov to facilitate the transfer of funds from the oligarch and the Russian government to the campaign of Donald Trump. Ike has demonstrated expertise in creating shell companies with anonymous ownership, then creating bank accounts in the names of these shell companies, and subsequently moving millions of dollars through these accounts quickly and anonymously from Russia and Eastern Europe.
Trump had just secured the Republican nomination and was badly out-funded by Clinton at the time, with the presidential campaign looming. What better way to show the Russian government's support for Trump, helped along by Aras and Emin, than by offering substantial financial support in an untraceable, concealed manner while accusing Clinton of doing that very thing?
Perhaps this support comes, as Rinat Akhmetshinov described, "in a plastic folder" of "corporate stuff, lawyerly stuff," e.g., bank accounts in corporate shell names full of untraceable funds?

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USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 26-07-2017

We turn now to look at the man many credit with helping Donald Trump become president: Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News. During the early days of the Trump presidency, many suggested Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, was pulling many of the strings in the Oval Office. Time magazine put Bannon on its cover in February with the headline "The Great Manipulator." That same month, Bannon, in a rare public comment, outlined his plans for the Trump administration.

STEPHEN BANNON: I think if you look at the lines of work, I kind of break it out into three verticals or three buckets. The first is kind of national security and sovereignty, and that's your intelligence, the Defense Department, homeland security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism. The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state. ... If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason. And that is the deconstruction. The way the progressive left runs is that if they can't get it passed, they're just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency. That's all going to be deconstructed. And I think that that's why this regulatory thing is so important.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Steve Bannon speaking at the CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Well, a new book by our guest, Joshua Green, chronicles how Bannon took his hard-right, nationalist politics from the fringes of the Republican Party all the way to the White House. Green has been closely following Bannon's career for years. In October 2015before Bannon joined Trump's campaignGreen dubbed Bannon "the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America." At the time, Bannon was head of Breitbart News and overseeing a multifaceted campaign to take down Hillary Clinton, as well as more moderate Republican candidates. Joshua Green's new book is titled Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.
So, Josh, talk about the rise of Donald Trump and why you think Steve Bannon was so key. Perhaps if there hadn't been a Steve Bannon, there wouldn't be a President Donald Trump.
JOSHUA GREEN: That's my contention in the book. And I think that the best way to understand this election, to understand what happened and how a guy like Trump wound up in the White House, and really to understand the forces that are roiling our politics and producing such extreme and unusual things, as we see literally every day now in the Trump administrationto understand that, you have to understand Steve Bannon. To me, he is the narrative thread that runs through not just the rise of Trump, but the rise of this whole right-wing populist, nationalist politics that he has been espousing ever since I first met him in 2011.
And the story I tell in the book, basically, is the intertwined story of the rise of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. But Bannon, I met back in 2011, when he was working on a documentary film about Sarah Palin, who he hoped would run for president in 2012. And he was trying to fill her head with the same ideas and the same policies that you heard from Donald Trump. It took him a while to find his candidate. But he was brought into Trump's orbit in 2010. He began advising him, kind of tutoring him on politics informally, at a time when everybody elseand certainly Ididn't take Trump seriously as a politician. I thought he was going to goose his ratings.
But Bannon was able to take his nationalist politicsand, in particular, the idea that there is political power in taking a hard line on immigration, on demonizing immigrants as marauders and killers, that Trump seemed to have intuitively sensed would resonate among Republican grassroots voters. And the combination of birtherism, which Trump pioneered on his own, and this anti-immigrant sentiment kind of mixed together to produce the candidate who upset the entire Republican field.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how Bannon came into Trump's orbit, not originally, but in the summer of 2016, how he came to take over. And this, of course, is also the story of the Mercers.
JOSHUA GREEN: Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, Bannon had been this kind of minor figure in Trump's life since 2010, when a veteran anti-Clinton activist named David Bossie brought him along on a trip to Trump Tower just to tutor Trump about politics. But he didn't enter most people's political awareness until he took over the campaign dramatically, in August, mid-August of 2016, at a time when Trump looked like he was floundering and almost certainly headed toward a blowout loss.
And I have a scene in the book that begins with the daughter of a right-wingvery secretive right-wing billionaire named Robert Mercer, who is the co-CEO of Renaissance Technology. It's a fabulously successful hedge fund.
AMY GOODMAN: That's based out in Stony Brook, Long Island.
JOSHUA GREEN: It's based in Stony Brook, Long Island. Mercer and his daughter, I call them in the book kind of the alt-Koch brothers. You know, the Koch brothers tend to be more mainstream. The Mercers have much more unusual and different beliefs. And they are essentially, or have been, Steve Bannon's benefactors over the last couple years, pouring money into Breitbart News, but also into a movie production company; Cambridge Analytica, a data sciences firm that Trump relied on; and, most importantly, a nonprofit research entity down in Tallahassee, Florida, called the Government Accountability Institute, which produced the Clinton Cashbook that came out on the eve of the election and sort of tarnished Hillary Clinton's image by documenting her ties to some of these shady foreign donors.
Well, the Mercers were big backers of Trump. They were originally behind Cruz, but once he fell, they got behind Trump right away, in a way that a lot of other wealthy Republicans were loath to do, giving him money, setting up a super PAC. But Rebekah Mercer, the daughter, who is very aggressive in getting involved in the candidates and causes she backsI have a scene in the book where she flies out to a Trump fundraiser in Long Island, demands a meeting with Trumpand you can do that if you've given him millions and millions of dollars, as the Mercers haveand says, "Look, you're losing. You're going to lose this election unless you make a change." And Trump says, "Well, yeah, things aren't going real well, but..." And she says, "No, you're losing. And the only way you're going to win is if you have a radical change. I have a team of people that I think ought to take over your campaign"Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and, later, David Bossie, all of them veteran Clinton activists. And Trump, who was frustrated with his current campaign manager, Paul Manafort, agrees and says, "OK, let's put them in charge. We need somebody who can hit harder."
Bannon is this famously aggressive Breitbart News publisher who would not be held back, has the same instincts as Trump. And people didn't know it at the time, but Trump had known Bannon for a long time. And lo and behold, we wake up, I think on a Wednesday morning, to this announcement that Steve Bannon, despised by just about everybody in Washington, is now in charge of Trump's presidential campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: And Paul Manafort is out, something he was resisting, and Jared Kushner played a role in that.
JOSHUA GREEN: Well, it's funny. Paul Manafort wasn't out, originally. And what Trump did was he hired Bannon, I think on a Sunday night, without telling Paul Manafort or anybody else. And there's a scene in the book, where it's on a Sunday, and Trump tells Bannon, "OK, you're in. Drive out to my country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, tomorrow. We're going to have a senior staff meeting," with Giuliani and Chris Christie and Manafort and all the kind of campaign brain trust. Kushner actually wasn't there, because he was off yachting in Croatia with David Geffen, so he wasn't present for that meeting. But at the meeting, Manafort, who still thinks he's in charge of the campaign, walks into a room and sees Steve Bannon there. And Bannon says, "Hey, I'm kind of joining the campaign."
And Trump is in a very bad mood, because The New York Times has just run this embarrassing story saying that Trump's own advisers feel they can't talk to him, and so they have to go on cable news in order to send a message to Trump. And Trump, who's been made to look like a fool, explodes at Manafort. There's a scene I have in the book where he says, "You know, am I a baby, Paul? Do you treat me like a baby? You have to go on TV?" and curses him, in language we probably can't use on the air here. A couple days later, decides that Manafort has to go. But Trump, despite the public image, doesn't like to fire people, so he deputizes his son-in-law, back from his yachting trip with David Geffen, at a breakfast, to get rid of Manafort, who resists. And then
AMY GOODMAN: Because, he says, "You're going to make it look like I'm guilty on the Russia stuff."
JOSHUA GREEN: Exactly. He doesn't want to do it, because he'll look like he's guilty of taking money from this pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. And he resists, and Kushner says, basically, "You're going. We have a press release coming out saying that you've resigned, and that goes online at 9:00 a.m., and that' in 30 seconds." And that was the end of Paul Manafort and the beginning of the successful Steve Bannon era of the campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let's talk about Steve Bannon and his background, where he comes from, for people to understand the different forces at play.
JOSHUA GREEN: Well, so, the newspaper bio synopsis of Steve Bannon is that he comes from a blue-collar, Irish, Democratic, Catholic, Navy family in Richmond, Virginiadad was a telephone linesmanand went to Virginia Tech, got into Harvard Business School, was in the Navy, later Goldman Sachs, and wound up in Hollywood, first as a film financier, an investment banker, and, later, once he had made some money, he moved over to the creative side and began making conservative documentaries.
AMY GOODMAN: When you say "made some money," we're talking Seinfeld.
JOSHUA GREEN: We're talking Seinfeld, yes. So, the interesting, weird little detail in Bannon's life is that while he was an investment banker, he brokered a deal between Castle Rock Pictures, which owned Seinfeld, which was in its infancy at the time, and Ted Turner, who wanted to buy the shows. And as Bannon tells me the story in the book, you know, when they sat down on the table, Turner was short of cash. And so, rather than let the deal fall apart, Bannon tookin lieu of his ordinary advisory fee, he took a basket of residuals from five television shows, including Seinfeld. As we all know, Seinfeld went on to become, I think, the most popular sitcom in television history and throw off an awful lot of money. Bannon and his partner own a very small part of that, but enough that they've made millions and millions of dollars from it. So, once Bannon got to that point, he decided he wanted to give a kind of a full airing to his hard-right conservative politics, which I think he had kept hidden as he traveled through the worlds of Harvard and Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, where you'd
AMY GOODMAN: Goldman Sachs's hero, Michael Milken.
JOSHUA GREEN: That's true. Bannonso, Bannon was at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the mid-1980s, at the height of the leveraged takeover boom. If you've ever read Barbarians at the Gate or some of these books, you know that there were these outsiders who were kind of storming the fortress and taking over sort of fattened corporations that were vulnerable to these outsiders. Bannon, I think, to his frustration, worked for Goldman Sachs, which would never align itself with a corporate raider, as it always did defense. But he recognized in Michael Milken a guy who was kind of his spirit animal: "Here's an outsider, you know, storming the fortresses, and he's winning. And these establishment banks, like the ones that I'm working for, really don't get it, and they're losing." I think that lodged in his mind. And Bannon, later on, when he got to Breitbart News, portrays himself in a political sense very much like Michael Milken portrayed himself in a financial sense back in the '80s.
AMY GOODMAN: Went to jail, by the way, right? Of course, for people who don't know, the younger set.
JOSHUA GREEN: Oh, yes, he went to jail, not ayeah, not a minor footnote in Milken's story. He was busted for insider trading and went to jail for a number of years. But I think Bannon liked the dark, outsider narrative that Milken told. And Milken kind of cultivated his own image, before he went to jail, as this guy who was storming the fortresses and was taking on the fattened, lazy, corrupt establishment, and thereby was doing something good. Bannon did the same thing at Breitbart News. The way he would talk about what he was doing was: "We're taking on the establishments of both parties, the crony capitalists." So I think he learned a bit from Milken.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Joshua Green, senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. I want to turn to a speech that Steve Bannon delivered via Skype to a conference held inside the Vatican in 2014.

STEPHEN BANNON: I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis. And it's really the organizing principle of how we've built Breitbart News to really be a platform to bring news and information to people throughout the world, principally in the West, but we're expanding internationally, to let people understand the depths of this crisis. And it is a crisis ofboth of capitalism, but really of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West and our beliefs. We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing almost far quicker than governments can handle it.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Steve Bannon, delivering a Skype address to a Vatican conference in 2014. Joshua Green, talk about the religion that informs Steve Bannon's politics.
JOSHUA GREEN: Well, so, we just talked about kind of the newspaper bio of Steve Bannon and the blue-collar background. But the most interesting line of research for this book is Bannon's religious and intellectual biography. And this is a story that hasn't been told, that I go into some detail in in the book.
But in the course of my reporting, I asked Steve BannonI said, "You know, when you were at that Vatican conference"and this wasn't just a Vatican conference, this was a group of far-far-right conservative Traditionalist Catholics. Bannon name-checked a man named Julius Evola, who was an Italian intellectual and Benito Mussolini's fascist ideologist at the beginning of World War II. And I said, "Steve, if you're not an anti-Semite and a Nazi and a white supremacist, as you're often charged with being, but you say you're not, why is it that you are familiar with people like Evola?" And he said, "Oh, you know, when I developed my ideas about nationalism, I went back and was looking for an intellectual edifice to kind of inform these ideas. And to find nationalist thinkers, you really have to go back to the 1930s and the 1940s, when those ideas were ascendant. But the real guy who influenced me," Bannon told me, "was an man named René Guénon, who was Evola's intellectual godfather."
Guénon has a fascinating biography. He was born in France in the late 19th century to a Roman Catholic family, practiced occultism, Freemasonry, and later converted to Sufi Islam and observed the Sharia, which is a very unusual guru, it seemed to me, for a guy like Steve Bannon, who is so virulently Islamophobic. But Guénon was the founder of a religion, a kind of religious philosophy, known as primordial Traditionalism. That's capital-T Traditionalism. And primordial Traditionalism holds that there is common spiritual truths, unifying spiritual truths, at the heart of ancient religions, like the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, medieval Catholicism, even paganism. And these are original spiritual truths that were revealed to mankind in the earliest ages of the world but had been lost in the West by the rise of secular modernity.
So, Bannon, who was raised in a very traditional Catholic family, who went to a right-wing Catholic military high school and has been steeped in this right-wing, Western sieve curriculum, believes, as Guénon does, that we are entering a dark age, that the rise of the Enlightenment in the 1500s has led us toward apocalypse, and that if he can't prop up traditional values and do what Guénon had hoped to do, which was to, quote, "restore to the West a traditional civilization," then mankind is going to be destroyed. And that is his animating belief.
AMY GOODMAN: And I wanted to turn to Julius Evola, in his own words, the monarchist and racial theorist who struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini. His ideas became the basis of fascist racial theory. This is Julius Evola speaking with a French filmmaker in 1971 about what he considered the positive aspects of fascism and, in particular, national socialism, Nazism.

JULIUS EVOLA: [translated] There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Julius Evola, one of the people Steve Bannon
JOSHUA GREEN: I've never seen that clip. So, the unifying thread here is that Evola also looked to Guénon for inspiration. Guénon was the godfather of this capital-T Traditionalist movement. Now, Guénon believed that the way to spiritual transcendence was to basically indoctrinate small groups of important people all over the world, what we would today call influencers. And he was veryhe believed that if you couldif you could push spiritual change, then political change would follow.
Evola is the black sheep of the Traditionalist family and had a different view. He said, "No, we can't just sit back and try and change people's spirituality. We need to go out and change society." So Evola went out and struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini to try and exert power in the Italian government, which he had. He was, as you said, the chief racial theorist for Mussolini. They had a falling out, and Evola later moved on to Hitler in Nazi Germany.
What all three of these men have, though, in common is the belief inat the heart of Guénon's religion was the belief in the Hindu concept of cyclical time, the idea that the world passes through set stages. And Evola believed, as Bannon does, as Guénon does, that we are in what the Hindus call the Kali Yuga, a 6,000-year-long dark age in which man's connection to God and the transcendent is wholly forgotten. So, Evola brought these ideas to interwar Europe, to Italy, and tried to change society that way to fight back against it. Bannon has come to this through a kind of populist, hard-right politics, where, through Breitbart and some of these affiliated organizations, he's tried to not only take over American politics, but look at what he's doing in places like the European Union. He's trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes is a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.
JOSHUA GREEN: You know, another story in the bookanother thing I got asked about a lot as a political reporter was: Where did this idea of the alt-right come from? Who are these people? How did they infect our politics in the way that they had? And Bannon, oddly enough, is a critical figure in the rise of the alt-right, many of whose members, I should just add as a side note, read and admire Julius Evola and his thinking.
But back in 2007, after Bannon had done Hollywood and filmmaking, he wound up, for about a year and a half, as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong, which did not actually make video games that you play. It pioneered something called gold farming, which I had never heard of. But what gold farming is, is the process of going into these massive multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft, and winning armor and prizes and gold, which allow you to advance in the game, but then turning around and selling them to people in the real world. So Bannon's company would hire teams of low-wage Chinese workers to play these games in 24-hour rotating cycles, win all this stuff, and then sell it to wealthier gamers offline, which was considered a serious enough business that Goldman Sachs actually invested money in Bannon's company.
But what happened was, the gamersmost of the people who played the games considered this cheating, and they got very angry. You know, kids would spend hours and weeks and months absorbed in these games, and didn't like the fact that there was this shortcut. And so, the gamers themselves organized on message boards. There are special message boards devoted to these multiplayer games. And they organized themselves and said, "Hey, we're going to put pressure on these video games and make them shut down the practice of gold farming." And they did. And it destroyedit bankrupted Bannon's business.
But the lesson he took away from this was that there are millions and millions of young, whitemostly whitemen who spend their entire lives in these online alternate realities, and that
AMY GOODMAN: 4chan.
JOSHUA GREEN: 4chan, exactly, Redditand that if they are motived to do so, they could be a very powerful political force: "They bankrupted my company. I want to see if I can channel them into politics." And when Bannon got to Breitbart News, he hired a notorious internet troll named Milo Yiannopoulos to be Breitbart's tech editor and to essentially entice these legions of angry online gamers into the world of populist right-wing politics. And eventually Bannon was able to turn them on to Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you now have Bannon in the White House. His main issues, as he talked about at CPAC, is dismantling the administrative state. Is he succeeding? How powerful is he right now
JOSHUA GREEN: He is, to an extent, not the extent he'd like to. But when you saw the CPAC clip that you showed him deconstructing the administrative state, that is a signal that is operating on two levels. If you are a ordinary, traditional movement Republicanyou don't like government, you want government to shrinkyou hear what Bannon said as "We're going to shrink government."
But on another level, and this gets back to Guénon and the Traditionalists, Bannon is using coded language there, which says deconstructing the administrative stateone of Guénon's beliefs was that there were two pivotal moments in world history that brought us away from God and the transcendent. One was the destruction of the Order of Knights Templar in 1312, which cut off Western connection to esoteric knowledge. And the other was the Peace of Westphalia, which gave rise to the modern nation-state. That is what Bannon wants to destroy.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, he talks about fake news. He talks about The New York Times as fake news, but he used The New York Times to advance his goals. And that goes to the issue of Clinton cash, etc.
JOSHUA GREEN: Absolutely, yeah. And so I tell the story in the book. Bannon, for all his complaints about the media, is a very savvy guy who understands how to manipulate the mainstream media. And one of the things
AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute.
JOSHUA GREEN: One of the things I thought he did so brilliantly, and I write about in the book, was find a way to get his stories into The New York Times. And so, he funded two years' worth of research, produced the book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, which documented all this stuff, all these financial connections, and then brought the book to reporters in mainstream outlets like the Times, like the Post, who took these stories, published them in their papers and spread his anti-Clinton message in the mainstream media, dissuading and discouraging a lot of Clinton's own voters. And in the end, that proved to be a very effective tactic.
AMY GOODMAN: And he also went after Fox News.
JOSHUA GREEN: Well, he also went after Fox News because Bannon believes that there is athere was a split between populist Republicans and what he would call Fox News establishment Republicans. There's a scene in the book of Bannon screaming profanely at Roger Ailes. Eventually Bannon won that war, broke the back of Fox News, and now they've become the most pro-Trump station you can find anywhere on the cable dial.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, we have just 30 seconds, but you went to college with Sean Spicer, Josh.
JOSHUA GREEN: I did go to college with Sean Spicer. I went to Connecticut College, a very PC liberal arts school. He was one of about 10 openly Republican kids on campus, very loud about it. His nickname in college was Sean Sphincter, so that gives you an idea of his popularity. But it was surprising to see where he's wound up, but I certainly recognize the guy that I went to college with.

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USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 27-07-2017

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