The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[Paul Rigby]

Well, Russian-controlled media and Putin's repeated denials are enough for me!

But why ever not? I mean, you've embraced a lot of CIA/Deep State piffle, so what's the objection?

WASHINGTON [FONT=&amp]Before Russian propaganda and fake news targeted Hillary Clinton, it went after Republican opponents of Donald Trump, including Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Lindsey Graham, as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, according to a cyber security expert who testified before the Senate Thursday.
Clint Watts, of George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, said during a break in a rare Senate Intelligence Committee public hearing that the one constant of the Russian campaign was "pumping up Trump."
Watts was one of six experts brought before the committee Thursday as Congress' efforts to investigate Russian election meddling moved to the Senate after 10 days of drama and chaos in the House Intelligence Committee's probe that appeared to freeze that investigation.

After a public hearing on March 20 where FBI director James Comey said his agents were investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign, the House committee's momentum all but disappeared over the actions of its Republican chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes of California. Nunes announced that he had seen classified documents that suggested Trump transition figures' names had been shared improperly by intelligence officials, then canceled a public hearing set to take testimony from former Obama officials.
On Thursday, Nunes and Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the committee, agreed to a new witness list. But a "dark cloud" still hung over the House committee, Schiff said, after the New York Times reported that Nunes had been given the classified documents by two White House officials.
Schiff said the White House had invited him and other senior House leaders to view classified documents to determined if the material had dealt properly with the names of Trump transition team members, but he did not know if they were the same documents Nunes had seen last week.
The leaders of the Senate probe had pledged to avoid similar tension in their investigation, and the first day of public testimony seemed intended to do that, offering testimony from experts to help define the history, scope and methods of Russian, or Soviet, efforts to interfere in U.S. politics.
Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., introduced the testimony as a way to help Americans "establish a foundational understanding" of Russian activities in the 2016 election.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the committee's senior Democrat, said the Russians in 2016 hacked into Democratic emails, then used the information they obtained to attack Clinton. The also spread false news reports, often targeted to users of social media, to drown out legitimate coverage and "to diminish and undermine our trust in the American media by blurring our faith in what is true, and what is not."


"This Russian propaganda on steroids' was designed to poison the national conversation in America," Warner said. He said that Russian meddling included an intense effort to reduce turnout among likely Clinton voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The experts said research on social media sites might be able to prove or disprove whether the Russian effort was successful in depressing turnout by Clinton voters, but that no one has undertaken such a study. Still, the experts agreed that Russia had attempted to swing the American election with a social media push aimed at hurting Clinton's credibility.
During his testimony, Watts also said that the Russians had targeted Rubio, who is a member of the committee, in the first public reference to suggest that the meddling also had taken place during the hard fought Republican primary. Afterward, interviewed by reporters, he added that Bush and Graham were targeted in the same way.
Russia's efforts, he said, were a combination of "pumping up Trump while tamping down the others."
Watts said that he could not recall the dates and titles of specific propaganda pieces without referring to his records. But he said the other Republican presidential candidates were placed at a disadvantage by a constant flow of pieces that painted Trump in a positive light.
"Sure, the Russians put out some negative information on Trump as well, but it was 90 percent positive," he said. "They had to put out some negative pieces to maintain credibility for the positive stories."
Rubio declined to comment on whether he was targeted during the primaries. But he told the committee that in July 2016, after his presidential run had ended, he learned that "former members of my presidential campaign team had been targeted by IP addresses somewhere in Russia."
He said the attacks happened twice and had been unsuccessful at penetrating their computers.
Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Graham, who has often maintained that the Russian scandal should be viewed not as a partisan problem but an American one said the senator was "not surprised."
"Senator Graham has long been one of Putin's most vocal critics," he said.
A spokeswoman for Bush, responding to an emailed request for comment, said the former governor had no knowledge of being targeted by a Russian campaign and had not been contacted by the FBI or the Senate committee.
During the hearing, the experts provided examples of the Trump campaign citing Russian propaganda or fake news.
One of those examples was a false report of a terror attack on the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey that Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort raised during an August interview on CNN. When asked about another topic, Manafort had tried to change the tone of the discussion. "You had the NATO base in Turkey being under attack by terrorists," he said.
Trump later made a reference to the same false report at a campaign rally a week after, Watts said, the reports had been disproved. There had been no attack, though there had been a small, non-violent, protest at the base.
When asked if he thought Trump knew he was quoting Russian propaganda when he talked about Incirlik, he responded "no," but he had a caveat.
"What I don't understand is the synchronization," Watts said, who said he'd been the target of Russian cyber attacks in the past. "I don't understand how his campaign manager after we had outed the Incirlik incident as fake, after the news had reported it as a fake campaign, one week later cites it on CNN. I don't understand how he calls that a terror attack, I don't understand how that ends up on stage."
Eugene Rumer, an expert from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, testified that "selective naming and shaming or targeting of political adversaries with false allegations of misconduct has been used by Russian propaganda to discredit political adversaries in the West."
"Russian propaganda, and Putin personally, has sought to deflect attention from the fact of the intrusion into the (Democratic National Committee) server and the top leadership of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign," he said. And, he added, in the end, "Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election is likely to be seen as a major success, regardless of whether its initial goal was to help advance the Trump candidacy."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics...rylink=cpy

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As Oscar Wilde nearly remarked, "One must have a heart of stone to read such Deep State nonsense without laughing."

MARCH 31, 2017

The Russia Hacking Fiasco: No Evidence Required

by MIKE WHITNEY

"So far, no single piece of evidence has been made public proving that the Trump campaign joined with Russia to steal the US presidency nothing….Stop to let that thought reverberate for a moment."

Paul Wood, BBC News, Washington, March 30, 2017

Here's what bugs me about the Russia hacking story: Why would the media, whose credibility is already at its lowest point ever, go after Trump when they had no facts to back them up?

Why?

Do the media bosses really think that if they set their hair on fire and run around yelling, "The Russians did it, the Russians did it", the American people will sheepishly nod in agreement?

And what do they think the Russians actually did?

Why they meddled in our elections, the media tells us.

Okay, but how?

Russia hackers stole damaging emails from the Democrats at the DNC, they tell us.

Alright, but how did that effect the elections?

Well according to a report on the BBC

"the stories based on this hacked information appear on Twitter and Facebook, posted by thousands of automated "bots", then on Russia's English-language outlets, RT and Sputnik, then right-wing US "news" sites such as Infowars and Breitbart, then Fox and the mainstream media.

…Russia downloads the online voter rolls. The voter rolls are said to fit into this because of "microtargeting". Using email, Facebook and Twitter, political advertising can be tailored very precisely: individual messaging for individual voters.

"You are stealing the stuff and pushing it back into the US body politic," said the former official, "you know where to target that stuff when you're pushing it back."

This would take co-operation with the Trump campaign, it is claimed." (BBC)

So the Russians stole the election by bashing Hillary on Facebook? Is that what you're telling me?

And they needed the Trump team's help to carry out this nefarious operation?

Is that the nuttiest explanation you've ever heard? And yet some people believe this baloney.

Did you know that the FBI opened this investigation in July 2016? That's eight months ago.

And what have they got to show for it?

Nothing. Not a damn thing.

So far, there's not a shred of evidence that Russia hacked the DNC computer system or that anyone on the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election. They have nothing and they know it. But the farce goes on regardless. It's all politics.

That's not to say that their weren't any connections between the 2016 political campaigns and Russia. There sure were, but the connections were all on Hillary's side. As Robert Parry reports in his latest piece at Consortium News:

"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….

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…." ("The Sleazy Origins of Russia-gate", Consortium News)

Get the picture? The whole case against Trump is based on a pile of unverified BS from some ex-MI-6 flunkey trying to make a killing off sexed up rumors of imaginary collusion. (BTW, Steele's "dodgy dossier" also contained the idiotic claims that Trump hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on him in a swanky hotel in Moscow.)

Parry also adds this revealing comment at the end of his article:

"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…."

Of course they said they believed it, because they know what side their bread is buttered on. What would you expect them to say; that its all an absurd witchhunt based on nothing but sketchy rumors? The Intel chiefs are no different than anyone else. They're just trying to placate their paymasters like any good employee.

Check out this comment that FBI Director Comey made during the recent Congressional hearings on alleged Russian meddling. It helps to expose what a political animal the man really is:

"He (Putin) hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much.

They engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy.

They were unusually loud in their intervention. It's almost as if they didn't care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing.

Their number one mission is to undermine the credibility of our entire democracy enterprise of this nation.

They'll be back. They'll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018."

Nice, eh?

So among his other talents, Comey also knows how to read minds. He knows that Putin hates Hillary and favors Trump. He knows the Russians "engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy", even though he hasn't produced a lick of proof to verify his claims.

And he knows that the Russians "number one mission is to undermine the credibility of our entire democracy", even though according to a recent survey the main reason Hillary lost the election was because undecided voters swarmed to Trump en masse after Comey announced he was reopening the investigation of the Clinton Foundation just 11 days before the election.

I guess Comey forgot to mention that part.

The Russia hacking fairytale is the biggest joke in history. I can't believe we're even wasting time on it. Unfortunately, gullible liberals have taken the bait, hook, line and sinker. A recent CBS poll shows that 67% of Democrats think Russia interfered in the election to help Trump, while only 13% of Republicans believe the same. (CBS News)

What does it all mean? Are Democrats more prone to believe uncorroborated politically-motivated rubbish than Republicans or are they just so blinded by their hatred for Trump that they'll accept any dirt the media dishes up?

I can't answer that, but it's never wise to let one's emotions cloud one's judgment.