The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[David Guyatt]

MARCH 30, 2017
The Surveillance State Behind Russia-gate: Will Trump Take on the Spooks?
by WILLIAM BINNEY AND RAY MCGOVERN




Email


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


The Wiretap' Red Herring


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Intelligence Community's Payback


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Source

[David Guyatt]

Meanwhile, from Wayne Madsen: "Congress/media get it wrong. Trump's ties are to Russian-Israeli Kosher Nostra mobsters, not the Russian government."

I don't read him as a rule but it looks to me - given Trumps mob connections -he has it correct on this issue.

https://twitter.com/WMRDC/status/847832792784400384

[David Guyatt]

I wonder if Tyler Durden will be proved right? I have my doubts.

On the other hand the Kosher-Nostra Mafiya allegation of Wayne Madsen may turn out to be the real story, but if it is, indeed, true can this be played out publicly? There are doubts that it can, I think, when one follows some of the leads of foreign donations to Hilary's campaign past year and the ingrained crookedness revealed by former FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds about US government officials.

The theory is that there's too much dirt that can be flung by both sides that will stick and the danger would be the destruction of public confidence in the whole political structure of the US - and that this, in turn, might possibly lead elsewhere --- to the UK and Europe perhaps -- resulting in a wide-scale collapse of government.

'Russiagate' Is Failing And Its Supporters Are Getting Concerned


Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Mar 31, 2017 8:48 PM
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Submitted by Alexander Mercouris of The Duran


Russiagate' is failing and its supporters are getting worried


Three weeks ago I wrote a piece for The Duran in which I suggested that the corner appeared to have been turned in the fake Russiagate' scandal.


What was a tentative conclusion then can now be firmed up.


Though the leaders of the US security services have denied the President's allegation that they wire-tapped him though they were careful not to deny that they mounted surveillance on him and his associates the President's claim that they did, in effect smoked them out.


Thus former DNI James Clapper admitted that he had seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians up to the point of his retirement on 20th January 2017, and former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell more recently has publicly trashed the whole story of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.


Possibly the single most important admission that no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians has been found came however from within the FBI itself, though it has gone almost completely unnoticed.


This came in the form of information deriving from an anonymous leak which appeared in an article in The New York Times on 5th March 2017. This leak almost certainly originated with FBI Director James Comey himself. The relevant sentence in the article reads as follows


In addition to being concerned about potential attacks on the bureau's credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public's expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia's efforts to disrupt the presidential election.
(bold italics added)


In my article of 6th March 2017 discussing this comment I said the following


This is very twisted language which shows that The New York Times is not reporting this part of the story straightforwardly. However the meaning is clear enough. The FBI is worried that the more discussion of its investigation there is extending all the way to discussions by no less a person than the President himself of court approved wiretaps the more people will fall for the false no smoke without fire' argument, and will feel let down by the FBI when it eventually announces that its investigation has drawn a blank.

This is an entirely valid concern, and is one of several reasons why such investigations are supposed to be confidential.

This is the second confirmation within a few hours from people who have held posts within the national security bureaucracy that the endlessly repeated claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia are not supported by evidence. The first was made by Clapper (see above) and the second was made anonymously to The New York Times by officials of the FBI.

These admissions follow a continuous pattern of admissions from officials within the national security bureaucracy now stretching back months that inquiries into claims of collusion by the Trump campaign and Russia are drawing a blank.
A further sign that the Russiagate' scandal is flagging is the way its supporters are latching on to non issues in order to keep it going.


Thus following the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday 20th March 2017 the militantly anti-Trump news media latched on to FBI Director Comey's formal confirmation that an FBI investigation was looking into the allegation of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, as if this was news, and made it the big story, even though the existence of this investigation has been public knowledge and the topic of exhaustive discussion in the media for months.


No doubt this was done in order to avoid mentioning the fact that the Committee on 20th March 2017 heard no evidence even slightly damaging to the President, but did hear evidence which appeared to confirm the truth of the President's claim that he and his campaign team had been placed under surveillance during the most critical months of the Presidential election campaign.


Then there was the way Representative Adam Schiff used in his opening statement at the Committee hearing the discredited Trump Dossier shot through with obvious falsehoods, uncorroborated by the intelligence agencies, and trashed by no less a person than Michael Morell as his frame story for his whole narrative of secret collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This is desperate, and shows how evidence-less and fact-free the whole Russiagate' story actually is.


Then there are the claims almost certainly originating in Ukraine about the supposedly nefarious activities of Donald Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort.


Not only have these claims been emphatically and authoritatively denied by the two people involved Manafort and Deripaska with Manafort asking to give evidence to the House Intelligence Committee to put the record straight and Deripaska threatening to sue anyone who repeats them, but since they involve alleged actions which took place years before Donald Trump launched his Presidential campaign, and have no connection to him, their relevance to the Russiagate' scandal is not obvious.


Lastly, there is the wholly bogus non-scandal around House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes, who is obviously being targeted by the Democrats because of his increasingly openly expressed and entirely justified skepticism about the whole Russiagate' story.


To be clear, Nunes's decision to share information about surveillance of the President and his team during the transition period with the White House before he shared it with his Committee colleagues was no doubt a mistake and one which Nunes has apologised for but it is hardly a serious one, or one which would justify removing him from his chairing of the Committee.


To my mind what this episode shows is how sensitive the Democrats are about the raising of the whole surveillance issue. This lends further strength to my opinion which I note is coming to be increasingly widely shared that it is the surveillance carried out during the election of Donald Trump and his campaign team which is the real scandal in this affair, and that the fake Russiagate' scandal is the smoke-screen concealing it.


Having increasingly given up on the House Intelligence Committee, the proponents of the Russiagate' scandal now seem increasingly to be resting their hopes on the Senate Intelligence Committee.


They will be equally disappointed there. These attempts to use Congressional committees as investigative and prosecutorial instruments suffer from a basic misconception: these are oversight committees, not investigative or prosecutorial committees, and they cannot be used in that way. They cannot magic up evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia that the actual investigation the one carried out by the FBI says is not there.


The single most important fact about the last few weeks, and the clearest possible sign that the Russiagate' scandal is flagging, is that there have been no more leaks from within the intelligence and security agencies since the ones at the beginning of March about Jeff Sessions's meetings with the Russian ambassador.


That suggests that the former Obama administration officials, who I suspect were the people who were physically communicating the information in the leaks to the media, are no longer being fed information about Donald Trump and his associates or about the progress of the FBI investigation by their sources within the intelligence and national security bureaucracy.


That could be because people within the intelligence and national security bureaucracy are being deterred by the investigation into the leaking of classified material which the President has been calling for but which the House Intelligence Committee hearing on 20th March 2017 suggested FBI Director Comey is resisting (almost certainly because people within the FBI were involved in the leaks), or it could be because increasingly there is no damaging information to leak.


Regardless of what the explanation is, in the absence of any more leaks there has been nothing over the last few weeks for the supporters of Russiagate' to work with. The result is that in the absence of anything new the effort to keep the Russiagate' scandal going and in the public eye is flagging.


My best guess is that it will collapse entirely by early summer.

Source

[David Guyatt]

A few years ago, Greg Burnham posted on this forum "A Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies" encompassing COINTEL techniques for dilution, misdirection and and control of an internet forum. It can be read HERE.

I recommend it be read and understood, as some of the techniques Greg identified are now being used in this folder. And it's going to stop.

[Dawn Meredith]

Ray McGovern on RT's CrossTalk

A family member- distant- of mine made a negative comment about RT being propaganda when I posted this on fb yesterday. I asked her to watch the video THEN decide. Of course that was the end of the conversation. I am so sick of people who have an OPINION based on mockingbird lies but refuse to look at any evidence to the contrary that I am unfriending and blocking people left and right. Life is too short to deal with such closed minds. Before all this Russian hysteria I hardly ever unfriended or blocked anyone. This particular story- with zero f'ing EVIDENCE is a real test of who can separate truth from mocking bird lies. It appears in their hatred of 45
a new cold war is preferable. Scary, disgusting and intolerable.

[Dawn Meredith]

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

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

The US is not a "democracy". And why on earth would you accuse anyone of "enjoying" this? Clearly your hatred of Trump is causing you to believe a story based on lies.

[Dawn Meredith]

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

OK. Now that settles it for me. I feel like I am living in the movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There are any number of people I thought to be enlightened enough to know when they are being lied to, or at least being played, and then ... they suddenly are strangely different. They just start saying bullshit.

Then of course there's the recent Brain Dead on Amazon Prime where peoples brains are eaten by space bugs.



Are we seeing the start of mass brain washing?

Oh, wait.... :: .... :hock:: ... ::flyingpig:: ...

You idiots. Putin. Everywhere. Traitors. I love the CIA. It's all so clear. ::

Ahhhh that explains it all. An Amazon prime show predicted all of this. ::cokesniff::

Seriously, I loved this series.

[Albert Doyle]

Amazon owner Bezos is now the 2nd richest man in America behind Bill Gates.

[Cliff Varnell]

The Resistance is nothing if not spectacular at times, though not in the way Debord defined "spectacle."

The Women's Marches in major cities on Jan 21 '17 were truly spectacular non-violent public demonstrations.

The town hall meetings filled with raucous voters are mini-spectacles of public anger.

It's not France May '68 by a long shot but potent nonetheless.

I think you and Tracy would look great in a knitted pussy power hat, though not, I dare say, in the alternatives proposed by Holly Derr (a knitted imitation vagina, as far as I can make out) or Andi Zeisler, the co-founder of Bitch Media and author of We Were Feminists Once, who appears to have argued for witch hats ("We need to go full witch. We need to really scare some folks")*.

I wonder if the precise fashion choice shouldn't be entrusted to a panel comprising George Soros, some psycho from the CIA, and Rachel Maddow?

*http://www.elle.com/culture/career-polit...t-protest/

Nice to see all that Soros money pouring into Liverpool!



Liverpool Women's March sees hundreds gather at St George's Hall



http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/live...s-12487584

Liverpool fans' wives have to do something with their spare time, even if it is only to march in support of the American Deep State & its transparent coup attempt.

Quite a number of punters in that crowd protesting the coup that brought the Big Orange Fascist into power.

Over the last 11 days of the 2016 Rigged Election the American airwaves were flooded with denunciations of Clinton.

Follow the music of the Mighty Wurlitzer...there have been more US airstrikes in Yemen in the past month than all of 2016, for instance...

[David Guyatt]

I think you and Tracy would look great in a knitted pussy power hat, though not, I dare say, in the alternatives proposed by Holly Derr (a knitted imitation vagina, as far as I can make out) or Andi Zeisler, the co-founder of Bitch Media and author of We Were Feminists Once, who appears to have argued for witch hats ("We need to go full witch. We need to really scare some folks")*.

I wonder if the precise fashion choice shouldn't be entrusted to a panel comprising George Soros, some psycho from the CIA, and Rachel Maddow?

*http://www.elle.com/culture/career-polit...t-protest/

Nice to see all that Soros money pouring into Liverpool!



Liverpool Women's March sees hundreds gather at St George's Hall



http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/live...s-12487584

Liverpool fans' wives have to do something with their spare time, even if it is only to march in support of the American Deep State & its transparent coup attempt.

Quite a number of punters in that crowd protesting the coup that brought the Big Orange Fascist into power.

Over the last 11 days of the 2016 Rigged Election the American airwaves were flooded with denunciations of Clinton.

Follow the music of the Mighty Wurlitzer...there have been more US airstrikes in Yemen in the past month than all of 2016, for instance...

Yes, but Yemen is principally a Saudi operation. It's one of those "peculiar" wars driven by the US but actioned by the Saudi's. The official doctrine, clearly a lie, is that US airstrikes in Yemen are focused on killing al-Qaeda leaders. And yet it is al-Qeda who is a paid and outfitted pawn of the US (there are a number of articles that have revealed this, btw).

So... despite my hopes based on his early comments it looks to me that Trump's statements to the contrary were not to happen - or rather were not allowed to happen, and the conclusion is, imo, that Trump has been aligned post election to acdept certain demands as the cost of retaining his presidency until the next election when the whole circus will start again. Assuming he isn't impeached, of course.

I see this as yet further confirmation that the US financial system remains predicated on war and has been ever since it emerged as the new world power just post WWII.

Wind back over 50 years to Eisenhower's warning about the Military Industrial Complex and the meaning of what he said. Wind it even further back to just prior to WWII when the CFR War & Peace Studies Group, knowing and understanding that the British Empire was irredeemably fucked (this was in any case known by the Rhodes-MIlner "Group" by the late 1800's - hence their desire to amalgamate with the US no matter what the cost) - elected to take over the role of warmonger-in-chief as the new Anglo super-power. Ever since WWII, war has been the main cornerstone of US financial hegemony.