The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[Tracy Riddle]

Paul, help me out here. Why would the FBI need FOUR FISA WARRANTS to spy on their own informant/undercover agent?

Maybe you can also explain why, if the Deep State wanted to stop Trump and help Hillary get elected, the FBI didn't just announce to the public BEFORE the election that the Trump campaign was under investigation (which they had been since July 2016). And why didn't Comey just keep quiet about Hillary's email investigation?

Why did they open a FISA investigation in October that wouldn't yield any results until AFTER the election? An investigation on a guy who officially stopped working for the Trump campaign in SEPTEMBER?

If the dossier was created to stop Trump, why didn't Hillary ever mention it during the campaign? I guess we're supposed to believe that HRC wouldn't dare to use a dossier of raw, unverified intelligence - a person who allegedly "suicides" people every day of the week?

I'm sure you can explain these things to me, Paul.

[Paul Rigby]

Did British Intelligence Try to Destroy the Trump Presidency?

by Publius Tacitus

07 FEBRUARY 2018

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_sempe...dency.html

Last night's release of the memo by Senator's Grassley and Graham asking the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele for possible violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1001 provides critical confirmation of charges presented in the HPSCI memo prepared under the leadership of Devin Nunes, but it also confirms that Christopher Steele was not just some random guy offering good gossip to the FBI. He was an official intelligence asset. He was, in John LeCarre's parlance, our "Joe." At least we thought so. But, there is growing circumstantial evidence that Steele was acting on behalf of Britain's version of the CIA--aka MI-6. If true, we are now faced with actual evidence of a foreign country trying to meddle in a direct and significant way in our national election. Only it was not the Russians. It was our British cousins.

Here are the key take aways from the Grassley/Graham memo:

The FBI has since provided the Committee access to classified documents relevant to the FBI's relationship with Mr. Steele and whether the FBI relied on his dossier work. . . .it appears that either Mr. Steele lied to the FBI or the British court, or that the classified documents reviewed by the Committee contain materially false statements.

October 21, 2016, the FBI filed its first warrant application under FISA for Carter Page. . .The bulk of the application consists of allegations against Page that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele and are also outlined in the Steele dossier. The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page, although it does cite to a news article that appears to be sourced to Mr. Steele's dossier as well.

March 17, 2017--the Chairman and Ranking Member were provided copies of the two relevant FISA applications, which requested authority to conduct surveillance of Carter Page. Both relied heavily on Mr. Steele's dossier claims, and both applications were granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

December of 2017, the Chairman, Ranking Member, and Subcommittee Chairman Graham were allowed to review a total of four FISA applications relying on the dossier to seek surveillance of Mr. Carter Page, as well as numerous other FBI documents relating to Mr. Steele.

When asked at the March 2017 briefing why the FBI relied on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration--and in light of the highly political motives surrounding its creation--then Director Corney stated that the FBI included the dossier allegations about Carter Page in the FISA applications because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.

In short, it appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton's presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate. It did so based on Mr. Steele's personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information.

. . . the FBI continued to cite to Mr. Steele's past work as evidence of his reliability, and stated that ''the incident that led to the FBI suspending its relationship with [Mr. Steele] occurred after [Mr. Steele] provided" the FBI with the dossier infonnation described in the application. The FBI further asserted in footnote 19 that it did not ,believe that Steele directly gave information to Yahoo News that "published the September 23 News Article."

The Grassley/Graham memo is devastating for Jim Comey. We can entertain only two possibilities--Jim Comey is a monumental dunce or he is a liar. One need only read the Michael Isikoff piece from 23 September 2016 to realize that Christopher Steele was a primary source for Isikoff. We are asked to believe that Comey is a naive, trusting soul bereft of curiosity, who refused to entertain the possibility that Steele was double dealing intel.

One of the most surprising revelations from the Grassley/Graham memo is in footnote 7. I'm surprised this was not redacted because it is drawn from a redacted/blacked out paragraph. Here is a critical bit of intel:

The FBI has failed to provide the Committee the 1023s documenting all of Mr. Steele's statements to the FBI, so the Committee is relying on the accuracy of the FBI's representation to the FISC regarding those statements.

This means Steele was a signed up intelligence asset for the FBI. He was our spy. A FD-1023 is an FBI form used to document meetings between FBI and sources. It is also called a CHS Report--CHS aka Confidential Human Source. Here is an example posted by a Trump supporter on Twitter:

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8...970c-popup

With this confirmation the next move is in the hands of the Brits. If Steele became an FBI asset without the knowledge of his former colleagues and chain of command, he faces legal risk. But two development in the last two days suggest that British intelligence officials, at least some key officials, were witting of Steele's activities in gathering information for the FBI.

First, Steele is resisting efforts to face a deposition in a lawsuit over his infamous dossier. Steele's lawyers argued in a court in London this week that a deposition would endanger the former spy's dossier sources as well as harm U.K. national security interests. If the Judge buys this claim then we will not have to speculate anymore about whether or not Steele was acting on his own or had a "wink-and-a-nod" from his MI-6 bosses.

Second, in my mind more telling, were the comments made this week by former MI-6 Chief, Richard Dearlove, on behalf of his former protege:

Among those who have continued to seek his expertise is Steele's former boss Richard Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004. In an interview, Dearlove said Steele became the "go-to person on Russia in the commercial sector" following his retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service. He described the reputations of Steele and his business partner, fellow intelligence veteran Christopher Burrows, as "superb."

But we do not have to rely solely on Dearlove's glowing remarks about Steele. There is other information indicating that the Brits played a substantial, if not leading, role in spying on Trump and building the Russian meddling meme. The Guardian reported in April 2017 that:

Britain's spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump's campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians, sources said.

So much for our special relationship. As the evidence of British intelligence meddling in the U.S. election piles up it will create some strains in our bi-lateral ties. It has the potential to harm cooperation on military, law enforcement and intelligence fronts. I suspect there is some scrambling going on behind the scenes to come up with a strategy to contain the damage while rooting out the sedition. Stay tuned.

[Paul Rigby]

Russiagate Should be Called Hillarygate

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, February 07, 2018

https://www.globalresearch.ca/russiagate...te/5628495

With considerable media help, the Clinton campaign cooked the books for her to win, losing for failing to cook them enough.

She and the DNC hired former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to produce his dodgy dossier on Trump filled with unverified accusations and allegations, an effort with no credibility.

It was part of a continuing anti-Trump smear campaign, calling him a Putin puppet, claiming he "encourages espionage against our people," along with falsely accusing Russia of US election hacking to elect him over Hillary.

As president, Trump has much to answer for. Alleging his team may have colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary is a bald-faced lie. Not a shred of evidence suggests it, nothing that would hold up in a fair and impartial tribunal.

No Russiagate investigation was warranted. No special counsel should have been appointed. The whole ugly business should be terminated with bipartisan consent.

Not a chance with undemocratic Dems wanting the witch hunt continued, disgraceful Adam Schiff one of their lead instigators. Maybe a Schiffgate investigation is warranted.

What's ongoing is more evidence of the hugely corrupted Washington swamp. Deep state long knives killed Jack Kennedy for transforming himself into a peacemaker, threatening dirty business as usual.

RFK and MLK were eliminated for the same reason. Trump is vilified for defeating Hillary instead of losing as expected, the Russiagate scam cooked up to discredit him the end game to remove him from office by impeachment or more sinister means.

The New York Times, CIA-connected Washington Post, CNN and other media scoundrels support the coup d'etat scheme to remove Trump from office.

Removing a sitting president from office is how banana republics operate, gangsterism posing as legitimate governance, tyranny heading toward becoming full-blown, most Americans none the wiser about what's going on.

Love or hate him, Trump was elected president. He's vilified for the wrong reasons, not the most important right ones, a disturbing indictment of a debauched system.

He's wrong about major policy issues, right saying "(n)o politician in (US) history…has been treated worse and more unfairly" than himself.

The witch-hunt investigation into possible improper or illegal dealings by him or his campaign team with Russia is an embarrassment to legitimate governance.

So is falsely accusing Moscow of US election hacking, no evidence suggesting any of these accusations are true.

On Monday, RT reported that Steele wrote a memo along with his dodgy dossier based on information fed him by Hillary's associates, according to a heavily redacted January 4 Senate Judiciary Committee document (included in the RT report), addressed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray.

It reveals coordination between Hillary's team and the Obama administration to smear Trump during the presidential campaign.

Dated October 19, 2016, it says unnamed foreign sources provided information to an unnamed Bill and Hillary Clinton associate, passing it on to an unnamed Obama State Department official, in turn handing it to Steele.

"It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele's work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility," the Senate committee report said, adding:

"It appears that either Steele lied to the FBI and the British court, or that the classified documents reviewed by the Committee contain materially false statements."

GOP Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham called for an FBI investigation of Steele. The Senate Judiciary Committee document conflicts with his sworn court statements.

Grassley called for declassifying relevant documents to reveal hard truths about what's been going on a conspiracy to remove Trump from office.

[Paul Rigby]

A LaRouchian commentary with some interesting bits and pieces:

A Who's Who in the British Intelligence Ongoing Coup Attempt Against the President -- and U.S. Policy

So, What about the State Department and the CIA?

Ron Kokinda

https://www.facebook.com/ron.kokinda.1/p...7706422839

Feb. 7 (EIRNS) -- The House Intelligence Committee has promised further memos on the conspiracy against the President over the next days. So far, the memos have only focused on the FBI and Department of Justice. They have not focused on the White House, John Brennan's CIA, which pumped the Steele memo both to Congress and the news media, or the State Department. Next up, according to Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy, is the State Department. Remember, Christopher Steele provided more than 100 memos to the U.S. State Department in the lead-up to the Ukraine coup. Victoria Nuland, the case officer for the coup, in her preemptive spin appearances on television on Sunday, said that they were written for one of Steele's private clients, and were provided "free of charge" to the State Department, like a public service. Nuland, attempting at all costs to avoid the probable facts about Steele's relationship to the State Department, claims that from the first of Steele's dossiers on Trump that crossed her desk in July 2016, she immediately referred them to the FBI. Virtuous Victoria knew that the Hatch Act precluded anything other than that, she pontificated.

We have repeatedly said that the coup against Trump started with the coup in Ukraine. The criminal British networks active in that coup will, hopefully, now be fully exposed, Nuland's lies notwithstanding.

Jonathan Winer, the State Department official implicated in the Grassley Justice Department criminal referral of Steele, along with Clinton operatives Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, was John Kerry's chief legislative aide when Kerry was in the Senate. He participated in Kerry's investigation of HSBC and BCCI which was led by Jack Blum. He then made a career of investigating transnational organized crime, focused on Russia and the East Bloc, which is where a lot of money can be made in Washington, DC.

There is an incestuous relationship between the DOJ and FBI transnational organized crime investigators, the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Brits. This group has functioned, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a "soft power" intelligence operation aimed at bringing down noncompliant government leaders in South America and elsewhere on corruption charges, and manipulating various oligarchs engaged in organized crime, or accused of engaging in organized crime, in the case of the former East Bloc and Russia.

Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, both of whom intensely focused on "Russian organized crime," went into business together in 2010. The most lucrative part of that relationship, according to Steele's statements to journalist Luke Harding, was investigative work for competing Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs who were at war with one another. Simpson also worked for Wall Street scumbag Paul Singer on corruption charges aimed at the Argentine government. Jonathan Winer is considered by many to be the dean of Russian organized crime investigation, and his relationship with Steele dates from Steele's time on the Russian desk of MI6. They applaud their long relationship on their respective {Linked In} accounts.

Steele's initial FBI contacts about Trump were, in all probability, with Michael Gaeta in Rome, who worked with Steele on the FIFA case for the Eurasian organized crime strike force, which had been led, at one point, by Andrew McCabe. Bruce Ohr, now demoted from his DOJ perch, also worked with this group extensively from the Department of Justice over a long period of time. Ditto Lisa Page, the lover of Peter Strzok. Page worked on an FBI task force out of Budapest, putting together a money laundering case against Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, a one-time business partner of Paul Manafort -- a case which has faced an uphill battle in Austrian courts because of evidentiary insufficiencies.

When Winer really went for the big bucks at APCO, the DC PR firm, one of his major clients was Bill Browder, the other British agent involved in key events in the ongoing coup, particularly the Trump Tower meeting. Winer, and his colleague Juleann Glover, are widely credited with the idea for and implementation of the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russia. Another major Winer APCO client was the Clinton Foundation.

Which brings us to the Trump Tower meeting now central to Mueller's bogus obstruction claims. Remember, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya traveled to the United States on a State Department business visa, over objections of the Justice Department. Remember, Robert Otto, the top U.S. intelligence guy on Russia, according to {Foreign Policy} magazine, had his emails hacked, and they show surveillance of Veselnitskaya's house in Russia prior to her visit to Trump tower. She claims her children had been threatened. Otto works for the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Some of Otto's emails concern his work with David Kramer, former State Department coordinator for Project Democracy, and the aide to John McCain who many believe leaked the Steele Memo to {Buzzfeed}.

Finally, there are the Chulupas, mother Irene at the State Department's Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty; Arlene, the social media maven in the Ukraine coup; and Alexandra, who coordinated the Clinton campaign work with Kiev's intelligence agencies in targeting Trump and Manafort. Which of these very dirty British spawns will be targeted by the House, we do not know. But we do know, that these relationships show how right we were in our strategic assessment. This coup began with the Chinese initiative on the Belt and Road. The first British reaction was the coup in Ukraine. Nothing short of taking down the whole network, including exposing Obama's role, will work.

[Tracy Riddle]

I guess Paul's not going to help answer my questions. I'm especially confused because he posted an article claiming that Carter Page was an undercover FBI informant, and then another one claiming Page was an innocent "associate of the opposing presidential candidate." Which is it?

The continuing attempts to shift the blame from the people who committed the crimes to the people reporting and investigating the crimes is pathetic and will not work in the long run.

[Paul Rigby]

Is the Steele Dossier Full of Russian Dirt' or British?

JAMES GEORGE JATRAS | 09.02.2018

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2...itish.html

With text messages between US Justice Department (DOJ) conspirators Peter Strzok and his adulterous main squeeze Lisa Page now revealing that then-President Barack Obama "wants to know everything we're doing," it now appears that the 2016 plot to subvert the rule of law and corrupt the US organs of state security for political purposes reached the very pinnacle of power. To call the United States today a "banana republic" increasingly may be seen as a gratuitous insult to the friendly spider-infested nations to our south.

Still, don't expect to see Barry Hussein Saetoro doing the perp walk anytime soon or even being deported back to Kenya. Don't expect to see orange prison suits on Strzok, Page, former FBI Director James Comey, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others implicated in putting a political thumb on the scales to, first, get Hillary Clinton elected, and then, when that failed, to neuter Donald Trump's presidency with a phony Russiagate probe. Officials' getting "former-ed" is one thing, their getting prosecuted quite another. (Just imagine if a GOP administration had similarly skewed the supposedly non-political law enforcement and intelligence services for partisan reasons. We'd have Watergate on steroids. The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN would be calling for hanging, drawing, and quartering.)

Indeed, it's not even clear the Russiagate investigation itself will be impacted. After all, the narrative may have flipped on one variable from Trump campaign collusion to Democratic and FBI collusion but the constant remains the same: Russia. Trump's defenders are as insistent as his detractors that the real culprit is Russia! Russia! Russia!

Sean Hannity of Fox News has been particularly hyperventilative that the entire Steele Dossier lying at the black heart of the mess consists of "phony, fake-news Russian propaganda" and "Russian intelligence lies" from British MI6 (supposedly "former") spymaster Christopher Steele's "Russian sources." Even level-headed observers like Paul Sperry and Patrick Buchanan characterize the file as a "Kremlin-aided smear job" and "Russian dirt [that] Steele was spoon-fed by old comrades in the Kremlin's security apparatus."

Christopher Steele is not Russian

But what do we really know about Steele's claimed sources? Not much.

Sure, maybe Vladimir Putin personally whispered every word of the dossier into Steele's ear. Or maybe Steele invented his supposed sources from whole cloth: your clients are paying for sleaze, you give them sleaze. Or anything in between: maybe Steele consulted some imaginative Russian cranks with only a marginal, and most likely adversarial, relationship to the Russian authorities, whose "inside knowledge" Steele padded to justify his fee. (Steele claims he didn't pay his "sources" assuming they exist at all but that's no more worthy of credit than anything else he says.)

As analyzed by Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen:

Where, then, … did Steele get his information? According to Steele and his many stenographers which include his American employers, Democratic Party Russiagaters, the mainstream media, and even progressive publications it came from his "deep connections in Russia," specifically from retired and current Russian intelligence officials in or near the Kremlin. From the moment the dossier began to be leaked to the American media, this seemed highly implausible (as reporters who took his bait should have known) for several reasons:

- Steele has not returned to Russia after leaving his post there in the early 1990s. Since then, the main Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, has undergone many personnel and other changes, especially after 2000, and especially in or near Putin's Kremlin. Did Steele really have such "connections" so many years later? [JGJ: Is it credible that the head of MI6's Russian branch is on a first-name basis with top Kremlin insiders? Turn the identities around and ask whether the chiefs of the US section of Russian or Chinese intelligence are on intimate speaking terms with the US president's top advisers or with the leadership of the CIA or FBI. Hardly.]

- Even if he did, would these purported Russian insiders really have collaborated with this "former" British intelligence agent under what is so widely said to be the ever-vigilant eye of the ruthless "former KGB agent" Vladimir Putin, thereby risking their positions, income, perhaps freedom, as well as the well-being of their families?

- Originally it was said that his Russian sources were highly paid by Steele. Arguably, this might have warranted the risk. But subsequently Steele's employer and head of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, wrote in The New York Times that "Steele's sources in Russia…were not paid." If the Putin Kremlin's purpose was to put Trump in the White House, why then would these "Kremlin-connected" sources have contributed to Steele's anti-Trump project without financial or political gain only with considerable risk?

- There is the also the telling matter of factual mistakes in the dossier that Kremlin "insiders" were unlikely to have made, but this is the subject for a separate analysis.

And indeed we now know that Steele had at least three other "sources" for the dossier, ones not previously mentioned by him or his employer. There was the information from foreign intelligence agencies provided by Brennan to Steele or to the FBI, which we also now know was collaborating with Steele. There was … a "second Trump-Russia dossier" prepared by people personally close to Hillary Clinton and who shared their "findings" with Steele. And most intriguingly, there was the "research" provided by Nellie Ohr, wife of a top Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, who, according to the Republican memo, "was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife's opposition research." Most likely, it found its way into Steele's dossier. (Mrs. Ohr was a trained Russian Studies scholar with a PhD from Stanford and a onetime assistant professor at Vassar, and thus, it must have seemed, an ideal collaborator for Steele.)'

The reference to "people personally close to Hillary Clinton and who shared their findings' with Steele" dovetails with another intriguing suggestion from former Clinton insider Dick Morris, who knows the modus operandi of the Clinton lie generator better than anyone else. On the Fox News "Ingraham Angle" show, Morris suggested to host Laura Ingraham that the bulk of the dossier was invented by veteran political dirty tricksters and Clinton-machine hatchet men Sid Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, who then engaged "former" spook Steele, because of the Brit's known relationship with the FBI, as their conduit to give their garbage credibility. (Never underestimate the residual "colonial" mentality of Yanks to find any sort of gibberish convincing if delivered with a British accent, as confirmed by the ubiquity of posh Brit voices in American advertising.)

Andrew Wood is not Russian

But Steele isn't the only limey link to #Dossiergate. In late 2016, after Trump's election victory, Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia, told US Senator John McCain about the existence of compromising material on Donald Trump, according to Wood's account to BBC4. Wood then set up a meeting between Steele and David Kramer, an associate of McCain's. It's unclear whether McCain already knew about the dossier at that point or whether Wood alerted the Senator to its existence.

For what it is worth not much Wood states that McCain had obtained the documents from the Senator's own sources. "I told him I was aware of what was in the report but I had not read it myself, that it might be true, it might be untrue. I had no means of judging really," and that he served only to inform McCain about the dossier contents: "My mission was essentially to be a go-between and a messenger, to tell the Senator and assistants that such a dossier existed," Wood told Fox News. Wood elsewhere relates that McCain was "visibly shocked" at his description and expressed interest in reading the full report. That doesn't sound as though McCain had already obtained the dossier from his "own sources" but, rather, that Wood was the instigator.

So which is it? Did McCain already know about the dossier, and if so how did it "happen" to get raised with a British diplomat? Conversely, was the initiative from Woods to induce the Senator known to be a strong Trump critic as well as for his hostility to Russia to pass the dossier on in Washington? Keep in mind that the dossier had already been used to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to monitor Carter Page, a peripheral asteroid in the Trump orbit, and that Trump had already been elected. By this time the conspiracy's purpose had shifted from preventing Trump's victory to tying down his incoming administration, especially with respect to blocking any opening to Moscow as Trump said he intended to do. What better way to set the cat among the pigeons than for a supposedly totally non-political British diplomat (certainly no intelligence officer, he!) to quietly peddle the material from Steele (whom Wood called a "very competent professional operator … I do not think he would make things up.") to the right man in Washington?

GCHQ is not Russian

Finally, while it's clear the dossier served to get a FISA warrant for American services to spy on the Trump campaign and later the transition team, US agencies' might not have been the only eyes and ears monitoring them. Amid all the hubbub over Michael Wolff's slash-and-burn Fire and Fury, little mention (other than a heated denial on the floor of the House of Commons, from the notoriously truth-challenged former prime minister Tony Blair, and from the relevant British agency itself!) has been made of the suggestion that the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Britain's version of the NSA was spying on Trump and providing their sister agencies in the US with additional data. Keep in mind the carefully worded deflection last year from James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), that "there was no wiretap against Trump Tower during the campaign conducted by any part of the national intelligence community... including the FBI," thus begging the question of whether Trump was spied on not by a US "national" agency but by one of the Anglosphere "Five Eyes" agencies most likely GCHQ which then passed the information back to their American colleagues. With Steele's and Wood's involvement, and given the virtual control of America's manifestly corrupted agencies of their counterparts in satellite countries like the United Kingdom, involvement by GCHQ and perhaps other "friendly" foreign agencies cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Madame Prime Minister is not Russian

To be sure, in 2016 the majority opinion in Russia was that Donald Trump's election would be preferable to Hillary Clinton's for the simple reason that the former openly advocated better relations with Moscow while the latter was a notorious warmonger. But there was also a strong minority view, especially among more pro-Western elements of the Russian establishment, that Hillary "the devil you know" was preferable to rolling the dice on an unpredictable and unknown quantity. Plus, Hillary was delightfully corrupt, with the Clinton Foundation an open invitation for many foreign powers to buy influence.

There was no ambiguity in the position of the British government, however. In 2016 Prime Minister Theresa May, like her German counterpart, made little effort to hide her disdain for the "just plain wrong" Trump and her preference for Hillary Clinton, whom she expected to win (as did most other observers). Why should anyone be surprised that her MI6 and GCHQ minions would share the same views and perhaps acted on them to provide some helping "hands across the water" to their US counterparts whose anti-constitutional conspiracy now stands exposed?

[Paul Rigby]

The Tom Woods' show: Ep. 1087 The Truth About the FISA Memo, With ex-CIA Analyst Ray McGovern

5th February 2018

https://tomwoods.com/ep-1087-the-truth-a...-mcgovern/

Is the Nunes memo, which speaks of the politicization of the FBI in the service of opposing the election of Donald Trump, really a "nothingburger," or is there something there? Ray McGovern, no Trump partisan, has been blacklisted by much of the progressive media (which once loved him) because he won't go alone with the Russiagate story, and he sharply dissents about the significance of the memo as well.

About the Guest

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990. During the 1980s he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. He received the Intelligence Commendation Medal at his retirement, but returned it in 2006 in protest at the CIA's involvement in torture. He co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity in 2003.

Related Article
"Nunes Memo Reports Crimes at Top of FBI and DOJ," by Ray McGovern
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/02/no_a...i-and-doj/

Guest's Website
RayMcGovern.com

Guest's Twitter
@raymcgovern

Related episode
Ep. 1029 NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney, and His Ordeal (Bill Binney)
https://tomwoods.com/ep-1029-nsa-whistle...is-ordeal/

Previous Appearances
Ep. 439 Afghanistan Is a Fiasco, But Can you Explain Why?
Ep. 415 Did the Surge Really Work?

[Lauren Johnson]

They've got him surrounded: Justin Ramondo

As Vice President Mike Pence made a fool both of himself and the country he is supposed to be representing at the Olympic Games by refusing to stand for the athletes of any nation other than the US, back at home the Washington Postwas reporting on a President Trump who appears to have nothing in common either with Pence or with the White House staff. The piece, entitled "Trump's favorite general: Can Mattis check an impulsive president and still retain his trust?" tells a story that pits a President inclined to challenge the War Party against a Praetorian Guard determined to nullify his electoral mandate to keep out of foreign wars and put "America first":

"Although Trump has given the military broad latitude on the battlefield, he also has raised pointed questions about the wisdom of the wars being fought by the United States. Last year, after a delegation of Iraqi leaders visited him in the Oval Office, Trump jokingly referred to them as the most accomplished group of thieves he'd ever met,' according to one former U.S. official."

Truer words were never spoken, but of course this leak is designed to embarrass Trump and put him at odds with those very thieves. Mattis was presumably horrified by this truism, since the General is an even bigger thief, having successfully manipulated Congress into appropriating 15.5 percentmore money for the military than Trump asked. The Post piece goes on to detail the President's many heresies:

"He has repeatedly pressed Mattis and McMaster in stark terms to explain why US troops are in Somalia. Can't we just pull out?' he has asked, according to US officials.

"Last summer, Trump was weighing plans to send more soldiers to Afghanistan and was contemplating the military's request for more-aggressive measures to target Islamic State affiliates in North Africa. In a meeting with his top national security aides, the president grew frustrated. You guys want me to send troops everywhere,' Trump said, according to officials in the Situation Room meeting. What's the justification?'"

Oh, the shocked silence in that room must have lasted for what seemed like forever. Then Mattis came up with the same old bullshit:

"Sir, we're doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,' Mattis replied."

Trump didn't fall for it: "The response angered Trump, who insisted that Mattis could make the same argument about almost any country on the planet." And the President wasn't alone in his skepticism: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed Trump's concerns, asking whether winning was even possible in a place such as Afghanistan or Somalia."

Here's the scary part, which concludes the piece:

"It was Mattis who made the argument that would, for the moment at least, sway Trump to embrace the status quo which has held for the past two presidents.

"Unfortunately, sir, you have no choice,' Mattis told Trump, according to officials. You will be a wartime president.'"

Really? Why is that? And which war is Mattis specifically referring to? Afghanistan? We're largely out of Iraq. Syria the latest addition to our interventionist folly? We aren't told, but in my view it's not any foreign war Mattis is referring to, but perhaps unconsciously he's referencing the war at home, i.e. the one being conducted by his own government against the President of the United States.

We read about it every day in the media: the Russia-gate hoax is still being flogged, despite growing evidence of its utter falsity. Robert Mueller is still on the prowl, looking for a pretext to take Trump down. The media, a longtime adjunct of the national security bureaucracy, is openly working in tandem with the intelligence services to take out Trump and if you want to know why, just re-read the reporting on Trump's reluctance to go along with the War Party's murderous agenda.

So once they take him down, who will be Trump's replacement? It'll be Mike Pence, of course, the same person doing everything in his power to destroy the possibility of peace on the Korean peninsula quite against Trump's expressed hope that "we can make a deal" with North Korea.

The War Party cannot tolerate a President who questions the most basic premises of the American Empire: "You guys want me to send troops everywhere!" Of course they do. However, Trump was elected to carry out a very different mandate: to start putting America first. He railed against regime change. And now the regime-changers want to carry out a change of regime against him.

Just look at the reporting by James Risen in The Intercept: the FBI/CIA/NSA cabal paid a Russian operative $100,000 as a down payment on a total of a million to get compromising material on Trump. Isn't this kind of thing only supposed to happen in places like Tadjikistan? Oh, it was all done under the pretext of getting back our stolen cyber-war tools, but really how valuable are they if the Russians already have them? Sure, we could find out what was stolen we still don't know but the long involved process described by Risen is really about getting rid of Trump. That's all they really care about right now, and they'll stop at nothing including, I believe, assassination to pull it off.

There's too much money riding on the continued existence and expansion of our worldwide empire to let Trump ruin their scam. Too many careers are based on it, too much prestige is at stake, too many "allies" are dependent on the largesse it affords them. They're boxing him in, despite his noninterventionist instincts, and they're compiling "dossiers," and they're mobilizing all their forces for the final assault on the Oval Office. In an important sense, Trump is being held hostage: they have limited his policy options in every important sphere of the national security/foreign policy realm, The "swamp" Trump talks about is an international miasma, and swamp creatures of diverse nationalities are crawling out of the muck, their claws aimed straight for the presidential throat.

The War Party plays for keeps. The question is: does Donald Trump? We shall see.

[Tracy Riddle]

They've got him surrounded: Justin Ramondo

As Vice President Mike Pence made a fool both of himself and the country he is supposed to be representing at the Olympic Games by refusing to stand for the athletes of any nation other than the US, back at home the Washington Postwas reporting on a President Trump who appears to have nothing in common either with Pence or with the White House staff. The piece, entitled "Trump's favorite general: Can Mattis check an impulsive president and still retain his trust?" tells a story that pits a President inclined to challenge the War Party against a Praetorian Guard determined to nullify his electoral mandate to keep out of foreign wars and put "America first":

"Although Trump has given the military broad latitude on the battlefield, he also has raised pointed questions about the wisdom of the wars being fought by the United States. Last year, after a delegation of Iraqi leaders visited him in the Oval Office, Trump jokingly referred to them as the most accomplished group of thieves he'd ever met,' according to one former U.S. official."

Truer words were never spoken, but of course this leak is designed to embarrass Trump and put him at odds with those very thieves. Mattis was presumably horrified by this truism, since the General is an even bigger thief, having successfully manipulated Congress into appropriating 15.5 percentmore money for the military than Trump asked. The Post piece goes on to detail the President's many heresies:

"He has repeatedly pressed Mattis and McMaster in stark terms to explain why US troops are in Somalia. Can't we just pull out?' he has asked, according to US officials.

"Last summer, Trump was weighing plans to send more soldiers to Afghanistan and was contemplating the military's request for more-aggressive measures to target Islamic State affiliates in North Africa. In a meeting with his top national security aides, the president grew frustrated. You guys want me to send troops everywhere,' Trump said, according to officials in the Situation Room meeting. What's the justification?'"

Oh, the shocked silence in that room must have lasted for what seemed like forever. Then Mattis came up with the same old bullshit:

"Sir, we're doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,' Mattis replied."

Trump didn't fall for it: "The response angered Trump, who insisted that Mattis could make the same argument about almost any country on the planet." And the President wasn't alone in his skepticism: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed Trump's concerns, asking whether winning was even possible in a place such as Afghanistan or Somalia."

Here's the scary part, which concludes the piece:

"It was Mattis who made the argument that would, for the moment at least, sway Trump to embrace the status quo which has held for the past two presidents.

"Unfortunately, sir, you have no choice,' Mattis told Trump, according to officials. You will be a wartime president.'"

Really? Why is that? And which war is Mattis specifically referring to? Afghanistan? We're largely out of Iraq. Syria the latest addition to our interventionist folly? We aren't told, but in my view it's not any foreign war Mattis is referring to, but perhaps unconsciously he's referencing the war at home, i.e. the one being conducted by his own government against the President of the United States.

We read about it every day in the media: the Russia-gate hoax is still being flogged, despite growing evidence of its utter falsity. Robert Mueller is still on the prowl, looking for a pretext to take Trump down. The media, a longtime adjunct of the national security bureaucracy, is openly working in tandem with the intelligence services to take out Trump and if you want to know why, just re-read the reporting on Trump's reluctance to go along with the War Party's murderous agenda.

So once they take him down, who will be Trump's replacement? It'll be Mike Pence, of course, the same person doing everything in his power to destroy the possibility of peace on the Korean peninsula quite against Trump's expressed hope that "we can make a deal" with North Korea.

The War Party cannot tolerate a President who questions the most basic premises of the American Empire: "You guys want me to send troops everywhere!" Of course they do. However, Trump was elected to carry out a very different mandate: to start putting America first. He railed against regime change. And now the regime-changers want to carry out a change of regime against him.

Just look at the reporting by James Risen in The Intercept: the FBI/CIA/NSA cabal paid a Russian operative $100,000 as a down payment on a total of a million to get compromising material on Trump. Isn't this kind of thing only supposed to happen in places like Tadjikistan? Oh, it was all done under the pretext of getting back our stolen cyber-war tools, but really how valuable are they if the Russians already have them? Sure, we could find out what was stolen we still don't know but the long involved process described by Risen is really about getting rid of Trump. That's all they really care about right now, and they'll stop at nothing including, I believe, assassination to pull it off.

There's too much money riding on the continued existence and expansion of our worldwide empire to let Trump ruin their scam. Too many careers are based on it, too much prestige is at stake, too many "allies" are dependent on the largesse it affords them. They're boxing him in, despite his noninterventionist instincts, and they're compiling "dossiers," and they're mobilizing all their forces for the final assault on the Oval Office. In an important sense, Trump is being held hostage: they have limited his policy options in every important sphere of the national security/foreign policy realm, The "swamp" Trump talks about is an international miasma, and swamp creatures of diverse nationalities are crawling out of the muck, their claws aimed straight for the presidential throat.

The War Party plays for keeps. The question is: does Donald Trump? We shall see.

Cool story. Unfortunately it doesn't fit any known facts. Trump may occasionally express skepticism about foreign wars. So did Dubya:


So did Obama. Remember how Obama wanted to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Let's look at what Trump does. After throwing billions more at the Pentagon last year, in his next budget he proposes:
http://fortune.com/2018/02/12/trump-military-budget/

[FONT=&amp]President Donald Trump's $686 billion defense request for the coming fiscal year would propel the Navy toward a new goal of 355 ships, restore major funding for a Boeing Co. fighter jet favored by the president and boost missile defense spending to counter threats from North Korea and Iran.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]On its voyage to a 355-ship Navy, the budget plan envisions building the fleet to 299 vessels by the end of fiscal 2019, which begins Oct. 1, and 326 by 2023. The Navy has 280 ships today, but some are nearing the end of their useful life.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Missile defense spending, spurred by Trump and supported by lawmakers over fears of North Korea's accelerated ballistic missile and nuclear programs, would increase about 25 percent over the Obama administration's last projected numbers for fiscal 2019 to $9.92 billion, or $1.91 billion more than previously planned. It would bankroll 20 new interceptor missiles and silos, a new "homeland defense radar" in Hawaii and, for the first time, a "salvo" test to fire two interceptors at once at an incoming target.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Trump has praised Boeing's Super Hornet, which former President Barack Obama's administration sought to phase out. By contrast, Trump has at times criticized the costs of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35, the most expensive U.S.. weapons system.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The Trump plan calls for adding 24 Boeing Co. F/A-18E/F Super Hornet jets in fiscal 2019, and 110 jets through 2023, as previously reported by Bloomberg News. The Obama administration had proposed ending purchases of the plane this year.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The Pentagon is requesting funding for 77 F-35s for fiscal 2019, three fewer than projected in the the last Obama plan. The Trump plan projects 84 of the fighters for fiscal 2020, the same as the last Obama plan, and 98 in 2021, or one fewer.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In addition, the Air Force plans $16.8 billion in funding through 2023 for the new B-21 bomber being built by Northrop Grumman Corp., including $2.3 billion next year for continued research.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The $686 billion includes $597.1 billion in base defense funding the most ever if enacted plus $89 billion in a war-fighting account. Of the $89 billion, $17 billion would finance readiness requirements "and other support activities" normally funded in the base budget, the Pentagon said.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The combined total falls short of the Obama administration's post-Cold War peak of $691 billion in fiscal 2010, which included $163 billion in war spending. Trump's overall national security package which includes Energy Department nuclear weapons programs and defense-related activities at the FBI and smaller agencies would total $716 billion.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]"The risk with such a large increase in the defense budget is that policy makers will be reluctant to make hard choices," Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an email. "DoD is still in desperate need of reform in many areas. It has 19 percent excess capacity in U.S. bases, a personnel system stuck in the 1950s, and scores of legacy weapons that need to be retired. If reforms aren't made in these areas, the military will just get fatter, not stronger."[/FONT]
Growth Trajectory'

[FONT=&amp]Even as the Pentagon unveils the administration's proposed defense budget, Congress has yet to complete a funding bill for the current fiscal year. Last week's budget agreement removed spending caps in the 2011 Budget Control Act for this year and fiscal 2019, only to have them return in fiscal 2020 and 2021 unless another deal is reached. Last week's relief marked the fourth such agreement since the Budget Control Act was passed.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]"The real story" of the fiscal 2019 defense request is "the growth trajectory from" the 2017 defense bill that was enacted "as opposed to 2019 in isolation," Mackenzie Eaglen, a budget analyst for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in an email.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Not counting war spending, the base defense budget will have increased 17.4 percent in nominal terms from 2017 to 2019, she said. Including the war spending, the budget plan approved by Congress provides for an increase of 2.9 percent from fiscal 2018 to 2019, she said.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Fred Bartels, the Heritage Foundation's defense budget analyst, said in an email that "this budget deal is going to provide a relief for the 18 months between March 24 and September 30, 2019. But as soon as it expires we are back at the same place."[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The new National Defense Strategy "calls for a sustained, predictable and increased budget to be able to execute the strategy," he said, so "being able to make the defense budget sustained and predictable will be dependent on future Congresses."[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The budget requests $6.5 billion for what's now being called the "European Deterrence Initiative," up from $4.7 billion requested last year, to increase the U.S. military presence in Europe, conduct more exercises with NATO partners and preposition equipment. It was previously called the "European Reassurance Initiative."[/FONT]
Missile Defense

[FONT=&amp]The top contractors that would benefit from the proposed increase in missile-defense spending are Boeing, Raytheon Co., Orbital ATK Inc., Northrop Grumman, Lockheed and Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The Missile Defense Agency's five-year plan projects $46.7 billion through 2023, $13.7 billion more than the last Obama plan that covered the five years through 2022.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]For fiscal 2019 the MDA request is:[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $6.8 billion for research, or about $1 billion more than previously planned, including programs to defend against hypersonic weapons under development by China and Russia.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $2.4 billion, or $855 million more than planned, for procurement including 20 additional interceptors from Orbital ATK, 42 more Standard Missiles from Raytheon, a redesigned hit-to-kill warhead to deploy by 2021 and additional silo construction at Fort Greely in Alaska.[/FONT]
Navy Expansion

[FONT=&amp]The Navy's five-year ship building plan calls for 111 vessels through 2023, going from 18 next year to 25 by 2023. The plan includes six new, better-armed frigates instead of the lightly armored Littoral Combat Ship; the first frigate would be bought in 2020[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The Navy's $58.5 billion fiscal 2019 procurement plan would benefit shipbuilders General Dynamics Corp., Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. and combat system suppliers Raytheon, Lockheed and BAE Systems PLC. It calls for buying:[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* 18 combat and auxiliary vessels, including continuing purchase of two Virginia-class submarines, three DDG-51 destroyers, one Littoral Combat Ship that's likely to be the last and five ship-to-shore connectors designed to move weapons systems, equipment and personnel to shore in support of an assault. Altogether, $21 .9 billion is earmarked for ship construction, which includes 10 new warships.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* 29 F-35C and B model F-35 jets, 24 Advanced E-2D Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, 19 P-8 Maritime surveillance planes, 23 KC-130J refueling tankers, eight CH-53K heavy lift helicopters and three Triton surveillance drones. The Navy plans to buy 198 F-35s through 2023. Also, the Marine Corps plans to buy 69 CH-53K choppers made by Lockheed's Sikorsky helicopter unit.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* 90 Small Diameter Bomb-II models made by Raytheon that can hit stationary and moving targets, toward a total of 3,750 through 2023, and 125 of Raytheon's Standard missile-6 multi-mission weapon toward a total of 625 through 2023.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* 112 Raytheon Tomahawk missiles would be upgraded, toward a total of 1,046 through 2023.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* 25 Lockheed long-range anti-ship missiles, and 75 through 2023.[/FONT]
Air Force Stable

[FONT=&amp]The Air Force would maintain stable budgeting for its planned major aircraft, including purchases, upgrades and maintenance:[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $7.2 billion to buy 48 F-35 jets next year, the initial installment of $40 billion for 258 F-35s through 2023. The Air Force, the F-35's biggest customer, plans to buy another 48 fighters in 2020 and 54 each through fiscal 2021-2023; Air Force officials have said they needed 60 a year.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $3.6 billion for continued Boeing KC-46 tanker procurement for 15 aircraft toward a goal of $20 billion and 75 aircraft through 2023.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $2.75 billion for continued operations and support and upgrades of Lockheed's F-22 stealth fighters.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $2.3 billion for continued B-21 development, up from $2 billion this year, or $16.8 billion through 2023; Northrop Grumman would see the first procurement dollars in fiscal 2022.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $964 million for continued upkeep of the aging A-10 "Warthog" close air support attack plane. The Air Force wanted to retire it but Congress refused. The service budgets $4.3 billion through 2023.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]* $1.1 billion to purchase 43,594 GPS-guided tail-kits from Boeing for the Jdam smart bomb, up from $834 million and 34,529 requested for this year.

And then there's his cavalier attitude towards nuclear weapons.
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/09/the-...m-jong-un/
[/FONT]
FOR ONCE, Donald Trump has a point. "We can't let a madman with nuclear weapons let on the loose like that," he told Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, according to the transcript from their bizarre phone conversation that was leaked to The Intercept in May.
The madman the U.S. president was referring to, of course, was North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The madman the rest of us should be worried about, however, is Trump himself, who lest we forget has the sole, exclusive and unrestricted power to launch almost 1,000 nuclear warheads in a matter of minutes, should he so wish.
Most nonproliferation experts as well as former President Jimmy Carterand a number of former Pentagon and State Department officials, both Republican and Democrat agree that the brutal and murderous Kim, for all his bluster, is not irrational or suicidal, but bent on preserving his regime and preventing a U.S. attack. Nuclear weapons are a defensive, not an offensive, tool for the North Korean leadership which, as Bill Clinton's defense secretary William Perry observed on Fox News in April, may be "ruthless and … reckless" but "they are not crazy."
Got that? Kim is bad, not mad.
The same cannot be said of The Donald. Think I'm being unfair? In February, a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers wrote to the New York Times "that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump's speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president." In April, another group of mental health experts told a conference at Yale University's School of Medicine that Trump was "paranoid" and "delusional" and referred to the president's "dangerous mental illness."
Is it any wonder then that so many recent reports suggest that South Koreans are more worried about Trump than they are about the threat posed by their hostile and paranoid neighbor?
People watch a broadcast displaying U.S. President Donald Trump on a screen at a train station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017.
Photo: Lee Jin-man/AP

Consider Trump's reaction this week to a confidential U.S. intelligence assessment leaked to the Washington Post that the DPRK is now able to construct a nuclear warhead small enough to fit inside its missiles. "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States," the president declaimed, in response to a reporter's question at his Bedminster Golf Club on Tuesday. "They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before."
How is this not an unhinged response from the so-called Leader of the Free World? In May, he said he would be "honored" to meet with Kim and praised him as a "pretty smart cookie." In August, he took a break from his golfing vacation to casually threaten nuclear annihilation of Kim's country (not even on the basis of any aggression by the DPRK, incidentally, but only their "threats").
Does Trump understand the difference between escalating and de-escalating a nuclear crisis? Listen to Republican Senator John McCain, who has never met a "rogue nation" he did not want to bomb, invade or occupy. "I take exception to the president's words," McCain said on Tuesday, adding: "That kind of rhetoric, I'm not sure how it helps."
I mean, just how crazy do you have to be to advocate a preemptive nuclear strike that even McCain cannot get behind?
Trump has form, though, when it comes to loose talk about nukes. During the presidential campaign, in August 2016, MSNBC host and ex-Republican congressman Joe Scarborough revealed that Trump, over the course of an hour-long briefing with a senior foreign policy adviser, had asked three times about the use of nuclear weapons. At one point during the meeting, according to Scarborough, the then-GOP presidential candidate asked his adviser, "If we had them, why can't we use them?"
[URL="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2017/08/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-nuclear-warheads-1502290059.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"]
[/URL]Coverage of an ICBM missile test is displayed on a screen in a public square in Pyongyang on July 29, 2017. Kim Jong-un boasted of North Korea's ability to strike any target in the U.S. after an ICBM test that weapons experts said could even bring New York into range.

To be so blasé, enthusiastic even, about the deployment of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction is a stark indicator of Trump's childishness, ignorance, belligerence, and, yes, derangement. Here is a president who is impulsive, erratic, unstable; whose entire life and career have been defined by a complete lack of empathy. Remember his strategy for defeating ISIS? "Bomb the shit out of 'em" and "take out their families."
So do you think civilian casualties were on his mind when he issued his "fire and fury" warning? Come. Off. It.
Listen to McCain's fellow Republican super-hawk Senator Lindsay Graham. "If there's going to be a war to stop [Kim], it will be over there," Graham told NBC's Matt Lauer last week, recounting a recent conversation he had with the president. "If thousands die, they're going to die over there. They're not going to die over here and he's told me that to my face."
"This is madness," Kingston Reif, a nuclear disarmament specialist at the Arms Control Association, tweeted in response to Graham's re-telling of Trump's remarks. "Unhinged madness."
Remember that 72 years ago today, the United States dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, killing around 39,000 people in Nagasaki. Three days earlier, the first A-bomb killed around 66,000 people in Hiroshima. But a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula would make those strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like pinpricks. Experts say even a conventional war between the U.S. and the DPRK could kill more than 1 million people; a nuclear exchange, therefore, might result in tens of millions of casualties. Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, has admitted that such a preemptive strike by the U.S. would be a "humanitarian catastrophe."
Does the president care? Graham doesn't seem to think so. Trump's former ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who spent 18 months in his company while working on The Art of the Deal, has called the president a "sociopath." In fact, one quote more than any other stood out from Schwartz's much-discussed interview with the New Yorker in July 2016 and, perhaps, should keep us all awake at night. "I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes," said Schwartz, "there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."
We can't say we weren't warned.
[FONT=&amp]

[/FONT]

[Cliff Varnell]

a President inclined to challenge the War Party against a Praetorian Guard determined to nullify his electoral mandate to keep out of foreign wars and put "America first"

Challenge the War Party...by promising "fire and fury" in North Korea?

By moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?

By jacking up civilian deaths by US drone strikes?

By sabotaging the Iran nuke deal?

Trump surrounds himself with generals.

How this child-like clown bamboozled so many people is the real question.