What President Trump’s Foreign Policy Will Look Like

Trump tweet from SEPT 2013......he seems to forget that Twitter achieves...AND he seems to have seriously changed his mind...why is that.???

Donald J. Trump
Verified account
‏@realDonaldTrump
I wonder how much our "leaders" have promised, or given, Russia in order for them to behave and not make the U.S. look even worse?

AND his choice for ODNI....????

Dan Coats, Trump’s pick as director of national intelligence, is virulently anti-gay:
http://slate.me/2j4aQDQ

READ this comment today from Russian State TV and then READ the article below...THIS is the impact now of Trump on the security of the US....

Russia's State TV: Ideological changes are coming to the U.S. IC, since Trump said only a fool wouldn't want to be friends w/Russia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/trumps-dangerous-anti-cia-cru…

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

Trump’s Dangerous Anti-C.I.A. Crusade

By MICHAEL J. MORELLJAN. 6, 2017

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.
WHEN I wrote in August 2016, in this newspaper, that Donald J. Trump’s character traits posed a national security threat, I didn’t imagine that the first manifestation of that dynamic could play out with the very organization where I spent the first 33 years of my career, the Central Intelligence Agency.

President-elect Trump’s public rejection of the C.I.A., and by extension the rest of the country’s intelligence community, over the assessment that Russia interfered in our presidential election is not only an unprecedented political challenge for our national security establishment — it is a danger to the nation.

While Mr. Trump’s statement on Friday that he had a constructive meeting with senior intelligence officials on the Russian hacking issue was a step in the right direction, his disparagement of American intelligence officers over the last few months is likely to cause significant damage to the C.I.A.

Mr. Trump has questioned the agency’s competence — repeatedly asking, often via Twitter, how we can trust the organization that incorrectly judged that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (criticism that, in my mind, is unfair for an agency that has changed dramatically in the last 15 years).

But he has also accused the agency of being biased and political, implying, in comments to The Times, that the C.I.A. manufactured its Russia analysis to undercut him. Mr. Trump, in essence, said that the agency’s officers were dishonorable. To the men and women of the C.I.A., sworn to protect the nation, this was a gut punch.

Mr. Trump’s behavior will weaken the agency, an organization that has never been more relevant to our nation’s security. The key national security issues of the day — terrorism; proliferation; cyberespionage, crime and war; and the challenges to the global order posed by Russia, Iran and China — all require first-rate intelligence for a commander in chief to understand them, settle on a policy and carry it out.

How will President Trump know whether the Iranians are living up to their commitment not to produce a nuclear weapon without good intelligence? How will he know how close North Korea is to mating a nuclear weapon to a long-range missile and detonating it over American soil? How will he know whether the Islamic State or Al Qaeda is plotting another 9/11-style attack?

The president-elect’s rhetoric will undermine the effectiveness of the C.I.A. in two key ways. First, expect a wave of resignations. Attrition at the C.I.A., which has been remarkably low since Sept. 11, 2001, will skyrocket.

The primary motivator for some of our smartest minds to go to work at the C.I.A. is to make a difference to national security, to play a role in keeping the country safe. All of the sacrifices — from the long hours, polygraph tests, unfair media criticism, not to mention the real dangers to life and limb — are worth it, if you are making a difference.

If the president rejects out of hand the C.I.A.’s work, or introduces uncertainty by praising it one day only to lambaste it on Twitter that afternoon, many officers will vote with their feet.

These officers cannot be easily replaced. It takes years of training and, more important, on-the-job experience to create a highly capable case officer, analyst, scientist, engineer or support officer. It would take at least a decade to recover from a surge in resignations.

There is precedent for this. When President Jimmy Carter’s C.I.A. director, Stansfield Turner, made it clear that, in his view, technology was making human intelligence obsolete, hundreds of officers departed. He then fired hundreds of others who questioned his approach; it took years for the agency to return to its pre-Turner strength.

The Trump resignations could make the Turner departures pale by comparison.

The president-elect’s rejection of the agency will weaken it in a second way. American intelligence agencies do not work alone; we rely on strong ties to parallel organizations in countless countries.

Why would a foreign intelligence service take the C.I.A. seriously (and share important information with it) when the American president doesn’t? A strong relationship between the C.I.A. and the president is a key incentive for other intelligence services to work with Langley.

Take that away, and our foreign relationships — which are absolutely critical in the global fight against terror, proliferation, you name it — will suffer.

And why would a foreign agent take extraordinary risks to spy for the United States if his or her information is not valued? Knowing their information is making its way to the president is an important motivator for spies.

Would the modern-day Adolf Tolkachev, the C.I.A.’s most important agent within the Soviet Union — who was executed as a spy in 1986 — sign on to work for Donald Trump? I doubt it. The potential loss of critical information could be extraordinary.

Mr. Trump’s attacks on the agency surprised me, but they shouldn’t have. It is not a coincidence that Mr. Trump, who has never let facts get in the way of his opinion, would fight with the organization whose very reason for existence is to put facts on the table.

He will have similar fights with other government agencies, and our country will suffer for it.

Russia's State TV: Ideological changes are coming to the U.S. IC, since Trump said only a fool wouldn't want to be friends w/Russia.

Spicer: Media doesn’t treat Trump with respect, cheers on Democrats

MAYBE the Trump transition team should ask them just why MSM is supposedly giving them no respect....

BUT WAIT....a staff member stating Trump accepts the US IC Russian hacking report AND or Trump himself stating it...by diverting via his staff...Trump is not being held responsible for his countless anti IC tweets and his friendship tweets with Russia....

Trump accepts U.S. intelligence on Russia hacking: chief of staff
http://reut.rs/2i5fEqS

APPEARS this Trump staff comment did not make it into the Russian State TV program.....

Trump stubbornly avoids any mention of Russian #propaganda, discussing only #hacking. Is it bcs he benefited from it, or bcs he watches RT?

Donald Trump Hosts the Premier Spy Event of the Season
Clapper, Comey, Brennan and Rogers walk into a room...

By John R. Schindler • 01/06/17 5:00pm

Today, while the rest of Manhattan was getting lunch, Donald Trump received an intelligence briefing from our nation’s top spies. America’s espionage leadership made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to give the president-elect their collective assessment of what Russia did to our election last year. At 12:30, they sat down with the man who will be inaugurated our 45th president in exactly two weeks and delivered the most anticipated intelligence briefing in years.

It’s not every day our spy bosses tag-team a presentation, but this was of course no ordinary intel brief. James Clapper, our Director of National Intelligence, led the effort, backed by Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and the head of U.S. Cyber Command, plus John Brennan and James Comey, the directors of the CIA and the FBI, respectively.

In other words, this was the premier spy event of the season.

The briefing was highly classified—Top Secret-plus—so we don’t know exactly what Clapper and the others had to say, but we can make an educated guess based on their testimony yesterday to the Senate Armed Services Committee. The leaders of our Intelligence Committee didn’t mince words, even though their comments were at the unclassified level and therefore lacking much detail about how they know what they do about Kremlin spy-games in 2016.

The IC’s joint statement to senators on cybersecurity left no doubt how our spy agencies look at what happened over the last year:

Russian cyber operations targeted government organizations, critical infrastructure, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations often using spearphishing campaigns.

In foreign countries, Russian actors conducted damaging and/or disruptive cyberattacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure networks.

In some cases Russian intelligence actors have masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack.

We assess that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized the recent election-focused data thefts and disclosures, based on the scope and sensitivity of the targets. 

Clapper made it clear that our IC leadership shares the view that Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence services to steal the emails of top American political figures, then weaponize them via Wikileaks, which functions as an appendage of the Kremlin.

This was the Active Measure I’ve told you about in detail recently. This clandestine undertaking was not just “hacking” but a complex, multifaceted espionage operation. While our spies officially have no opinion regarding exactly what impact these Russian spy-games had in 2016, it’s apparent that they were hardly good news for the Democrats.

IC bosses also pointedly took the president-elect to task for his repeated insulting and disparaging comments about our country’s spy agencies, which he is soon to be the big boss of.

“I do think public trust and confidence in the Intelligence Community is crucial,” stated Clapper: “I’ve received many expressions of concern from foreign counterparts about the disparagement of the US Intelligence Community.”

Clapper indicated that more Congressional testimony is coming next week on this issue, while he promised the imminent release of an unclassified version of the IC assessment regarding Russian Active Measures in 2016 against the United States, adding that he wanted to include as much information as possible, without compromising top secret intelligence sources and methods.

It’s plain that the IC has very good intelligence here, given how sure they sound about attributing blame to Moscow. A hint of what the spies have in their possession came with a new NBC report, based on IC leaks—which the White House has pointedly denied came from anybody near President Obama—about top secret-plus signals intelligence from NSA which featured top Kremlin officials gloating about Trump’s victory at the ballot box.

NSA intercepted other high-level Kremlin communications which plainly showed that Russian intelligence was behind the whole operation to cause pain to the Democrats and their presidential nominee last year. Indeed, an old NSA colleague of mine recently informed me that the agency has “reams of reports” on this, all highly classified, and he mentioned the highly unflattering term which Kremlin insiders use to describe the president-elect whom Moscow plainly views as “their guy.”

Indeed, American spies have identified the specific individuals, all connected to Russian intelligence, who passed stolen Democratic emails to Wikileaks, contrary to the increasingly threadbare lies of Julian Assange, which Trump has backed. It is expected that some version of this story will be released to the public in the next few days, while the president-elect surely got the full story today.

This morning, before his important briefing, Trump denounced the examination of Russia’s interference in our election as a “witch hunt,” demanding a Congressional investigation into who leaked the NSA information reported yesterday by NBC. This led Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, to mockingly ask the president-elect, “Of all issues implicated by Russian active measures, this is what you want to investigate?”

Hearing what the IC had to say about the Kremlin may have caused Team Trump to back off a bit. After the briefing concluded, the president-elect issued a statement which was a good deal more open-minded than his previous utterances on this touchy issue. He praised the work and dedication of America’s spies while admitting some malfeasance by Moscow:

While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election including the fact that there was no tampering whatsoever with voting machines.

Trump then promised to get tough on cybersecurity with an unnamed team of experts within 90 days of taking office. This is progress of a sort, though it’s far from admitting the full extent of what Putin did last year, while the idea that Russian espionage and propaganda had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election” seems like wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, it is to be welcomed that the president-elect appears to have walked away, even if only slightly, from the awkward situation he was in only 24 hours ago, lined up with the Kremlin and Wikileaks against the entire U.S. Intelligence Community.

This issue is far from over, and will get bigger in coming days as the IC releases some more of its findings about Russian malfeasance. Watch this space.

AND Trump does not believe Russia hacks.....

France thwarts 24,000 cyber-attacks against defence targets
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38546415 

Russian "influence operations" first directed at the US in support of Trump and verified by US IC.....now a main Trump advisor moves his "influence operations" to Europe....AND there is no connections between Russia and Brietbart.com??????

It's now clear Breitbart trying to engineer French, German elections with propaganda. More of the below necessary.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/08/breitbart-looks-to-france… 

AND there is no conflict of interests inside the Trump WH.....?????

By Philip Rucker and Danielle Paquette
Donald Trump Jr. backs the ‘Hearing Protection Act,’ an effort to ease restrictions on gun silencers...

BUT WAIT he is suppose to be managing his fathers business interests and thus not connected to the WH.......

Gun owners need silencers to "protect their hearing"??????

MORE for Trump and his transition team to read in order to catch up with the US IC....

@MarkGaleotti on #Russia’s #HeavyMetalDiplomacy - How Russia Divides, Distracts, Dismays & Dominates
http://goo.gl/QHUIsE

Galeotti is one of the better Russian analysts these days....and has a blogsite Moscow in the Shadows....

Maxim Tucker
✔
@MaxRTucker
#Russia state TV asked me to take part in a propaganda operation. I recorded their call. Listen here:
https://soundcloud.com/max-tucker-1/russian-propaganda-operation-caught… 

WONDER if Trump believes in Russian influence operations???? Russian info warfare directed straight at US policy in NATO....

Or this RT Spanish headline, "Hundreds of US tanks arrive in Europe". Not even 100, in fact.
https://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/227903-centenares-tanques-eeuu-lle… 

.@RANDCorporation on RU info war: "modern, media-savvy twist on Soviet propaganda methods"
pic.twitter.com/iYgbxhNjeU
http://usa.liveuamap.com/en/2017/8-january-extensive-randcorporation-an… 

MAYBE Trump should expand his reading horizons.....

BUT WAIT...Trump even supported WikiLeaks this week in his tweet rants....

.@JuddLegum & I went through Trump's speeches in Oct

He mentioned Wikileaks 164x. Now claims it didnt sway election
http://thkpr.gs/40aa62ea5002

APPEARS that in fact if the number of 164 times is in fact correct...Trump fully understands "influence operations" driven by the Russians....

The Russian "digital infowar" program was always GRU
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2951.htm

BUT WAIT Trumpalready knew this as he stated "he is smarter than all others"...
 

Maybe Trump should start to read MSM instead of quickly reading Breitbart.com and or Infowars........

How We Fool Ourselves on Russia
http://nyti.ms/2jfRoTM

Insightful piece on campaign to stop fake news, hate sites and Breitbart by throttling their advertising revenue
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/how-to-destroy-the-… 

The core problem with Trump reading say Brietbart.com and Infowars is that he has failed to understand the concept of "influence operations"...

European social media comment from abroad sums up Trump's tweets yesterday...NOT exactly sure just how he is going to overcome the European image of him being simply a loose cannon who knows nothing about trade...NATO..foreign policy ......AND Russian hacking and influence operations which the Europeans have been experiencing from first the Soviet Union and now Russia...

Quisling-in-Chief @realDonaldTrump blasts 'fools' who oppose good Russian ties
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38542415 

Here is the coming FP problem...we have a large number of voters who fully understand what the Russian hacking an influence operations means for the US and the electoral process....

THEN we have a large ...not as large but surprisingly large number of Trump voters who are either not caring about it...are actually in favor of supporting Russia and or such as this voters comments totally uninformed on just about anything...AND this person came from an area which voted heavily for Trump....

QUOTE
Ms. Kubacki said she perceived Russia as “somewhere in the middle” between friend and enemy, but agreed with Mr. Trump that the United States could work with them to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “We may have to line up with people who may not be our ‘friend’ to make that happen,” she said.

In Louisiana, David Gubert, 56, chain-smoked Eagle 20 cigarettes in the cab of his pickup, with stacks of firewood for sale behind him in the bed. Like the Willises, he ruminated on what it would mean if the Russians had gotten involved, and possibly even swung the election.

But Mr. Gubert came to a different conclusion.
“If that’s what it took,” he said, “I’m glad they did it.”
UNQUOTE.

NOTE somehow this voter apparently feels the threat from IS is far greater than the threat of nuclear war being thrown at the US by Russian almost constantly since their military annexation of Crimea....

These voters of Trump were....

1. apparently unaware of Russian involvement in Syria
2. completely and evidently unaware that Putin has been accused of war crimes for the bombing of hospitals...aid stations and using cluster and incendiary munitions deliberately on civilians
3. that the vast refugee flows have been largely caused by a genocidal ethnic cleansing dictator supported by Putin and Iran...the same Iran that held the US Embassy and personnel captive for months and who has driven terrorism equaling IS in the ME against US personnel.

AND most importantly appears to have totally missed the US SecDef statement that Russian has done absolutely nothing to stop and or attack IS inside Syria.

Both Russian propaganda and Trump tweets works extremely well on an uninformed civil society.

I have never seen this level of being uninformed.....or worse yet totally uneducated about the world around them....since 9/11 it appears that this group of voters has simply withdrawn from the world.

This statement ties into many statements from Trump voters that openly admitted that they do not trust MSM and get their information from Breitbart.com...Infowars and such alt right and or neo right blog sites and websites AND from social media...Twitter...Instragram and FB...

If that is the level of being informed that drives these voters of Trump...just what is the US FP suppose to look like and or reflect if Trump is basically playing to this group of voters?????

Why do I say that??...has Trump even remotely attempted to reach out to those that voted not for him.....the answer is quite evident...NO he has not...so he will be driving FP based on his and his voters emotional needs and in the case of Trump...his business needs...

Yesterday...this was made very clear with his twitter use of the words...."stupid or fools mixed in with poor losers" when people voice their concerns about Russian influence operations and hacking....

IMHO what we are seeing in the group of voters that support Trump is the same level of being informed and educated about the world around them that Trump has...basically none.....

Does anyone understand anything that is ongoing inside the Trump transition team with the individuals they select to help govern the US....

This is a farce if not so important to the future security of the US.....

We have a white supremacist ...a failed fired for cause former General and now this......all as national security advisors.....in some fashion.....

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/kfile-trump-monica-crowley-plagia…

Trump national security pick Monica Crowley plagiarized multiple sources in 2012 book

By Andrew Kaczynski, design by Tal Yellin

Conservative author and television personality Monica Crowley, whom Donald Trump has tapped for a top national security communications role, plagiarized large sections of her 2012 book, a CNN KFile review has found.

The review of Crowley’s June 2012 book, "What The (Bleep) Just Happened," found upwards of 50 examples of plagiarism from numerous sources, including the copying with minor changes of news articles, other columnists, think tanks, and Wikipedia. The New York Times bestseller, published by the HarperCollins imprint Broadside Books, contains no notes or bibliography.

Crowley did not return a request for comment. Multiple requests for comment by phone and email over the past two days to HarperCollins went unreturned.

Crowley, a syndicated radio host, columnist, and, until recently, a Fox News contributor, will serve as Trump’s senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council.

Trump’s transition team is standing by Crowley.

"Monica’s exceptional insight and thoughtful work on how to turn this country around is exactly why she will be serving in the Administration," a statement from a transition spokesperson said. "HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller.

Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country."

In the book, Crowley lifted an entire section on Keynesian economics from the IAC-owned website Investopedia.

In one instance, Crowley lists a variety of so-called "pork" items she claimed were part of the 2009 stimulus package. Many of the instances were copied wholesale from a conservative list of pork barrel spending, with some items dating back to the 1990s.

Most of the copied instances were listed on a website for a podiatrist dating back to 2004.

A section on organized labor appears largely copied from a 2004 article by the libertarian think tank the Mises Institute. Another portion of her book on torture is copied from a Fox News article.

Sections of her book are repeatedly lifted from articles by National Review author Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a friend of Crowley’s. Lines in her book also match word-for-word the work of other columnists, including National Review’s Rich Lowry, Michelle Malkin, conservative economist Stephen Moore, Karl Rove, and Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View.
Crowley also lifted word-for-word phrases from the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the BBC, and Yahoo News.

Crowley has been accused of plagiarism before. In 1999, Slate reported a column by Crowley in the Wall Street Journal mirrored a 1988 article in Commentary, the neoconservative magazine.

"Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article," a Journal editor’s note said at the time. Crowley denied the charge at the time, saying,

BLUF......her own quote
"I did not, nor would I ever, use material from a source without citing it."

BTW....again the Trump team blames everyone else...BUT not the plagiarizer.
Trump team appears to not be worried about any moral values much less anything else.....

QUOTE
"Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country."

Been known for a while, also in Europe:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/20/rus
sias-quiet-war-against-european-fracking/ 

NOTICE the date of the article and what the US IC said about Russian financing to anti fracking groups in the US...AND Trump thinks many are stupid and or fools....??????

Remnick on Trump, Putin, and "The Big Hack"
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-putin-and-the-big-hack 

Trump, Putin, and the Big Hack
By David Remnick   January 6, 2017

According to U.S. intelligence reports, Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign” to undermine Hillary Clinton and work with “a clear preference” to enhance Donald Trump’s prospects.

Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, once remarked while on a trip to Berlin in the early days of the Cold War, “The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they will turn out.”

On the morning of November 9th, Molotov’s grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of the Russian Duma’s foreign-affairs committee, announced to the parliament, “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the American Presidential elections. And just this second Donald Trump began his speech as President-elect.” The Duma members cheered and applauded.

In the days to come, there were more declarations of acid satisfaction among the Russian élite. Dmitri Kiselyov, the host of “News of the Week,” a popular current-affairs show on state-controlled television, gloated over Trump’s victory and Barack Obama’s inability to prevent it. Obama, he said, was a “eunuch.” Trump was an “alpha male”—and one who showed mercy to his vanquished rival. “Trump could have put the blonde in prison, as he’d threatened in the televised debates,” Kiselyov said on his show. “On the other hand, it’s nothing new. Trump has left blond women satisfied all his life.”

Kiselyov further praised Trump because the concepts of democracy and human rights “are not in his lexicon.” In India, Turkey, Europe, and now the United States, he declared, “the liberal idea is in ruins.”

Vladimir Putin did not showboat, but he, too, made his satisfaction plain.

His spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters that the similarity between Trump and Putin’s “conceptual approach to foreign policy” was “phenomenal.” Trump’s victory was the basis for Russia’s “moderate optimism”; now both sides could discuss how “to clear out the Augean stables in our bilateral relations.”

All of this is all the more alarming to recall now, in the light of the latest news: according to U.S. intelligence reports, Putin “ordered an influence campaign” to undermine Clinton and work with “a clear preference” to enhance Trump’s prospects.

A classified version of this intelligence has now been delivered to both the President and the President-elect. Briefed in New York on Friday by the heads of the C.I.A., F.B.I., and N.S.A., Trump, who earlier in the day called the focus on Russian hacking “a political witch hunt,” finally allowed, if obliquely, that the Russians—and not the Chinese, not “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds”—might have hacked the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

A declassified report concluded that Putin ordered a campaign of covert operations, from defamatory “fake news” articles about Clinton to the hack itself.

Even as Trump seemed to shift his view of the source of the D.N.C. hack, he did not concede that the operation had helped his campaign. The declassified report, however, said that the C.I.A., F.B.I., and N.S.A. had uniformly “high confidence” that Putin ordered the operation in order to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” The N.S.A. had only “moderate confidence” on some details, while the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had “high confidence.”

The differences, while vague, seem to be over the degree of Putin’s personal role. The declassified version of the report was unrevealing about how the agencies had come to their conclusions or collected their information.

One should continue to demand even more information from the U.S. government, and one can readily concede that Trump won his Electoral College victory for a variety of reasons, including the disaffection of the white working class in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; the F.B.I. director’s two letters, late in the campaign, about Clinton’s e-mail server; and Clinton’s deficiencies and tactical errors as a candidate.

And yet how is it possible, if these intelligence reports are true, to count the 2016 Presidential election as unsullied? We are two weeks away from Trump’s Inauguration, and American intelligence agencies, flawed as they are, have declared, publicly and clearly, that they have convincing evidence that Russia, at its President’s direction, interfered in a Presidential election.

Congress clearly has a job to do, but it is not alone. No matter how much it may offend Trump’s ego or his sense of self-possession, it will be his responsibility, his duty as President, to order the agencies at his command to dig even deeper, to provide as full a reckoning as possible.

Will he resist Congress on this issue? Is he capable of questioning, in a sense, his own election? If he decides to refuse this duty, to just “move on,” as he likes to say, one will have to ask why.

Putin’s resentment of Clinton was always manifest; it is almost as severe as Trump’s. Putin saw the Clinton Administration of the nineties as having taken advantage of Russian weakness after the fall of the Soviet Union, twenty-five years ago. He viewed Hillary Clinton as a foreign-policy hawk who wanted regime change from Baghdad to Kiev to Moscow.

In 2011, Putin, who lives in fear of spontaneous uprisings, events like the Arab Spring and the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, accused Clinton of giving “a signal” to urge thousands of Russians to come out on the streets of Moscow to protest parliamentary-election “irregularities” and Putin’s intention to return once more to the Kremlin as President.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had conversations with Russian political experts, and all of them agreed that Putin was certainly pleased, at least initially, with Trump’s victory—and that satisfaction is reflected, too, on countless news and talk shows on television. These analysts added that Putin is undoubtedly cheered that Rex Tillerson, Trump’s appointment to head the State Department, was likely to leave behind American “sanctimony” about human rights and democracy and, following the pattern of his career at ExxonMobil, to concentrate on purely “transactional politics.”

Some, however, wondered if Putin will remain enchanted with Trump once he encounters Trump’s inconsistencies, his alarming penchant for surprise pronouncements via Twitter.

Like many nationalist politicians in Europe, Trump has made plain his admiration for Putin, complimenting the Russian leader’s “great control over his country,” while at the same time failing to address the reality that Putin’s regime has instituted wholesale censorship of television, increased repressive measures on ordinary citizens, and unleashed his forces in Ukraine and Syria. (Putin, of course, discounts criticism of his policies as Western hypocrisy and points to everything from the invasion of Iraq, which he opposed, to the eastward expansion of NATO, which he sees as an aggressive act.)

Trump’s argument throughout the campaign, the reason for his compliments for Putin, he has said, is related to his stated desire to ease tensions between Russia and the United States and avoid the ultimate disaster, a nuclear confrontation.

But what concerns many seasoned American analysts, politicians, and diplomats is that Trump is deluding himself about Putin’s intentions and refuses to see the nature of Russia’s nationalist, autocratic regime clearly. Trump has spoken critically of NATO and in support of European nationalist initiatives like Brexit to such a degree that, according to one Obama Administration official, “our allies are absolutely terrified and completely bewildered.”

Strobe Talbott, who was Bill Clinton’s closest adviser on Russia, told me recently that the hack of the D.N.C. and Putin’s other moves in Europe—including the annexation of Crimea, the Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine, and the financial support of nationalists like Marine Le Pen, of France—were part of a larger strategy intended to weaken the E.U. and NATO.

“I try to be careful about superlatives,” Talbott said, “but I cannot think, going back to the Soviet Union or since, that there’s been a Moscow-Kremlin-instigated gambit that was so spectacularly successful as what they have done with our democracy.

All of those assets that they tried to use on us over the years were far less by comparison; this was like winning seventeen jackpots all at once.”

so how is Trump exactly going to handle Assad as he has inferred that he wants to work with Russia and Assad in his fight against IS....BUT he seems to have forgotten this tidbit......

Kyle W. Orton
✔
@KyleWOrton
Three infamous 1980s terrorists:
- Abu Nidal
- Abu Abbas
- Carlos the Jackal
All worked for #Assad's regime.
https://goo.gl/eG1tqf

The New York Times
✔
@nytimes
Trump said only “stupid” people would reject an embrace of Russia, calling for a closer relationship
http://nyti.ms/2i0LfPf

WASHINGTON — A day after the release of a damning intelligence report on Russia’s wide-ranging efforts to influence the American election, President-elect Donald J. Trump called on Saturday for a closer relationship between the two nations, saying only “stupid” people or “fools” would think this was unwise.

The United States, Mr. Trump wrote in a series of Twitter messages Saturday morning, has “enough problems around the world without yet another one.” He pledged that Russia would “respect us far more than they do now” after he is sworn in as president, and said that the two nations could perhaps work together on the international stage.

For years, Russia has been anything but a willing partner of the United States. Relations became strained well before the election-related cyberattacks began nearly a year and a half ago, despite the Obama administration’s early effort to reset relations.

After Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea in 2014, the United States and its allies levied broad sanctions against the Russian economy and blacklisted dozens of its citizens, including some close to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

President Obama added to those measures last month in retaliation for the hacking, expelling 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on two Russian intelligence services. Russia and the United States have also often been at odds over Moscow’s involvement in the war in Syria.

Senior intelligence officials briefed Mr. Trump on their findings on Russian election interference on Friday, before releasing a declassified report that concluded that Mr. Putin had “ordered” a sprawling campaign intended to denigrate Hillary Clinton and aid Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions as politically motivated, but he appeared to soften that stance in a statement his transition team released after the briefing. He also seemingly conceded Russian involvement in the election, but he has taken pains to point out that there is no evidence that any vote tallies were altered, apparently seeking to avoid the suggestion that his victory was illegitimate.

Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that it is time to “move on” from the focus on Russian meddling in the election, arguing that it has received such attention only because Democrats are embarrassed about their loss — an assertion he repeated on Twitter on Saturday.

Late on Friday, he blamed the Democratic National Committee for the hacking of its computer systems, saying that “gross negligence” had allowed it to happen. Many Democrats said on Twitter that Mr. Trump was essentially engaging in victim-blaming.

Can anyone explain to me just how it is that Trump gets a thorough and detailed breakout of Russian influence operations being directed straight at the US....which refutes everything he has been tweeting in the past about poor intelligence AND THEN THIS.......

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 1h
1 hour ago
both countries will, perhaps, work together to solve some of the many great and pressing problems and issues of the WORLD!

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 2h
2 hours ago
have enough problems around the world without yet another one. When I am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now and....

If Trump actually read yday's report or processed his intel briefing, he'd be fetal today. Instead, says Dems & Russia's critics are stupid.

He virtually blames everyone except himself...he is use to taking absolutely no responsibility....for anything...

One of many worrying things is that he seems incapable of seeing this as a national security issue rather than a personal slight.

Russian infor warfare used to support Russian political warfare directed straight at the US is built on the two corner stones....cyber warfare and information warfare...

THIS information warfare uses both disinformation via fakes news sites and internet trolling....

Russian propaganda and fake news/disinformation uses the Russian SIX Ds of propaganda...Distort...Dismay....Dimiss....Deflect ALL designed to create Doubt and Distrust.....

THESE are the recent tweets from today's Trump's twitter rants...

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 1h
1 hour ago

Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only "stupid" people, or fools, would think that it is bad! We.....

Putin launches a strategic cyber attack on the U.S. and @realDonaldTrump wants America to surrender.

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 4h
4 hours ago

Only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC is discussed is that the loss by the Dems was so big that they are totally embarrassed!

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 4h
4 hours ago

Intelligence stated very strongly there was absolutely no evidence that hacking affected the election results. Voting machines not touched!

WHICH of the Russian propaganda SIX Ds are being used in this set of Trump twitter rants.....

1. Deflect....NOTICE even in the face of an overwhelming IC finger pointed directly at Russia....Trump does not focus on that aspect...and uses then the DNC tweet to Distract from the IC intel briefing he had received....

2. Dismiss....NOTICE just how Trump swings attention again back to the alleged poor computer security of the DNC....Trump is using this to defocus away from the hard assessment of the IC that Russia was at the heart of the hacking

3. Distort....NOTICE how Trump defines those that accept Russia indeed hack the meddle in the US election "are stupid people and or fools".....

WHAT Trump is desperate and is clinging to as his sole defense is the single point he makes over and over....THAT the hacking did not touch the voting machines....

BUT WAIT....the IC did not check the three State voting databases that were in fact proven to have been hacked before the election NOR were recounts run in States that had unusual voting results...meaning paper ballots compared against digital counts...

WHAT Trump really is attempting to cover-up up are the IC comments and proven by them of Russian information warfare actively being conducted inside the US during the campaign and through the actual election....

The use of fake news being pushed by alt right and neo right blogsites originating outside of the US...the use of proTrump American twitter comments conducted by a Russian company in Macedonia and which at the height of the campaign some 33% of the total proTrump tweets came from Macedonia....AND on and on...

This is called "influence operations"....the core of what the former KGB/GDR MfS Stasi did against the West for years.....

THIS is what Trump is DEFLECTING everything away from with his twitter rants...

So can anyone really explain exactly why Trump's use of propaganda matches exactly the Russian SIX Ds of propaganda...

NOTICE any potential connections?....this is not well known in the US ...........

Malofeev, #Russian orthodox billionaire, in 2014, bankrolled #Crimea annexation & Eastern #Ukraine campaign.

Sen Sessions (Miller) in 2009-10 built a pro-VVP, racialist, anti-liberal network. Trump contacted in 2011. Malofeev probed faith groups.

WHY does this surprise anyone in the US...if US MSM had been accepting what social media has been tracking...reporting on an analyzing they would have seen as early as 2015 Russian non linear warfare being used in support of a Russian political warfare against the US and Obama....

I have been commenting on this since in the Ukrainian and then Syrian threads since the Crimea military annexation by Russia and the first SWC discussions on Russian non linear warfare...

ABC News: How Russia used trolls, cyberattacks and propaganda to try to influence election
http://dlvr.it/N3L1Wd

STILL no major tweet from Trump at least acknowledging the Russians actually actively hacked the US electoral process and supported him via a strong information warfare aimed directly into the US in support of him.....

New details: Russian intelligence got into DNC earlier, maintained access longer than assumed. Note "at least." Crowdstrike report: 14 June.

ALL we currently have from him is his tweet that the DNC computer security was supposedly lax.....and the RNC was better....which is not saying anything about the Russians....

AND THIS IS ALL the new incoming President has to say on his highly classified briefing yesterday???????

Russian information warfare works on the Russian propaganda concept of the SIX Ds....Dismiss....Deflect...Distort...Dismay ALL designed to create Doubt and Distrust....

WHICH of the Russian propaganda SIX Ds...did Trump use in his following tweet.

Cup of Starbuck's here in berlin for the person who can spot it immediately......ACTUALLY at least three are in play.....

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 2h
2 hours ago

Gross negligence by the Democratic National Committee allowed hacking to take place.The Republican National Committee had strong defense!

Following SIX Ds were used by Trump:

DISMISS
DEFLECT
DISTORT

Definitely used to reinforce Doubt and Distrust in the US IC...

NOTICE not a single stern word directed towards his best friend Putin who was probably very definitely pointed out in yesterday's briefing....

WHY is that???

Suddenly the Trump twitter machine went silent after his hacking briefing yesterday.....now we can get to the urgently needed SWC discussion on what is and or is not information warfare and how did Russia play their narrative in the US campaign and election ASSISTED by the now incoming President in his twitter rants...once we fully understand that then and only then can be compare what Trumps says to his FP in order to see if it is information warfare driven and by whom...

QUOTE
1/06/2017 — 
WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), the Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee, issued the following statement today after the release of a declassified intelligence report highlighting Russian hacking and interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election:
“Our elections should be decided by American citizens, not foreign hackers, heads of state, or their propagandists.

This report shows that Russian operatives actively manipulated our presidential election.  They left cyber fingerprints and the U.S. intelligence community unanimously concluded that Russia intervened with the intention of undermining Hillary Clinton and helping Donald Trump. 

The report clearly states: 'the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.'
Regardless, as Senator McCain points out: this was an attack on all Americans because it undermines our democracy.

We know that Russia continues to engage in similar cyber campaigns and we need to take corrective action to put a stop to it.

This declassified report is a start, but it is not enough.  The American public has been given a glimpse of a few pieces of a much larger puzzle.  They deserve as much information as can be provided without putting our intelligence assets and techniques at risk.  And the most effective way to achieve that goal is through an independent, select committee to investigate Russian interference with our election. 

There is hard evidence and broad consensus from U.S. intelligence officials on this matter, and there ought to be bipartisan consensus and action from Congress, too. 

This is not about embarrassing the President-elect; it’s about protecting our democracy.  I realize this may be an uncomfortable situation for President-elect Trump, but the American people and the strength of our democracy should come first.”

AFTER more Trump tweets today referencing WLs and Russian hacking being a "witch hunt"...it is important to bring back up comments taken from a 1992 German published book which concerned the GDR Stasi COL who headed the GDR Disinformation Warfare Dept X for over 25 years......

Stasi's highly secretive "Department X" in charge of active measures [aktive Maßnahmen] was first presented internally in Belzig in 1986

Book in German
Auftrag Irrefuerhung
Wie die Stasi Politik im Westen machte
Publisher Carlson

Auftrag: Irreführung. Wie die Stasi Politik im Westen machte - Amazon.de
https://www.amazon.de/Auftrag-Irreführung-Politik-Westen-machte/dp/3551…

Fits nicely with the Trump tweets.....

Stasi: "Conspiracy was widely practiced—most widely concerning the existence and responsibilities of the Active Measures Department [X]"

—‘Embarrassment’
—‘corrosion’ [Zersetzung]
—‘incitement’
—‘disruption’
—‘influence’
—‘discrediting’
"even combined into one active measure"

Stasi covert operator: "Active measures directed against [Western] intelligence agencies in Bonn were code-named JUNGLE"

Stasi memoirs: "[KGB] black propaganda used camouflage and deception in order to penetrate deep into the political structures of the West."

Stasi, 1980s: "Black and white propaganda were not divided by some firewall. They were more like twins: information and disinformation"

Perhaps the most remarkable historical novelty when comparing 1980s Active Measures to the 2010s: this recurring tenet is no longer valid —
MEANING..in the 80s if the active measure was detected they would back off...NOW Russia in fact doubles down more.

A few details on how Russia's KGB and East Germany's Stasi cooperated on active measures and covert influence operations

"In the 80s we increased our support for the West German peace movement—at the same time we fought the pacifists in our own country"

Stasi HVA, 1989: "Western intelligence agencies simply didn’t have such a fine-grained disinformation apparatus in Europe."

"We [Stasi] eventually learned that psychological warfare did not favor peace"

One of the most amazing details from an amazing book: Stasi active measures & disinformation targeted famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal

Always amazing what Stasi covert Active Measure operators said about Western journalists—not dissimilar assessments probably going on today

Deleted...duplicate

“Mattis was furious...it made him suspicious of the transition team"
http://wapo.st/2i0i911
 
great @joshrogin scoop

Can Trump outdo his last 24 hours on Twitter?

You know he can.

Maybe next he'll tweet the nuclear launch codes with a side of midget porn.

When the IC releases the names of the RIS agents who cyber-attacked the DNC, PEOTUS has to admit he's wrong or he has no legitimacy as CINC.

Donald Trump’s Soft Spot for Russia Could Be His Political Undoing

President-elect may soon learn that you can’t fool all the people, all the time
By John R. Schindler • 01/04/17 1:30pm

http://observer.com/2017/01/donald-trump-russia-wikileaks/

QUOTE
Three weeks ago, I counseled President-elect Donald Trump that going to war against the spies is never a good idea in Washington. Our Intelligence Community knows lots of things, not all of which would be flattering to someone whose retinue includes so many people with odd connections to the Kremlin. When spies get angry, they call reporters and arrange discreet chats in parking garages. The last president who entered the Oval Office with this much dislike and distrust of the IC was Richard Nixon—and we know how that worked out for him.

Trump has now outdone Nixon, upping his war on the spooks even before his inauguration, by making plain that he believes Moscow—not our country’s spies—regarding the issue of Russian interference in our election. As I’ve explained in detail, although there is no evidence that the Kremlin literally “hacked” our election in 2016, there’s a mountain of evidence that Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services stole Democratic emails then went public with them via Wikileaks to hurt Hillary Clinton.

However, the president-elect refuses to accept the consensus view of the IC, not to mention many outside experts who have confirmed their analysis. In response to President Obama’s recent public statement pointing a finger at the Kremlin for their misdeeds against our democracy, backed up by rather mild sanctions on Moscow, President-elect Trump has pursued his customary tactic of denying, doubling-down, then denying some more, regardless of any evidence proffered.

Trump and his mouthpieces continue to deny that Russians had any role in our 2016 election, which is a patent falsehood. Indeed, a few days ago, the president-elect promised to deliver revelations by the middle of this week about what happened with those Democratic emails, adding that he knew “things that other people don’t know” about the hacking. Here he apparently channeled O. J. Simpson, whose quest to find the “real killers” of his ex-wife and her friend remains unfulfilled, more than two decades later.

Trump’s promise was empty, and there is no new evidence to contradict the IC’s conclusion that Moscow stood behind the operation to politically harm Hillary Clinton and her party last year. Like his promise to reveal President Obama’s “real” birth certificate—which would show he was born in Kenya, or Mars, rather than Hawaii—this was no more than another cynical Trumpian publicity stunt.

The facts are in regarding the theft of Democratic emails, and the only people seriously disputing them are those in thrall to Vladimir Putin one way or another. (For an excellent quick primer on the evidence, this cannot be beat.) The promised “new evidence” seems to be no more than the latest lies proffered by Julian Assange in his most recent obsequious interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. Here, Assange once again stated that Wikileaks, which he created a decade ago, didn’t get the Democrats’ emails from the Russians.

The source of the purloined emails was “not the Russian government and not a state party,” explained the fugitive holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012, as Hannity fawned over his unsubstantiated claims. Assange’s line—which naturally leaves open the door to a third-party source between Wikileaks and Moscow, what spies term a “cut-out”—is that he won’t say who the source was, but it definitely wasn’t the Russians.

Since the evidence for Wikileaks serving as a front for Putin’s intelligence service for years is now overwhelming to anybody even marginally acquainted with espionage, there’s no need to take any of Assange’s absurd claims at face value.

Yet Team Trump does. Kellyanne Conway, who managed Trump’s campaign to electoral success and is soon to take up a plum job in the new White House, urged the public to take Assange’s alleged  “bombshell” seriously.

The new administration has solidified its message on the election: whoever it was subverting our democracy, it sure wasn’t the Russians.

The president-elect has jumped on the bald-faced denial bandwagon too, offering quick backup to Assange on social media in a series of remarkable tweets last night and this morning. First, he mocked the American spies who suggested that maybe it actually was the Russians.

Then, in addition to tweeting support for Assange’s assertion that Obama is trying to undermine his successor with propaganda about the Russians, the president-elect cited the fugitive’s claims:

The president-elect’s unsubtle mocking of our spies was prominent, as was his need to put “Russian hacking” in quotes with the “so-called” jibe. Trump has made abundantly clear that he believes Moscow—not the government he is about to take over in a couple weeks.

It’s time to be clear about what is happening. Our soon-to-be commander-in-chief is publicly ridiculing our security agencies, while backing a fugitive on the lam from rape charges who is also an agent of the Kremlin.

To call this situation unprecedented is an understatement.

Trump has backed himself into a corner with his refusal to consider that the Russians might have had a role in the attacks on his rival in 2016.

Now, he is stuck, since the IC shows no sign of wavering from its conviction that the Kremlin is the guilty party. If the president-elect has no evidence beyond the unsubstantiated assertions of an accused rapist hiding in an embassy for over four years, he has no leg to stand on.

Moreover, even his supporters are starting to wonder what’s really going on. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Trump backer, today made clear that he, like many fellow Republicans, doesn’t support the president-elect on the issue: “I have a lot more faith in our intelligence officers … than I do in people like Julian Assange,” he stated on MSNBC.

Democrats, too, are casting grave doubts on what Trump is up to. Despite the president-elect’s recent fawning over Sen. Chuck Schumer, whom he said he likes better than fellow Republicans in the Senate, the new minority leader explained that Trump was “really dumb” for attacking the IC, adding, “Let me tell you, you take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Here Schumer spoke the truth, and our spies right now are seething at the repeated insults thrown their way by the president-elect.

What our counterspies are also doing these days is piecing together a puzzle of Russian espionage operations against America during the two terms of the Obama presidency. As I explained, these isolated stories actually aren’t; they form a mosaic of interlinked Russian spy-games aimed at the heart of Washington—and our democracy.

Recently I sat down with an old friend and onetime partner in the SpyWar who’s a senior IC counterintelligence official. We reviewed the cases, one by one, over coffee. First, Ed Snowden, who’s been in Russia under Kremlin protection since June 2013. It’s well established that Snowden was no whistleblower, in fact he was motivated to steal 1.5 million classified documents from his employer, the National Security Agency, because he got reprimanded at work for being a jerk, emailing top NSA officials with minor complaints when he was just a low-level IT contractor.

He wanted payback, and he sure got it, but Snowden, a sysadmin who never actually worked in intelligence operations, really knew very little about what NSA does. He simply stole whatever top secret files he could get his hands on and passed them to the press—and the Russians. Snowden was no more than a patsy. He was never a Russian mole—indeed, he served as cover for the real moles inside NSA and its Anglosphere Five Eyes intelligence partners. There’s no reason to think he gave Moscow very much about NSA which the Russians didn’t know already.

What Snowden did possess, however, was an enormous trove of classified files that created a global sensation. That Russian propaganda offensive, what can be called the Snowden Operation, did enormous damage to NSA, the IC, and their longstanding intelligence partnerships with nearly the whole Western world. The Kremlin has tried to do this for decades, and they finally hit pay-dirt with the malcontent Snowden and his purloined PowerPoints.

The Snowden Operation likewise did great damage to the IC’s reputation at home, convincing millions of Americans that NSA is spying on them—when, in fact, they do not.

However, this distorted image became gospel truth to many citizens, including some on the right who never liked Big Government, and really didn’t like it when it was in the hands of Barack Obama.

Thus did the notion that NSA and the IC are the enemies of Americans, rather than their protectors which they actually are, become a meme in our politics. This has been very useful for Donald Trump as questions have mounted about his actual ties to the Kremlin.

In the post-Snowden era it’s easy to dodge such awkward queries, at least for a while, with implications that American spies are crooks and liars anyway, so why believe them about anything?

The common denominator between Trump and Snowden, of course, is Wikileaks. It was Assange who told the fugitive to seek refuge in Moscow back in mid-2013, just as it was Assange who led the charge in 2016 to take out Hillary Clinton at the ballot box. Counterspies don’t like coincidences, and this is very big one indeed. “It all sounds like a really successful linked op for the Kremlin to me,” was how my old friend summarized our walk-through of the spy cases with a wry smile.

The key question now is: Why does Donald Trump feel the need to protect Putin and his spy agencies at every turn, on every issue, no matter how flimsy and evidence-free his defense might be? This is the question which must be asked, and answered, preferably before he officially becomes our 45th president.

Trump may soon learn that you really can’t fool all the people, all the time. One year ago, I reported extensively on Hillary’s emails, based on leaks from angry members of the IC who wanted her to pay a price for exposing our secrets to foreign intelligence agencies. I stated then, and many times after, that #EmailGate would be ultimately sink Clinton. There were many doubters and Hillary looked like a shoo-in, but I was right.

Now I want to state that, unless he comes clean and starts accepting reality soon, Trump’s inexplicable gullibility about the Russians will prove to be his political undoing.
UNQUOTE

IMHO...BLUF...Trump has been thoroughly and completely compromised by RIS complete with audio and video....OR they have invested so much into his companies he is afraid to reveal the depth of Russian black money investments in his companies....

Appears that the Japanese are not in the least bullied by Trump FP tweets....

Oh man. Japan has *COME OUT SWINGING* against Donald Trump's Toyota-baiting:
https://www.ft.com/content/06e7fc2c-d3dc-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1b51 

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 20h
20 hours ago

Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. NO WAY! Build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax.

Social media response to this tweet.....

Just imagine, all that from a single tweet. When was Melania going to start on that anti-bullying thing again?

That town in KY where so many Toyota cars are built is where I spent my childhood. Ppl there support DT big time. It's disheartening.

Toyota might well decide it's safer to build all their cars outside the US

And Trump had Abe at Trump Towers with Ivanka who wants to do a deal with a company owned in part by Japan govt

Here we go again...Trump FP via twitter...and again he is lying to the American people yet those that voted for him buy the tweet.....

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 2h
2 hours ago

The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!

NOT EXACTLY sure just how Trump is going to get Mexico to pay for a wall BUILT on US territory...so to tell everyone that he will build it and then collect later at some unnamed point in time is basically a deflecting lie...ESPECIALLY after Mexico has formerly stated they will pay for nothing.

WHAT Trump apparently does not quite fully understand a wall on international boundaries cannot be built on the territory of the other nation state...if it is then the border wall and or markings must be painted in the national colors of both countries...THUS a wall and or fence is usually built three feet back from the actual territorial boundary line...so that any individual can be arrested for actually illegally crossing and being on the territory of the US thus in violation of actual US laws....if the border wall is exactly in the middle of the actual boundary line then one runs the risk of arresting individuals on the Mexico side of the border....

QUOTE
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump on Friday tweeted that Mexico will reimburse American taxpayers for a new border wall and that U.S. money spent will be for the "sake of speed."

His tweet came as top aides consider a plan to ask Congress to ensure money is available in U.S. coffers for the wall, but to rely on existing law that already authorizes fencing and other technology along the southern border.

The potential approach was confirmed Thursday by two congressional officials and a senior transition official with knowledge of the discussions; all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Trump said in a tweet early Friday: "The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!"

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly told voters if elected he would build a wall along the U.S. southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
Trump transition spokesman Sean Spicer said putting U.S. money up-front "doesn't mean he's broken his promise." In an interview Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Spicer said: "I think he's going to continue to talk to them (the Mexican government) about that."

The approach could also stave off a legislative fight that Trump might lose if he tried to get Congress to pass a measure authorizing the kind of border wall he promised during the campaign.

It's not clear how much could be done along the 2,000-mile border without additional actions by Congress. Lawmakers passed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, but most of those 700 miles have already been built. Some areas are in much better shape than others, though, and long stretches are made up of fencing that stops vehicles but not pedestrians.

But whatever steps might be taken without Congress' approval would be likely to fall short of the extravagant new wall on the border that Trump repeatedly said Mexico would pay for during his campaign for the White House. And despite Congress' involvement in approving any spending, such an approach might also open Trump to charges of circumventing the House and the Senate to take unilateral actions, something he repeatedly criticized President Barack Obama for doing.

A spending bill including money for border construction could also provoke a legislative showdown given potential opposition from Senate Democrats.
Still, several lawmakers and congressional officials said the administration could have significant flexibility in taking additional steps without Congress' approval.

"There's a lot of things that can be done within current law," said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., a longtime proponent of comprehensive immigration reform, though he emphasized that a lasting solution on immigration would take action by Congress. "You cannot minimize the potential impact of the administration doing what they can do under the law," he said.

However, some immigration hard-liners have already expressed the desire to see Congress take a vote, given how prominent the wall was during Trump's presidential campaign, and their desire to act on the issue.

Trump's vow to build an impenetrable, concrete wall along the southern border was his signature campaign proposal. "Build the wall!" supporters would chant at his rallies. "Who's going to pay for it?" Trump would ask them. "Mexico!" Trump often promised the wall would be built of hardened concrete, rebar and steel as tall as his venues' ceilings, and would feature a "big, beautiful door" to allow legal immigrants to enter.

Most experts viewed such promises as unrealistic and impractical, and Trump himself sometimes allowed that the wall would not need to span the entire length of the border, thanks to natural barriers like rivers. After winning the election, he said he'd be open to stretches of fencing.
UNQUOTE

BLUF....building a fence is not the same thing that Trump stated he would do...build a concrete wall with rebar ALONG the entire border.......

What can one say about these tweets....they speak for themselves...literally...

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 11h
11 hours ago

How did NBC get "an exclusive look into the top secret report he (Obama) was presented?" Who gave them this report and why? Politics!

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 11h
11 hours ago

The Democratic National Committee would not allow the FBI to study or see its computer info after it was supposedly hacked by Russia......

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 11h
11 hours ago

So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?

BLUF....WHO is feeding Trump totally false and incorrect information....the servers were in fact analyzed and thoroughly and one does not specifically need the servers...one needs the capture the streaming data for forensics....that Trump should realize is always archived.....and then one needs the computers the hack landed on....not always found on the server...WHICH Trump should know....

So exactly just how the Trump FP to handle this.....since Duterte now wants Putin to protect the Philippines....

Sound vaguely similar to the US elections...????

One month before pro-Putin Duterte won presidency of the Philippines, country's voter database was hacked and experts warned of voter fraud

BUT WAIT...Trump des not believe in Russian hacking efforts and is a great friend of Putin's so all will be well.....in the South China Sea areas....