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The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Tracy Riddle - 12-01-2017 Deep state at war with Trump? Yeah, I'm good with that. I've got lots of popcorn - caramel, cheese, all different kinds of flavors. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-intelligence.html?_r=0 WASHINGTON Seven months ago, a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele won a contract to build a file on Donald J. Trump's ties to Russia. Last week, the explosive details unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes, real estate deals that were intended as bribes and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of Democrats were summarized for Mr. Trump in an appendix to a top-secret intelligence report. The consequences have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day. Word of the summary, which was also given to President Obama and congressional leaders, leaked to CNN Tuesday, and the rest of the media followed with sensational reports. Mr. Trump denounced the unproven claims Wednesday as a fabrication, a Nazi-style smear concocted by "sick people." It has further undermined his relationship with the intelligence agencies and cast a shadow over the new administration. Late Wednesday night, after speaking with Mr. Trump, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, issued a statement decrying leaks about the matter and saying of Mr. Steele's dossier that the intelligence agencies have "not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable." Mr. Clapper suggested that intelligence officials had nonetheless shared it to give policy makers "the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security." Parts of the story remain out of reach most critically the basic question of how much, if anything, in the dossier is true. But it is possible to piece together a rough narrative of what led to the current crisis, including lingering questions about the ties binding Mr. Trump and his team to Russia. The episode also offers a glimpse of the hidden side of presidential campaigns, involving private sleuths-for-hire looking for the worst they can find about the next American leader. The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists, Fusion GPS, to compile a dossier about the real estate magnate's past scandals and weaknesses, according to a person familiar with the effort. The person described the opposition research work on condition of anonymity, citing the volatile nature of the story and the likelihood of future legal disputes. The identity of the donor is unclear. Fusion GPS, headed by a former Wall Street Journal journalist known for his dogged reporting, Glenn Simpson, most often works for business clients. But in presidential elections, the firm is sometimes hired by candidates, party organizations or donors to do political "oppo" work shorthand for opposition research on the side. It is routine work and ordinarily involves creating a big, searchable database of public information: past news reports, documents from lawsuits and other relevant data. For months, Fusion GPS gathered the documents and put together the files from Mr. Trump's past in business and entertainment, a rich target. In June, the tenor of the effort suddenly changed. The Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, apparently by Russian government agents, and a mysterious figure calling himself "Guccifer 2.0" began to publish the stolen documents online.After Mr. Trump emerged as the presumptive nominee in the spring, the Republican interest in financing the effort ended. But Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton were very interested, and Fusion GPS kept doing the same deep dives, but on behalf of new clients. Mr. Simpson hired Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence officer with whom he had worked before. Mr. Steele, in his early 50s, had served undercover in Moscow in the early 1990s and later was the top expert on Russia at the London headquarters of Britain's spy service, MI6. When he stepped down in 2009, he started his own commercial intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. The former journalist and the former spy, according to people who know them, had similarly dark views of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. officer, and the varied tactics he and his intelligence operatives used to smear, blackmail or bribe their targets. As a former spy who had carried out espionage inside Russia, Mr. Steele was in no position to travel to Moscow to study Mr. Trump's connections there. Instead, he hired native Russian speakers to call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own connections in the country as well. Mr. Steele wrote up his findings in a series of memos, each a few pages long, that he began to deliver to Fusion GPS in June and continued at least until December. By then, the election was over, and neither Mr. Steele nor Mr. Simpson was being paid by a client, but they did not stop what they believed to be very important work. (Mr. Simpson declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Steele did not immediately reply to a request for comment.) The memos described two different Russian operations. The first was a yearslong effort to find a way to influence Mr. Trump, perhaps because he had contacts with Russian oligarchs whom Mr. Putin wanted to keep track of. According to Mr. Steele's memos, it used an array of familiar tactics: the gathering of "kompromat," compromising material such as alleged tapes of Mr. Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, and proposals for business deals attractive to Mr. Trump. The goal would probably never have been to make Mr. Trump a knowing agent of Russia, but to make him a source who might provide information to friendly Russian contacts. But if Mr. Putin and his agents wanted to entangle Mr. Trump using business deals, they did not do it very successfully. Mr. Trump has said he has no major properties there, though one of his sons said at a real estate conference in 2008 that "a lot of money" was "pouring in from Russia." The second Russian operation described was recent: a series of contacts with Mr. Trump's representatives during the campaign, in part to discuss the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton's campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. According to Mr. Steele's sources, it involved, among other things, a late-summer meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and Oleg Solodukhin, a Russian official who works for Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization that promotes Russia's interests abroad. Get the Morning Briefing by Email By all accounts, Mr. Steele has an excellent reputation with American and British intelligence colleagues and had done work for the F.B.I. on the investigation of bribery at FIFA, soccer's global governing body. Colleagues say he was acutely aware of the danger he and his associates were being fed Russian disinformation. Russian intelligence had mounted a complex hacking operation to damage Mrs. Clinton, and a similar operation against Mr. Trump was possible. But much of what he was told, and passed on to Fusion GPS, was very difficult to check. And some of the claims that can be checked seem problematic. Mr. Cohen, for instance, said on Twitter on Tuesday night that he has never been in Prague; Mr. Solodukhin, his purported Russian contact, denied in a telephone interview that he had ever met Mr. Cohen or anyone associated with Mr. Trump. The president-elect on Wednesday cited news reports that a different Michael Cohen with no Trump ties may have visited Prague and that the two Cohens might have been mixed up in Mr. Steele's reports. But word of a dossier had begun to spread through political circles. Rick Wilson, a Republican political operative who was working for a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio, said he heard about it in July, when an investigative reporter for a major news network called him to ask what he knew. By early fall, some of Mr. Steele's memos had been given to the F.B.I., which was already investigating Mr. Trump's Russian ties, and to journalists. An MI6 official, whose job does not permit him to be quoted by name, said that in late summer or early fall, Mr. Steele also passed the reports he had prepared on Mr. Trump and Russia to British intelligence. Mr. Steele was concerned about what he was hearing about Mr. Trump, and he thought that the information should not be solely in the hands of people looking to win a political contest. After the election, the memos, still being supplemented by his inquiries, became one of Washington's worst-kept secrets, as reporters including from The New York Times scrambled to confirm or disprove them. Word also reached Capitol Hill. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, heard about the dossier and obtained a copy in December from David J. Kramer, a former top State Department official who works for the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. Mr. McCain passed the information to James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. Remarkably for Washington, many reporters for competing news organizations had the salacious and damning memos, but they did not leak, because their contents could not be confirmed. (Mother Jones magazine was an exception, publishing a story on Oct. 31 that described the dossier, its origin and significance, while omitting the titillating details.) That changed only this week, after the heads of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency added a summary of the memos, along with information gathered from other intelligence sources, to their report on the Russian cyberattack on the election. Now, after the most contentious of elections, Americans are divided and confused about what to believe about the incoming president. And there is no prospect soon for full clarity on the veracity of the claims made against him. "It is a remarkable moment in history," said Mr. Wilson, the Florida political operative. "What world did I wake up in?" The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 12-01-2017 CIA Interference in US Election is Without Precedent Blackmailing McCain & Graham Wayne Madsen http://phibetaiota.net/2017/01/wayne-madsen-cia-interference-in-us-election-is-without-precedent/ January 6-8, 2017 Unprecedented: CIA attempting to undermine president-elect Quote:Although the Central Intelligence Agency has had a long history of undermining presidents-elect and prime ministers-elect in other countries, the United States has never witnessed the intelligence agency so blatantly attempting to politically weaken a U.S. president-elect just a few weeks prior to the inauguration. What the CIA is doing in forcing Donald Trump into shifting from his campaign promise of restoring good relations with Russia to one of outright hostility to Moscow favored by the CIA, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the neo-conservatives within the Republican and Democratic party establishments is nothing less than an overt threat to American democracy. The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 12-01-2017 Behind the CIA's Covert Ops Against Trump Brian Becker 12.01.2017 On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker is joined by former CIA analyst and political activist Ray McGovern, and by editorial cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall. Trump prepares to take office in just over a week as unverified claims circulate that Russia has damaging information about him. Could this be a coup attempt on behalf of the state to make sure that Trump never takes office? https://sputniknews.com/popup/radio/?audio_id=47153106 The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 12-01-2017 Paul Rigby Wrote:Christopher Steele, Ex-British Intelligence Officer, Said to Have Prepared Dossier on Trump Britain dragged into Donald Trump 'dirty dossier' row amid claims Whitehall knew of the file By Gordon Rayner, chief reporter Claire Newell Ruth Sherlock 12 JANUARY 2017 10:00PM http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/12/britain-dragged-donald-trump-dirty-dossier-row-amid-claims-whitehall/ Quote:Britain has been dragged into the frantic row over the "dirty dossier" on Donald Trump after it was claimed that the Government gave the FBI permission to speak to the former MI6 officer who compiled it. Christopher Steele: A career in the shadows Quote:Christopher Steele, who wrote reports on compromising material Russian operatives allegedly had collected on US President-elect Donald Trump, is a former officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, according to people familiar with his career. The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Lauren Johnson - 13-01-2017 Peter Lemkin Wrote:Lauren Johnson Wrote:I suspect there is a power struggle going in DC right now -- something like the kind we used to see back in the cold war years in the Kremlin. It's like a mob family war to the death. One side is the CIA fronted by Obama, et. al. and another faction yet to be named fronted by Trump. Hmmm. Suddenly he had a blinding glimpse of the obvious. :: The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Nick Lombardi - 13-01-2017 Meh, this clip says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jDkPZYWPs *Also see the longer, unabridged version of aforementioned clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIZOHa2kgPo The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - David Guyatt - 13-01-2017 Tracy Riddle Wrote:Deep state at war with Trump? Yeah, I'm good with that. I've got lots of popcorn - caramel, cheese, all different kinds of flavors. And therein lies the whole problem with America and American democrats today. No wonder the US if so fucked up and on the edge of ruin. First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me. Martin Niemoller The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - David Guyatt - 13-01-2017 Lauren Johnson Wrote:Peter Lemkin Wrote:Lauren Johnson Wrote:I suspect there is a power struggle going in DC right now -- something like the kind we used to see back in the cold war years in the Kremlin. It's like a mob family war to the death. One side is the CIA fronted by Obama, et. al. and another faction yet to be named fronted by Trump. There is certainly a fight to the death between two elite factions. That much is clearly evident. Neither side wish the ordinary guy or gal well, or even care a flying fuck about them. At best they are seen as the breathing meat that pay tax so it can be immediately sucked out again by whichever elite faction has its hands on the state purse. Beyond that, everyone are (attributed, I believe, to Henry Kissinger), "useless eaters". The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Tracy Riddle - 13-01-2017 David Guyatt Wrote:Tracy Riddle Wrote:Deep state at war with Trump? Yeah, I'm good with that. I've got lots of popcorn - caramel, cheese, all different kinds of flavors. Please tell me which of those groups applies to Trump. You live in the UK, don't you, David? I have to live with this lunatic with the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old girl as my President. Actually, the whole world has to live every day wondering what crazy thing he may decide to do. No, I'm sorry, FUCK HIM. The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Tracy Riddle - 13-01-2017 A lot of uncomfortable truths here, especially for people who call themselves anti-imperialist and anti-oligarch, but are hypocritically aligning themselves with the same types of people in Russia. [URL="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/13/how-putin-played-the-far-left.html"] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/13/how-putin-played-the-far-left.html[/URL] How Putin Played the Far Left The Kremlin didn't just rely on the alt-right to help Trump win. Bernie Bros, Greens, and anti-imperialists' got had, too. [URL="http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/casey-michel.html"]CASEY MICHEL [/URL] 01.12.17 10:15 PM ET In the aftermath of the U.S. intelligence community's recent report on the Russian-directed hacking of the Democratic National Committee, it's easy but misleading to conclude that the Russian government's propaganda strategy lies solely in advancing the careers of conservative Republicans in the United States. Backing Donald Trump's candidacy, via steady leaks of stolen communiques to organizations like WikiLeaks, was but one prong of the Kremlin's assault on American liberal democracy. Part of its campaign to vilify Hillary Clinton involved catering to her rivals on the far-left and pushing any number of crankish conspiracy theories that appeal as much to "anti-imperialists" as to neo-Nazis. There's nothing new in that, really. Moscow's attempts to cultivate America's far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow's intelligence operations against the "main adversary" involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump. Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein's trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump's soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.'s "disastrous militarism." Afterward, straddling Moscow's Red Square, Stein described the panel as "inspiring," going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he "agree[d]" with her "on many issues." Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, her pro-Kremlin stance wasn't limited to merely praising Putin's amicability. Stein joined the Russian president and Kazakhstani dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in describing Ukraine's 2014 EuroMaidan revolution as a "coup," and claimed, bizarrely, that NATO is currently "fighting… enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff." For good measure, she also asserted in September that "Russia used to own Ukraine," by way of defending its colonization. She even selected a vice-presidential candidate who, when asked whether the downing of Flight MH17a massacre almost certainly caused by Russian-supplied separatists in eastern Ukrainewas a false flag, responded, "[T]hat's exactly what has happened." Green Party officials across Europe slammed a "delusional" Stein for her views, with leading Russian environmental activists saying they were "deeply shocked" by her comments during her Moscow trip. No matter. For her efforts in burnishing Kremlin conspiracy theories for American audiences, Stein was awarded not simply with an invitation to the 2015 RT gala, but RT even hosted her party's 2016 presidential debatea move Stein hailed as a "step towards real democracy." RT also covered "live updates" from Stein's reactions to the debates between Clinton and Trump, a decision Stein further praised. This mutual affection is, naturally, of a piece with RT's broader modus operandi in the U.S. As I helped catalog at the Columbia Journalism School, RT, rather than focus solely on puffing up GOP candidates, expends more effort in targeting America's far-left fellow-travelers. There's a reason, after all, that Kremlin-funded Sputnik hosts podcasts by Americans who claim "progressive" viewpointsat least when it comes to altering the exclusively domestic landscape in America. Nor are these fake news outlets tilling fallow soil.
Consider one of the flagship magazines of the American left, which, for all its support of gay rights, government transparency, and voting rights as they pertain to U.S. society, has developed a notoriously soft spot for a regime that violently opposes all of the above. The Nation's coverage of Russian affairs is a national embarrassment. RT is a website that hosts neo-Nazis as "expert" commentators. Yet that does not stop The Nation from publishing whataboutist articles in defense of the propaganda channel; articles pushing the same argument, with the exact same headlines, as those found in white-nationalist publications. The Nation's crop of Russia watchers have lately busied themselves by lending credence to the "autonomy referendums" in eastern Ukraine, thus legitimizing illegal and neo-imperialist land-grabs, or notions that the entire Ukrainian crisis was "instigated by the West's attempt… to smuggle [Ukraine] into NATO." That these views bizarrely mesh with those of Trump and his Breitbart-friendly advisers is perhaps another oddity of an age of ideological psychosis. Stephen Cohen, The Nation's lead Russia analyst (and husband of the magazine's editor in chief and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel), has even been endorsed by David Duke and the wife of white-nationalist Richard Spencer, the intellectual godfather of the pro-Trump "alt-right," as a rare voice of sanity when it comes to U.S.-Russian relations. At times, the substance and style of what has been dubbed the "alt-left" are indistinguishable from that of its counterpart on the other end of the political spectrum. And Moscow's info-warriors appear to appreciate the resemblance, as the American arm of Sputnik exhorted supporters of Bernie Sanders to vote for Trump (as did Trump himself, repeatedly). In years of researching Kremlin influence-peddling, I've discovered first-hand just how eerily similar far-left and far-right Putinists are to each other. When I pointed out that one of The Nation's contributing writers, former J.P. Morgan banker James Carden, now executive editor of the American Committee for East-West Accordan organization partly funded by vanden Heuvel's familycontinues to contribute to Kremlin-funded Russia Direct, what I received was nothing short of a deranged ad hominem. Carden, who appeared on RT a few weeks ago to claim that The Washington Post is pursuing a "project of promoting a new Cold War with the Russian Federation," sent me a note on LinkedIn calling me a "sniveling shit," and vaguely (if unintentionally hilariously) threatening me with physical violence, demanding to see if I was "brave as BATMAN [sic]" in person. He later apologized. Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechesHenwood annotating, Assange writing the forewordtranscripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, two of which concluded that this was done with the express purpose of helping Trump get elected. When I brought up this pending project, as detailed both on the book publisher's website and in multiple articles, Henwood called me a "fucking idiot." (Henwood's publisher, when contacted for this story, noted that Henwood was no longer affiliated with the endeavor, saying that he had now grown "weary of chronicling Hillary Clinton's boundless political shortcomings.") WikiLeaks is clearly the online epicenter of the 21st-century's red-brown convergence. How else to account for how an Australian cyberanarchist has found common cause with a racist millionaire real-estate baronapart, that is, from their apparent mutual regard for the opposite sex? WikiLeaks, it is worth recalling, began as a seemingly noble "transparency" organization that sought to help shine a light on post-Soviet autocracies and their human-rights abuses. Yet somewhere along the way it saw fit to partner with anti-Semites who delivered leaked U.S. State Department cables to Belarus's pro-Moscow dictatorship, which used these sensitive documents to chase down dissidents. Nor has this caused WikiLeaks or Assange any moral misgivings. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp detailed, Assange refused to investigate WikiLeaks's role in aiding the machinations of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, whose secret police (still known by its Cold War acronym, the KGB) arrested activists and opposition figures. A quick glimpse through WikiLeaks's Twitter feed lately is enough to confirm the group's disconcerting preference for siding with the Putinist narrative, and Kremlin interests, all in the name of anti-Americanism. Assange has personally run a not-so-subtle rearguard defense for Trump, an overture that has been reciprocated by the president-elect, who now publicly defers to Assange's analysis of the DNC hacks over that of the U.S. intelligence arms Trump is about to command in little over a week's time. When not slamming last year's Panama Papers leak as an "attack story on Putin," WikiLeaks's feed, long thought to be personally manned by Assange, has layered Kremlin-friendly conspiracy over everything from the Eurovision Song Contest to, like Stein's candidacy, the destruction of MH17. (Little surprise, then, that Stein considers Assange a hero.) Or, as WikiLeaks tweeted on Ukraine, "Cable shows USA was already warned of #Russia's concerns so it now looks like #Obama is the provocateur; not #Putin." Stein, The Nation, and WikiLeaks are hardly outliers on social media or insignificant in their political reach; to their respective audiences, they wield as much influence as Breitbart does with Trump loyalists. In a few swing states, after all, Clinton lost to Trump by a margin smaller than Stein's total statewide voter haul. The Nation has tens of thousands of subscribers and a venerable, 150-year-old pedigree for liberal advocacy. The WikiLeaked DNC and John Podesta emails, meanwhile, gradually released during and after the Democratic National Convention in August, did untold damage to Clinton's campaign. What remains of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party is understandably unnerved by how much of the American right has happily aligned with Putin's spymasters and arms-length purveyors of "active measures" and provided cover for a foreign government's interference in a U.S. election. But the American left has just as much reason to take stock. Ideologically promiscuous and unbound by the orthodoxies of a single party or historical narrative, Putin has cultivated dupes, fellow travelers, and purblind fools among plenty of American progressives who, whether by accident or design, have facilitated the rise of the most extremist and reactionary president this country has ever elected. [/COLOR] |