The attempted Clinton-CIA coup against Donald Trump

[James Lateer]

What a fantastic repartee on this very crucial issue right now, today in America.

1) Yes, Lockheed, Goldman-Sachs, Blackwater, the WTO, etc etc. are undoubtedly considered by most people reading this to be part of the National Security State.

2) Lockheed is a perfect example of the dilemma. The Air Force was made separate by the National Security Act of 1947 as was the Department of Defense. Prior to that, the Army had Army Arsenals, the Navy had Navy Yards, but the Air Force had neither. Therefore, the Air Force had to hook up with Aerospace Contractors to create an instant research and testing network. So they sort of "merged" with Lockheed, and the Skunk-works of engineer Kelly Johnson. So the relationship of Lockheed and the National Security State was born out of the 1947 Act.

3) Trump may be a globalist by definition just because he sponsors hotels in dozens of countries.

4) However, it was the 1947 Act which is still causing these current problems. There was no such thing a as a National Security Advisor until 1947. There was no CIA or NSA. There was no defense department. At the time the National Security Act of 1947 was enacted, it was actually discussed that the President might be made a member of a 5-man committee and the President would only get one of the five votes to make decisions. That's how far they went to try and sabotage the Presidency (and thus the US) with the 1947 Act.

5) It's because of the 1947 restructuring of the Presidency and Congressional Committees (in 1946) that we have had the JFK murder, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Iran Contra investigations and the Clinton investigation and impeachment.

6) In my definition, it is specifically the Frankenstein created in 1946 and 1947 that is the true National Security State that is currently causing problems for Trump. And in this regard, it doesn't matter whether he is a globalist by some definitions or whether he is in love with the idea of billions of dollars and billionaires.

7) Trump is trying to be President and he is at war with the Internal Machinery created by the National Security Act of 1947 for the purposes of frustrating his presidency (or the presidency of anyone) who does not relinquish control of the Presidency while in office to this Frankenstein. The Frankenstein is the politicized FBI, the CIA, the DOD, the Pentagon (built around 1943), the "special counsels", the FISA court and most importantly, the National Security Council.

8) For the first 65 years of my life, I never heard of the National Security Council. Americans should pay specific attention to this problem. That's not to say that Lockheed and the Military Industrial Complex isn't a huge problem. Or the sleazy international bankers like Goldman-Sachs who wrecked the economy under GW Bush.

9) But Trump has good ideas on trade, immigration and foreign guest workers. In that sense, he is a nationalist and not a globalist. He may actually be lying about this point. But he should be given a chance to do what he has said he will do with tariffs and the Wall.

10) And his biggest enemy is within his own administration: the Frankenstein National Security State.

James Lateer

[Cliff Varnell]

10) And his biggest enemy is within his own administration: the Frankenstein National Security State.

His biggest enemy is the 60% of the American public who oppose his racist/xenophobic/sexist policies, his war on the poor, his policy of massive wealth transfer from the bottom to the top, his upcoming war on Iran, his appointment of judges who usurp freedom, his constant prevarication, narcissistic kleptomania, limited intellect and emotional immaturity.

We fight this fascist scum in the courts, at the ballot box, and in the streets!

Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!

[James Lateer]

What a privilege to have the chance to debate the Trump problem with probably the best Trump opponents in the country. Three cheers for everyone who is reading this and is following this topic closely.

Although I have had to eat a lot of words lately, due to the pointed arguments of my fellow posters, I can only add:

1) According the the AP, Trump won 2623 counties in the 2016 election and Hilary Clinton won 489. He won 308 electoral votes to 277 for Hilary. Outside of California (where a lot of Republicans didn't waste time voting) he likely won even the popular vote. And you might even factor in the Libertarian votes in analyzing his support vs. the alternative. And of course, he bested 17 opponents in the Republican primary process.

2) What is puzzling is that so many people in both parties are calling Trump a fascist, yet they favor him being removed from office (without an election) by the National Police Force.

3) To me, that's an odd choice of expletive to be using against Trump in the "Trump vs. Mueller" battle.

4) Although J Edgar Hoover and his COINTELPRO program are criticized by many, the recent revelations about the communications of Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page and the actions of Rosenstein don't seem to represent an improvement over the mentality of J Edgar Hoover. How can these folks have so many friends, especially in high places?

5) The fact that Mueller was involved in the Whitey Bulger/FBI travesty only makes everything look even worse.

It's easy to claim that 60% of the people want to be rid of Trump, then have him removed by the National Police without an election. That's too close (for me) to the tactics used by Germany, the CIA, Hilary and Ukrainian Nazis to remove the elected government in Ukraine in 2014.

For people like me who pretty much like living in American under the American system, we have to keep in mind that the American Revolution was not just won at Yorktown. It had to be won again at Gettysburg. And it may have to be won a third time someplace soon in our own generation.

James Lateer

[Paul Rigby]

Dems Pin Midterm Hopes on Trump Hatred and "Ludicrous Conspiracy Theory"

MIKE WHITNEY APRIL 26, 2018

http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/dems-pin-mid...cy-theory/

The Democrats have decided to double-down on a political strategy that has divided the country, undermined confidence in public elections, alienated their progressive base and increased the chances of a violent clash with Russia. On Friday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a lawsuit charging the Russian government, the Trump campaign and Julian Assange of conspiring to sabotage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The 66-page legal complaint is a politically-motivated smokescreen intended to divert attention from the fact that that Dems have abandoned any pretense of representing the interests of working class people. The party leadership is now fully-committed to pursuing an elitist, anti-Russia, anti-Trump agenda that lacks any progressive component and which is entirely based on a ludicrous conspiracy theory for which there is not a shred of hard evidence. Simply put: The lawsuit is the last disgraceful nail in the coffin of a thoroughly-corrupted political organization that has lost all credibility and clearly outlived its shelf-life.The Democrats are now the party of Hillary Clinton, John Brennan and James Clapper. They represent the narrow interests of the Intelligence Agencies, the Pentagon, the foreign policy establishment and Wall Street. The reason why Barack Obama never prosecuted any of the bankers who precipitated the financial crisis and plunged the economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression, is because they represent the party's core constituency, the rapacious, obscenely-wealthy mandarins who grease the wheels on Capitol Hill, pull the political puppet-strings, and implement the belligerent policies that keep the country mired in one bloody conflict after the other. These are the behind-the-scenes powerbrokers who call the shots, rig the primaries, euthanize the party's progressive wing and throw leftist candidates, like Bernie Sanders, under the bus.

The 66-page lawsuit is a monument to stupidity that must be read to be believed. The document rehashes virtually all of the spurious allegations that have been leveled at Trump and Moscow for the last 18 months without any supporting evidence. The perpetrators of this legal charade obviously think that the media's relentless propaganda has convinced the American people that Russia did in fact "meddle" in the 2016 presidential elections and that Trump and Co, did "collude" with Russian agents. But that does not appear to be the case. Recent surveys indicate that one's feelings about the ongoing investigation are largely shaped by one's political orientation. In a January Quinnipiac survey, "Eighty-three percent of Republicans said the investigation was a witch hunt while 79 percent of Democrats thought it was legitimate". These strong partisan divisions do not bode well for the Dems who seem to believe that the lawsuit will help to sway voters in the midterm elections. That is not just a very cynical calculation, it also strikes me as a very bad bet. Russiagate skeptics whose numbers continue to grow are more likely to see the lawsuit as just another temper tantrum by crybaby Democrats who still can't accept the fact that their cherished NWO candidate lost the election to a rank amateur with no constituency and no experience. Bottom line: There's no reason to think that the DNC's pathetic lawsuit will succeed in luring uninformed voters into the Democrat's camp. As always, the condition of the economy will be a much larger factor in determining how people vote. And, at present, most people think the economy is in "good shape". Now take a look at this short excerpt from the DNC lawsuit:

"In the run-up to the 2016 election, Russia mounted a brazen attack on American democracy. The opening salvo was a cyber attack on the DNC, carried out on American soil… Russia then used this stolen information to advance its own interests: destabilizing the US political environment, denigrating the Democratic president nominee, and supporting the campaign of Donald J. Trump, whose policies would benefit the Kremlin."

"In the Trump campaign, Russia found a willing and active partner in this effort… Russian agents trespassed onto the DNC's computer network in the United States, as well as other email accounts, collected trade secrets and other private data, and then transmitted the data to Defendant WikiLeaks, whose founder, Assange, shared the defendants' common goal of damaging the Democratic party in advance of the election." (DNC Lawsuit)

This, of course, is the same sketchy fairytale the Dems have been reiterating for the last year and a half. So far, none of the main allegations have been verified, in fact, to date, there's not even a reasonable basis for believing that a crime has been committed which means that this massive investigation that has tied up both Houses of Congress and a Special Counsel for more than 18 months doesn't even meet minimal probable cause requirements. It's beyond outrageous, it is a criminal misuse of government resources to pursue a political vendetta that serves the exclusive interests of the losing party. That is not the way democracy is supposed to work.

The Dems do not expect to find any incriminating evidence that will tie Trump to Moscow nor is that even the point of the lawsuit. The real objective is to increase public suspicion of Trump thus tainting the party's leader as an election-rigging foreign collaborator. The Dems believe that their character assassination campaign which begin prior to the 2016 with the compiling of the nefarious "Trump Dossier remains their best path to victory in the midterms. The lawsuit is just part of that broader political calculation.

So what is the real motive behind this bogus lawsuit?

It's obvious, isn't it? The goal is to poison the minds of the American people against Trump, to persuade the masses that the President is not just a political opponent but a scurrilous traitor who poses a significant threat to national security. The DNC's below-the-belt tactics have never been "politics as usual". The Dems are engaged in a ruthless, scorched earth "dirty tricks" campaign designed to annihilate Donald Trump with one unverified slander after the other. This is agenda-driven political warfare at its very worst. The Dems aren't interested in the truth. What they care about is winning elections, and their treatment of Trump shows that they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. Whatever one thinks about Trump, (I voted for socialist candidate, Jerry White) the behavior if the Dems is nonetheless despicable.

The lawsuit helps to underscore an important point about the Dems, that is, that the party is no longer perceived to have any core convictions, ideology or beliefs. The corrupt and manipulative party leadership is comprised entirely of ingratiating sycophants who merely march in lockstep with the diktats of their "Big Money" constituents. Meanwhile, the grassroots base is kicked to the curb. The Washington Post recently "outed" the unprincipled Dems in a revealing article titled "A majority says the Democratic Party stands for nothing." Here's an excerpt:

"Whatever Trump's struggles, the poll shows clear risks of Democrats' opposition to Trump. Some 37 percent say the party currently stands for something, while 52 percent say it mainly stands against Trump. Even among Democrats, over one-quarter say their party primarily stands in opposition to Trump rather than for their own agenda." (Washington Post)

What a terrible indictment of a party adrift. Like the survey suggests, the Dems stand for nothing, it's the party of nothing, the Nothing Party. Oh, except for hating Trump, that is. The Dems are quite good at hating Trump, in fact, it has become the cornerstone upon which the entire political apparatus rests.

The Democratic base knows what it wants. The base wants jobs, health care, affordable college tuition, retirement savings and did I mention jobs? This is from NBC News:

"A December 2017 AP poll showed that health care and the economy matter far more to Americans, all things considered. Only 38 percent said "the Russia investigation" was very or extremely important. Compare that to the 85 percent who said the same about health care, 83 percent who gave that rating to the economy and 78 percent who felt that way about taxes."

Here's more from an article at the Washington Post:

"The fact that we have spent so much time talking about Russia has been a distraction from what should be the clear contrast between Democrats and the Trump agenda, which is on economics," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).

The Democratic polling firms … found the Comey news and concerns related to Russia are major liabilities for Republicans. But the pollsters found that the health-care issue is a significantly bigger driver of voter behavior. "A key imperative for Democrats and progressive organizations is to bring even greater attention to the health care issue in the weeks and months to come," the pollsters said in a memo about their numbers….Tamara Draut, vice president of policy and research for Demos, a liberal advocacy organization, said that focusing on pocketbook issues is the only way Democrats will win back working-class voters who defected from the party last year. ….We will win or lose the midterms based on the bread-and-butter kitchen table issues.

Democrats Should Focus More on Jobs, Less on Russia," progressive writer Robert Borosage urged his compatriots in a column for The Nation back in March. "Democrats are railing about the Russians and the last election, while Trump is talking jobs, law and order, protecting our borders, and health care. We know which of these speak to the challenges Americans face." (Washington Post)

So its' clear what the Democratic base wants, just as it is clear that the corrupt, tone-deaf DNC establishment will brush them aside to pursue their own lunatic "Trump collusion" scam. It's infuriating. The people at the top of this iniquitous pyramid, are completely impervious to the demands of their base. They just don't give a damn. Which is why they're probably headed for another big trainwreck in November.

As for the lawsuit, well, the flamboyant Roger Stone put it best in a recent post on his website titled "Why the DNC Lawsuit will Backfire". Here's a clip:

"This lawsuit is just the latest among many examples of the Democrats' unflinching resort to abusing institutions of our government for their cheap partisan chicanery and nefarious scheming. It should come as no surprise to anyone…We now know that some of the highest officials of the Obama regime, as well as intelligence and law enforcement agencies, criminally abused the most sensitive possible national security powers to spy on a major party presidential candidate and his campaign, during and after the election, using a salacious "dossier" they had fabricated in collusion with foreign spooks, paid for by Hillary Clinton herself….

The DNC's harassment legal action is…just politically-motivated litigation smear campaign by degenerate partisans willing and ready to, yet again, abuse the justice system for their sordid purpose." (Stone Cold truth, Roger Stone)

Bullseye, Roger, that sums it up perfectly.

[Paul Rigby]

Here's the REAL purpose and mission of the Deep State

To say that the game was rigged is probably the biggest understatement in the history of American politics and the game remains rigged

SERAPHIM HANISCH

May 29, 2018, 15:03

http://theduran.com/the-purpose-and-miss...ussiagate/

The media narrative on the pro-Trump side of things is that the RussiaGate investigation is on its last legs and that it is falling apart. The anti-Trump side of this matter says quite the opposite, and keeps promising that the damning evidence is just around the corner' and that the media sources involved are committed to bringing the truth to the American people', and so on.

The fact remains that the investigation and its counter-investigations are not over, and moreover, there is probably no REAL indication that they will ever actually end. This may sound like an incredibly bleak perspective but it really isn't. It is probably much more realistic to understand the nature of this activity for what it is, and also to understand that it is precisely BY that nature that this now 16 month long "witch hunt" is not going to end with the demise of RussiaGate, if even that investigation is ever put into the grave where it belongs.

A recent salvo in this war against the President was launched by the New York Times on May 16, in a piece of "investigative" reporting entitled "Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation." It starts out with the literary appeal of a good spy novel:

WASHINGTON Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia in the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. dispatched a pair of agents to London on a mission so secretive that all but a handful of officials were kept in the dark.

Their assignment, which has not been previously reported, was to meet the Australian ambassador, who had evidence that one of Donald J. Trump's advisers knew in advance about Russian election meddling. After tense deliberations between Washington and Canberra, top Australian officials broke with diplomatic protocol and allowed the ambassador, Alexander Downer, to sit for an F.B.I. interview to describe his meeting with the campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos.

The agents summarized their highly unusual interview and sent word to Washington on Aug. 2, 2016, two days after the investigation was opened. Their report helped provide the foundation for a case that, a year ago Thursday, became the special counsel investigation. But at the time, a small group of F.B.I. officials knew it by its code name: Crossfire Hurricane

.

This piece, a massive effort by the writers Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos, stands as a very skillfully written attempt to prove that there really is some sort of case here, that the intelligence agencies were too "tough" on Hillary Clinton with regards to the e-mail issue and too "soft" on Donald Trump. If a reader was to rely on this publication, it would truly seem that something sinister was afoot in the Trump camp while the government agencies perhaps, in an effort to be "fair" actually stepped all over themselves and ended up being more unfair to Hillary Clinton than they should have.

However, this narrative attempt was addressed by National Review's Andrew McCarthy in his pieces run in that magazine on May 17th, and again with a different angle on May 19th.

The May 17th piece is essentially a rebuttal of the Times piece, and in it Mr. McCarthy wastes no time getting down to the brass tacks of his own view of this piece as a masterful attempt at spin:

The quick take on the 4,100-word opus is that the Gray Lady "buried the lede." Fair enough: You have to dig pretty deep to find that the FBI ran "at least one government informant" against the Trump campaign and to note that the Times learned this because "current and former officials" leaked to reporters the same classified information about which, just days ago, the Justice Department shrieked "Extortion!" when Congress asked about it.

But that's not even the most important of the buried ledes. What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party's presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

The Times barely mentions the word counterintelligence in its saga. That's not an accident. The paper is crafting the media-Democrat narrative. Here is how things are to be spun: The FBI was very public about the Clinton-emails investigation, even making disclosures about it on the eve of the election. Yet it kept the Trump-Russia investigation tightly under wraps, despite intelligence showing that the Kremlin was sabotaging the election for Trump's benefit. This effectively destroyed Clinton's candidacy and handed the presidency to Trump.

Mr. McCarthy's later piece made significant further points, as he finally approached what is probably one of the main questions about this whole matter the question of "Why?" and "How was the RussiaGate investigation initially justified?"

As we contended in rebuttal on Thursday, the Times' facts are selective and its narrative theme of disparate treatment is hogwash: Clinton's bid was saved, not destroyed, by Obama's law-enforcement agencies, which tanked a criminal case on which she should have been indicted. And the hush-hush approach taken to the counterintelligence case against Donald Trump was not intended to protect the Republican candidate; it was intended to protect the Obama administration from the specter of a Watergate-level scandal had its spying on the opposition party's presidential campaign been revealed.

And McCarthy doesn't stop here. He continues, later:

It has now been confirmed that the Trump campaign was subjected to spying tactics under counterintelligence law FISA surveillance, national-security letters, and covert intelligence operatives who work with the CIA and allied intelligence services. It made no difference, apparently, that there was an ongoing election campaign, which the FBI is supposed to avoid affecting; nor did it matter that the spy targets were American citizens, as to whom there is supposed to be evidence of purposeful, clandestine, criminal activity on behalf of a foreign power before counterintelligence powers are invoked.

But what was the rationale for using these spying authorities?

The fons et origo of the counterintelligence investigation was the suspicion which our intelligence agencies assure us is a fact that the Democratic National Committee's server was hacked by covert Russian operatives. Without this cyber-espionage attack, there would be no investigation. But how do we know it really happened? The Obama Justice Department never took custody of the server no subpoena, no search warrant. The server was thus never subjected to analysis by the FBI's renowned forensics lab, and its evidentiary integrity was never preserved for courtroom presentation to a jury.

How come? Well, you see, there was an ongoing election campaign, so the Obama Justice Department figured it would be a terrible imposition to pry into the Democrats' communications. So, yes, the entire "Russia hacked the election" narrative the nation has endured for nearly two years hinges on the say-so of CrowdStrike, a private DNC contractor with significant financial ties to the Clinton campaign.

In Investigations 101, using foreign-intelligence authorities to spy on Americans is extraordinary, while taking custody of essential physical evidence is basic. By the way, the government's failure to ensure the evidentiary integrity of the DNC server by taking possession of it and performing its own rigorous testing on it makes it practically impossible to prosecute anyone for "colluding" in Russia's cyber-espionage. It's tough to prove that anyone conspired in something unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the something actually happened the way you say it happened. To do that in a courtroom, you need evidence a confident probability analysis by your intelligence agencies won't do.

This above information was extensively reported by Rush Limbaugh on his radio program during the following week, as the radio pundit noted that Andrew McCarthy had found his way to the basic question of "What document or source was presented to the authorities to get them to begin this series of investigations?" And to date, there is no answer to this question.

The situation is shaping up to be a massive political scandal, indeed, if properly and honestly viewed, one that would make Watergate look like a simple theft of an ice cream cone by some headstrong kid on the street. But even here, the presence of the Deep State and its power through the mainstream press blunts the efforts to expose this unconstitutional and illegal behavior by the Deep State establishment for what it is.

However, it is not being ignored. FoxNews.com reported late Sunday, May 27, that President Trump had several things to say about the Deep State and its attempts to disrupt his candidacy and to destroy his presidency.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/stat...eduran_com

These remarks came several hours after he lashed out at special counsel Robert Mueller's probe on the social media platform.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/stat...eduran_com

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/stat...eduran_com

In the review of facts, it is apparent that the Trump campaign was clean of any collusion with Russia or any other foreign power. It is surprising that the idea of Russian interference even is worth mentioning by President Trump himself, because there has been found no evidence at all that operatives in the Russian Government in any way worked with Trump's campaign to fool the American people and get Trump elected. In the now immortalized words of this Florida lady:

[video=youtube_share;CkeevQOIXrM]http://youtu.be/CkeevQOIXrM[/video]

The frustration this woman shows with the simply amazing effort of the CNN reporter to force her to swallow the propaganda is something shared by a great many Americans. Simultaneously, there is a significantly sized group who does believe the MSM narrative, and the Deep State is doing a pretty good job of keeping its RussiaGate case alive.

Despite the hopes that "soon all this will explode and it will be finally over!", the reality is that it will not be over. The Deep State has its reasons for not letting go of this matter, and so this problem will not be allowed to go away.

In the next piece in the series, the motivation of this group will be examined in an attempt to find the reasons this is happening.

There has not been such a significantly virulent power struggle in American politics for a very long time. This situation is far more blatant than Watergate, and far more successful. There is a reason for this.

[James Lateer]

It's amazing to me how many people are ok with (1) abusing the legal system for political purposes (to get rid of people you don't like and (2) thinking that lying is perfectly ok (if you are trying to get rid of somebody you don't like).

In reading lately about the Nazi period in Germany, there were some people, even top Nazis who kept a perfectly level head and were targeting the period AFTER THE WAR when the tables would turn, and not wallowing in the Nazi insanity.

It seems like the old saying is true: "If you can keep your head when those around you are losing theirs, you will be a man..." (Rudyard Kipling).

The scarcity of people who are maintaining integrity in the face of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is, to me, pretty frightening and discouraging. But I'm determined not to join them in the mud.

James Lateer

[Paul Rigby]

The Plot to Slaughter Donald Trump

by Publius Tacitus

29 May 2018

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

Each day brings more evidence of a plot involving intelligence and law enforcement officials to destroy Donald Trump using the pretext of Russia. This is not a theory. It is a fact. While many of the specific details about who actually made key decisions remains to be revealed, there is abundant evidence in the public record that exposes the skeletal framework of this plot. To put it bluntly, Trump has been a target of a coup d'etat that has relied of information warfare rather than actual arms. But the objective of the plotter was no different from a traditional coup, such as the one that removed Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. In fact, it appears that the CIA has been involved in both efforts.

Let's go through the evidence. The first piece comes courtesy of the dump of John Podesta emails. Podesta is in contact with Brent Budowsky (a longtime Democrat operative who served in senior congressional staff positions including legislative assistant to former Senator Lloyd Bentsen;[6] extensively involved with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and Intelligence Officers Death Benefits Act). In that email sent on 21 December 2015, shortly after noon, Budowsky recommends using Russia to bludgeon Trump. His email states it starkly:

Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin

Budowsky's message to Podesta was not just a rant on Trump. It included a detailed discussion of Syria and the need to distance Hillary from the Obama policy while also lamenting Vladimir Putin's support for the Syrian Government of Bashar al Assad. This is a critical point to understand. The plot against Trump was not based on a simple dislike of someone perceived as an uncouth bully from New York. His policy stances on issues like Syria and NATO were viewed as an attack on the establishment status quo. Such effrontery could not be tolerated.

This email, by itself, does not "prove" that there was a plot against Trump. But it does illustrate that top political minds in the Clinton campaign were recommending using the perception of close ties between Trump and Putin as a means for attacking (and weakening) Trump. When we examine the subsequent news reports, the Steele Dossier and indictments of some Trump associates, a clear picture of a coordinated plot emerges. And this effort included foreign intelligence agencies, U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. law enforcement aka the FBI.
There is solid reporting that British intelligence agencies--MI6 and GCHQ to be precise-- were involved early on in trying to tie Russia to Trump. Both the Guardian and the Independent (British newspapers) published detailed reports in April 2017 about those intelligence activities:

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

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

A piece in the Independent on the 14th of April made a similar point:

This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information under the "Five Eyes" agreement, which calls for open sharing of certain types of information among member nations the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The notion that exchanging such information was "routine" is a bald face lie. What we are talking about are intercepted communications of persons associated with the Trump campaign. Such "interceptions" are not just stored on some computer. No. They are transcribed and published as a piece of what is known in the intelligence community as a piece of Signals Intelligence aka SIGINT. Intelligence about alleged ties between a major U.S. Presidential candidate and the Russians is anything but "routine." It is extraordinary and requires extraordinary measures in handling such information.

So, how does such a "routine exchange" take place? The process started with the U.K.'s Joint Intelligence Committee:

The [British] Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) is an interagency deliberative body responsible for intelligence assessment, coordination and oversight of the Secret Intelligence Service, Security Service, GCHQ and Defence Intelligence. The JIC is supported by the Joint Intelligence Organisationunder the Cabinet Office. . . .

[It is responsible for] maintaining liaison with Commonwealth and foreign intelligence organisations as appropriate, and to consider the extent to which its product can be made available to them.

The CIA's Chief of Station regularly attends the meeting of the JIC, which provides a venue for the U.S. and the U.K. to share sensitive intelligence with each other. There are somethings that are so sensitive that they are passed verbally rather than run the risk of putting such information into a document.

The absurd notion that the info about Trump people was handled routinely was exposed as total farce in late March 2017, when Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News went on air and reported that GCHQ was intercepting Trump communications. The Brits had a meltdown:

GCHQ's involvement in the investigation is controversial, with Mr Trump's press secretary, Sean Spicer, having previously accused the "British spying agency" of bugging Trump Tower on behalf of Barack Obama. Mr Spicer cited an unsubstantiated report on Fox News, from which the television station later distanced itself.

At the time GCHQ diverged from its usual policy of refraining from commenting to the media, describing the allegations as "nonsense".

Fox executives, under pressure from British authorities, moved quickly to sanction the Judge:

Fox News has suspended its legal affairs commentator Andrew Napolitano after his uncorroborated allegation that former President Barack Obama used the U.K.'s spying operation to monitor President Donald Trump provoked an international incident.

The suspension only lasted nine days. Then came the report from The Guardian corroborating Judge Napolitano's initial report:

But both US and UK intelligence sources now acknowledge that GCHQ played an early and important role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016.

One source told the Guardian the British eavesdropping agency was the "principal whistleblower".

GCHQ is the British version of the NSA. It intercepts emails and telephone calls and (thanks to Ed Snowden) the information is stored in massive databases and can be retrieved at will.

But it is not only the Guardian that confirmed the GCHQ role. The New York Times reported on 1 March 2017 (more than a month before the Guardian article appeared) that the Brits and the Dutch were collecting such information and sourced this to three former U.S. government officials:

In the Obama administration's last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn't duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials and others close to Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.

Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.

How did the Brits know who to look at? So far we have been told that the first to be targeted was George Papadopoulos and that occurred in March of 2016. Yet, both the New York Times and The Guardian are reporting from multiple sources that there was intelligence collected on associates of Trump. And The Guardians asserts this started in late 2015.

What needs to be clarified is whether the Brits first approached the U.S. intelligence community, which means ultimately communicating with CIA Director John Brennan and/or DNI James Clapper. Or, did Brennan or Clapper approach the Brits and request their help. Or was it a simultaneous approach.

Regardless of how this started, we can easily deduce that what the Brits passed through "intel channels" came as a SIGINT report that was classified as TOP SECRET and probably had some additional caveats or codewords attached to it. It is very likely that such information would be placed in a Special Access Program category aka SAP. This means access to the information would be highly restricted and tightly controlled. But it also means that people like John Brennan and James Clapper had absolute knowledge that the Brits were supplying intelligence reports claiming that Trump associates were in contact with Russians.

That leaves a very simple question--When did Brennan and/or Clapper first brief President Obama? Information currently on the public record indicates that Obama was briefed on these matters in late July 2016 or early August 2016. After Obama was briefed, CIA Director John Brennan went to the Hill and briefed Senator Harry Reid on the tawdry allegations. Despite being told about allegedly damning Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Obama continued as late as October to insist that it was ludicrous:

Mrs. Clinton was off the campaign trail on Tuesday, preparing for her final debate with Mr. Trump on Wednesday, so it fell to Mr. Obama to rebut Mr. Trump's assertions. The president did so with obvious relish.

There is no evidence, he said, that a presidential election has ever been rigged. He said there was little indication that it could be, given that elections are run by state and local authorities, with people from both parties supervising polling sites and ballot counting.

This is more than a case of "the dog that did not bark." We have press reports that conversations among Trump associates were intercepted that implicated them in Russian collusion. The Steele Dossier, in the very first report, claimed the relationship with Trump went back to at least 2011. Yet, despite this supposed mountain of intelligence, no actual evidence has surfaced to corroborate these outlandish claims. To the contrary, there is evidence of sedition by government officials.

As I noted in my previous piece that focused on George Papadopoulos and the coordinated effort to frame the Trump Campaign as Russian Lackeys, the actual intelligence does not show that Trump associates took the initiative in reaching out to have contact with Russians. Nope. The Trump associates--Papadopoulos and Carter Page in particular--were baited with information. Once they took the bait and communicated that information back to other Trump associates, their communications were seized by the Brits, put into a SIGINT report and then shared with the US intelligence authorities.

This duplicitous, machiavellian tactic allowed CIA Director Brennan and DNI James Clapper to pretend that the information about Trump links to Russians came from independent sources that just happened, innocently, to stumble on the intelligence. Yet, if there was actual intelligence that demonstrated that the Trump campaign had been in touch with and coordinating with the Russian Government that would now be in the public domain. Does anyone really believe that someone like Adam Schiff would not have leaked that explosive information to an eager member of the anti-Trump press?

The outlines of the conspiracy against Donald Trump are becoming more clear. More investigation is needed, but the questions that need to be asked and answered are coming into focus. We do know one thing with certainty--the Clinton campaign to "slaughter Donald Trump" has failed. Identifying and punishing those responsible for this failed plot remains unfinished business.

[Paul Rigby]

Trump Lost the First Round of His Trade War With China

Ivan Danilov

30 May 2018

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/20180...trade-row/

Donald Trump is waging a trade war on China. He once claimed that such a war would be "easy to win." So far, it looks like he's losing, chiefly because of internal conflicts within his party and the fact that the US media is fighting against him.

It is ironic that one of Trump's most obvious vulnerabilities has nothing to do with China itself, or with the fact that some American companies are vulnerable to Beijing's retaliation in a tit-for-tat trade war. The US president is losing credibility because the US political establishment, including the Republicans who hate him, is actively sabotaging his diplomatic efforts. The ZTE scandal is a prime example. Trump basically took the Chinese company hostage, trying to extract some concessions from the Chinese.

Given ZTE's dependency on US technology, his actions brought the Chinese company to the brink of bankruptcy, forcing Xi Jinping to plead for Trump's mercy. All was going well for Trump right until US lawmakers decided to throw a monkey wrench into his carefully orchestrated strategy.

NBC reported, "As the Trump administration reached a deal Friday to reduce sanctions on the Chinese telecom giant ZTE, Congress has shown rare unity in working to prevent the president from giving in to the foreign-backed company in a way that would compromise national security." In simpler terms, Congress has shown rare unity in backstabbing Trump and making sure that no Chinese negotiator takes Trump seriously ever again. Bloomberg had reported that "a potential bill to prohibit ZTE Corp. and other Chinese telecommunications companies from operating in the U.S. would have supermajority support in Congress, Republican Senator Marco Rubio said." If the president can't ensure that the promises he makes to Beijing won't be torpedoed by Congress, then why bother negotiating?

"Another problem for the Trump administration is that the Chinese view his trade war as a direct threat to China's national security and even dignity. Trump could have framed the contentious trade issues in a different manner, but it's too late for that now because even media outlets like Caixin (the privately owned leading business newspaper in China) lambastes Trump for trying to force "a fundamental opening-up of the Chinese economy to the Washington free-market liberal reforms that China has steadfastly resisted," adding that Trump's trade war "is a new version of the Anglo-American opium wars of the 1840s using other means to open China."

Any Sinologist would tell you that the Anglo-American opium wars were the most traumatic events in China's history and that one of the core tenets of the implicit social contract between the people and the ruling Communist Party is that Chinese leaders must ensure that China never again experiences a new defeat of such magnitude and is never again subjected to the resulting national humiliation. If the dominant narrative on the trade war with the US is that it's an "opium war 2.0," then it makes any significant concession from the Chinese virtually impossible, because any significant concession would make Xi Jinping lose face and possibly even lose his political power.

Another casualty of the trade war, that's not even finished yet, is Trump's reputation or what's left of it. His opponents are now viewing him as a pushover and as someone willing to sacrifice the national interest for the sake of a couple lucrative deals for his own business empire. Case in point: the recent Ivanka Trump scandal. According to The New York Times, "China this month awarded Ivanka Trump seven new trademarks across a broad collection of businesses, including books, housewares and cushions," adding that "her growing portfolio of trademarks in China raises questions about whether Chinese officials are giving the Trump family extra consideration that they otherwise might not get."

According to Time magazine, "a Chinese government-owned company had signed on to help build an Indonesian project that will include a Donald Trump-branded hotel and golf course." Don Fox, the former general counsel of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, told Time that "the Chinese knew exactly what they were investing in with the deal in Indonesia," adding that "it also strains credulity that the president wasn't aware of this when he made his favorable comments about ZTE."

No matter what kind of deal is reached between Trump and Xi, any concession made by Trump will be inevitably viewed as a result of Chinese bribes. For Trump it is basically a no-win situation because he will inevitably have to make some concessions to the Chinese. His only hope is to score a gargantuan win, which will silence his critics, but looking at the interim results of the Sino-American trade war it is hard to see that as a probable scenario. So far, it is safe to assume that Trump has lost the first round of his trade war with China, and the best result he can hope for in the long run is nothing more than a stalemate.

[Paul Rigby]

Spooks Spooking Themselves

May 31, 2018

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/sp...hemselves/

As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate story, as Daniel Lazare explains.

With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.

It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block "Siberian candidate" Trump.

The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove, Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according toThe Washington Post, Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin."

Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born or, rather, a very questionable scandal.

Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth, other participants include:

Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA.
Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat.
Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow.
Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic.
James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence.
John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst).

In-Bred

A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor.

Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale. In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd.

n December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian intelligence suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge history department and the seminar's founder, regards as "absurd" as well.

As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.

Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.

The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public manipulation and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

It Started Late 2015

The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland, Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring what they said were "suspicious interactions' between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents."

Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors. Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."

This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York Times describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.

After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.

Was Papadopoulos Set Up?

Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.

On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise the Steele dossier, in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."

One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau as well.

On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War.

Stefan Halper then infiltratedthe Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.

On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke. In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty. "George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there, but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in Washington.

The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign … so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration.

Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics, his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying "to build something that did not exist." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws.

But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved. Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive just $46,000 worth of Facebook ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with no particular slant at all that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under intense pressure to come up with anything at all.

The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article, 2,700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day.

The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus "had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success."

Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape if you don't use it?

Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government.

Using it Anyway

Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.

Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security official who says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way."

But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, The New Yorker continues to defend it, while Timescolumnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well, saying it's a "rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.

It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique, and his articles about the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites as Jacobin and The American Conservative.

[Paul Rigby]

Memo to President Trump

Time To End the Special Relationship; Declassify All British-Spawned Documents Concerning Your 2016 Campaign

by Barbara Boyd

This article appears in the June 1, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

http://www.icontact-archive.com/zB0-nxR9...46DGf2?w=2

May 24As of this writing, the U.S. media has its knickers in a complete knot because of "Spygate," the scandal evolving from the President of the United States exercising his constitutional powers to declassify secret intelligence documents bearing on the completely illegal investigation of his 2016 presidential campaign by the Obama White House, Obama's intelligence chiefs, and their masters in the City of London.

In the view of the Anglo-American establishment, Trump is once again being insubordinate, refusing to be told what to do, unlike every American President since the death of FDR, with the exception of John F. Kennedy. So-called "experts" have been trotted out to sniff about "unsubstantiated," "baseless" and "wild" accusations, and "conspiracy theories," propagated by the "unhinged" President of the United States. He aims, they say, to undermine the "rule of law," which, according to them, emanates solely from the personage of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

These experts are taking their cues from former DNI James Clapper and Obama's CIA Chief John Brennan, and include numerous former staffers for Special Counsel Robert Mueller when he was at the FBI, who have become official commentators on CNN and other cable ventures. As we shall show you below, this amounts to letting the future inmates run the institution. They warn how dangerous and illegal the President is being in demanding that the "independent" Justice Department submit to oversight by the Congress, and how dictatorial he has become by asserting that the President of the United States can declassify documents about a coup being run against his Presidency. Turning Abe Lincoln on his head, they seem to think they can fool all the people, all the time.

They bet that people won't pick up and read the Constitution, establishing for themselves that everything President Trump is doing is perfectly and wonderfully legal. The Constitution places the ultimate authority for classifying or declassifying documents, or information, with the President, although in the normal course, that power is delegated to subordinate officials in the Executive branch. The Constitution holds that Congress polices the executive branch agencies, such as the Justice Department, the CIA, and the FBI. These agencies are not independent plenary powers, free to operate however they please. In fact, the Constitution says that Donald Trump is the boss of the DOJ and the intelligence community, no matter how much these agencies may rail against the founding fathers for establishing that fact.

So, the louder these so-called "experts" scream, the more you know you are on to something singularly important and devastating to those responsible for the current ruin of the United States. That something is the fact that Trump is right, and if justice prevails, most of Robert Torquemada Mueller's case is going up in smoke and many of his favored witnesses will be doing time in jail.

A British Operation from the Beginning

We have learned in the past week that the Obama Administration and the British planted a long-time CIA/MI6 asset, Stefan Halper, to run operations against the Trump presidential campaign. As a matter of convenience, it has been claimed that Halper was an FBI informant, since MI6 and the CIA can't legally spy on Americans. But his pedigree is solidly MI6 and CIA, as we shall see. Revelations to date, point to Halper's role in creating a trail of fake evidence linking the Trump campaign to Russia, in the hopes of derailing Trump's presidential campaign amidst fake charges amounting to treason. The same planted and fake evidence has been picked up and used in Robert Mueller's inquisition against the Trump Presidency. It remains an open question to this writer whether Halper is the Trump campaign "informant" the FBI told British agent Christopher Steele about in the course of the FBI's illicit relationship with Steeleor even the sole informant.

Christopher Steele, of course, is the author of the dirty MI6 dossier claiming that Trump was a Manchurian candidate personally compromised by Vladimir Putin. The British-originated Steele dossier has been a staple for the media and, until recently, the backbone of the entire Russiagate hoax. Steele's dossier was supposedly the "solid" investigative backbone used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its Russiagate ravings and by the FBI and Justice Department in applying for FISA warrants, and taking other unprecedented steps against an American presidential campaign. Over the past year however, through the dogged investigation of a few brave men in the U.S. House and Senate, Steele's ravings have been exposed as a classic cash-for-trash dirty trick, paid for by Hillary Clinton, but legitimized and spun to the media by the Obama White House, FBI, DOJ, State Department, CIA and DNI. A huge public relations effort involving multiple magazine puff pieces on the British agent, and whole books about his courage and rectitude, did not succeed in vanquishing the fundamental truth exposed by the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees about Christopher Steele. In the hasty course of doing damage control concerning Steele, a transcript of the testimony of Glenn Simpson before the Senate Judiciary Committee was released, unilaterally, by Senator Dianne Feinstein. In that testimony, Simpson said that the FBI had told Christopher Steele that it had an informant within the Trump campaign. Needless to say, the President and his congressional allies were interested in this unprecedented infiltration, and Stefan Halper has been outed, by the New York Times and Washington Post, as the informant Steele learned about.

President Trump has displayed extraordinary courage in facing down a hostile intelligence community and its national media assets which control, for all practical purposes, the majority of the U.S. Congress. "Spygate," and the recent feistiness of the President and his legal team, mean this fight could be a major turning point for the better in U.S. history, provided that the President has popular support and aims at the most vulnerable flank of the operations against himthe illegal British intervention into the U.S. electionin which Stefan Halper and his close friend, Sir Richard Dearlove, were extremely significant players. The dirty Christopher Steele dossier, the operations of the strange Maltese Professor Joseph Mifsud, and Halper's interactions with Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos all emanate from Sir Richard Dearlove's British circle. They preceded by months the official opening of the FBI's "enterprise counterintelligence investigation" and provide the fake evidentiary pretexts to justify that investigation.

The British actors who continue to play the central role in the coup against Donald Trump, hope that all the endless and tantalizing details being dumped about the coupMichael Cohen, porn star Stormy Daniels, and whatever other barnyard remnants the "Resistance" is able to throw at the American peoplewill combine with the anti-Russian blind spot of U.S. congressional investigators to bury the truth, the actual story here. The actual story, which we explore below, is that the British and their friends in the Obama Administration ran an information warfare operation against the American presidential campaign of Donald Trump, because they knew that Trump could win the election against Hillary Clinton, an uninspiring robot candidate who had completely lost touch with any Americans not associated with the bi-coastal elites. They violated numerous U.S. laws in the process.

As Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly insisted, this was an international operation, not something confined to the United States. The British establishmentin shock over the popular revolt represented in the Brexit vote, finding similar dissent throughout their European colonies, being outflanked by Putin in Syria and Ukraine, viewing China's Belt and Road Initiative as a deadly strategic threat, and sitting on top of a hopeless speculative financial powder kegfaced the danger, if Clinton lost, of losing the United States as their designated gendarme for the world.

They panicked. As MI6's Christopher Steele confessed to former DOJ Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, he and his friends across the pond were "desperate to stop Trump's election." They launched a furious operation to destroy Donald Trump because of Trump's determination to seek a new, collaborative relationship with Putin and Russia, and because of Trump's pledge to end the U.S. role as world policeman. They found willing collaborators in the Obama and Clinton partisans manning the Department of Justice and Obama's intelligence agencies, and in their longstanding assets in the United States. According to George Neumayr's explosive report in the American Spectator of May 22, John Brennan said his extraordinary and completely illegal convening of an inter-agency task force at CIA headquarters to attack the Trump campaign in the early spring of 2016 was the result of Trump putting "the special relationship" with the British at risk. After assuming the Presidency, Trump refused to back down on his quest for better relations with Russia, despite everything they have thrown at him. In addition, he formed a personal friendship with China's Xi Jinping. As a result, Perfidious Albion has doubled down on its machinations. It has acted to continue the coup while engaging in provocations and false flag operations against Russia, such as the Skripal poisoning hoax and the bogus claim that Assad used chemical weapons against Syria's citizens. They seek to corner Trump into obedience, to cause his impeachment, or both.

The President seems to have focused his initial attention on getting certain documents at the FBI and Department of Justice declassified. He shouldn't expect to find the story about this British operation in the files of the DOJ or FBI, howeverthey just got the manufactured end-products. Whole chunks of information about this operation exist only in the files and recorded interactions of the Obama White House, Obama's CIA, DNI, Treasury Department, and State Department, as well as of the British old-boy spy networks and "private" spy companies affiliated with Sir Richard Dearlove, and the official British spy agenciesMI6 and GCHQ. Senator Rand Paul has taken the right approach by forcing this issue with the new head of the CIA, Gina Haspel. Senator Paul has demanded to know what Haspel knows about the British/U.S. spy operations against the President. Haspel, a devotee of MI6, a Russia hater, and an acolyte of John Brennan, was the CIA station chief in London during the entire 2014-2017 time period, and, thus, either a key player in these operations or someone who knows a whole lot about them.

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal has repeatedly called for the President to use his power to declassify the documents which the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies are yelping about and withholding. Strassel is absolutely correct, but the declassification process has to be much larger. In our view, the relevant documents in U.S. agencies to be targeted for declassification include the following:

(1) all the documents referencing the allegations fed by the British, NATO allies, Ukraine, or Estonia, to U.S. agencies concerning the Trump campaign's alleged connections to Russia, beginning no later than 2015, if not earlier;

(2) all documents referencing the claim that Trump was a Manchurian candidate, a Putin puppet, as circulated through the Clinton campaign, the news media, and the Obama White House, State Department, CIA and FBI;

(3) all documents concerning the summer 2016 face-to-face meeting between John Brennan and GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan;

(4) all documents referencing British knowledge of an alleged Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee's computers dating from 2015 or earlier; all documents in which the CIA's "Marble Framework" was used to falsely attribute cyberattacks to nation states; all documents pertaining to Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails; and all documents pertaining to former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney's meeting with Mike Pompeo concerning the alleged DNC/Podesta hacks;

(5) all documents concerning surveillance and counterintelligence tools deployed against the Trump campaign and transition as the result of Executive Order 12333 or other classified techniques; and

(6) all documents concerning entrapment and infiltration exercises conducted against the campaign, including, specifically, all State Department and intelligence agency documents concerning the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

These documents, and all the documents presently under subpoena or otherwise requested by the House Intelligence Committee, House Judiciary Committee, House Government Affairs Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee related to the Trump/Russia investigation, should be declassified now and shared with the American public.

To complete the picture, the President should also demand that the British provide him with all information from their side of the pond, concerning the role of British intelligence services or British intelligence-related operatives in attempting to discredit both himself and Vladimir Putin in the operation popularly known as "Russiagate," an operation which continues to the present day on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout Europe. While the President's allies in the Congress have proved to be terrific and courageous investigators, they are blinded by years of British brainwashing and partisan legends about Putin and Russia. They are attempting to sell the fake story that the Russians manipulated the elections but did so only benefit to Hillary Clinton or to sow "divisiveness" in an already deeply polarized and divided American public.

If the Brits don't fess up and cooperate, then sanction them in a targeted fashion, starting with the City of London financial center, the heart of the new British Empire. This is the swamp which must be drained, the actual parasite now sucking the life out of the U.S. economy: the City of London, its offshore hot money financial havens, together with its American dupes and appendages. This is the swamp which would engage us in new and deadly wars targeted at both Russia and China. It is the center of the war being waged against the United States and its new President.

Birth of the FBI Investigation of Trump:An Ever-Shifting Story

Steele Dossier Blows Up with Multiple Casualties

Stefan Halper's role in the coup against the President emerged as the House Intelligence Committee dug deep in order to figure out exactly how the unprecedented and illegal FBI counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign began. Initially, following leads from leaks to the news media by the intelligence community and Democrats, and their own investigation, House Republicans focused on Steele's dirty dossier as the probable point of origin. That focus produced major scandals as House investigators discovered that the dirty, anonymously sourced, third-party-hearsay hit job against the Trump campaign, parading as an intelligence product from the man who headed MI6's Russia desk, turned out to have been paid for by Hillary Clinton; pumped by the likes of John Brennan, James Clapper, and the Clinton campaign to publicly Putin-bait Trump throughout the last weeks of the Presidential campaign; and used by Clapper and James Comey in a blatant attempt to intimidate the President-elect in a January 6, 2017 meeting at Trump Tower. At that meeting, Comey confronted the President with Steele's fake claims, correctly referencing the experience as akin to his "J. Edgar Hoover" moment. James Clapper had previously leaked the contents of the dirty dossier to CNN. Comey told Trump he was telling him about Steele's dubious dirt because CNN already had the dirty document and was about to publish it. Of course, Comey left out the fact that CNN only had the document because Clapper had leaked it to them. In addition, David Kramer, John McCain's longtime aide, had the dirty document, having received it via British intelligence's Sir Andrew Wood, a high level associate in Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, and from Christopher Steele, personally. Kramer leaked it to Buzzfeed. When Trump stood his ground and demanded that Comey investigate the source of the fake allegations, Buzzfeed published the British dirt, smearing the incoming President of the United States as a sexual pervert who had been compromised by Putin.

After almost two years of FBI investigation, Steele's main claims either could not be verified or stood refuted. But against its own guidelines, in the Fall of 2016, the FBI used the unverified Steele Dossier to procure a FISA warrant on Carter Page, never telling the Court that the Clinton campaign had paid for Steele's hit job and that Steele himself had been terminated by the FBI because he lied about his contacts with the news media. This warrant was obtained and continued even after the Fall 2016 departure of Carter Page from the Trump Campaign. And it was, reportedly, preceded by FISA warrants in which Page was a subject, dating back to 2014. In other words, Carter Page, one of many weird members of Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Advisory Board, was a walking government microphone. Prior to formally terminating its relationship to Christopher Steele in October of 2016, the FBI told the British agent something which, under relevant guidelines, should never have been disclosed to a foreign agent: that they had an informant in the Trump Campaign. After his termination, Steele continued to feed his information into the coup plotters through a different official channel, Bruce Ohr, the former Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States. Ohr's wife Nellie worked for Steele's American employer, Fusion GPS. As a result of the Ohr/Steele relationship coming to light, Ohr was demoted. Senator Chuck Grassley continues to demand Ohr's testimony and is pursuing other avenues concerning Steele's actions.

True to the clandestine nature of this entire affair, the Steele dossier was not delivered to the FBI by normal law enforcement or intelligence channels. Rather, it arrived by way of the very partisan U.S. State Department, formerly led by Hillary Clinton. Steele had previously provided more than a hundred memos to assist Victoria Nuland in her role as U.S. case officer for the British-inspired 2014 regime-change operation in Ukraine. Nuland authorized the initial July 2016 meeting between Steele and Michael Gaeta, the former FBI Eurasian organized crime task force member who had worked previously with Steele and was now stationed in Rome. Gaeta reported Steele's bogus claims about Trump and Russia to FBI headquarters. At the same time, Steele's friend at State, Secretary Kerry's long-time counsel, Jonathan Winer, vouched for Steele and put him in touch with Clinton operatives Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, who made similar bogus claims about Trump and Russia. Steele used the Blumenthal/Shearer charges to corroborate his own wild charges to the FBI. At the center of the initial Steele memos was the July 2016 trip to Moscow by Carter Page. As we shall see below, Stefan Halper struck up a relationship with Page almost as soon as Page stepped off the plane from Moscow in London, in July of 2016. This relationship continued, involving numerous meetings and correspondence, until September of 2017.

Based on the exposures by the House Intelligence Committee, and Steele's referral for criminal prosecution by Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, the Steele dossier has become a political hot potato in the ongoing narrative promulgated by the coup-meisters. Their current diktat is that it is to be referenced only as part of a larger mosaic which can somehow, when taken altogether, legitimize the unprecedented FBI investigation of the Republican presidential nominee. In the meantime, Tom Steyer and other Democratic Party, Silicon Valley billionaires have provided over $50 million to Fusion GPS and Steele's British company in an all-out effort, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein's former staffer, Daniel Jones, to somehow resuscitate the Steele dossier's bogus and discredited claims.

Narrative #2: Papadopoulos Did It

With Steele's British tale embroiled in scandal, a new official narrative has been ginned up and provided to the Congress and the news media. This narrative says that George Papadopoulos' drunken claims to the Australian High Commissioner in London, Alexander Downer, at a high-class London bar, provoked the FBI's investigation of Trump. It presents Papadopoulos' interactions with the Australian, Downer; the Steele dossier; and, now, the spy Halper's interactions with Papadopoulos and Carter Page; and the alleged Russian hack of the DNC, as if they were all separate events, rather than just aspects of the same large British operation to fabricate a pretext for the FBI to investigate Trump.

According to this narrative, the drunken Papadopoulos, stalked and courted by Downer, mouthed off to the Australian diplomat in May 2016, that he knew that the Russians had thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails. Downer reported this to the Australian government which then reported it to the FBI after the June 15, 2016 attribution of the "DNC hack" to the Russians by CrowdStrike and the July publication of the DNC emails by Wikileaks. CrowdStrike was paid for its attribution services by the same Democratic Party law firm which was paying Christopher Steele. This new narrative, however, has multiple problems, in addition to the fact that it is incredible on its face. The biggest problem is that when it is followed through, it exposes the months of CIA and MI6 illicit activities preceding the official opening of the formal FBI counterintelligence investigation in July of 2016.

We now know, as the result of the recent declassification of the FBI's Memo originating the investigation, that Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort were the immediate targets of the FBI/Trump counterintelligence probecode-named "Crossfire Hurricane"and formally opened in July of 2016. Not to make too much of it, but the FBI didn't even use an American name to disguise this British-originated operation and the manufactured evidence which accompanied it into FBI files, instead adopting a line from the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin Jack Flash" as the investigation's moniker.

It is claimed that Papadopoulos learned about Russian possession of Clinton's emails, about six weeks after the 28-year-old ingenue inserted himself into the clumsily and hastily formed Trump Foreign Policy Advisory team in early March 2016. He learned this from a mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, who, according to Robert Mueller, had to be a Russian intelligence agent targeting Papadopoulos. Throughout March and April of 2016, Mifsud courted Papadopoulos, giving him a job, introducing him to someone he falsely claimed was Putin's niece, introducing young George Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council, and claiming to George in a meeting on April 26, that he has just met with high level Russian government officials in Moscow who had "dirt" on Clinton in the form of thousands of her emails. Papadopoulos eagerly passed this information on to Trump Campaign officials in the form of written emails and public Facebook chats, while constantly seeking to set up meetings with high level Russian agents he believed he could broker. His offers were refused, but a huge document cache was fabricated, providing the pretext for further investigation. As we will further detail below, it now appears that Mifsud was also a British intelligence operative.

On July 7, 2016, Carter Page traveled to Moscow to give a speech at the New Economic School. He flew to London immediately after, where he met Stefan Halper at a Cambridge University event about the 2016 U.S. elections, and continued to communicate with Halper through September of 2017. Christopher Steele was at the same event, positioning himself, according to some accounts, right behind Page. Page's July Moscow trip forms a major part of Christopher Steele's first memos concerning Russian contacts with the Trump Campaign. Steele claimed, absurdly, that Carter Page had been offered a major share in the Russian state oil company, Gazprom, if he could broker the ending of the Magnitsky Act sanctions on Russia.

In between the courtship of Papadopoulos and the Page meeting, another set-up meeting to feed the growing FBI fake file, occurred at Trump Tower in New York City on June 16, 2016. As we detail below, a British publicist, Rob Goldstone, wrote to Donald Trump, Jr. to set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer who would deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton straight from the "Crown Prosecutor of Russia." Although nothing like that actually occurred at the meeting, the fake evidence trail had been created for future prosecutive purposes. This meeting was exploited by another high-level British intelligence agent, Bill Browder, who formally complained to the Justice Department that participants in the meeting had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Eleven days after the Trump Tower meeting, Christopher Steele wrote his first memo noting that the Russians and the Trump campaign were in contact, developing "dirt" about Hillary Clinton in a well-designed collusion operation.

In September of 2016, Stefan Halper, out of the blue, offered $3,000 to George Papadopoulos to write a paper about oil fields in the Mediterranean. Papadopoulos went to London, met Halper, and was aggressively queried by him about his knowledge of Russian hacks of "the emails," circling back on the fake facts presented by the Maltese professor. Papadopoulos allegedly said he didn't know what Halper was talking about, much to Halper's chagrin. According to some accounts, Halper also used a sexy assistant to try and enmesh boy George further in his sway. He met with Papadopoulos on multiple occasions following this introduction. At the same time, Halper met with Sam Clovis, who chaired the Trump Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and sought a formal position in the Trump campaign.

As revealed in the media to date, Stefan Halper, while still operating on or through Carter Page and Papadopoulos, on behalf of the FBI, the CIA and MI6 against the Trump campaign and the incoming Administration, sought an ambassadorship in the Trump Administration, reportedly in an Asian country. He used Peter Navarro, Trump's anti-China trade assistant, as his emissary.

The Inconvenient Facts of the Matter

The claim that the FBI initiated an unprecedented investigation of the Republican Presidential nominee based on a drunken and very ambiguous conversation with George Papadopoulos about Hillary Clinton's emails, is ridiculous. It is backpedaling, revisionist history and never happened. Hillary Clinton erased 30,000 emails from her illicit and unsecure basement server, and it was assumed by many that the Russians (and potentially other hackers) had them. They were eagerly sought by the Republicans in pursuit of their claim that Clinton engaged in illegal activities and compromised classified information through her use of her email private server. It is simply beyond a stretch to insinuate that Mifsud and boy George were privy to British intelligence information, allegedly passed to the United States in 2015, that the Russians had hacked the DNC, or that the Russians would confess their dirty deed to the likes of Joseph Mifsud.

Moreover, the Russian hack of the DNC and 2016 handover of files to Wikileaks never happened. On a simple level, the very clumsy official narrative instructs us that the Russians were inside the DNC's computers as of 2015, the DNC was warned about it by the FBI, and yet nothing, absolutely nothing, was done about this. The tip that the Russians were inside the DNC computers, of course, came from the British. William Binney, a former technical director of the NSA, points out that the NSA monitors all Internet activity throughout the world and would be able to document and demonstrate the alleged Russian hack and any Internet transmission of DNC files to Wikileaks, if, indeed, either event ever happened. No such document has been provided. Rather, the American public was told to rely on "assessments" from intelligence analysts hand-picked by John Brennan, for the assertion that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta, and gave the product to Wikileaks. When confronted about this evidence-free "assessment," Brennan simply states that he "does not do evidence."

Binney and others have demonstrated that the DNC files which ultimately ended up at Wikileaks derived from an internal leak, not a Russian hack, just as Wikileaks has consistently asserted. (See https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-...-dnc-hack/ and https://www.larouchepub.com/other/2017/4...-gate.html) It is noteworthy that the CIA's "Marble Framework" allows the CIA to create false-flag cyberattacks by leaving behind false signatures of behavior in order to attribute cyberattacks to other countries. The FBI never did any forensic analysis of the DNC's computers. Instead they simply accepted the analysis of CrowdStrike's Alperovitch, a Russian-born, anti-Putin fanatic who, aside from being paid by the DNC, associated himself with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab. The Lab itself is incorporated into NATO's Centre for Strategic Communications, a British operation which has been conducting cyberwar against Russia and "exposes" about alleged Russian disinformation activities since the 2014 coup in Ukraine.

Andrew McCarthy, Kimberley Strassel, and Byron York have all noted that the final House Intelligence Report on Russian Interference in the 2016 Election states that James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council "on the Page information," in "late Spring of 2016." The principals were the highest ranking national security officials of the Obama Administration. Apparently, according to the same report, shortly before the Obama White House principals' meeting, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Loretta Lynch all met. The subject was the same: Carter Page. The Democratic version of the House Report states that the FBI interviewed Carter Page in March 2016. Page had previously collaborated with the FBI in 2013 in the prosecution of Russians operatives who allegedly targeted Page for recruitment while referring to him constantly as an "idiot." Most U.S. media accounts of Page's activities, including those of the President's supporters, echo the alleged Russian sentiment. The friendliest accounts call him an "eccentric" and a "knucklehead." From the moment he insinuated himself into Trump's Foreign Policy Advisory team, in March of 2016, Page began a public speaking campaign strongly supporting Putin and Russia while denouncing the United States.

Michael Flynn joined the Trump campaign as an advisor in February 2016. Paul Manafort joined the campaign to manage convention operations in March and was named campaign manager in May. Both were hated by the Obama White House and the British: Manafort for his activities on behalf of the duly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, whom the British and Americans deposed in 2014, and Flynn for exposing Obama Administration direct support of terrorists in Syria, while also seeking better relations with Russia's Putin in order to deal with international terrorism. According to the BBC and other sources, in the early spring of 2016, no later than March, John Brennan had convened his completely illegal inter-agency task force at CIA headquarters operating off of "British tips" about Trump and Russia and targeting the Trump campaign.

Some time in the summer of 2016, GCHQ's Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to deliver some type of product to Brennan personally. Hannigan resigned, unexpectedly, following the U.S. election. It is possible that Hannigan was providing the intercepted communications between the patsies, Papadopoulos and Page, and their Russian and Trump campaign interlocutors. Most informed observers believe that Hannigan's resignation was a late British effort to dissociate the government itself from the election operations against Trump. For those who might not know it, it is completely illegal for the CIA to spy on American citizens, let alone an American presidential campaign, or to farm out that activity to foreign intelligence agencies.

All of what we have said here derives from the House Intelligence Committee reports, court documents, and well-informed reporting. It plainly shows that the British used the Obama CIA and DNI and a bevy of their own agents, to create the fake basis for the FBI "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation of Donald Trump, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. Page and Papadopoulos were at least used as plants for fake and false allegations, if they were not, themselves, compromised as informants.

The People Across the Pond: Looking Behind the Curtain

Sir Richard Dearlove, KCMG, OBE, was Christopher Steele's boss as head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004. Steele and his business partner, Christopher Burrows, remain extremely close to Dearlove. By their own accounts, Sir Richard mentored and shepherded their calculated information warfare operation against the Trump campaign. A major force in the U.S./British anti-Russian Henry Jackson Society of neo-conservatives, Sir Richard is widely blamed, correctly, for the fake intelligence which led the United States into the disastrous Iraq War. Christopher Steele's private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, makes a great deal of money, according to Steele's own account, providing "intelligence" to warring Russian oligarchs, the perfect cover for disruption and low intensity warfare operations against the modern Russian state.

Stefan Halper, the son-in-law of the CIA's Ray Cline by his first marriage, has a long history with the CIA and the Bush family. In the 1980 presidential campaign, Halper worked with a team of CIA agents promoting the candidacy of George H.W. Bush. After the Republican primaries, Halper was accused of pilfering certain documents from the Carter campaign, disclosing how Carter would deal with Ronald Reagan in the general election. You would think that MI6 could come up with someone new to run intelligence agency operations in elections, rather than an aging veteran of the trade. Later, Halper chaired Palmer Bank, which is where Oliver North laundered money destined for the illegal Contra insurgency operation. From 2001 through 2015, Halper taught international affairs and American studies at Cambridge. In the British intelligence trade, universities are prime grounds both for recruitment and for spying operations. Halper and Dearlove have been described as very close friends, and together chaired, for years, the Cambridge Security Initiative, which featured policy talks involving spooks from throughout the world. From 2012 forward, Halper earned more than a million dollars working on contracts with the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, the spook domain formerly chaired by the utopian Andrew Marshall. His chief engagement there appears to have been in producing multiple studies bashing China.

Alexander Downer, Halper, and Dearlove share deep connections to another British private intelligence firm, Hakluyt & Company, described frequently as the favorite retirement home for premier MI6 spies. Richard Hakluyt was a 16th century geographer who is described as a principal inspiration for the formation of the infamous British East India Company. This private company, not the British government, was the heart of the British Empire. Downer was on the advisory board of Hakluyt. He has also been associated, in his role as a diplomat for Australia, with a $25 million grant to the Clinton Foundation to fight AIDS. Dearlove is personally close to Hakluyt's founder, Mike Reynolds, the former head of station in Germany for MI6. Stefan Halper has co-authored two books with Hakluyt's Jonathan Clarke.

This group's targeting of Michael Flynn dates from Flynn's attendance at a Cambridge Intelligence Seminar in February of 2014, while he was still director of the DIA, if not earlier. According to the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross, who has provided the best reporting on Halper's activities, Halper falsely claimed that Flynn had been compromised by a Russian woman at the Seminar, Svetlana Lokhova, and reported this bogus claim to U.S. authorities while circulating it in the U.S. and British news media. Lokhova is still a teacher and researcher at Cambridge, and Halper's claims were found to be baseless. This dovetails with the focus on Flynn in Luke Harding's book, Collusion, which attempts to salvage Christopher Steele's reputation. Harding, MI6's favorite reporter, details extensive British intelligence reporting and investigation of Flynn based on the simple fact that he visited the headquarters of the GRU in Russia in an official capacity. Many believe that Flynn's firing by the Obama Administration was based on British complaints.

Halper and Dearlove resigned as conveners of the Cambridge Security Initiative in December of 2016, claiming that it had been infiltrated by the Russians. According to other MI6-related leaders of the seminar series, this charge also was completely bogus. As of 2018, Dearlove has resumed his association with the Cambridge intelligence seminars, and Svetlana Lokhova is listed as a speaker for a program on May 18, 2018. Such are the ways of British intelligence operations.

The capper in this spy story so far, though, is that the strange Maltese professor who provided the fake Russian dirt concerning Hillary Clinton's emails to Papadopoulos, also appears to be a British intelligence operative. Numerous reports link Mifsud to Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence who vets all UK intelligence personnel. Mifsud has disappeared off the face of the earth since his doings were exposed. In a statement to the Italian press, before his disappearance, he denied being a Russian operative and stated that he was a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Clinton Foundation.

The June 2016 Trump Tower Meeting: Time for Another Look

No examination of British operations against the Trump campaign would be complete without revisiting the meeting on June 9, 2016, involving Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, Jr., and five other people, only one of whom was Russianthe lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. By all accounts provided by participants, the meeting was very short, and involved the Magnitsky Act sanctions imposed by the U.S. Congress on certain Russians. These were, of course, the same sanctions referenced by Christopher Steele in his bogus claim that Carter Page was involved in a bribe involving Gazprom shares and rolling back the sanctions.

The emails setting up the meeting do not reflect what actually happened. These emails, written by British publicist Rob Goldstone, purport to offer dirt, straight from the "Russian Crown Prosecutor," about Hillary Clinton, for use by Trump, along with further offers of help directly from the Russian government. Right after creating this very crude fake file, Goldstone disappeared on what appeared to be a world-wide tour of gay bathhouses, only to turn up significantly later. The document-trail for future use was created and there was no need to stick around. Can anyone be blind to the pattern here?

On July 15, 2016, just before the FBI opened its "Crossfire Hurricane" charade, Bill Browder filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice concerning four participants in the Trump Tower meeting and others for failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Browder's complaint claimed that Veselnitskaya's contingent at the Trump Tower meeting, none of whom were Russians, were engaged in unregistered Russian lobbying activities, namely, attempting to overturn the Magnitsky Act. Browder, the grandson of the former head of the Communist Party U.S.A., renounced his American citizenship in 1989 to become a British subject and has since operated at the highest levels of British intelligence. His Magnitsky Act sanctions were the brainchild of Jonathan Winer, previously referenced in this spy saga for his role in laundering the Christopher Steele dossier to the FBI. Browder, Winer, and Steele have had a years-long "close friendship" according to statements made by Winer.

According to Foreign Policy magazine and others, on July 11, 2017, a hacker going by the name of "Johnnie Walker" published a trove of emails from the private account of Lieutenant Robert J. Otto, who is tasked to a secretive unit in the U.S. State Department focused on Russia. Newsweek magazine states that Otto is the nation's "foremost" intelligence guy concerning Russia. The emails have not been authenticated. However, they include an email purported to have been written on the day of the Trump Tower meeting between Otto and Kyle Parker, of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, featuring a picture of Russian attorney Natalia Velselnitskaya's house in Russia. Parker credits himself as the actual author of the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russia, and is a close friend of Bill Browder. Velselnitskaya claims that her children have been threatened as a result of her participation in a legal case questioning the bona fides of Bill Browder and the factual foundations of the Magnitsky Act. The picture of her house in this context suggests another level of intense surveillance directed at Trump Tower on the day of the meeting, and the possibility that threats to her family were actually governing Veselnitskaya's behavior. Strangely, Veselnitskaya was in the United States based on a State Department visa granted over strident U.S. Department of Justice opposition.

As we noted previously, Christopher Steele's first memo in his dirty dossier was written 11 days after the June 15, 2016 Trump Tower meeting and alleged that the Russians were providing the Trump Campaign with negative information about Clinton as part of a well-crafted collusion scheme.

We are told that President Trump is a target of Special Counsel Mueller regarding this meeting because he provided "false exculpatory" information to counter media accounts which originally portrayed the Trump Tower meeting as a smoking gun in the Trump/Russia collusion saga. As the President has otherwise correctly characterized Mueller's obstruction-of-justice fantasies, the special prosecutor seeks to criminalize the simple act of fighting back against a frame-up which Mueller must know by now, was orchestrated by the British and the Obama Administration. Based on this writer's experience with Mueller in the prosecution of Lyndon LaRouche, however, it is probable that our own Torquemada was in on the game from the day he was appointed.

A Personal Post-Script

This very British tale of fabricating and planting evidence may seem foreign to what anyone learned in civics class about the American legal system. Here is an anecdote from the Boston prosecution of Lyndon LaRouche, supervised by Robert Mueller, for you to ponder. Through extensive surveillance and infiltration during the two years prior to the Boston indictments of LaRouche and his associates, the prosecutors in the LaRouche case knew that some of the LaRouche defendants in that case recorded all significant conversations in their notebooks for future reporting purposes. Mueller's lead prosecutor, John Markham, tasked an FBI informant, Ryan Quade Emerson, to suggest that the defendants obstruct justice, and Emerson's remarks were duly recorded in the notebooks. Markham then used the fabricated notebook entries, in his opening statement to the jury, as proof that the LaRouche defendants intended to obstruct justice, without disclosing the fact that he authored those comments or that he laundered them through an FBI informant into the notebooks. U.S. District Judge Robert Keeton, reflecting the judicial norms of previous times, found in that case that Mueller, Markham, and their DOJ supervisors engaged in systemic, institutional, prosecutorial misconduct.