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The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 29-03-2017

The Surveillance State Behind Russia-gate

March 28, 2017

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/28/the-surveillance-state-behind-russia-gate/

Exclusive: Amid the frenzy over the Trump team's talks with Russians, are we missing a darker story, how the Deep State's surveillance powers control the nation's leaders, ask U.S. intelligence veterans Ray McGovern and Bill Binney.

By Ray McGovern and Bill Binney

Quote:Although many details are still hazy because of secrecy and further befogged by politics it appears House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was informed last week about invasive electronic surveillance of senior U.S. government officials and, in turn, passed that information onto President Trump.

This news presents Trump with an unwelcome but unavoidable choice: confront those who have kept him in the dark about such rogue activities or live fearfully in their shadow. (The latter was the path chosen by President Obama. Will Trump choose the road less traveled?)

What President Trump decides will largely determine the freedom of action he enjoys as president on many key security and other issues. But even more so, his choice may decide whether there is a future for this constitutional republic. Either he can acquiesce to or fight against a Deep State of intelligence officials who have a myriad of ways to spy on politicians (and other citizens) and thus amass derogatory material that can be easily transformed into blackmail.

This crisis (yes, "crisis" is an overused word, but in this highly unusual set of circumstances we believe it is appropriate) came to light mostly by accident after President Trump tweeted on March 4 that his team in New York City's Trump Towers had been "wiretapped" by President Obama.

Trump reportedly was relying on media reports regarding how conversations of aides, including his ill-starred National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, had been intercepted. Trump's tweet led to a fresh offensive by Democrats and the mainstream press to disparage Trump's "ridiculous" claims.

However, this concern about the dragnets that U.S. intelligence (or its foreign partners) can deploy to pick up communications by Trump's advisers and then "unmask" the names before leaking them to the news media was also highlighted at the Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, where Nunes appealed for anyone who had related knowledge to come forward with it.

That apparently happened on the evening of March 21 when Nunes received a call while riding with a staffer. After the call, Nunes switched to another car and went to a secure room at the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, where he was shown highly classified information apparently about how the intelligence community picked up communications by Trump's aides.

The next day, Nunes went to the White House to brief President Trump, who later said he felt "somewhat vindicated" by what Nunes had told him.

The Wiretap' Red Herring

But the corporate U.S. news media continued to heckle Trump over his use of the word "wiretap" and cite the insistence of FBI Director James Comey and other intelligence officials that President Obama had not issued a wiretap order aimed at Trump.

As those paying rudimentary attention to modern methods of surveillance know, "wiretapping" is passé. But Trump's use of the word allowed FBI and Department of Justice officials and their counterparts at the National Security Agency to swear on a stack of bibles that the FBI, DOJ, and NSA have been unable to uncover any evidence within their particular institutions of such "wiretapping."

At the House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, FBI Director Comey and NSA Director Michael Rogers firmly denied that their agencies had wiretapped Trump Towers on the orders of President Obama.

So, were Trump and his associates "wiretapped?" Of course not. Wiretapping went out of vogue decades ago, having been rendered obsolete by leaps in surveillance technology.

The real question is: Were Trump and his associates surveilled? Wake up, America. Was no one paying attention to the disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 when he exposed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as a liar for denying that the NSA engaged in bulk collection of communications inside the United States.

The reality is that EVERYONE, including the President, is surveilled. The technology enabling bulk collection would have made the late demented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's mouth water.

Allegations about the intelligence community's abuse of its powers also did not begin with Snowden. For instance, several years earlier, former NSA worker and whistleblower Russell Tice warned about these "special access programs," citing first-hand knowledge, but his claims were brushed aside as coming from a disgruntled employee with psychological problems. His disclosures were soon forgotten.

Intelligence Community's Payback

However, earlier this year, there was a stark reminder of how much fear these surveillance capacities have struck in the hearts of senior U.S. government officials. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that President Trump was "being really dumb" to take on the intelligence community, since "They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

Maddow shied away from asking the logical follow-up: "Senator Schumer, are you actually saying that Trump should be afraid of the CIA?" Perhaps she didn't want to venture down a path that would raise more troubling questions about the surveillance of the Trump team than on their alleged contacts with the Russians.

Similarly, the U.S. corporate media is now focused on Nunes's alleged failure to follow protocol by not sharing his information first with Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Democrats promptly demanded that Nunes recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

On Tuesday morning, reporters for CNN and other news outlets peppered Nunes with similar demands as he walked down a corridor on Capitol Hill, prompting him to suggest that they should be more concerned about what he had learned than the procedures followed.

That's probably true because to quote Jack Nicholson's character in "A Few Good Men" in a slightly different context, the mainstream media "cannot handle the truth" even if it's a no-brainer.

At his evening meeting on March 21 at the Old Executive Office Building, Nunes was likely informed that all telephones, emails, etc. including his own and Trump's are being monitored by what the Soviets used to call "the organs of state security."

By sharing that information with Trump the next day rather than consulting with Schiff Nunes may have sought to avoid the risk that Schiff or someone else would come up with a bureaucratic reason to keep the President in the dark.

A savvy politician, Nunes knew there would be high political cost in doing what he did. Inevitably, he would be called partisan; there would be more appeals to remove him from chairing the committee; and the character assassination of him already well under way in The Washington Post, for example might move him to the top of the unpopularity chart, displacing even bête noire Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But this episode was not the first time Nunes has shown some spine in the face of what the Establishment wants ignored. In a move setting this congressman apart from all his colleagues, Nunes had the courage to host an award ceremony for one of his constituents, retired sailor and member of the USS Liberty crew, Terry Halbardier.

On June 8, 1967, by repairing an antennae and thus enabling the USS Liberty to issue an SOS, Halbardier prevented Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats from sinking that Navy intelligence ship and ensuring that there would be no survivors to describe how the Israeli "allies" had strafed and bombed the ship. Still, 34 American seamen died and 171 were wounded.

At the time of the award ceremony in 2009, Nunes said, "The government has kept this quiet I think for too long, and I felt as my constituent, he [Halbardier] needed to get recognized for the services he made to his country." (Ray McGovern took part in the ceremony in Nunes's Visalia, California office.)

Now, we suspect that much more may be learned about the special compartmented surveillance program targeted against top U.S. national leaders if Rep. Nunes doesn't back down and if Trump doesn't choose the road most traveled acquiescence to America's Deep State actors.



The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 29-03-2017

Is Trump at war with the CIA?

The president's upcoming decision on still-secret JFK records will be revealing

"JFK researchers: Trump at risk for assassination" is a lousy piece of journalism, less a story than a meme

SUNDAY, MAR 26, 2017

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/26/is-trump-at-war-with-the-cia-the-presidents-upcoming-decision-on-still-secret-jfk-records-will-be-revealing_partner/

Quote:From the fever swamp of Alex Jones' InfoWars, Jerome Corsi reports that "JFK researchers" are saying President Donald Trump is at risk for assassination because of his differences with the Central Intelligence Agency.

I have been a JFK researcher for 35 years. Corsi has distorted what most of us think to serve a fear-mongering political agenda. "JFK researchers: Trump at risk for assassination" is a lousy piece of journalism, less a story than a conspiratorial meme. But it does reveal an important untold story about Trump and the CIA.

As Corsi reports, the president faces a big JFK decision later this year.

Origins of the story

At a Sunshine Week conference on JFK assassination records, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on March 16, attorney Larry Schnapf made a hard-to-refute point: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is still a crucial story in American political life.

"The Invisible Government," a bestseller about the CIA written while JFK was still alive and published after his death, was an early statement of the "deep state" concept, now debated by pundits from Remnick to Greenwald to Gingrich. Trump used a bogus JFK theory to defeat rival Ted Cruz. We flock to movies about Jackie Kennedy and LBJ. And across the political spectrum, people worry about the unchecked secret powers of the CIA.

The contemporary relevance of the JFK story is unmistakable.

A stretch

In his remarks, Schnapf likened President Trump's differences with the CIA to Kennedy's and speculated they could provoke a deadly response.

"Donald Trump must understand the threat to his life from enemies within the Deep State is real," Schnapf said.

Schnapf was extrapolating from a common suspicion about JFK's death. President Kennedy, a pro-civil rights, pro-peace president, was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The belief that CIA personnel were involved in JFK's death is not proven. (Nor is it unfounded, as my forthcoming biography of legendary spook James Jesus Angleton will show.)

But it is a stretch for Schnapf to say Trump faces a greater threat of assassination as a result of his CIA policies. It is an even bigger stretch for Corsi to conclude that Schnapf's view is the "consensus" of JFK researchers. It isn't.

Trump vs. the CIA

Historically speaking, there are big differences between Trump's relationship with the CIA and JFK's.

Over the last six months, Trump has had a series of verbal skirmishes with unnamed former agency officials (but surely including pro-Clinton former CIA directors John Brennan and Mike Morrell). He has made clear his disdain for the CIA and its analytical work. Former CIA officials have responded in kind.

This could be seen as a Deep State power struggle. It could also wind up being just another Washington turf war.

With its $15 billion-a-year budget and 20,000-plus employees, the CIA is an independent power center in the nation's capital. The agency is institutionally resistant to Trump's agenda because adviser Steve Bannon seeks to dismantle America's traditional international alliances. The CIA has played a leading role in those alliances since 1947. Naturally, the agency opposes radical change.

Trump's actual policy differences with the CIA are hard to discern. The president advocates torture via waterboarding, which the CIA has renounced. He has reportedly loosened restrictions on CIA drone strikes. Neither move seems unfriendly to Langley's interests. We don't know anything about what Trump is actually proposing for the CIA's FY 2018 budget.

As Michael Glennon recently told AlterNet, it is quite possible that the authoritarian Trump will make common cause with the most secretive sectors of America's "double government," including the CIA.

JFK vs. the CIA

By contrast, President Kennedy had much more substantive differences with the CIA.

From 1961 to 1963, JFK deployed the CIA to wage covert war from Cuba to Berlin to Laos, to photograph Soviet nuclear installations and support the growing U.S. military mission in Vietnam.

Kennedy, while often supportive of the agency, broke with the CIA and the Pentagon during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Over vehement objections from his generals, JFK refused to invade the island. He improvised and imposed a peaceful solution and won a huge increase in popularity.

This confrontation shaped the rest of JFK's presidency. In early 1963, Kennedy effectively thwarted the plans of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provoke an invasion of Cuba. In his famous American University speech of June 1963, JFK promoted peace with the Soviet empire. In the fall of 1963, he privately discussed reconciliation with Cuba. He was cruising toward re-election. And then he was shot and killed.

In short, Kennedy's clash with the CIA was about specific policies and it was profound. Trump's is neither at least not yet.

In any case, Corsi's idle headline about the possible assassination of a sitting president is irresponsible, especially in a country with as many guns and mentally ill people as the United States. InfoWars should retire this meme.

JFK disclosure in 2017

Corsi's dispatch overlooked the more significant news. In the conference's keynote address, federal judge John Tunheim called for complete release of the government's JFK files later this year.

"It's time to release them all," said Tunheim, the former chair of an independent panel that declassified thousands of JFK records in the 1990s.

The National Archives retains a trove of more than 3,500 JFK assassination records, obtained by Tunheim's review board, that have never been seen by the public. The records are historically significant.

The unseen CIA files include 2,000 pages of transcripts of the CIA's harsh interrogation of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who handled Lee Harvey Oswald's file for Soviet intelligence service. They also include CIA files of senior undercover officers in 1963 such as Bill Harvey, David Phillips and Howard Hunt. All three believed Kennedy's policies were dangerously weak, perhaps even treasonous. Harvey and Phillips are known to have mounted assassination operations.

The JFK Records Act of 1992 mandates the release of all of these records by October 26, 2017.

In his Press Club comments, Tunheim, the senior federal judge in Minnesota, noted that President Trump and White House General Counsel Donald McGahn face important decisions about these records. The leadership of the CIA, including Trump-appointed director Mike Pompeo, may prefer that some of this material remain secret.



The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 30-03-2017

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/03/29/whos-roger-daltrey-slams-hillary-clinton-dead-dog-could-have-won-against-her.html


The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - David Guyatt - 30-03-2017

Bless Robert Parry for trying. Too few journalists have any integrity left. So many people want to throw out the baby with the bathwater without understanding - or even caring as far as I can tell - that the consequences of a deep state success in routing Trump on fabricated charges would be appalling for what is already the tattered remnants of democracy.

Quote:The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate
March 29, 2017

Exclusive: Official Washington's groupthink is that Russian "disinformation" helped elect Donald Trump, but the evidence is actually much stronger that Russian "dirt" was helping Hillary Clinton, reports Robert Parry.




By Robert Parry


An irony of the escalating hysteria about the Trump camp's contacts with Russians is that one presidential campaign in 2016 did exploit political dirt that supposedly came from the Kremlin and other Russian sources. Friends of that political campaign paid for this anonymous hearsay material, shared it with American journalists and urged them to publish it to gain an electoral advantage. But this campaign was not Donald Trump's; it was Hillary Clinton's.




Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
And, awareness of this activity doesn't require you to spin conspiracy theories about what may or may not have been said during some seemingly innocuous conversation. In this case, you have open admissions about how these Russian/Kremlin claims were used.


Indeed, you have the words of Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, in his opening statement at last week's public hearing on so-called "Russia-gate." Schiff's seamless 15-minute narrative of the Trump campaign's alleged collaboration with Russia followed the script prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele who was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump.


Steele, who had worked for Britain's MI-6 in Russia, said he tapped into ex-colleagues and unnamed sources inside Russia, including leadership figures in the Kremlin, to piece together a series of sensational reports that became the basis of the current congressional and FBI investigations into Trump's alleged ties to Moscow.


Since he was not able to go to Russia himself, Steele based his reports mostly on multiple hearsay from anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele's associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into "raw" intelligence reports.


Lewd Allegations


Besides the anonymous sourcing and the sources' financial incentives to dig up dirt, Steele's reports had numerous other problems, including the inability of a variety of investigators to confirm key elements, such as the salacious claim that several years ago Russian intelligence operatives secretly videotaped Trump having prostitutes urinate on him while he lay in the same bed in Moscow's Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.




The luxury Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow
That tantalizing tidbit was included in Steele's opening report to his new clients, dated June 20, 2016. Apparently, it proved irresistible in whetting the appetite of Clinton's mysterious benefactors who were financing Steele's dirt digging and who have kept their identities (and the amounts paid) hidden. Also in that first report were the basic outlines of what has become the scandal that is now threatening the survival of Trump's embattled presidency.


But Steele's June report also reflected the telephone-tag aspects of these allegations: "Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for a least 5 years.


"Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity both within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia's interests. … In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years. …


"The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these."


Besides the anonymous and hearsay quality of the allegations, there are obvious logical problems, especially the point that five years ago, you could have gotten astronomical odds about Trump's chances to win the U.S. presidency, although perhaps there is more an astrological explanation. Maybe the seemingly logical Putin went to some stargazing soothsayer to see the future.


There also may have been a more mundane reason why Trump's hotel deal fell through. A source familiar with those negotiations told me that Trump had hoped to get a half interest in the $2 billion project but that Russian-Israeli investor Mikhail Fridman, a founder of Russia's Alfa Bank, balked because Trump was unwilling to commit a significant investment beyond the branding value of the Trump name.


Yet, one would assume that if the supposedly all-powerful Putin wanted to give a $1 billion or so payoff to his golden boy, Donald Trump, whom Putin just knew would become President in five years, the deal would have happened.


Whetting the Appetite


Despite the dubious quality of Steele's second- and third-hand information, the June report appears to have won the breathless attention of Team Clinton. And once the bait was taken, Steele continued to produce his conspiracy-laden reports, totaling at least 17 through Dec. 13, 2016.




Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Flickr Gage Skidmore)
The reports not only captivated the Clinton political operatives but influenced the assessments of Obama's appointees in the U.S. intelligence community. In the last weeks of the Obama administration, I was told that the outgoing intelligence chiefs had found no evidence to verify Steele's claims but nevertheless believed them to be true.


Still, a careful analysis of Steele's reports would have discovered not only apparent factual inaccuracies, such as putting Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at a meeting with a Russian official in Prague (when Cohen says he's never been to Prague), but also the sort of broad conspiracy-mongering that the mainstream U.S. news media usually loves to ridicule.


For instance, Steele's reports pin a range of U.S. political attitudes on Russian manipulation rather than the notion that Americans can reach reasonable conclusions on their own. In one report dated Sept. 14, 2016, Steele claimed that an unnamed senior official in President Vladimir Putin's Presidential Administration (or PA) explained how Putin used the alleged Russian influence operation to generate opposition to Obama's Pacific trade deals.


Steele wrote that Putin's intention was "pushing candidate CLINTON away from President OBAMA's policies. The best example of this was that both candidates [Clinton and Trump] now openly opposed the draft trade agreements, TPP and TTIP, which were assessed by Moscow as detrimental to Russian interests."


In other words, the Russians supposedly intervened in the U.S. presidential campaign to turn the leading candidates against Obama's trade deals. But how credible is that? Are we to believe that American politicians running the gamut from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren through former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to President Donald Trump have all been tricked by the Kremlin to oppose those controversial trade deals, which are also broadly unpopular with the American people who are sick and tired of trade agreements that cost them jobs?


Steele's investigative dossier suggests that we can't really think for ourselves. We are all Putin's puppets.


Greater Skepticism?


Normally, such a ludicrous claim along with the haziness of the sourcing would demand greater skepticism about the rest of Steele's feverish charges, but a curious aspect of the investigations into Russia's alleged "meddling" in Election 2016 is that neither Steele nor the "oppo research" company, Fusion GPS, that hired him reportedly with funding from Clinton allies has been summoned to testify.




Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California
Usually, official investigations begin with testimony from the people who are making the allegations, so their credibility and motives can be tested in an adversarial setting. Plus, some baseline information should be established: Who, for instance, paid for the contract? How much was the total and how much went to Steele? How much did Steele then pay his Russian contacts and did they, in turn, pay the alleged Russian insiders for information? Or are we supposed to believe that these "insiders" risked being identified as spies out of a commitment to the truth?


None of these answers would necessarily discredit the information, but they could provide important context as to whether this "oppo" team had a financial motive to sex-up the reports to keep Clinton's friends coming back for more. Arguably the funders of this "oppo" research should be called to testify as well regarding whether they would have kept ponying up more money if Steele's reports had concluded that there were no meaningful contacts between Trump's people and the Russians. Were they seeking the truth or just dirt to help Hillary Clinton win?


Since last November's election, Steele has ducked public inquiries and Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal journalist who heads Fusion GPS, has refused to divulge who hired his firm or answer other relevant questions. That means we still don't know which Clinton friends paid for the dirt and how much money was given to subcontractors like Steele and his Russian associates. (One source told me it may have totaled around $1 million.)


According to various press reports, Fusion GPS first worked for a Republican opponent of Trump's, but then switched over to the Clinton side after Trump won the Republican race. With Steele generating his reports every few days or every few weeks, people close to Clinton's campaign saw the Russia allegations as a potential game-changer. They reached out to reporters to persuade them to publish Steele's allegations even if they could not be verified.


Before the election, a longtime Clinton operative briefed me on aspects of Steele's investigation, including the "golden shower" allegations, and urged me to at least publish the accusations as a rumor citing the fact that some major news organizations were looking into the charges, an offer that I declined.


In a different setting when Gov. Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency and Republican "oppo" researchers were pushing various wild and salacious allegations about him the Clinton team dismissed such claims and the motivations of the people behind them as "cash for trash."


Following the Storyline


Yet, Schiff's opening statement at the hearing on March 20 relied heavily on Steele's narrative and the supposed credibility of the ex-British spy and his anonymous Russian sources, even to the point of naming Americans who presumably joined in a scheme to collaborate with the Russians to help rig the U.S. election, an act that some commenters have compared to treason.




President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 1997. (White House photo)
The California Democrat said, "Russian sources tell [Steele] that [Carter] Page [a Trump foreign policy adviser who made a public trip to Russia in early July 2016] also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft. … According to Steele's Russian sources, Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company."


These "Russian sources" also tell Steele, according to Schiff, that "the Trump campaign is offered documents damaging to Hillary Clinton, which the Russians would publish through an outlet that gives them deniability, like Wikileaks. The hacked documents would be in exchange for a Trump Administration policy that de-emphasizes Russia's invasion of Ukraine and instead focuses on criticizing NATO countries for not paying their fare share."


Schiff continued: "Is it a coincidence that the Russian gas company Rosneft sold a 19 percent share after former British Intelligence Officer Steele was told by Russian sources that Carter Page was offered fees on a deal of just that size? Is it a coincidence that Steele's Russian sources also affirmed that Russia had stolen documents hurtful to Secretary Clinton that it would utilize in exchange for pro-Russian policies that would later come to pass?"


However, is it also not possible that Steele and his profit-making colleagues made their reports conform to details that already were known or that they had reason to believe would occur, in other words, to match up their claims with independently known facts to give them greater credibility? That is a classic way for conmen to establish "credibility" with marks who are either gullible or simply want to believe.


Also, clever prosecutors in presenting a "circumstantial case" as Schiff was doing on March 20 can make innocent coincidences look suspicious. For instance, though Trump's resistance to escalating tensions with Russia was well known through the primary campaign, Schiff made a big deal out of the fact that Trump's people opposed a plank in the Republican platform that called for shipping lethal military supplies to Ukraine for the government's war against ethnic Russian rebels in the east. Schiff presents that as the quo for the quid of the Russians supplying purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks (although WikiLeaks denies getting the emails from the Russians).


In his opening statement, Schiff said: "In the middle of July, Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager and someone who was long on the payroll of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests, attends the Republican Party convention. Carter Page, back from [a business meeting in] Moscow, also attends the convention.


"According to Steele, it was Manafort who chose Page to serve as a go-between for the Trump campaign and Russian interests. [Russian] Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak, who presides over a Russian embassy in which diplomatic personnel would later be expelled as likely spies, also attends the Republican Party convention and meets with Carter Page and additional Trump Advisors J.D. Gordon and Walid Phares. It was J.D. Gordon who approved Page's trip to Moscow.


"Ambassador Kislyak also meets with Trump campaign national security chair and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions would later deny meeting with Russian officials during his Senate confirmation hearing. Just prior to the convention, the Republican Party platform is changed, removing a section that supports the provision of lethal defensive weapons' to Ukraine, an action that would be contrary to Russian interests.


"Manafort categorically denies involvement by the Trump campaign in altering the platform. But the Republican Party delegate who offered the language in support of providing defensive weapons to Ukraine states that it was removed at the insistence of the Trump campaign. Later, J.D. Gordon admits opposing the inclusion of the provision at the time it was being debated and prior to its being removed."


Problems with the Conspiracy


So, not only is Schiff relying on Steele to provide key links in the conspiracy chain but Schiff ignores the surrounding reality that Trump had long opposed the idea of escalating the confrontation with Russia in Ukraine as, by the way, did President Obama who resisted pressure to send lethal military hardware to Ukraine.




Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
Plus, Schiff ignores other logical points, including that party platforms are essentially meaningless and that the savvy Putin would not likely take the huge risk of offending the odds-on winner of the presidential race, Hillary Clinton, for something as pointless as a word change in the GOP platform.


There is also the point that if Trump were a true "Manchurian candidate," he would have taken the more politically popular position of bashing Russia during the campaign and only reverse course after he got into the White House. That's how the scheme is supposed to work. (And, of course, all embassies including American ones have spies assigned to them, so there is nothing unusual about Ambassador Kislyak presiding at an embassy with spies.)


Other independent-minded journalists have noted various chronological problems with Steele's narrative, such as Marcy Wheeler at her emptywheel.net Web site.


In other words, there are huge holes in both the evidence and the logic of Schiff's conspiracy theory. But you wouldn't know that from watching and reading the fawning commentary about Schiff's presentation in the mainstream U.S. news media, which has been almost universally hostile to Trump (which is not to say that there aren't sound reasons to consider the narcissistic, poorly prepared Trump to be unfit to serve as President of the United States).


The journalistic problem is that everyone deserves to get a fair shot from reporters who are supposed to be objective and fair regardless of a person's popularity or notoriety or what the reporter may personally feel. That standard should apply to everyone, whether you're a foreign leader despised by the U.S. government or a politician detested for your obnoxious behavior.


There is no professional justification for journalists joining in a TV-and-print lynch mob. We also have seen too often where such wrongheaded attitudes lead, such as to the groupthink that Iraq's hated dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs, or in an earlier time to the McCarthyism that destroyed the lives of Americans who were smeared as unpatriotic because of their dissident political views.


So, yes, even Donald Trump deserves not to be railroaded by a mainstream media that wants desperately along with other powerful forces in Official Washington to see him run out of town on a rail and will use any pretext to do so, even if it means escalating the risks of a nuclear war with Russia.


And, if mainstream media commentators truly want a thorough and independent investigation, they should be demanding that it start by summoning the people who first made the allegations.
Source


The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Tracy Riddle - 30-03-2017

David Guyatt Wrote:Bless Robert Parry for trying. Too few journalists have any integrity left. So many people want to throw out the baby with the bathwater without understanding - or even caring as far as I can tell - that the consequences of a deep state success in routing Trump on fabricated charges would be appalling for what is already the tattered remnants of democracy.

Spare us the crocodile tears. You don't believe the US is a democracy to begin with, and I really think you are actually enjoying all of this.
Fabricated charges? Have you read everything I posted in the Red Don thread? What exactly has been fabricated? Be specific, please.


The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - David Guyatt - 30-03-2017

Following the Parry article above, Ray McGovern has a podcast interview HERE.


The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 30-03-2017

Russian Perspective on the Election Controversy

Mitch Jeserich interviews Robert English Professor of International Relations at USC, who has just written a piece for Foreign Affairs that is critical of the US's reaction to allegations of Russian interference in the election.

https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=256875

The article in question (a free sign up gives access to the entire piece)

Russia, Trump, and a New Détente: Fixing U.S.-Russian Relations

By Robert David English

March 10, 2017

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2017-03-10/russia-trump-and-new-d-tente


The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 30-03-2017

The Sovietization of the American Political-Media Establishment?

The hunt for Trump's "Kremlin connections" indulges in practices reminiscent of the Soviet Kremlin and its media

By Stephen F. Cohen

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-sovietization-of-the-american-political-media-establishment/

Quote:Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.) Batchelor begins by recalling the early 1950s, when President Eisenhower finally ended Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for Communists in the US government. Cohen remarks that this is what Russians call zhivaia istoriia or "living history"remote events that continue to influence or recur in contemporary affairs, but he recalls instead Kremlin political-media practices he closely observed while living several months a year in Brezhnev-era Moscow from 1976 to 1982, when Soviet authorities denied him a reentry visa.

While emphasizing all of the important dissimilarities between that Soviet political system (prior to Gorbachev's ending of censorship after he came to power in 1985) and the American system today, Cohen points to some similarities to current political-media practices of the US establishment's campaign to "unmask" President Trump's purported ties to Putin's Kremlin. In particular, he emphasizes the need for an accusatory narrative and draws an analogy with the Soviet media's insistence that President Nixon was driven from office in 1974 not due to Watergate crimes but to his policy of détente with Soviet Russiaa narrative that still strongly influenced Soviet media coverage of US politics when Cohen arrived two years later. In order to spread and safeguard that orthodox narrative, and others, Kremlin newspapers and broadcast media employed several well-known practices. Some of them seem to be appearing, at least to some degree, in American mainstream media today. Cohen discusses four of them:

Alternative or dissenting voices were excluded from leading Soviet newspapers and broadcasts. The foundational narrative of Trump's Kremlin-related complicity is based on the allegation that Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers and disseminated e-mails found there through WikiLeaks in order to damage Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and to abet Trump's. Leading American media outletsamong them The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBChave relied on this narrative virtually daily for several months. People unaffiliated with Trump's campaign or presidency but knowledgeable about these matters and with contrarian views are very rarely, if ever, invited to appear on these opinion pages or television panels. When they appear in alternative, less-influential media, they are often stigmatized in the mainstream as "Putin apologists" or as having their own suspect "connections" to Russia, much as Soviet media labeled its dissidents "agents of American imperialism" and "CIA collaborators."

When Soviet establishment figures became open dissidents, official media set out to destroy their personal reputations. Though Representative Devin Nunes is clearly no dissident, anti-Trump mainstream American media seems determined to tarnish his personal reputation for having confirmed what was already widely known: that intelligence agencies in the Obama administration were, as Trump implied, surveilling his associates prior to and after his election. The media may now be turning to the reputations of Trump family members, including his son-in-law, in addition to having already slurred the reputations of some of his "associates," another common Soviet practice.

Such narratives rely on purported facts. The facts cited to support the official Soviet version of Nixon's downfall were fake, highly selective, or examples of a conspiracy narrative relying on other conspiracy theories. Though it is possible they exist somewhere, no facts for the allegation that Putin's Kremlin hacked the DNC have ever been presented by the American mainstream media or anyone else. The only purportedly forensic evidence was presented by CrowdStrike, a private cyber enterprise hired by the DNC. (For some reason, the FBI did not conduct its own examination of DNC computers but relied on the one done by CrowdStrike.) CrowdStrike's claims were challenged by some independent experts from the outset, and now two aspects of its purported evidence have been discredited. None of these factual gaps in the Putin-Trump narrative have been reported in the mainstream media, only alluded to as "Russian propaganda" and "weaponized disinformation," not unlike Soviet-era claims that inconvenient information was "American propaganda."

Running through these narratives is always, of course, the covert and open role of official intelligence agencies. Soviet media often cited allegedly indisputable KGB reports and even featured "retired" KGB officials to bolster official accounts of events. The US media and congressional hunt for Trump's "Kremlin connections" feature a slew of "intel" leaks to the press and former intelligence officials as expert TV panelists. Whatever the KGB actually did or didn't know, the quality of US intelligence directors was revealed when FBI Director James Comeyappearing in front of Congress in his previously unknown capacity as a Russia expert, a role once played by J. Edgar Hooverwas asked by a Democratic House member if he knew what Gazprom was. (The Russia giant state natural-gas company, the largest in the world, producer of some third of Europe's energy, and very often mentioned in the American press as an essential aspect of Putin's power.) Comey said he had not heard of Gazprom. Nor did it help when the congresswoman explained it was an oil company. Here Cohen recalls the mainstream mantra that "17 US intelligence agencies had high confidence" in the report that Putin had ordered the hacking of the DNC. In fact, only threethe FBI, the CIA, and the NSAeven claimed to have done any serious investigation, and the NSA, which has the digital competence, said it had only "moderate confidence" in the report it co-signed.

Of course, Cohen concludes, none of this means the American political-media establishment has been sovietized. But media narratives conceived and maintained for political purposes have certain common practices, as we are witnessing today. Importantly, Soviet media narratives were directed by the Kremlin; today's anti-Trump narrative is directed against the White House, inspired most perhaps by the Clinton campaign that lost the presidency. American dissenters can resort to alternative media, though their impact on political developments seems marginal at best. Batchelor asks what Americans can do in light of the influence of the mainstream narrative. Returning again to Soviet history, Cohen says attentive Soviet citizens were adept at reading "between the lines" of the official press, at reading it "Aesopianly," and thereby able to detect some hidden elements of truth. Some became media dissidents, creating their own network of samizdattypescript copies circulated from hand to hand. Ultimately, though, they had to wait for Gorbachev to introduce from above the policy of glasnost, or openness, that soon ended Soviet censorship.



The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - Paul Rigby - 30-03-2017

Neo-Mccarthyism in Washington DC

Caleb Maupin

Published on 21 Mar 2017

[video=youtube_share;c2yl7_a4Q9M]http://youtu.be/c2yl7_a4Q9M[/video]

Caleb Maupin is a radical journalist and political analyst who resides in New York City. Originally from Ohio, he studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College.


The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump - David Guyatt - 31-03-2017

Paul Rigby Wrote:Neo-Mccarthyism in Washington DC

Caleb Maupin

Published on 21 Mar 2017

[video=youtube_share;c2yl7_a4Q9M]http://youtu.be/c2yl7_a4Q9M[/video]

Caleb Maupin is a radical journalist and political analyst who resides in New York City. Originally from Ohio, he studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College.

Dear Tooth, didn't you know... McCarthyism isn't happening, it's only our imagination at work. It's a crock and it's... ::hush::

Oops.

Other than the smell of napalm in the morning, I can think of no over thing I love so much as dim-wits and trolls denying reality and... ::hush::

Oops 2.