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Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page Intelligence Dossier' Directed against Donald Trump
By Prof Michael Keefer
Global Research, January 15, 2017
http://www.globalresearch.ca/our-man-in-...mp/5568555
During the past weeks and months, the US media have been agog over one revelation after another of supposed Kremlin skullduggery in tipping the US presidencythe rightful inheritance, needless to say, of Hillary Clintoninto the unsavoury lap of Donald Trump.
Quote:Some critics have been ungrateful enough to suggest that claims published without the least scintilla of supporting evidence by intelligence agencies which have a rich history of lying to the American people as well as everyone else, and which are in addition led by James Clapper, (image right) the Director of National Intelligence, may not be above suspicion.[1]
But the latest revelation, a 35-page sequence of linked texts published on January 10 by BuzzFeedNews, gives what simpletons are expected to interpret as unimpeachable evidence of soundness and credibility. The document is authored "by a person who has claimed to be a former British intelligence official," and its sources, identified by letters of the alphabet, include a "senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure," "a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin," as well as another "senior Kremlin official."[2] (How could one fail to doff one's cap in acknowledgment of the spy-craft of those Brits, who are able so deftly to penetrate the inner counsels of the wicked Mr. Putin and induce his close associates to sing like canaries?)
The texts which make up this document propose that Mr. Trump and his entourage had routine treasonous contacts with Russian state authorities over a long period leading up to the election, and that Mr. Putin was interfering in that election in every way possibleincluding by exploiting "TRUMP's personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable kompromat' (compromising material) on him."[3]
The document's most lurid claimcertified by Sources B, D, E and Fis made on its second page. It's not clear what form of perverse pleasure Mr. Trump was supposed to have obtained by having "a number of prostitutes" urinate on his bed in the Moscow Ritz Carlton's presidential suite. The explanation given for the motivation behind this command performancethat the same bed had previously been slept in, on one of their official visits to Russia, by Barack and Michelle Obama ("whom he hated")[4]seems bizarre.
After all, on the night in question, whose soggy bed was it now?
By way of comparison: What harm would I be doing to a champion heavyweight boxer, however much I loathed him, if I were to lace on one of his boxing gloves and punch myself in the face with it?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/...45-PM2.png
The most immediate concern raised by this literally filthy story may be humanitarian. It seems well attested that Mr. Trump is not merely fastidious, but germaphobic:[5] where is he supposed to have slept out the rest of the night? On the perhaps undefiled sofa, or on the carpet? And what are we to make of the claim by trolling posters at 4Chan that this "golden showers" story was a hoax they had foisted onto a Republican operative known to despise Trump, who then shopped it around to news media, other politicians, and intelligence agencies?[6]
If this story is a fiction, then are the document's Sources B, D, E and F, who confirmed it, also fictional? And if some of the document's sources are made up, what kind of fool would want to believe that any of the rest are authentic?
Other aspects of the document have also run into trouble. Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's special counsel, whom the document says was a key figure in "the ongoing secret liaison relationship between the New York tycoon's campaign and the Russian leadership," and who is supposed to have met secretly with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016, has declared that he has never visited the Czech Republic or Russia and was in New York and Los Angeles during the time in question.[7] (It does not seem to have occurred to mainstream media journalists who have described the document's claims as generally unverifiable that a private, first-hand inspection of Mr. Cohen's passport would provide one important test of this narrative's truth or falsity.)[8]
As Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov observes, writing at The Guardian, the document implausibly makes Igor Diveikin responsible for dealings with the US election: in fact, he was in charge of Russian elections, and in October 2016 "was moved to the apparatus of the state Duma." And it confuses Department K of the FSB, which was not gathering material on Hillary Clinton because it "has nothing to do with eavesdropping or cyber investigations," with Department K of the Interior Ministry, which is indeed "in charge of cyber investigations."[9]
In addition to problematic features such as these, the document also contains lesser errors of fact, such as the misspelling of the name of a Russian banking corporation, and the incorrect claim that Moscow's Barvikha suburb is "reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates"[10]not to mention swathes of inside dope about the machinations and anxieties of Putin and his closest advisors that have a distinct feel of having been woven out of thin air.
Within a day of BuzzFeeds publication of the document, the author's identity was revealed by the Wall Street Journal.[11] He is one Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent who is now co-principal of a consulting firm, Orbis Business Intelligenceand who has gone into hiding, leaving his neighbour in Surrey to feed the family cats and his partner in Orbis to make unrevealing statements to the press.[12]
According to Julian Borger of The Guardian, Steele's writings about Trump "were initially commissioned as opposition research"a polite term for scandal-mongering"during the presidential campaign, but its author was sufficiently alarmed by what he discovered to send a copy to the FBI."[13]
It seems more likely that his employers invited him to pass it on. The Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign inherited work by Steele that was initially paid for by Jeb Bush, who was steamrollered by Trump in the Republican primaries. They were desperate to divert attention away from the scandalous substance of the emails of the Democratic National Committee and of John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, that Wikileaks was releasing to the publicthe DNC emails in two batches on July 22 and November 6, and the Podesta emails on a daily basis beginning on October 7. They had fixed on a McCarthyite smearing of Trump-the-Kremlin-puppet' as the most efficacious way of doing so;[14] and they must have been sufficiently impressed by Steele's work to hope that it might induce the FBI to give further momentum to their own previous claims.[15]
That may be speculation, but Steele's documents, which achieved no more in the public sphere before the election than an article by David Corn in Mother Jones,[16] were certainly given an emphatic push after the election by Republican Senator John McCain. Julian Borger writes that McCain, "who was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state"this seems a coy reference to Her Majesty's Government"dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source and then decided to present the material to [FBI Director] Comey in a one-on-one meeting on 9 December…."[17]
In his best deferential Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern style, Borger informs us that "McCain is not thought to have made a judgment on the reliability of the documents but was sufficiently impressed by the source's credentials to feel obliged to pass them to the FBI."[18] He then reveals that McCain thought highly enough of their reliability that, having been denied a special Senate committee to investigate connections between Trump's campaign and Moscow, he told NBC that three other committeesArmed Services (which he chairs), Foreign Relations, and Intelligencewould examine the matter, and if they produced "enough information," a special committee would be struck after all "to attack the issue."[19] This sounds less like a withholding of judgment than a full-court press.
Other news outletsnotably CNNand intelligence operatives have sought to put some distance between themselves and the dossier. James Clapper, for instance, issued a statement on January 11 denying that the US "intelligence community" had produced the document published by BuzzFeed.[20] But the English newspaper The Guardian has worked stubbornly to sustain the validity of Steele's document.
This attempt might be said to epitomize The Guardians decline from its former eminence. Writing in its columns on January 12, Andrei Soldatov, whose exposure of some of Steele's factual errors I have quoted above, maintains that despite "factual confusion"; despite problems with the conspiratorial bias of the document's analysis; despite "unverifiable sensational details"; despite "questionable evidence"; and finally, despite "big questions" about the "high-placed Kremlin officials [who] seem a little too keen to talk to a former British spy, and feed him damaging information about the most sensitive Kremlin operation in the 21st centuryright in the middle of the operation";despite all these failings, Steele's representation of Kremlin procedures and motivations "sounds about right," and "looks entirely plausible." "And that," Soldatov concludes, "whatever the truth of Putin's connections with Trump, makes it all pretty scary."[21]
I would describe this reasoningaccording to which a document whose analytical method is problematic and whose evidential basis is variously confused, unverifiable, highly questionable, or wholly absent, can nonetheless be accepted as plausibleas mental debris. If any categorical distinction can be made between thinking of this order and the kind of arguments that sent accused witches to the stake in the 16th and 17th centuries, I should like to know what it might be.
In another article published on the same day, January 12, Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding of The Guardian doubled down on their newspaper's support for Christopher Steele. They pose the question of why, if the claims made in the 35-page dossier prepared by Steele were as mendacious as President-Elect Trump claimed during his January 11 news briefing, "had America's intelligence agencies felt it necessary to provide a compendium of the claims to Barack Obama and Trump himself?"[22]
Their answer is that Steele's former colleagues described him as "'very credible'a sober, cautious and meticulous professional with a formidable record"; and as
"an experienced and highly regarded professional [...]. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it for it to be worth considering. Chris is a very straight guy. He could not have survived in the job he was in if he had been prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way."
"That," Hopkins and Harding declare, "is the way the CIA and FBI, not to mention the British government, regarded him too."[23]
In their praise of "the credibility" of Christopher Steele, "the quality of the sources he has, and the quality of the people who were prepared to vouch for him," Hopkins and Harding exceed even their colleague Julian Borger in obsequiousness. They describe Steele as a friend and contemporary of Alex Younger, the current head of MI6, and speculate (apparently on their own bat) that he might perhaps have had the top job himself were it not that his area of specialization, Russian espionage, "was taking a back seat to Islamic terrorism and non-state threats."[24]
But anyone with experience of composing and interpreting letters of reference and recommendation within a large organization will understand nuances in what Steele's former colleagues said about him that seem to have escaped these journalists. With the exception of "formidable record," the terms applied to Steele suggest an all-round good egg, experienced, hard-working and conscientious in a straightforward waybut they abstain from any hint that he was either exceptional or brilliant, or some kind of T. E. Lawrence of the Russia desk.
It's not evident, for that matter, that the former colleagues consulted by Hopkins and Harding were themselves among the sharper knives in the drawer, since they seem not to reflected on reasons for incredulity about Steele's work that should have occurred to insiders like themselves. Steele's document claims that he became aware that for years (first five, then eight) Vladimir Putin had schemed to run Trump, with the latter's knowledge and connivance, as a Manchurian Candidate.'
It would follow, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray has lucidly observed, that
A private company [Orbis Business Intelligence] had minute by minute intelligence on the Manchurian Candidate scheme and all the indictable illegal activity that was going on, which the CIA/NSA/GCHQ/MI6 did not have, despite their specific tasking and enormous technical, staff and financial resources amounting between them to over 150,000 staff and the availability of hundreds of billions of dollars to do nothing but this.
It would follow as well that
A private western company is able to run a state level intelligence operation in Russia for years, continually interviewing senior security sources and people personally close to Putin, without being caught by the Russian security servicesdespite the fact that the latter are brilliant enough to install a Manchurian Candidate as President of the USA. This private western company can for example secretly interview staff in top Moscow hotelswhich they themselves say are Russian security service controlledwithout the staff being too scared to speak to them or ending up dead. They can continually pump Putin's friends for information and get it. [25]
* * * * *
Despite all these criticisms listed here, does there remain a sense in which Christopher Steele's document can be understood as participating in well-established traditions of British intelligence?
I am thinking, in particular, of striking parallels between Steele's work and that of two celebrated British secret agents, one of them deservedly illustrious, and the other even better known to a wide public: Juan Pujol GarcÃa, M.B.E., and James Wormold, O.B.E.
Pujol, a Spanish citizen, decided after the fall of France in 1940 to contribute to "the good of humanity" by helping Britain resist Nazi Germany.[26] Adopting the identity of a fiercely pro-Nazi Spanish government official, he was taken on by the Abwehr as an agent, given instruction in spy-craft, and ordered to move to Britain and recruit a network there. But like Steele, who as Hopkins and Harding inform us is unable to travel to Russia and has not set foot in that country for twenty years, Pujol preferred to act at a distance. He moved to Lisbon, where he invented a network of fictitious agents living in different parts of Britain, and began to provide the Abwehr with a stream of misinformation, the plausible coloration for which he derived from newsreels, a tourist guide, and magazines and reference books in the public library. The Germans accepted the story that his dispatches were being sent from the UK to Lisbon by a courier, a KLM pilot.
In the spring of 1942 Pujol succeeded in being taken up by the British secret service and moved by them to the UK; his ensuing mystifications of German intelligence were carried out by radio. He was able to contribute to the work of the Bletchley Park code-breakers in penetrating successive versions of the German Enigma codes, and in June 1944 played an important role in helping to persuade the German High Command that the D-Day landings in Normandy were merely a feint, and that the principal landings would be carried out in the Pas de Calais by a army of 150,000 men under the command of General George Patton. To resist this nonexistent force, the Germans held back twenty-one divisions that might otherwise have intervened in the Normandy fighting. It appeared from postwar analysis that during the period of this deception, from June to August 1944, no less than 62 of Pujol's radio reportsbased on information gathered by his very substantial network of some two dozen purely imaginary sub-agent sourceshad been quoted in the German High Command's intelligence summaries.[27]
On July 29, 1944, in recognition of his services to the German war effort, Pujol was by Hitler's personal authorization awarded the Iron Cross, Second Classby radio, of course. King George VI presented him in person with an M.B.E. on November 25th of the same year.
James Wormold's deceptions were of a more reflexive nature, since they were directed solely at his own employers. Recruited in 1957 by MI6 in Havana, where he ran a business selling vacuum cleaners, Wormold was initially stumped as to how he could satisfy the demands of his handler and the authorities in London for intelligence, let alone manage, as a single parent, the out-of-control extravagances of his teenage daughter Milly.
He resolved the two problems together by inventing, as Pujol had done before him, an expanding network of fictional sourceswho of course ran up expenses and needed payments of various kinds. MI6 headquarters was impressed by the volume and the breadth of Wormold's dispatches (which like Pujol's were derived from publicly available sources and his own fertile imagination)and went into a particular tizzy over his major intelligence coup, the discovery' in Cuba's Oriente province of strange and frightening installations that appeared to represent some hitherto undreamt-of form of military technology. The fears of Wormold's MI6 handler that the sketches one of his sources produced looked rather like enlarged images of the latest model Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner were dissipated when agents of a foreign power, who had taken note of Wormold's activities, launched aggressive action against him and his supposed network. How could Wormold be a fake when foreign intelligence agencies were going to the trouble of bumping off people they thought were his agents?
But the supposed Oriente installations were indeed made up of vacuum-cleaner parts.
When MI6 folded up Wormold's operation and recalled him to London, however, it was recognized that a man who had never had any secrets but had simply made them up wholesale couldn't be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, and that MI6′s loss of prestige if Naval Intelligence or the War Office, let along the press, ever got wind of what had transpired would be intolerable.
In the concluding chapter of Graham Greene's novelfor of course this spy, "our man in Havana," is himself no less a fiction than all of the intelligence sources he invented and the reports that flowed from his burgeoning imaginationthe head of MI6 himself informs James Wormold of the outcome:
We thought the best thing for you under the circumstances would be to stay at homeon our training staff. Lecturing. How to run a station abroad. That kind of thing.' He seemed to be swallowing something very disagreeable. He added, Of course, as we always do when a man retires from a post abroad, we'll recommend you for a decoration. I think in your caseyou were not there very longwe can hardly suggest anything higher than an O.B.E.'[28]
* * * * *
The sequence here may be instructive. Juan Pujol was unambiguously a heroic figure, a man of stunning initiative, boldness, and imagination who took decisive and inventive action at a time when the likelihood that any one person could contribute meaningfully to averting geopolitical catastrophe must have seemed vanishingly small. Over a period of five years he successfully deceivedand with significant consequencesthe military intelligence service of what when he began had been the dominant military power in Europe.
Graham Greene's satirical novelthe product of a man with some experience of intelligence workflowed from a mood of cynicism generated by Cold-War preparations for global war and the pervasive McCarthyism of the 1950s. When Beatrice Severn, the secretary provided to Wormold by MI6, defiantly tells an interrogation committee that she'd happily have been his accomplice if she had known what he was up to, she responds to an interruption by adding,
'Oh, I forgot. There's something greater than one's country, isn't there. You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact, NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don't mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. And we don't believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom. What kind of freedom? You want your careers.'
She adds, to Wormold:
They haven't left us much to believe, have they?even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.[29]
A kind of motto for this novel, with its merciless mockery of the world of intelligence,' is provided by the Noel Coward-ish song of a dinner-jacketed performer in the Havana nightclub where Wormold and Beatrice first meet: "Sane men surround / You, old family friends. / They say the earth is round / My madness offends. / An orange has pips, they say, / And an apple has rind. / I say that night is day / And I've no axe to grind. / Please don't believe…."[30] Wormold's operation does result in the violent deaths of several people, one of whom he shoots. But there's no doubt, in this world, that the nincompoops of MI6 richly deserve the deceptions he practises on them.
What, finally, of Christopher Steele? It doesn't seem very risky, at this point, to propose that his modus operandi in compiling his Trump dossier' followed the examples of Pujol and Wormold. As in their cases, it can be said that the people most thoroughly deceived by his laboursa large gaggle of Clintonite Democrats, noisy cheerleaders for World War Three like John McCain, and journalistic incompetents like The Guardians teamrichly deserved to be fooled.
But Pujol displayed nobility of characterand courage, for had his operation been exposed by the Abwehr while he was still working out of Lisbon, he would certainly have been killed. Greene imparted to his James Wormold a kind of unassuming stubborn integrity appropriate to the age of existentialist philosophy. It's hard, by comparison, to find anything praiseworthy in Steele's work as a merchant of sleazedangerous sleaze too, since its obvious purpose was to contribute to the heightening of New-Cold-War tensions between the USA and Russia.
Notes
[1] See for example "The Hacking Evidence Against Russia Is Extremely Weak," WashingtonsBlog (18 December 2016), http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/12/h...weak.html; "'US intel community lost professional discipline': Ex-NSA tech director on Russia hacking' report," RT (7 January 2017), https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372874-us-int...scipline/; John Wight, "On Washington's hacking hysteriawhat would Freud say?" RT (7 January 2017), https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372915-hackin...emocracy/; Mike Whitney, "US Intel Agencies Try to Strong-Arm Trump into War with Russia," Information Clearing House (10 January 2017), http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46193.htm; and Glenn Greenwald, "The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer," The Intercept (11 January 2017), https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-...ems-cheer/. On Clapper's perjury, see Paul Campos, "How James Clapper will get away with perjury," Salon.com (12 June 2013), http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/how_jame...h_perjury/.
[2] "These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia," BuzzFeedNews (10 January 2017), https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/th....ygWnrNKQL. The defamatory documents have also been published by Slate Magazinesee Joshua Keating, "These Salacious Memos Allege Russian Efforts to Compromise Trump," Slate.com (10 January 2017), http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2...mp.htmland by Wikipedia: see "File: 2017 Trump dossier by Christopher Steele, Ex-MI6 Russia Desk Intelligence Agent.pdf," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2017_..._Agent.pdf.
[3] "These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia."
[4] Ibid.
[5] Kevin Drum, "Donald Trump Is a Germaphobe," Mother Jones, (23 December 2015), http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/20...ermaphobe; Carolyn Gregoire, "Trump Is Right About One Thing: Shaking Hands is Kinda Gross," Huffington Post (7 April 2016), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hand...53af06a8f; Matt Frei, "Proof That Donald Trump Is Indeed a Germaphobe," LBC (12 January 2017), http://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/ma...ermaphobe/.
[6] The Republican in question is Rick Wilson, whose description of Trump supporters as "single white males who masturbate to anime" apparently prompted a 4Chan user to troll him. See The_Real_Fly, "How 4Chan Fooled McCain, Buzzfeed, and the CIA Into Believing Trump's Golden Showers," Zero Hedge (11 January 2017), http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-11...en-showers. For a dissenting view, see Gideon Resnick and Ben Collins, "Despite Weak Stream of Proof, 4chan Claims It Invented the Trump Golden Showers Story," The Daily Beast (10 January 2017), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...story.html.
[7] Rosie Gray, "'It is Fake News Meant to Malign Mr. Trump,'" The Atlantic (10 January 2017), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ource=feed. Wikileaks has declared that "35 page PDF published by Buzzfeed on Trump is not an intelligence report. Style, facts & dates show no credibility," https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/818992803829137408.
[8] Cohen has intimated as much by posting an image of the passport's front cover online; for obvious reasons, he has refused to circulate online images of its inner contents.
[9] Andrei Soldatov, "The leaked Trump-Russia dossier rings frighteningly true," The Guardian (12 January 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...ingly-true.
[10] Julian Borger, "John McCain passes dossier alleging secret Trump-Russia contacts to FBI," The Guardian (11 January 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017...a-contacts.
[11] See ZeroPointNow, "Dead Giveaway The 35 Page Dossier Was A Hoax?" Zero Hedge (11 January 2017), http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-11...use-offici.
[12] Gordon Rayner, Patrick Sawyer, and Ruth Sherlock, "Former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, who produced Donald Trump Russian dossier, terrified for his safety' and went to ground before name released," The Telegraph (11 January 2017), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/...terrified/.
[13] Borger, "John McCain passes dossier…." Steele also told David Corn in October 2016 that "near the start of July [2016] on his own initiativewithout the permission of the US company that hired himhe sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI"; see Corn, "A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump: Has the bureau investigated this material? Mother Jones (31 October 2016), http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016...nald-trump.
[14] For examples of this smear-tactic, see Glenn Greenwald, "Democrats' Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S.," The Intercept (8 August 2016), https://theintercept.com/2016/08/08/dems...ory-in-us/. As Greenwald observes, this smear was used against Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders in 2015, and subsequently against Green Party candidate Jill Stein, before being turned against Donald Trump in the summer of 2016. He notes as well that there are powerful ironies to the use of this smear by Hillary Clinton and her supporters: in April 2015 she was revealed to have approved, as Secretary of State, a 2013 deal that "gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States." The Clinton Foundation received donations totalling $2.35 million from a Russian foundation linked to the deal, and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by a Russian bank involved in promoting the deal for a speech he gave in Moscow. See Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, "Cash flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," The New York Times (23 April 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/ca...mpany.html.
[15] Evidence is emerging that the British government gave Steele approval for his contacts with the FBI: see Gordon Rayner, Claire Newell, and Ruth Sherlock, "Britain dragged into Donald Trump dirty dossier' row amid claims Whitehall knew of the file," The Telegraph (13 January 2017), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/...whitehall/.
[16] David Corn, "A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information…."
[17] Borger, "John McCain passes dossier…."
[18] Ibid. For McCain's explanation, see Kyle Feldscher, "McCain confirms he sent Trump allegations to FBI," Washington Examiner (11 January 2017), http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mccain...le/2611498.
[19] Borger, "John McCain passes dossier…."
[20] Anna Giaritelli, "Clapper: 35-page dossier didn't come from intelligence community," Washington Examiner (11 January 2017), http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/clappe...le/2611620.
[21] Soldatov, "The leaked Trump-Russia dossier rings frighteningly true."
[22] Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding, "Donald Trump dossier: intelligence sources vouch for author's credibility," The Guardian (12 January 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017...ier-author.
[23] Ibid. A more plausible answer to the question posed by Hopkins and Harding might be that powerful members of the Senate, among them John McCain and Harry Reid, were chomping at the bit to get Steele's claims into public circulation, and the US intelligence services were actively complicit in the program to defame and discredit the incoming Trump administration.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Craig Murray, "The Steele Dossier or the Hitler Diaries Mark II," Craig Murray (11 January 2017), https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/...-mattress/.
[26] The following account of Pujol is based on "Juan Pujol GarcÃa," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa. That article's principal sources are Juan Pujol and Nigel West, Operation GARBO: The Personal Story of the Most Successful Double Agent of World War II (New York: Random House, 1985); Tomás Harris and Mark Seaman, Garbo: The Spy Who Saved D-Day (Toronto: Dundurn, 2004); Hervie Haufler, The Spies Who Never Were: The True Story of the Nazi Spies Who Were Actually Allied Double Agents (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2006); and Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War (New York: Skyhorse, 2010).
[27] Pujol and West, Operation GARBO, p. 196; cited in "Juan Pujol GarcÃa."
[28] Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958; rpt. London: Vintage, 2004), p. 177.
[29] Ibid., p. 179.
[30] Ibid., p. 80.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Prof Michael Keefer, Global Research, 2017
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Russia Must be Destroyed: John McCain and the Case of the Dodgy Dossier
by JOHN WIGHT
JANUARY 13, 2017
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/r...y-dossier/
Quote:Delanda est Cathargo (in English "Carthage must be destroyed") are words that come down to us from ancient history. They were spoken by the famed Roman soldier, statesman and orator Cato the Elder, and have never been more relevant than now, today.
The Rome of our time is Washington, Russia is Carthage, and today's Cato the Elder is US Senator John McCain, whose quest for conflict with Russia is unbounded. Indeed, for Mr McCain the belief that Russia must be destroyed has been elevated to the status of a self evident and received truth.
Origins of the dodgy dossier'
It was McCain who passed the dodgy dossier' on Trump to the FBI, after receiving it from former UK ambassador to Russia, Sir Andrew Wood. Contained within the dossier is information purporting to reveal how Trump has been compromised by Russian intelligence over various sexual encounters with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. Compounding the scandal, adding to the lurid nature of it, are reports of the existence of a second Russian dossier on the president-elect.
The dossier's originator has been revealed as former British MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who now runs a private intelligence company and has, according to reports, gone into hiding in the UK, supposedly fearing assassination by Russian agents.
The fact that Mr Steele hasn't set foot in Russia for a number of years and reportedly, on behalf of Trump's enemies within the Republican Party establishment, paid for the information contained in the 35-page dossier, recently released with the caveat that its contents cannot be verified, should have been more than enough to have it instantly dismissed as, well, fake news?
In his most recent article on the dossier for the UK's Independent website, Patrick Cockburn writes, "I read the text of the dossier on Donald Trump's alleged dirty dealings with a scepticism that soon turned into complete disbelief," prior to observing how, "In its determination to damage Trump, the US press corps has been happy to suspend disbelief in this dubious document."
Convenient timing of the dossier's appearance
More significant than the fact this dossier was not immediately dismissed is the timing of its emergence and subsequent publication by the US news site, Buzz Feed. It comes on the very cusp of president-elect Donald Trump's official inauguration as the 45th President of the United States on January 20th, and the very point at which his cabinet appointees were being grilled over their views of Russia, the threat Russia allegedly poses to the US and the West, during their official Senate confirmation hearings.
A political coup against Trump is underway
By now most people are aware, or at least should be, of Washington long and ignoble history when it comes to fomenting, planning, supporting, and funding political and military coups around the world in Central and Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere the CIA and other US agencies have brought down countless leaders and governments that have refused to toe the line when it comes to serving US interests.
In unprecedented fashion, what we have in this instance are those same deep state actors, working in conjunction with the US liberal establishment, currently engaged in a coup designed to destroy the Trump presidency if not before it begins then certainly soon after, with the prospect of impeachment proceedings against him already being mooted in Washington circles.
During his recent press conference, Trump felt minded to declaim against Washington's bloated intelligence community, accusing it of releasing the dossier to the media, an allegation US intelligence chiefs have denied. The result is an unprecedented open war between the country's next president and his soon-to-be intelligence services that has pitched the country into a political crisis that grows deeper by the day.
Russia's demonization
On the question of why the US deep state and Washington's liberal establishment is so intent on maintaining Russia in the role of deadly enemy, the answer is very simple money.
Huge and powerful economic and ideological interests are tied up in the new cold war of the past few years. We're talking the country's previously mentioned gargantuan defense and intelligence budgets, continuing US support and financing of NATO, along with reason for the continued existence and funding of the vast network of political think tanks in Washington and throughout the West, all of which are committed to sustaining a status quo of US hegemony and unipolarity.
Russia's emergence as a strategic counterweight to the West in recent years has and continues to challenge this hitherto uncontested hegemony emanating from Washington, providing lucrative opportunities for organizations, groups, and individuals with a vested interest in the resulting new cold war. For those of a sceptical persuasion in this regard, I refer you to the chilling warning issued by former US President Dwight D Eisenhower prior to leaving office in 1960 to make way for his replacement, John F Kennedy.
Don't fuck with the military industrial complex
In his televised farewell address to the American people in 1961, Eisenhower said, "we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations."
He continued, "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society."
Finally, Eisenhower warned the American people how "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Though neoconservatives may no longer be in the driving seat in Washington, neoconservative ideas undoubtedly are. And prime among them is the idea that not only must Russia be destroyed but also anyone who would dare stand in the way of this narrative, up to and including President-elect Donald J Trump.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
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The Russian Dossier Reminds Me of the Row Over Saddam's WMDs
by PATRICK COCKBURN
JANUARY 13, 2017
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/t...dams-wmds/
Quote:I read the text of the dossier on Donald Trump's alleged dirty dealings with a scepticism that soon turned into complete disbelief. The memo has all the hallmarks of such fabrications, which is too much detail and that detail largely uncheckable and too many names of important people placed there to impress the reader with the sheer quantity and quality of information.
I was correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s and again during the first years in power of Vladimir Putin. Every so often, people would tell me intriguing facts about the dark doings of the Kremlin and its complicity in various crimes, such as the infamous apartment block bombings in 1999. But my heart used to sink when the informant claimed to know too much and did not see that what they were saying contained a fatal contradiction: Putin and his people were pictured as unscrupulous and violent people, but at the same time they were childishly incapable of keeping a secret damaging to themselves.
The conclusions reached in the Trump dossier similarly claim to be based on multiple sources of information where, in the nature of things, they are unlikely to exist. The dossier cites at least seven of them. "Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, [said that] the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP, for at least five years."
I obviously failed as a correspondent when I was in Russia because it turns out that Moscow is choc-a-bloc with fellows in senior positions willing to blow the gaff on the Kremlin's deep laid plans. A and B, despite achieving high rank, apparently remain touchingly naive and more than willing to make revelations that, if known, would get them imprisoned or shot in short order.
Reading the papers on Trump brought back memories of talking to Iraqi defectors in the 1990s who claimed to have plenty of information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and gossip about his family affairs. It did not take long to work out that they were making it up when they produced convincing but uncheckable details about the doings of some of the more dangerous and suspicious people in the world, with whom the defectors claimed have had frank and revealing conversations.
In its determination to damage Trump, the US press corps has been happy to suspend disbelief in this dubious document. The former member of MI6, Christopher Steele, reportedly has a high reputation in espionage circles and was stationed in Moscow 20 years ago. The New York Times is unworried by his consequent inability to travel to Moscow "to study Mr Trump's connections there". This is where the famed MI6 tradecraft proved so useful. Steele is said to have "hired native Russian speakers to call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own connections in the country as well."
The word "contact" is a useful word for journalists because it could mean a highly-placed friend or, alternatively, it might refer to some lowly freelancer who is being paid to supply information. Having Russian speakers call up Russians in Russia is an astute move, though it presupposes that FSB does not monitor foreign phone calls to people with sensitive information.
I suspect that those Iraqi defectors who used to tell me tall tales about WMD and the home life of Saddam Hussein would have dreamed up a more convincing story than this.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
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The Russian Patsy
by GEOFF DUTTON
JANUARY 13, 2017
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/13/t...ian-patsy/
"We are going to do a terrible thing to youwe are going to deprive you of an enemy."
~ Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for U.S and Canada Studies, 1988
Quote:The Soviet Union was the most militarily powerful enemy the United States has ever faced, and after its demise in 1990, US foreign policy and military strategy hasn't done so well. Since Grenada, the US has lost or stalemated every armed conflict it engaged in. (Let's not count Libyait had already surrendered before we decided to bomb it.) We still have holdovers from the Axis of EvilSyria, North Korea, and Cubathat we can't seem to defeat. Nixon lost China and Obama gave up on Cuba, yet it seems our leaders still cling to the notion of bringing Russia into America's orbit. This will be news to many people, but that objectiveturning Russia into a US client statehas smoldered among the best and the brightest of our militarists since 1990. The election of Donald Trump has smothered but not extinguished that beacon of hope. Throughout all those decades "we will deprive you of an enemy" has met a chorus of murmurs saying "hold on, not so fast; we're not done with you yet…"
Now that we "know" that the Russians hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton advisor John Podesta and released them on Wikileaks, a chorus of outrage has swelled from the swells of Washington and editorial pages across the nation. Of course the recently-released joint intelligence report doesn't provide any real proof (that would reveal "sources and methods" don't you know), but that's enough to convince the masses that Vladimir Putin aims to sabotage American democracy.
Other than his immediate and obvious preference for wild-card Trump over neoliberal Clinton they don't say why Putin has this putative agendathat would be "speculationthey just want you to believe. So let me ask you, do you think the Russkies are out to destroy our democracy? If answered No, then how do you know? If you answered Yes, then likewise, what's your evidence? If you answered Don't Know, then join the club, but realize that you're in in the minority, along with Donald Trump, of course.
More and more American mainstream media outlets are becoming comfortable with calling Russia our main adversary, as if it were a proven fact that it has the US in its gun sights. I swear I heard an NPR reporter call Russia that a few days ago, but it seems to have been elided from the transcript. No matter and no need to single out NPR for this pernicious meme, which permeates the infosphere. Dissing Russia has become a media pastime even before members of the "intelligence community" managed to overcome their turf battles and petty jealousies to jointly communicate that Russian hackers, orchestrated by Vlad "The Inhaler" Putin, perpetrated cyber attacks on the DNC last summer. Their secret report and its sanitized version did not go so far as to claim that the theft of DNC and John Podesta's email and subsequent release on Wikileaks altered the course of the presidential election, but that's only in the narrow sense that the evildoers did not electronically electorally compromise the voting process.
But that doesn't mean it wasn't compromised or that the affair didn't affect the outcome. All that would have taken would have been for a sufficient number of voters not to signify for Hillary Clinton after learning of the double-dealing going on in the DNC. And of course, it could also have been the result of FBI Director James Comey announcing the Agency was going to investigate Clinton's use and abuse if her private email server, then closing the investigation, and next reopening it during the last week before the election, raising doubt in many voters' minds about her integrity (not, I grant you, that such doubts weren't already widespread). But let's not get into how Clinton managed to undermine her own candidacy in any number of ways. Her emails and the DNC scandal may not have done her in on their own, but they must have contributed to the evaporation of her substantial lead last October, when these matters were being widely taken up in the press.
Politicians of both parties and the so-called liberal media appear to have closed ranks behind the intelligence community to blame Russia for hacked revelations that, to a person, they agree did not alter the outcome of the election. But the events surrounding those revelations and the positions that Clinton's adversaries took probably did tilt the election in ways that nobody seems willing to discuss. Another possibly contributing factor that politicians and the media steer clear of is the use of electronic voting systems in swing states that are amenable to unverifiable tampering from within. No, it's so much easier for everyone on the losing side to blame the Russians and not open our own cans of worms.
There is, apparently, a certain nostalgia in certain high circles for the good old days of the cold war when the US and the Soviet Union were on hair-trigger alert for a nuclear engagement, and some of these circles encompass the highest levels of government and our military-industrial establishment.[1] Badmouthing Russia is simply a necessary first step toward gaining public acceptance for raising the threat level to the point where the US will have no choice but to militarily respond to its evil provocations. Respond, that is, beyond expanding NATO, arming Russia's neighbors in Eastern Europe with anti-missile installations and other advanced weapons systems, and conducting war games there that from Putin's perspective have tightened the military noose around the Russian Republic. Our war hawks can't forgive Putin for its accession of Crimea, a reaction primarily triggered by a CIA-engineered coup in Ukraine that installed an oligarch friendly to the West. Of course, that was no provocation.
Which brings us back to NPR and the rest of the "liberal media" taking for granted that Russia is our implacable adversary. Hence, not one major US news outlet has seen fit to investigate any alternative theory about the email hacking. It was, of all sources, the Tea Party that alerted me to credible allegations that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked. Its blog quoted an article in the UK Daily Mail about Craig Murray, a UK diplomat for 20 years until he was drummed out of the corps for contradicting official stories. In mid-December, Murray, who is close to Julian Assange, claimed that it was he, not the Russians, that gave the DNC emails to Wikileaks. He had obtained them, he said, on a flash drive from an intermediary in a wooded area on the campus of American University in Washington DC. Murray claims in his blog that the data had been downloaded by a disgruntled DNC staffer who had legitimate access to it and that Russia had nothing to do with any of it.
One can count on the fingers of the stump of one hand the number of US mainstream media outlets that have given time to Murray's allegations. Politifact has never bothered to check them out, but Snopes.com did and labeled them "unproven." Of course, Murray could have made this all up. He could be shilling for Putin for that matter. But the astounding thing is that no US news outlet (though plenty of bloggers) saw fit to run his story. In fact, Murray asserts (and provides evidence) that Facebook suppressed shares of his post. (After he called out Facebook for doing that, he said Facebook did unblock it.) One can only conclude that the American "free press" not only vigorously peddles the Russian hacking angle, it is bound and determined to suppress all alternative explanations.
It seems Russia has no need to destroy America's democratic institutions while our four estatesaided and abetted by think tanks, SuperPACs and corporate enterprisesare doing such a good job of it.
Notes.
[1] Readers too young to remember that MAD (mutual assured destruction) era should watch the recent PBS American Experience film Command and Control to see how close America came to nuking itself on more than one occasion.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
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The Deep State Wants to Deep Six Us
by DAVID SWANSON
JANUARY 16, 2017
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/16/t...ep-six-us/
Quote:What do these pieces of evidence tell you?
The United States and Russia each possess enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over.
Pentagon officials say the cold war with Russia is for profit and bureaucracy.
When there was danger of peace breaking out in Syria, the U.S. military acted to prevent it, apparently against the will of President Obama.
The U.S. facilitated a coup in Ukraine, characterized a secession vote in Crimea as an invasion and seizure by force, made unsubstantiated claims about the shooting down of an airplane, opened a missile base in Romania, started building a missile base in Poland, moved more troops and equipment into Eastern Europe than seen since World War II, dropped all pretense that the enemy provoking all this was Iran, and spread the word through endless repetition that Russia was threatening Europe (even though Russia, for all its real crimes and offenses, including bombing Syria, was not threatening Europe).
The U.S. so-called intelligence so-called community put out the word that Russia had hacked Vermont's electricity grid a story it had simply made up.
It may have been the same people who first claimed Trump had a computer server tied to a Russian bank. There was no evidence.
The media began running with stories that C-Span and other channels had been hacked by Russia. There was no evidence. C-Span said Russia didn't do it. Someone other than Russia had made Russian TV content air on C-Span.
The Washington Post whose owner makes far more from the CIA than from the Washington Post published an article promoting a ridiculous list of news sources, many of them among the best we've got, as being Russian propaganda.
The so-called "intelligence" so-called "services" put out a series of evidence-free reports and stories that convinced many Americans that Vladimir Putin had broken into U.S. election machines. The reports attempted to imply without actually claiming the possession of evidence that Russia hacked into Democrats' emails and gave them to WikiLeaks. Attempts at evidence of the first half of that fell wildly short, and the second half was not even attempted.
Things in those reports that could be checked independently tended to fall apart. ISPs identified as Russian were not Russian. When the reports were augmented with publicly available information about a Russian TV network, many of the details were stupidly screwed up, suggesting a serious lack of concern with accuracy.
When Donald Trump suggested evidence should be required before believing the CIA, out popped an unverified story of a Trump sex scandal and corruption.
To my mind, the above evidence suggests a death wish, an inclination toward speciecide. It should not be equated with simply opposing Donald Trump, though. I think the media's willingness to hand Trump billions of dollars worth of free airtime and, consequently, the White House, as well as the FBI director's possible support for Trump come from a similar inclination.
But the Deep State would attack its own mother if she opposed the selection of an enemy, and with it weapons sales and global domination. Do so at your own risk. Fail to do so at the risk of our future.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
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'If this guy is British you got a lot of problems': Trump calls on the UK to investigate ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele who wrote the dirty dossier
- Donald Trump has called on Britain to investigate ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele
- He added UK has got 'a lot of problems' after Steele wrote a dossier on Trump
- The dossier came to light last week and contained lurid sex claims about Trump
By JENNIFER NEWTON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 17:01, 16 January 2017 | UPDATED: 18:10, 16 January 2017
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...6-spy.html
Quote:Donald Trump has called on Britain to investigate an ex-MI6 spy who wrote a 'dirty dossier' full of lurid claims about the president-elect.
Christopher Steele compiled a 35-page report claiming that Trump was open to blackmail after allegedly being secretly filmed paying prostitutes to take part in a sex game on a hotel bed in Moscow.
Steele, who studied at Cambridge University, has packed his bags and fled his £1.5million Surrey mansion 'fearing for his life' and Russian reprisals after the story broke.
The President-elect and his aides have furiously denied the allegations in the reports with Trump himself branding BuzzFeed 'fake news' for publishing the claims.
And now in an interview with The Times, Trump has admitted he is so disgusted by lurid sex claims about himself, he was afraid to shake hands with anyone and has called for an investigation.
He told former British cabinet minister Michael Gove, who conducted the interview for the newspaper: 'I left, I wasn't even there... I was there for the Miss Universe contest, got up, got my stuff and I left I wasn't even there it's all... so if this guy is a British guy you got a lot of problems.
'Well, that guy is somebody that you should look at, because whatever he made up about me it was false he was supposedly hired by the Republicans and Democrats working together even that I don't believe because they don't work together, they work separately and they don't hire the same guy what they got together?
'See the whole thing is fake news because it said the, whoever it was, intelligence, the so-called intelligence, said he's an operative of Republicans and Democrats they don't work together, they don't work together.'
Meanwhile when asked who he thought was behind the dossier, the president-elect said he thought it could be the Democratic party or intelligence.
He added: 'When I just heard it I ripped up the mat... if I did that in a hotel it'd be the biggest thing they'd have me on the front page of The New York Post, right?'
Steele's dossier came to light last week and it claimed among other things that Russia had tapes of Trump engaging in 'perverted sexual acts' while in a Moscow hotel room.
It circulated for months among major media outlets but neither the news organisations nor US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to corroborate them.
Steele, a married father-of-four, who set up his own intelligence agency - Orbis Business intelligence company - has now gone into hiding.
His involvement in the dossier leak has also embarrassed Prime Minister Theresa May only weeks before she is due to fly to America to meet the new US President.
The revelations have also damaged Britain's shaky relations with Vladimir Putin.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
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US Intel Agencies Try to Strong-Arm Trump into War With Russia
by MIKE WHITNEY
JANUARY 10, 2017
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/10/u...th-russia/
Quote:Powerful elites are using the credibility of the US Intelligence agencies to demonize Russia and prepare the country for war. This is the real meaning of the "Russia hacking" story which, as yet, has not produced any hard evidence of Russian complicity.
Last week's 25-page report, that was released by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, illustrates to what extent intelligence is being "fixed around the policy". Just as the CIA generated false information related to Weapons of Mass Destruction to soften public resistance to war with Iraq, so too, the spurious allegations in the DNI's politically-motivated report are designed to depict Russia as a growing threat to US national security. The timing of the report has less to do with the election of Donald Trump as President than it does with critical developments in Syria where the Russian military has defeated US-proxies in Syria's industrial hub, Aleppo, rolling back Washington's 15-year War of Terror and derailing the imperialist plan to control vital resources and pipeline corridors across the Middle East and Central Asia. Russia has become the main obstacle to Washington achieving its strategic vision of pivoting to Asia and maintaining its dominant role into the next century. The Intelligence Community has been coerced into compromising its credibility to incite fear of Russia and to advance the geopolitical ambitions of deep state powerbrokers.
The "Russia hacking" flap shows how far the Intel agencies have veered from their original mandate, which is to impartially gather and analyze information that may be vital to US national security. As we have seen in the last two weeks, the leaders of these organizations feel free to offer opinions on issues that clearly conflict with those of the new President-elect. Trump has stated repeatedly that he wants to reduce tensions and reset relations with Russia, but that policy is being sabotaged by members of the intelligence community, particularly CIA Director John Brennan who appeared just last week on PBS Newshour with Judy Woodruff. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
"We see that there are still a lot of actions that Russia is undertaking that undermine the principles of democracy in so many countries. What has happened in our recent election is not new. The Russians have engaged in trying to manipulate elections in Europe for a number of years…
the Russians tried to interfere in our electoral process recently, and were actively involved in that. And that is something that we can't countenance." ("Interview with CIA Director John Brennan", PBS Newshour)
Brennan, of course, provided no evidence for his claims nor did he mention the hundreds of CIA interventions around the world. But Brennan's accusations are less important than the fact that his appearance on a nationwide broadcast identifies him as a political advocate for policies that conflict with those of the new president. Do we really want unelected intelligence officials whose job it is to provide the president with sensitive information related to national security to assume a partisan role in shaping policy? And why would Brennan whose is supposed to "serve at the pleasure of the president" accept an invitation to offer his views on Russia when he knew they would be damaging to the new administration?
Powerful people behind the scenes are obviously pushing the heads of these intelligence agencies to stick to their anti-Moscow' narrative to force Trump to abandon his plan for peaceful relations with Moscow. Brennan isn't calling the shots and neither are Clapper or Comey. They're all merely agents serving the interests of establishment plutocrats whose geopolitical agenda doesn't jibe with that of the incoming administration. If that wasn't the case, then why would the Intelligence Community stake its reputation on such thin gruel as this Russian hacking gibberish? It doesn't make any sense. The people who launched this campaign are either supremely arrogant or extremely desperate. Which is it? Here's an excerpt from an article by veteran journalist Robert Parry sums it up like this in an article at Consortium News:
"The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons to suspect that Russia was the source of the information built largely on the argument that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations with Republican nominee Trump.
But the case, as presented, is one-sided and lacks any actual proof. Further, the continued use of the word "assesses" as in the U.S. intelligence community "assesses" that Russia is guilty suggests that the underlying classified information also may be less than conclusive because, in intelligence-world-speak, "assesses" often means "guesses." ("US Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia Hack'", Robert Parry, Consortium News)
Bottom line: Brennan and his fellow spooks have nothing. The report is little more than a catalogue of unfounded assumptions, baseless speculation and uncorroborated conjecture. In colloquial parlance, it's bullshit, 100 percent, unalloyed Russophobic horse-manure. In fact, the authors admit as much in the transcript itself when they say:
"Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents."
What kind of kooky admission is that? So the entire report could be BS but we're supposed to believe that Putin flipped the election? Is that it???
What's really going on here? Why have the Intelligence agencies savaged their credibility just to convince people that Russia is up to no good?
The Russia hacking story has more to do with recent developments in Syria than it does with delegitimizing Donald Trump. Aleppo was a real wake up call for the US foreign policy establishment which is beginning to realize that their plans for the next century have been gravely undermined by Russia's military involvement in Syria. Aleppo represents the first time that an armed coalition of allied states (Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah) have actively engaged US jihadist-proxies and soundly beat them to a pulp. The stunning triumph in Aleppo has spurred hope among the vassal states that Washington's bloody military juggernaut can be repelled, rolled back and defeated. And if Washington's CIA-armed, trained and funded jihadists can be repelled, then the elitist plan to project US power into Central Asia to dominate the world's most populous and prosperous region, will probably fail. In other words, the outcome in Aleppo has cast doubts on Uncle Sam's ability to successfully execute its pivot to Asia.
That's why the Intel agencies have been employed to shape public perceptions on Russia. Their job is to prepare the American people for an escalation of hostilities between the two nuclear-armed superpowers. US powerbrokers are determined to intensify the conflict and reverse facts on the ground. (Recent articles by elites at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institute reveal that they are as committed to partitioning Syria as ever.) Washington wants to reassert its exceptional role as the uncontested steward of global security and the lone unipolar' world power.
That's what this whole "hacking" fiasco is about. The big shots who run the country are trying to strong-arm the Donald' into carrying their water so the depredations can continue and Central Asia can be transformed into a gigantic Washington-dominated corporate free trade zone where the Big Money calls the shots and Capital reigns supreme. That's their dreamstate, Capitalist Valhalla.
They just need Trump to get-with-the-program so the bloodletting can continue apace.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
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More Proof CIA Has Always Been Full Of Sh*t-- Church Committee Hearings of 1975
Published on 12 Jan 2017
Proof that the CIA has lied to the public in the past.
Jimmy Dore breaks it down:
[video=youtube_share;Uy5AezXWYao]http://youtu.be/Uy5AezXWYao[/video]
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
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Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire
Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL and DAVID STERN 01/11/17 05:05 AM EST
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/uk...ire-233446
Quote:Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
Russia's effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country's military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said "I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case."
There's little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country's election. And President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.
08_donald_trump_107_ap_1160.jpg
Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections.
Russia's meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. The U.S. intelligence community undertook the rare move of publicizing its findings on the matter, and President Barack Obama took several steps to officially retaliate, while members of Congress continue pushing for more investigations into the hacking and a harder line against Russia, which was already viewed in Washington as America's leading foreign adversary.
Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko's regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin's regime.
Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials "to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations."
"Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Ukraine," said David A. Merkel, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who helped oversee U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine while working in George W. Bush's State Department and National Security Council.
Merkel, who has served as an election observer in Ukrainian presidential elections dating back to 1993, noted there's some irony in Ukraine and Russia taking opposite sides in the 2016 presidential race, given that past Ukrainian elections were widely viewed in Washington's foreign policy community as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia.
"Now, it seems that a U.S. election may have been seen as a surrogate battle by those in Kiev and Moscow," Merkel said.
The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump's team and alignment with Clinton's can be traced back to late 2013. That's when the country's president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. Instead, Yanukovych entered into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under Putin's protection.
In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the radar.
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party.
In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities including Ukrainian-Americans she said that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well.
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump's campaign Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign, "I felt there was a Russia connection," Chalupa recalled. "And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election," said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was "Putin's political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections."
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She said she shared her concern with Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn't particularly concerned about the operative's ties to Trump since he didn't believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump's ties to Russia let alone Manafort's were not the subject of much attention.
That all started to change just four days after Chalupa's meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation.
A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an "informal conversation," saying "briefing' makes it sound way too formal," and adding, "We were not directing or driving her work on this." Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation agreed that with the DNC's encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort's ties to Yanukovych.
While the embassy declined that request, officials there became "helpful" in Chalupa's efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. "If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with." But she stressed, "There were no documents given, nothing like that."
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, "they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It's a political issue, and they didn't want to get involved politically because they couldn't."
Shulyar vehemently denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining "we were stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to interfere into the campaign affairs."
Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine. According to the embassy's website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna Hopko, who discussed "Ukraine's fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas," and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign.
Shulyar said her work with Chalupa "didn't involve the campaign," and she specifically stressed that "We have never worked to research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort."
But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. "Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa," recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. "They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa," he said, adding "Oksana was keeping it all quiet," but "the embassy worked very closely with" Chalupa.
In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, "If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump's involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September."
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort's hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. But, Chalupa said, "It didn't go anywhere."
Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a "touchy subject" in an internal email to colleagues that was accidentally forwarded to Politico.
Kaptur's office later emailed an official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an independent commission to investigate "possible outside interference in our elections." The office added "at this time, the evidence related to this matter points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of foreign entities interfering in our elections."
Almost as quickly as Chalupa's efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas.
Within a few weeks of her initial meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what became a series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account, warning her that "state-sponsored actors" were trying to hack into her emails.
She kept up her crusade, appearing on a panel a week after the initial hacking message to discuss her research on Manafort with a group of Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the Library of Congress for a program sponsored by a U.S. congressional agency called the Open World Leadership Center.
Center spokeswoman Maura Shelden stressed that her group is nonpartisan and ensures "that our delegations hear from both sides of the aisle, receiving bipartisan information." She said the Ukrainian journalists in subsequent days met with Republican officials in North Carolina and elsewhere. And she said that, before the Library of Congress event, "Open World's program manager for Ukraine did contact Chalupa to advise her that Open World is a nonpartisan agency of the Congress."
Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center "put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort."
In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she'd been "working with for the past few weeks" with Isikoff "and connected him to the Ukrainians" at the event.
Isikoff, who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event, declined to comment.
Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that she intended to share "offline" with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including "a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on you should be aware of." Explaining that she didn't feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about "state-sponsored" hacking on her account, explaining, "Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo account despite changing my password often."
Dillon and Miranda declined to comment.
A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party's political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms.
Nonetheless, Chalupa's hacked email reportedly escalated concerns among top party officials, hardening their conclusion that Russia likely was behind the cyber intrusions with which the party was only then beginning to grapple.
Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into Manafort, Trump and Russia. She said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to "a lot of journalists" working on stories related to Manafort and Trump's Russia connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment.
About a month-and-a-half after Chalupa first started receiving hacking alerts, someone broke into her car outside the Northwest Washington home where she lives with her husband and three young daughters, she said. They "rampaged it, basically, but didn't take anything valuable left money, sunglasses, $1,200 worth of golf clubs," she said, explaining she didn't file a police report after that incident because she didn't connect it to her research and the hacking.
But by the time a similar vehicle break-in occurred involving two family cars, she was convinced that it was a Russia-linked intimidation campaign. The police report on the latter break-in noted that "both vehicles were unlocked by an unknown person and the interior was ransacked, with papers and the garage openers scattered throughout the cars. Nothing was taken from the vehicles."
Then, early in the morning on another day, a woman "wearing white flowers in her hair" tried to break into her family's home at 1:30 a.m., Chalupa said. Shulyar told Chalupa that the mysterious incident bore some of the hallmarks of intimidation campaigns used against foreigners in Russia, according to Chalupa.
"This is something that they do to U.S. diplomats, they do it to Ukrainians. Like, this is how they operate. They break into people's homes. They harass people. They're theatrical about it," Chalupa said. "They must have seen when I was writing to the DNC staff, outlining who Manafort was, pulling articles, saying why it was significant, and painting the bigger picture."
In a Yahoo News story naming Chalupa as one of 16 "ordinary people" who "shaped the 2016 election," Isikoff wrote that after Chalupa left the DNC, FBI agents investigating the hacking questioned her and examined her laptop and smartphone.
Chalupa this month told Politico that, as her research and role in the election started becoming more public, she began receiving death threats, along with continued alerts of state-sponsored hacking. But she said, "None of this has scared me off."
While it's not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign and certainly for Manafort can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency and publicized by a parliamentarian appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.
The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers' existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were "a focus" of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry.
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One of the most damaging Russia-related stories during Donald Trump's campaign can be traced to the Ukrainian government. | AP Photo
Clinton's campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats' argument that Trump's campaign was closely linked to Russia. The ledger represented "more troubling connections between Donald Trump's team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine," Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, said in a statement. He demanded that Trump "disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort's and all other campaign employees' and advisers' ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump's employees or advisers are currently representing and or being paid by them."
A former Ukrainian investigative journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part of Poroshenko's party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively investigate Manafort.
"I believe and understand the basis of these payments are totally against the law we have the proof from these books," Leshchenko said during the news conference, which attracted international media coverage. "If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think he has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine," Leshchenko added.
Manafort denied receiving any off-books cash from Yanukovych's Party of Regions, and said that he had never been contacted about the ledger by Ukrainian or American investigators, later telling POLITICO "I was just caught in the crossfire."
According to a series of memos reportedly compiled for Trump's opponents by a former British intelligence agent, Yanukovych, in a secret meeting with Putin on the day after the Times published its report, admitted that he had authorized "substantial kickback payments to Manafort." But according to the report, which was published Tuesday by BuzzFeed but remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin "that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this" an alleged statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger.
The scrutiny around the ledgers combined with that from other stories about his Ukraine work proved too much, and he stepped down from the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.
At the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine Trump. "For me, it was important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world," Leshchenko told the Financial Times about two weeks after his news conference. The newspaper noted that Trump's candidacy had spurred "Kiev's wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election," and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting that the majority of Ukraine's politicians are "on Hillary Clinton's side."
But by this month, Leshchenko was seeking to recast his motivation, telling Politico, "I didn't care who won the U.S. elections. This was a decision for the American voters to decide." His goal in highlighting the ledgers, he said was "to raise these issues on a political level and emphasize the importance of the investigation."
In a series of answers provided to Politico, a spokesman for Poroshenko distanced his administration from both Leshchenko's efforts and those of the agency that reLeshchenko Leshchenko leased the ledgers, The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. It was created in 2014 as a condition for Ukraine to receive aid from the U.S. and the European Union, and it signed an evidence-sharing agreement with the FBI in late June less than a month and a half before it released the ledgers.
The bureau is "fully independent," the Poroshenko spokesman said, adding that when it came to the presidential administration there was "no targeted action against Manafort." He added "as to Serhiy Leshchenko, he positions himself as a representative of internal opposition in the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko's faction, despite [the fact that] he belongs to the faction," the spokesman said, adding, "it was about him personally who pushed [the anti-corruption bureau] to proceed with investigation on Manafort."
But an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies.
"It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to," said the operative.
And, almost immediately after Trump's stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the investigations into the ledgers and the ledgers themselves.
An official with the anti-corruption bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, "Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case."
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Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko has sought to recast his investigation after the election. | Getty
And, while the anti-corruption bureau told Politico late last month that a "general investigation [is] still ongoing" of the ledger, it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. "As he is not the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law couldn't investigate him personally," the bureau said in a statement.
Some Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing away from investigating because the ledgers might have been doctored or even forged.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country's head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that "only one part of the black ledger appeared." He asked, "Where is the handwriting analysis?" and said it was "crazy" to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington with Trump allies, and said, "of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign."
And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication "a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady."
He added that he felt particularly wronged by efforts to cast his work in Ukraine as pro-Russian, arguing "all my efforts were focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West." He specifically cited his work on denuclearizing the country and on the European Union trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to Russia. "In no case was I ever involved in anything that would be contrary to U.S. interests," Manafort said.
Yet Russia seemed to come to the defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry charged that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a political weapon.
"Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump's election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs," Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing, according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry's website. "All of you have heard this remarkable story," she told assembled reporters.
Beyond any efforts to sabotage Trump, Ukrainian officials didn't exactly extend a hand of friendship to the GOP nominee during the campaign.
The ambassador, Chaly, penned an op-ed for The Hill, in which he chastised Trump for a confusing series of statements in which the GOP candidate at one point expressed a willingness to consider recognizing Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea as legitimate. The op-ed made some in the embassy uneasy, sources said.
"That was like too close for comfort, even for them," said Chalupa. "That was something that was as risky as they were going to be."
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned on Facebook that Trump had "challenged the very values of the free world."
Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a "clown" and asserting that Trump is "an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism."
Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the "diagnosis of a dangerous misfit," according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called Trump "dangerous for Ukraine and the US" and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader "fled to Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?"
The Trump-Ukraine relationship grew even more fraught in September with reports that the GOP nominee had snubbed Poroshenko on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Ukrainian president tried to meet both major party candidates, but scored only a meeting with Clinton.
Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country's ambassador in Washington, had actually instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump's campaign, even as it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump's leading GOP rival, Ted Cruz.
"We had an order not to talk to the Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his critical position on Crimea and the conflict," said Telizhenko. "I was yelled at when I proposed to talk to Trump," he said, adding, "The ambassador said not to get involved Hillary is going to win."
This account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko opponent, who said, "The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows this is from the Ukrainian side." He called the strategy "bad and short-sighted."
Andriy Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump's team during the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings for Chaly but was rebuffed.
"It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy," Artemenko said. "They did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team, to publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. … I think that they simply didn't meet because they thought that Hillary would win."
Shulyar rejected the characterizations that the embassy had a ban on interacting with Trump, instead explaining that it "had different diplomats assigned for dealing with different teams tailoring the content and messaging. So it was not an instruction to abstain from the engagement but rather an internal discipline for diplomats not to get involved into a field she or he was not assigned to, but where another colleague was involved."
And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trump's foreign policy team "to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the U.S."
Despite the outreach, Trump's campaign in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for the U.S. to provide "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged.
The outreach ramped up after Trump's victory. Shulyar pointed out that Poroshenko was among the first foreign leaders to call to congratulate Trump. And she said that, since Election Day, Chaly has met with close Trump allies, including Sens. Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for attorney general, and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while the ambassador accompanied Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine's vice prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, to a round of Washington meetings with Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer, and Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation, which played a prominent role in Trump's transition.
Many Ukrainian officials and operatives and their American allies see Trump's inauguration this month as an existential threat to the country, made worse, they admit, by the dissemination of the secret ledger, the antagonistic social media posts and the perception that the embassy meddled against or at least shut out Trump.
"It's really bad. The [Poroshenko] administration right now is trying to re-coordinate communications," said Telizhenko, adding, "The Trump organization doesn't want to talk to our administration at all."
During Nalyvaichenko's trip to Washington last month, he detected lingering ill will toward Ukraine from some, and lack of interest from others, he recalled. "Ukraine is not on the top of the list, not even the middle," he said.
Poroshenko's allies are scrambling to figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring and prosecuting grudges for years.
A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington partly to try to make inroads with the Trump transition team, but they were unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative familiar with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from the Washington lobbying firm BGR including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson about how to navigate the Trump regime.
Weeks later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine would pay the firm $50,000 a month to "provide strategic public relations and government affairs counsel," including "outreach to U.S. government officials, non-government organizations, members of the media and other individuals."
Firm spokesman Jeffrey Birnbaum suggested that "pro-Putin oligarchs" were already trying to sow doubts about BGR's work with Poroshenko. While the firm maintains close relationships with GOP congressional leaders, several of its principals were dismissive or sharply critical of Trump during the GOP primary, which could limit their effectiveness lobbying the new administration.
The Poroshenko regime's standing with Trump is considered so dire that the president's allies after the election actually reached out to make amends with and even seek assistance from Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine's efforts to make inroads with Trump.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko's rivals are seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trump's team. Some are pressuring him to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenko's who is being blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing if not engineering the country's anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians and operatives interviewed for this story. They say that several potential Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking audiences of their own with Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so.
"None of the Ukrainians have any access to Trump they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for it," said one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with Yuriy Boyko, a former vice prime minister under Yanukovych. Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and his representatives offered "to pay a shit-ton of money" to get access to Trump and his inaugural events, according to the consultant.
The consultant turned down the work, explaining, "It sounded shady, and we don't want to get in the middle of that kind of stuff."
SOME ELECTION INTERFERENCE IS MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS HOW UKRAINE MEDDLED ON BEHALF OF CLINTON
Published: January 15, 2017
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Some_Elec...8/Y/M.html
SOURCE: MICHAEL KRIEGER, LIBERTY BLITZKRIEG
Quote:A couple of days ago, Politico published a fascinating piece describing how factions associated with the current Ukrainian government apparently interfered in the U.S. election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The findings seem pretty damning, and certainly warrant at least some conversation within the American media given the 24/7 obsession with Russia. Nevertheless, most of you have probably never heard of this saga, since when it comes to the corporate media news cycle, some election interference is more equal than others.
The article is lengthy, and can be confusing at times given all the moving parts, but I highly encourage you to read it. Ukrainian interference in the election can be traced to essentially two sources. First, there was the apparent collaboration between the Ukrainian embassy in Washington D.C. and a highly paid Ukrainian-American DNC consultant, Alexandra Chalupa. The second angle is far more disturbing, and involves the publicization of a so-called ledger demonstrating corruption between Paul Manafort and pro-Russian elements in Ukraine, by a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko. Bizarrely, the investigation was effectively dropped after Trump won the election, making you wonder if there was anything really there in the first place.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
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Abolish the CIA
By Michael S. Rozeff
January 16, 2017
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/01/mich...olish-cia/
Quote:Every American who looks at the CIA objectively or in a balanced way and judges it by any number of criteria, such as moral, legal and pragmatic, should reach the conclusion that the CIA should be abolished. JFK wanted to break it into a million pieces. Trump is right to dismiss its intelligence reports about DNC hacking. The CIA war on Trump shows us immediately that the CIA is a rogue organization within the U.S. government and a severe threat to America.
The CIA is an internal threat to the rule of law and to the government that it supposedly serves. Senator Schumer acknowledges the CIA's unbridled power, its subversive power, its power to undermine even a president, especially one that wishes to control or alter the organization, when he says:
"Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. For a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this."
Schumer is saying that the CIA is so powerful that a president should not attempt to control it or else! The CIA is so powerful that elections do not matter when it comes to the CIA. The CIA stands alone. The Constitution that empowers the president as the Executive, the boss of government operations, does not matter. Basic American institutions and laws must bow before the threats that the CIA possesses. This is the assessment of a Senator beginning his 4th term and who is the highest ranking Democrat in the Senate in his post as minority leader.
The CIA is an organization that perpetually undermines traditional American values and moral values. It consistently kills innocent people. It continually causes instability and wars. It undermines other societies and our own. It interferes constantly in foreign nations, to the detriment of them and us. It is an unelected power that challenges elected officials. It favors abuses of power, including torture. Its actual value at generating usable intelligence is minimal, often wrong, often misleading, inaccurate and harmful as in the WMD that were never found in Iraq.
"The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an American Holocaust.' This quote and a detailed timeline of CIA atrocities is available.
William Blum has listed CIA interventions for us.
All that needs to be done to understand the enormity of CIA crimes against humanity is to associate each of these interventions with the deaths, injuries, disruption of lives and destruction that they have caused. The most recent of these are:
Afghanistan 1980s *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 *
Iraq 2003 *
Haiti 2004 *
Somalia 2007 to present
Honduras 2009
Libya 2011 *
Syria 2012
Ukraine 2014 *
The asterisks indicate a case where the CIA overthrew a government.
As long as Trump is at war with the CIA, a war that the CIA launched against him, not that this matters much because Trump has every right to change the CIA and the CIA has no right to disobey or blacken his name, he should attack the CIA much more completely and thoroughly. It deserves to be attacked. He should abolish it altogether. For a bone to those who have fears that the republic will fall without the CIA, whatever small amount of residual value that is present in its intelligence operations can easily be retained or transferred to other agencies. The latter are already in profuse abundance in Washington. The fact is, however, that the republic is more likely to fall further than it already has in the presence of the CIA than in its absence.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
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