The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[Tracy Riddle]

Deep state at war with Trump? Yeah, I'm good with that. I've got lots of popcorn - caramel, cheese, all different kinds of flavors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/po....html?_r=0


WASHINGTON Seven months ago, a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele won a contract to build a file on Donald J. Trump's ties to Russia. Last week, the explosive details unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes, real estate deals that were intended as bribes and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of Democrats were summarized for Mr. Trump in an appendix to a top-secret intelligence report.
The consequences have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day. Word of the summary, which was also given to President Obama and congressional leaders, leaked to CNN Tuesday, and the rest of the media followed with sensational reports.
Mr. Trump denounced the unproven claims Wednesday as a fabrication, a Nazi-style smear concocted by "sick people." It has further undermined his relationship with the intelligence agencies and cast a shadow over the new administration.
Late Wednesday night, after speaking with Mr. Trump, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, issued a statement decrying leaks about the matter and saying of Mr. Steele's dossier that the intelligence agencies have "not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable." Mr. Clapper suggested that intelligence officials had nonetheless shared it to give policy makers "the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security."


Parts of the story remain out of reach most critically the basic question of how much, if anything, in the dossier is true. But it is possible to piece together a rough narrative of what led to the current crisis, including lingering questions about the ties binding Mr. Trump and his team to Russia. The episode also offers a glimpse of the hidden side of presidential campaigns, involving private sleuths-for-hire looking for the worst they can find about the next American leader.
The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists, Fusion GPS, to compile a dossier about the real estate magnate's past scandals and weaknesses, according to a person familiar with the effort. The person described the opposition research work on condition of anonymity, citing the volatile nature of the story and the likelihood of future legal disputes. The identity of the donor is unclear.
Fusion GPS, headed by a former Wall Street Journal journalist known for his dogged reporting, Glenn Simpson, most often works for business clients. But in presidential elections, the firm is sometimes hired by candidates, party organizations or donors to do political "oppo" work shorthand for opposition research on the side.
It is routine work and ordinarily involves creating a big, searchable database of public information: past news reports, documents from lawsuits and other relevant data. For months, Fusion GPS gathered the documents and put together the files from Mr. Trump's past in business and entertainment, a rich target.
In June, the tenor of the effort suddenly changed. The Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, apparently by Russian government agents, and a mysterious figure calling himself "Guccifer 2.0" began to publish the stolen documents online.After Mr. Trump emerged as the presumptive nominee in the spring, the Republican interest in financing the effort ended. But Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton were very interested, and Fusion GPS kept doing the same deep dives, but on behalf of new clients.
Mr. Simpson hired Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence officer with whom he had worked before. Mr. Steele, in his early 50s, had served undercover in Moscow in the early 1990s and later was the top expert on Russia at the London headquarters of Britain's spy service, MI6. When he stepped down in 2009, he started his own commercial intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
The former journalist and the former spy, according to people who know them, had similarly dark views of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. officer, and the varied tactics he and his intelligence operatives used to smear, blackmail or bribe their targets.
As a former spy who had carried out espionage inside Russia, Mr. Steele was in no position to travel to Moscow to study Mr. Trump's connections there. Instead, he hired native Russian speakers to call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own connections in the country as well.
Mr. Steele wrote up his findings in a series of memos, each a few pages long, that he began to deliver to Fusion GPS in June and continued at least until December. By then, the election was over, and neither Mr. Steele nor Mr. Simpson was being paid by a client, but they did not stop what they believed to be very important work. (Mr. Simpson declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Steele did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
The memos described two different Russian operations. The first was a yearslong effort to find a way to influence Mr. Trump, perhaps because he had contacts with Russian oligarchs whom Mr. Putin wanted to keep track of. According to Mr. Steele's memos, it used an array of familiar tactics: the gathering of "kompromat," compromising material such as alleged tapes of Mr. Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, and proposals for business deals attractive to Mr. Trump.
The goal would probably never have been to make Mr. Trump a knowing agent of Russia, but to make him a source who might provide information to friendly Russian contacts. But if Mr. Putin and his agents wanted to entangle Mr. Trump using business deals, they did not do it very successfully. Mr. Trump has said he has no major properties there, though one of his sons said at a real estate conference in 2008 that "a lot of money" was "pouring in from Russia."
The second Russian operation described was recent: a series of contacts with Mr. Trump's representatives during the campaign, in part to discuss the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton's campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. According to Mr. Steele's sources, it involved, among other things, a late-summer meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and Oleg Solodukhin, a Russian official who works for Rossotrudnichestvo, an organization that promotes Russia's interests abroad.
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By all accounts, Mr. Steele has an excellent reputation with American and British intelligence colleagues and had done work for the F.B.I. on the investigation of bribery at FIFA, soccer's global governing body. Colleagues say he was acutely aware of the danger he and his associates were being fed Russian disinformation. Russian intelligence had mounted a complex hacking operation to damage Mrs. Clinton, and a similar operation against Mr. Trump was possible.
But much of what he was told, and passed on to Fusion GPS, was very difficult to check. And some of the claims that can be checked seem problematic. Mr. Cohen, for instance, said on Twitter on Tuesday night that he has never been in Prague; Mr. Solodukhin, his purported Russian contact, denied in a telephone interview that he had ever met Mr. Cohen or anyone associated with Mr. Trump. The president-elect on Wednesday cited news reports that a different Michael Cohen with no Trump ties may have visited Prague and that the two Cohens might have been mixed up in Mr. Steele's reports.
But word of a dossier had begun to spread through political circles. Rick Wilson, a Republican political operative who was working for a super PAC supporting Marco Rubio, said he heard about it in July, when an investigative reporter for a major news network called him to ask what he knew.
By early fall, some of Mr. Steele's memos had been given to the F.B.I., which was already investigating Mr. Trump's Russian ties, and to journalists. An MI6 official, whose job does not permit him to be quoted by name, said that in late summer or early fall, Mr. Steele also passed the reports he had prepared on Mr. Trump and Russia to British intelligence. Mr. Steele was concerned about what he was hearing about Mr. Trump, and he thought that the information should not be solely in the hands of people looking to win a political contest.
After the election, the memos, still being supplemented by his inquiries, became one of Washington's worst-kept secrets, as reporters including from The New York Times scrambled to confirm or disprove them.
Word also reached Capitol Hill. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, heard about the dossier and obtained a copy in December from David J. Kramer, a former top State Department official who works for the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. Mr. McCain passed the information to James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director.
Remarkably for Washington, many reporters for competing news organizations had the salacious and damning memos, but they did not leak, because their contents could not be confirmed. (Mother Jones magazine was an exception, publishing a story on Oct. 31 that described the dossier, its origin and significance, while omitting the titillating details.) That changed only this week, after the heads of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency added a summary of the memos, along with information gathered from other intelligence sources, to their report on the Russian cyberattack on the election.
Now, after the most contentious of elections, Americans are divided and confused about what to believe about the incoming president. And there is no prospect soon for full clarity on the veracity of the claims made against him.
"It is a remarkable moment in history," said Mr. Wilson, the Florida political operative. "What world did I wake up in?"

[Paul Rigby]

CIA Interference in US Election is Without Precedent Blackmailing McCain & Graham

Wayne Madsen

http://phibetaiota.net/2017/01/wayne-mad...precedent/

January 6-8, 2017 Unprecedented: CIA attempting to undermine president-elect

Although the Central Intelligence Agency has had a long history of undermining presidents-elect and prime ministers-elect in other countries, the United States has never witnessed the intelligence agency so blatantly attempting to politically weaken a U.S. president-elect just a few weeks prior to the inauguration. What the CIA is doing in forcing Donald Trump into shifting from his campaign promise of restoring good relations with Russia to one of outright hostility to Moscow favored by the CIA, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the neo-conservatives within the Republican and Democratic party establishments is nothing less than an overt threat to American democracy.

Amid pressure from the CIA, DNI, National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense's under-secretariat for Intelligence, Trump has vowed to revamp the U.S. Intelligence Community. Trump has also questioned the politicization of U.S. intelligence, particularly the January 5 Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony of DNI James Clapper, NSA director Mike Rogers, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre. Clapper, in particular, not only called out Russia for hacking election-related computers at the Democratic National Committee but also using "fake news, social media and RT to influence the recent US elections." That was a slap at Trump's incoming national security adviser, former Defense Intelligence Agency chief retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who stood accused of re-tweeting, along with his son, "fake news."

Clapper not only used the Senate Armed Service Committee hearing to rant about Russian hacking of U.S. election-related computers but used the occasion to push for a U.S. government propaganda agency to counteract not only Russia but also WikiLeaks, social media, and any news source that disagreed with U.S. government policy. Clapper said, "We could do with having a USIA [U.S. Information Agency] on steroids to fight this information war a lot more aggressively than we're doing right now." The U.S. has moved so far to the right, it should be recalled that it was uber-conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who pushed for USIA to be eliminated in 1999 because it represented too powerful a U.S. government propaganda arm that was ultimately beholden to the Secretary of State. Now, Clapper does not believe USIA was powerful enough, a stand that would make Helms turn over in his grave.

Clapper had particular disdain for RT, the Russian government-supported global satellite news network. He said, "RT was very active in promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, etc. Whatever crack, fissure they could find in our tapestry, they would exploit it." Clapper's statement had nothing to do with the stated purpose of the hearing, Russian cyber-intrusions into the 2016 U.S. election. Under McCain's constipated chairmanship, the hearing devolved into constant Russia-bashing by Clapper, Rogers, Lettre, McCain, Graham, and Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). Cardin intends to propose legislation that will increase sanctions on Russia. Cardin's only interest is to advance the Russia destabilization goals of George Soros and exiled anti-Vladimir Putin Russian tax cheats and oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin, all supported by Cardin's puppet masters that include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and American Jewish Committee. It is also the case that Cardin, Soros, Khodorkovsky, and Nevzlin all happen to be Jewish.

The Bobbsey Twins who advocate nothing less than an all-out U.S.-Russian war, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), were prepped by the U.S. Intelligence Community to rattle the sabers against Russia. Before an approving Clapper, Rogers, and Lettre, Graham issued an unprecedented warning to a president-elect about his need to kow-tow before the U.S. Intelligence Community, "Mr. President-elect, when you listen to these people, you can be skeptical, but understand, they're the best among us, and they're trying to protect us." As for Russia, Graham, summoning up his usual persona of a hysterical Southern belle with a sudden onset of the vapors, declared, "Ladies and gentlemen, it is time now not to throw pebbles but to throw rocks."

The CIA can easily manipulate the two neo-con senators because of the blackmail it has on both. McCain's intelligence dossier, as previously reported by WMR, contains details of his USS Forrestal flight deck "horseplay" antics with his A-4 fighter. McCain's July 1967 dangerous "wet start" of his A-4 resulted in the deadliest ship fire, not caused by combat, in the history of the U.S. Navy. CIA files are also bulging with still-classified details of the information McCain spilled to his North Vietnamese and Soviet interrogators while a prisoner-of-war from 1967 to 1972. McCain was so loose-lipped about Navy operational schedules and tactics, his fellow POWs nicknamed the son of Navy Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., then the Commander of U.S. Pacific Forces, "songbird."

Then there is the information never publicly revealed by the Senate Ethics Committee about the amount of money McCain illegally took from Lincoln Savings and Loan chairman Charles Keating, enough money to have kicked McCain out of the Senate and into a federal prison. What the CIA has on McCain is enough collateral to ensure that he echoes everything he is told by Langley, including his warning to Trump that Russia's hacking threatens the "unraveling" McCain's precious "world order." However, McCain's "world order" is represented by neo-Nazis and fascists ruling Ukraine, the outbreak of war with Russia in Europe and the Caucasus, Sunni jihadists taking over Syria and Lebanon, a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, illegal migrants continuing to stream into the United States from Mexico and into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa, and a continuing freeze in U.S. relations with Cuba.

As for the goods the CIA has on Graham, homosexuality may no longer be taboo in the U.S. military but it was while Graham served as a reserve officer in the Air Force Judge Advocate General corps for most of his 33 years in the reserve prior to his retirement in 2015. In Graham's home state of South Carolina, gays serving openly in the military has never been a popular cause. Because of South Carolina's large number of military veterans Graham has tried to keep his gay life style a secret from his constituents, but to little avail. Reporters for The Statenewspaper in Columbia are well aware of Graham's sexual orientation but publicly reporting it because of pressure from the state's Republican Party establishment.

While attending the National Press Club's Fourth Estate dinner honoring CBS newsman Bob Schieffer on October 15, 2010, this editor was on the receiving end of a very drunk Graham, at the very end of the festivities and after Schieffer and his country band stopped playing, leaning on me and asking where "we" would continue to party. I replied that "I" was heading home to Arlington, Virginia and was calling it a night. At about the same time, Graham's aide came up, gave me a rolling eyes apologetic glance, and told the senator his car was outside and that it was time to leave. The warnings about Graham from the reporters with The State all made a world of sense as Graham staggered with his aide from the press club's ballroom. The CIA very likely has photos of Graham, a lifelong bachelor, when he did not leave DC parties unaccompanied.

Senator Cotton echoed the anti-Russian theme during the McCain hearing. Cotton also has a problem with CIA blackmail. As WMR previously reported, Cotton, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and a close colleague of Graham, was found to have been running political ads on GRINDR, a smart phone application for gay men looking to hook up with other gay men, during his 2014 senate campaign. WMR also reported that Cotton, both during his time as a member of the U.S. Army's "Old Guard" at Arlington National Cemetery and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was a frequent customer of JR's, a well-known gay bar in Washington, DC's primarily-gay Dupont Circle neighborhood. If the CIA continues to follow precedent, it has plenty of incriminating evidence on Cotton, who hastily got married in March 2014 during his Senate campaign in Arkansas. It is no coincidence that the CIA's major anti-Russia activists on the Armed Services Committee are the immensely blackmailable McCain, Graham, and Cotton.

McCain did not have his own way with all the statements by committee members. For example, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) accurately described America's own sordid track record on influencing foreign elections, stating that the U.S. was responsible for influencing elections "more than twice as often as Russia has been accused of."

On the House side, the CIA also has its sycophants, including House Homeland Security Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX); Representative Will Hurd (R-TX), a former CIA clandestine operative; and ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff. McCaul is still sore that Trump did not nominate him to be Secretary of Homeland Security. Other Trump administration prospective candidates, apparently rejected because of opposition to their neocon credentials, are also taking the opportunity of the unprecedented rift between Trump and the intelligence agencies to not only continue to bash Russia but also Trump. These include former CIA director James Woolsey, who severed all links with Trump, and former unconfirmed U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who has not, as widely expected, been tapped to be Deputy Secretary of State under nominee Rex Tillerson. Bolton recently said that sanctions were not enough against Russia and that what Russia needed was to "feel pain." That is directly out of sync with Tillerson's policy of a seeking close detente with Moscow.

[Paul Rigby]

Behind the CIA's Covert Ops Against Trump

Brian Becker

12.01.2017

On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker is joined by former CIA analyst and political activist Ray McGovern, and by editorial cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall.

Trump prepares to take office in just over a week as unverified claims circulate that Russia has damaging information about him. Could this be a coup attempt on behalf of the state to make sure that Trump never takes office?

https://sputniknews.com/popup/radio/?audio_id=47153106

[Paul Rigby]

Christopher Steele, Ex-British Intelligence Officer, Said to Have Prepared Dossier on Trump

Former spy is director of London-based Orbis Intelligence Ltd.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/christopher-...1484162553

By BRADLEY HOPE, MICHAEL ROTHFELD and ALAN CULLISON
Updated Jan. 11, 2017 4:20 p.m. ET

A former British intelligence officer who is now a director of a private security-and-investigations firm has been identified as the author of the dossier of unverified allegations about President-elect Donald Trump's activities and connections in Russia, people familiar with the matter say.

Christopher Steele, a director of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., prepared the dossier, the people said. The document alleges that the Kremlin colluded with Mr. Trump's presidential campaign and claims that Russian officials have compromising evidence of Mr. Trump's behavior that could be used to blackmail him. Mr. Trump has dismissed the dossier's contents as false and Russia has denied the claims.

Mr. Steele, 52 years old, is one of two directors of the firm, along with Christopher Burrows, 58.

Mr. Burrows, reached at his home outside London on Wednesday, said he wouldn't "confirm or deny" that Orbis had produced the report. A neighbor of Mr. Steele's said Mr. Steele said he would be away for a few days. In previous weeks Mr. Steele has declined repeated requests for interviews through an intermediary, who said the subject was "too hot."

A LinkedIn profile in Mr. Burrows's name says he was a counselor in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with foreign postings in Brussels and New Delhi in the 2000s. The Foreign Office declined to comment. A LinkedIn profile for Mr. Steele doesn't give specifics about his career. Intelligence officers often use diplomatic postings as cover for their espionage activities.

Orbis Business Intelligence was formed in 2009 by former British intelligence professionals, it says on its website. U.K. corporate records say Orbis is owned by another company that in turn is jointly owned by Messrs. Steele and Burrows. It occupies offices in an ornate building overlooking Grosvenor Gardens in London's high-end Belgravia neighborhood.

The firm relies on a "global network" of experts and business leaders to provide clients with strategic advice, mount "intelligence-gathering operations" and conduct "complex, often cross-border investigations," its website says.

The dossier consists of a series of unsigned memos that appear to have been written between June and December 2016. Beyond creating the document, Mr. Steele also devised a plan to get the information to law-enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europe, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

"We have no political ax to grind," Mr. Burrows said, speaking about corporate-intelligence work in general terms. He said when clients asked a firm like Orbis to investigate something, you "see what's out there" first and later "stress test" your findings against other evidence.

No presidential campaigns or super PACs reported payments to Orbis in their required Federal Election Commission filings. But several super PACs over the course of the campaign reported that they paid limited liability companies, whose ultimate owners may be difficult or impossible to discern.

The dossier's emergenceit was published online and widely circulated Tuesdayhas generated a firestorm less than 10 days before Mr. Trump's inauguration. U.S. officials have examined the allegations but haven't confirmed any of them. The Wall Street Journal also hasn't corroborated any of the allegations in the dossier.

"It's all fake news," Mr. Trump said in a news conference Wednesday. "It's all phony stuff. It didn't happen."

The dossier contains lurid and hard-to-prove allegations. The FBI has found no evidence, for example, supporting the dossier's claim that an attorney for Mr. Trump went to the Czech Republic to meet Kremlin officials, U.S. officials said. The attorney has also denied the claim.

The allegations in the document, while unsubstantiated, provoked concern in official circles in Washington. Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he received a copy of the document late last year and forwarded it to the FBI.

"Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI," Mr. McCain said.

The author of the report had a good reputation in the intelligence world and was stationed in Russia for years, said John Sipher, who retired in 2014 after 28 years in the CIA's clandestine service, where he specialized in Russia and counterintelligence. Mr. Sipher is now director of client services at CrossLead Inc., a Washington-based technology company set up by retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Private-intelligence firms like Orbis have a growing presence. Major corporations use them to conduct due diligence on potential business partners in risky areas, but quality control can be loose when it comes to high-level political intrigue, executives of private intelligence companies say.

When government intelligence agencies produce clandestine political reports, they often include thick sections about sources, possible motivations behind their information and the methods used to approach them. Such background helps decision makers determine how reliable the information is.

Andrew Wordsworth, co-founder of London-based investigations firm Raedas, who often works on Russian issues, said the memos in the Trump dossier were "not convincing at all.""It's just way too good," he said. "If the head of the CIA were to declare he got information of this quality, you wouldn't believe it."Mr. Wordsworth said it wouldn't make sense for Russian intelligence officials to expose state secrets to an ex- former MI-6 officer. "Russians believe once you are an agent, you're an agent forever," he said.

Jenny Gross and Jason Douglas contributed to this article.

By the way, MI6 will not be terribly unhappy if all this sours relations between a Trump White House and May's No 10, as it significantly curtails the latter's options and buys time for regime change in Washington the better to restore the status quo ante.

Britain dragged into Donald Trump 'dirty dossier' row amid claims Whitehall knew of the file

By Gordon Rayner, chief reporter Claire Newell Ruth Sherlock
12 JANUARY 2017 10:00PM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/...whitehall/

Britain has been dragged into the frantic row over the "dirty dossier" on Donald Trump after it was claimed that the Government gave the FBI permission to speak to the former MI6 officer who compiled it.

Sources in the US have told The Telegraph that Christopher Steele, a former spy, spoke to officials in London before he handed the document to the FBI and met one of its agents.

The document, which contained allegations of lurid sexual behaviour by Mr Trump in Russian hotels, was leaked earlier this week, and Britain now finds itself caught in the crossfire of accusations between Russia and the US.

On Thursday Russia publicly accused MI6 of "briefing both ways" against Russia and Mr Trump and suggested Mr Steele was still working for the Secret Intelligence Service.

The Russian embassy in London used its official Twitter account to say: "Christopher Steele story: MI6 officers are never ex: briefing both ways against Russia and US President."

Mr Trump has angrily rejected the information in the dossier as "fake" and the involvement of a former MI6 officer is unlikely to help Britain's intelligence-sharing relationship with the US when he becomes president later this month.

Mr Steele, who friends say fears for his safety, has gone into hiding while the veracity of the claims made in his dossier, and his own reputation, continue to be fiercely debated.

It emerged that he was the MI6 case officer assigned to Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB agent murdered in London with a radioactive substance.

Mr Steele was hired to find information on Mr Trump by a Washington-based consultancy that was being paid by Republican opponents of the president-elect the BBC claimed they were acting on behalf of fellow nominee Jeb Bush and, later, by Democrats.

However, he decided the information was so sensitive that it should also be passed on to the FBI and to his old colleagues at MI6.

The Daily Telegraph was told during a meeting with a highly-placed source in Washington DC last October that the FBI had contacted Mr Steele asking if they could discuss his findings with him. The source said that Mr Steele spoke to officials in London to ask for permission to speak to the FBI, which was duly granted, and that Downing Street was informed.

Downing Street and the Foreign Office refused to comment, while security sources said that it would have been a "professional courtesy", though not an absolute requirement, for Mr Steele to seek permission for a meeting with the FBI.

Once he had been given the all-clear, he met an FBI agent in another European country, where he discussed the background to the file he had compiled. His contact with the FBI reportedly began in July last year and ended in October, after he became frustrated by the bureau's slow progress.

Dominic Grieve, chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee, said he expected the committee to discuss the fallout from the dossier and the question of whether British intelligence agencies had been involved in handling it.

The FBI declined to comment, and the US embassy in London did not respond to requests for comment.

As the row over the dossier continued, the US vice-president Joe Biden said the FBI had felt obliged to tell President Barack Obama about the information it contained because of concerns it would go public and catch the president off guard.

Mr Biden said neither he nor Mr Obama asked US intelligence agencies to try to corroborate the unverified claims that Russia had obtained compromising sexual and financial allegations about Mr Trump.

Members of the US intelligence community have said it would have been a "dereliction" of duty not to mention allegations that the Russians had material with which they might try to blackmail Mr Trump.

Christopher Steele: A career in the shadows

Christopher Steele, who wrote reports on compromising material Russian operatives allegedly had collected on US President-elect Donald Trump, is a former officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, according to people familiar with his career.

Former British intelligence officials said Steele spent years under diplomatic cover working for the agency, also known as MI6, in Russia and Paris and at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

After he left the spy service, Steele supplied the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer's governing body.

It was his work on corruption in international soccer that lent credence to his reporting on Trump's entanglements in Russia, US officials said on Wednesday.

Emails seen by Reuters indicate that, in the summer of 2010, members of a New York-based FBI squad assigned to investigate "Eurasian Organized Crime" met Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA, the Swiss-based body that also organizes the World Cup tournament.

People familiar with Steele's activities said his British-based company, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired by the Football Association, Britain's domestic soccer governing body, to investigate FIFA. At the time, the Football Association was hoping to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. British corporate records show that Orbis was formed in March 2009.

Amid a swirl of corruption allegations, the 2018 World Cup was awarded to Moscow and Qatar was chosen to host the 2022 competition.

The FBI squad whose members met Steele subsequently opened a major investigation into alleged soccer corruption that led to dozens of US indictments, including those of prominent international soccer officials.

Senior FIFA officials, including long-time president Sepp Blatter, were forced to resign.

Steele was initially hired by FusionGPS, a Washington, DC-based political research firm, to investigate Trump on behalf of unidentified Republicans who wanted to stop Trump's bid for the GOP nomination. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that Steele was initially hired by Jeb Bush, one of Trump's 16 opponents in the 2016 Republican primary. It was not immediately possible to verify the BBC's report.

He was kept on assignment by FusionGPS after Trump won the nomination and his information was circulated to Democratic Party figures and members of the media.

Steele's dealings with the FBI on Trump, initially with the senior agent who had started the FIFA probe and then moved to a post in Europe, began in July. However, Steele cut off contact with the FBI about a month before the Nov. 8 election because he was frustrated by the bureau's slow progress.

The FBI opened preliminary investigations into Trump and his entourage's dealings with Russians that were based in part on Steele's reports, according to people familiar with the inquiries.

However, they said the Bureau shifted into low gear in the weeks before the election to avoid interfering in the vote. They said Steele grew frustrated and stopped dealing with the FBI after concluding it was not seriously investigating the material he had provided.

Steele's reports circulated for months among major media outlets, including Reuters, but neither the news organizations nor US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to corroborate them.

BuzzFeed published some of Steele's reports about Trump on its website on Tuesday but the President-elect and his aides later said the reports were false. Russian authorities also dismissed them.

Associates of Steele said on Wednesday he was unavailable for comment. Christopher Burrows, a director and co-founder of Orbis with Steele, told The Wall Street Journal, which first published Steele's name, that he could not confirm or deny that Steele's company had produced the reports on Trump.

[Lauren Johnson]

I suspect there is a power struggle going in DC right now -- something like the kind we used to see back in the cold war years in the Kremlin. It's like a mob family war to the death. One side is the CIA fronted by Obama, et. al. and another faction yet to be named fronted by Trump.

I really can't yet see what the 'Trump faction' is composed of. Yes, the 'visible' public part is starting to become apparent, but not the Deep invisible part with real power. I think Oglesby's Yankee and Cowboy War might need to be dusted off and re-read, as I think Trumpf fits the Cowboy profile and is likely supported by the Cowboy Deep Political State as described by Oglesby. https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...Cowboy-War

Hmmm. Suddenly he had a blinding glimpse of the obvious. ::

[Nick Lombardi]

Meh, this clip says it all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jDkPZYWPs

*Also see the longer, unabridged version of aforementioned clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIZOHa2kgPo

[David Guyatt]

Deep state at war with Trump? Yeah, I'm good with that. I've got lots of popcorn - caramel, cheese, all different kinds of flavors.

And therein lies the whole problem with America and American democrats today.

No wonder the US if so fucked up and on the edge of ruin.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemoller

[David Guyatt]

I suspect there is a power struggle going in DC right now -- something like the kind we used to see back in the cold war years in the Kremlin. It's like a mob family war to the death. One side is the CIA fronted by Obama, et. al. and another faction yet to be named fronted by Trump.

I really can't yet see what the 'Trump faction' is composed of. Yes, the 'visible' public part is starting to become apparent, but not the Deep invisible part with real power. I think Oglesby's Yankee and Cowboy War might need to be dusted off and re-read, as I think Trumpf fits the Cowboy profile and is likely supported by the Cowboy Deep Political State as described by Oglesby. https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...Cowboy-War

Hmmm. Suddenly he had a blinding glimpse of the obvious. ::

There is certainly a fight to the death between two elite factions. That much is clearly evident. Neither side wish the ordinary guy or gal well, or even care a flying fuck about them. At best they are seen as the breathing meat that pay tax so it can be immediately sucked out again by whichever elite faction has its hands on the state purse. Beyond that, everyone are (attributed, I believe, to Henry Kissinger), "useless eaters".

[Tracy Riddle]

Deep state at war with Trump? Yeah, I'm good with that. I've got lots of popcorn - caramel, cheese, all different kinds of flavors.

And therein lies the whole problem with America and American democrats today.

No wonder the US if so fucked up and on the edge of ruin.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemoller

Please tell me which of those groups applies to Trump. You live in the UK, don't you, David? I have to live with this lunatic with the emotional maturity of a fourteen-year-old girl as my President. Actually, the whole world has to live every day wondering what crazy thing he may decide to do. No, I'm sorry, FUCK HIM.

[Tracy Riddle]

A lot of uncomfortable truths here, especially for people who call themselves anti-imperialist and anti-oligarch, but are hypocritically aligning themselves with the same types of people in Russia.
[URL="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/13/how-putin-played-the-far-left.html"]
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...-left.html[/URL]
How Putin Played the Far Left

The Kremlin didn't just rely on the alt-right to help Trump win. Bernie Bros, Greens, and anti-imperialists' got had, too.
[URL="http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/casey-michel.html"]CASEY MICHEL

[/URL]
01.12.17 10:15 PM ET


In the aftermath of the U.S. intelligence community's recent report on the Russian-directed hacking of the Democratic National Committee, it's easy but misleading to conclude that the Russian government's propaganda strategy lies solely in advancing the careers of conservative Republicans in the United States. Backing Donald Trump's candidacy, via steady leaks of stolen communiques to organizations like WikiLeaks, was but one prong of the Kremlin's assault on American liberal democracy. Part of its campaign to vilify Hillary Clinton involved catering to her rivals on the far-left and pushing any number of crankish conspiracy theories that appeal as much to "anti-imperialists" as to neo-Nazis.

There's nothing new in that, really.

Moscow's attempts to cultivate America's far-left long predate the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The Kremlin, according to available evidence, donated more funds per capita to the U.S. Communist Party than any other communist claque during the Soviet period, when Moscow's intelligence operations against the "main adversary" involved recruiting agents of influence and spies of a progressive background who were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But the past 18 months have seen a noted spike in information warfare aimed at gulling the Bernie Bros and Occupy-besotted alternative-media set, which saw Clinton as more of a political danger than it did Trump.


Perhaps the starkest case in point is Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her constituency. In December 2015, the Kremlin feted Stein by inviting her to the gala celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Kremlin-funded propaganda network RT. Over a year later, it remains unclear who paid for Stein's trip to Moscow and her accommodations there. Her campaign ignored multiple questions on this score. We do know, however, that Stein sat at the same table as both Putin and Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Trump's soon-to-be national security adviser. She further spoke at an RT-sponsored panel, using her presence to criticize the U.S.'s "disastrous militarism." Afterward, straddling Moscow's Red Square, Stein described the panel as "inspiring," going on to claim that Putin, whom she painted as a political novice, told her he "agree[d]" with her "on many issues."

Stein presents herself as a champion of the underclass and the environment, and an opponent of the surveillance state and corporate media, and yet she seemed to take pleasure in her marriage of true minds with a kleptocratic intelligence officer who levels forests and arrests or kills critical journalists and invades foreign countries. Their true commonality, of course, is that both Putin and Stein are dogged opponents of U.S. foreign policy.

Indeed, her pro-Kremlin stance wasn't limited to merely praising Putin's amicability. Stein joined the Russian president and Kazakhstani dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev in describing Ukraine's 2014 EuroMaidan revolution as a "coup," and claimed, bizarrely, that NATO is currently "fighting… enemies we invent to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff."

For good measure, she also asserted in September that "Russia used to own Ukraine," by way of defending its colonization. She even selected a vice-presidential candidate who, when asked whether the downing of Flight MH17a massacre almost certainly caused by Russian-supplied separatists in eastern Ukrainewas a false flag, responded, "[T]hat's exactly what has happened."

Green Party officials across Europe slammed a "delusional" Stein for her views, with leading Russian environmental activists saying they were "deeply shocked" by her comments during her Moscow trip.

No matter. For her efforts in burnishing Kremlin conspiracy theories for American audiences, Stein was awarded not simply with an invitation to the 2015 RT gala, but RT even hosted her party's 2016 presidential debatea move Stein hailed as a "step towards real democracy." RT also covered "live updates" from Stein's reactions to the debates between Clinton and Trump, a decision Stein further praised. This mutual affection is, naturally, of a piece with RT's broader modus operandi in the U.S.

As I helped catalog at the Columbia Journalism School, RT, rather than focus solely on puffing up GOP candidates, expends more effort in targeting America's far-left fellow-travelers. There's a reason, after all, that Kremlin-funded Sputnik hosts podcasts by Americans who claim "progressive" viewpointsat least when it comes to altering the exclusively domestic landscape in America. Nor are these fake news outlets tilling fallow soil.

Consider one of the flagship magazines of the American left, which, for all its support of gay rights, government transparency, and voting rights as they pertain to U.S. society, has developed a notoriously soft spot for a regime that violently opposes all of the above.

The Nation's coverage of Russian affairs is a national embarrassment. RT is a website that hosts neo-Nazis as "expert" commentators. Yet that does not stop The Nation from publishing whataboutist articles in defense of the propaganda channel; articles pushing the same argument, with the exact same headlines, as those found in white-nationalist publications.

The Nation's crop of Russia watchers have lately busied themselves by lending credence to the "autonomy referendums" in eastern Ukraine, thus legitimizing illegal and neo-imperialist land-grabs, or notions that the entire Ukrainian crisis was "instigated by the West's attempt… to smuggle [Ukraine] into NATO."

That these views bizarrely mesh with those of Trump and his Breitbart-friendly advisers is perhaps another oddity of an age of ideological psychosis. Stephen Cohen, The Nation's lead Russia analyst (and husband of the magazine's editor in chief and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel), has even been endorsed by David Duke and the wife of white-nationalist Richard Spencer, the intellectual godfather of the pro-Trump "alt-right," as a rare voice of sanity when it comes to U.S.-Russian relations.

At times, the substance and style of what has been dubbed the "alt-left" are indistinguishable from that of its counterpart on the other end of the political spectrum. And Moscow's info-warriors appear to appreciate the resemblance, as the American arm of Sputnik exhorted supporters of Bernie Sanders to vote for Trump (as did Trump himself, repeatedly).

In years of researching Kremlin influence-peddling, I've discovered first-hand just how eerily similar far-left and far-right Putinists are to each other.

When I pointed out that one of The Nation's contributing writers, former J.P. Morgan banker James Carden, now executive editor of the American Committee for East-West Accordan organization partly funded by vanden Heuvel's familycontinues to contribute to Kremlin-funded Russia Direct, what I received was nothing short of a deranged ad hominem. Carden, who appeared on RT a few weeks ago to claim that The Washington Post is pursuing a "project of promoting a new Cold War with the Russian Federation," sent me a note on LinkedIn calling me a "sniveling shit," and vaguely (if unintentionally hilariously) threatening me with physical violence, demanding to see if I was "brave as BATMAN [sic]" in person. He later apologized.

Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him.

Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechesHenwood annotating, Assange writing the forewordtranscripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, two of which concluded that this was done with the express purpose of helping Trump get elected. When I brought up this pending project, as detailed both on the book publisher's website and in multiple articles, Henwood called me a "fucking idiot." (Henwood's publisher, when contacted for this story, noted that Henwood was no longer affiliated with the endeavor, saying that he had now grown "weary of chronicling Hillary Clinton's boundless political shortcomings.")

WikiLeaks is clearly the online epicenter of the 21st-century's red-brown convergence. How else to account for how an Australian cyberanarchist has found common cause with a racist millionaire real-estate baronapart, that is, from their apparent mutual regard for the opposite sex?

WikiLeaks, it is worth recalling, began as a seemingly noble "transparency" organization that sought to help shine a light on post-Soviet autocracies and their human-rights abuses. Yet somewhere along the way it saw fit to partner with anti-Semites who delivered leaked U.S. State Department cables to Belarus's pro-Moscow dictatorship, which used these sensitive documents to chase down dissidents. Nor has this caused WikiLeaks or Assange any moral misgivings. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp detailed, Assange refused to investigate WikiLeaks's role in aiding the machinations of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator, whose secret police (still known by its Cold War acronym, the KGB) arrested activists and opposition figures.

A quick glimpse through WikiLeaks's Twitter feed lately is enough to confirm the group's disconcerting preference for siding with the Putinist narrative, and Kremlin interests, all in the name of anti-Americanism.

Assange has personally run a not-so-subtle rearguard defense for Trump, an overture that has been reciprocated by the president-elect, who now publicly defers to Assange's analysis of the DNC hacks over that of the U.S. intelligence arms Trump is about to command in little over a week's time. When not slamming last year's Panama Papers leak as an "attack story on Putin," WikiLeaks's feed, long thought to be personally manned by Assange, has layered Kremlin-friendly conspiracy over everything from the Eurovision Song Contest to, like Stein's candidacy, the destruction of MH17. (Little surprise, then, that Stein considers Assange a hero.) Or, as WikiLeaks tweeted on Ukraine, "Cable shows USA was already warned of #Russia's concerns so it now looks like #Obama is the provocateur; not #Putin."

Stein, The Nation, and WikiLeaks are hardly outliers on social media or insignificant in their political reach; to their respective audiences, they wield as much influence as Breitbart does with Trump loyalists.

In a few swing states, after all, Clinton lost to Trump by a margin smaller than Stein's total statewide voter haul. The Nation has tens of thousands of subscribers and a venerable, 150-year-old pedigree for liberal advocacy. The WikiLeaked DNC and John Podesta emails, meanwhile, gradually released during and after the Democratic National Convention in August, did untold damage to Clinton's campaign.


What remains of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party is understandably unnerved by how much of the American right has happily aligned with Putin's spymasters and arms-length purveyors of "active measures" and provided cover for a foreign government's interference in a U.S. election.

But the American left has just as much reason to take stock. Ideologically promiscuous and unbound by the orthodoxies of a single party or historical narrative, Putin has cultivated dupes, fellow travelers, and purblind fools among plenty of American progressives who, whether by accident or design, have facilitated the rise of the most extremist and reactionary president this country has ever elected.

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