Trump’s Foreign Policy Philosophy Hard to Pin Down
Masood Farivar, Voice of America
Is President-elect Donald Trump a foreign policy realist or idealist? Is he bringing Richard Nixon’s hard-edged realpolitik to his foreign policy or following in the footsteps of the more idealistic Ronald Reagan?
The question has become a parlor game among Washington's policy pundits.
Trump’s frequent invocation of Reagan’s “peace through strength” mantra and campaign pledge to rebuild America’s “depleted” military has invited comparisons to the Republican icon credited with winning the Cold War.
His advocacy of a foreign policy based on America’s national interests has led some to liken it to Nixonian realism, while his aversion to foreign interventions has won him the label of a non-interventionist and even isolationist.
Don’t Fence Trump In
Trump has professed no great power doctrine and his advisers discourage applying labels to his vision of the world.
“I’m not going to be put into the little academic, graduate school box because I think it doesn’t suit, and it doesn’t apply in a rapidly changing world,” said K.T. McFarland, Trump’s incoming deputy national security adviser, when asked to describe the Trump doctrine.
While Trump’s call for “peace through strength” reflects Reagan’s view of deterrence, “there are parts of Nixon and (Henry) Kissinger that Donald Trump has also advocated,” McFarland said at the U.S. Institute of Peace, alluding to Trump’s interest-based approach to world affairs.
Trump’s Speeches
A foreign policy neophyte, Trump has shied away from declaring any grand foreign strategy during the campaign, though he did give two major speeches devoted to foreign policy and national security.
In the first speech, delivered at the realist-leaning Center for the National Interest in Washington in April, Trump outlined what he called a “coherent foreign policy based on American interests” and called for “getting out of nation building,” creating stability and quashing “radical Islam.”
“Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world,” Trump said. “Events may require the use of military force, but it’s also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.”
In the second speech, at Youngstown University in Ohio in August, Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric about terror, warning countries around the world that they’d be judged based on their commitment to the U.S. goal of fighting terrorism.
“All actions should be oriented around this goal, and any country which shares this goal will be our ally,” Trump told a rally of supporters.
‘Strategic Surprise’
It was a theme that Trump would repeat, in one iteration or another, throughout the campaign, but his advisers say Trump’s pre- and post-election pronouncements on foreign policy, often delivered off the cuff, should not be read as policy prescriptions.
“Actually, he didn’t say a lot about foreign policy and national security on the campaign trail, and what he did say really doesn’t add up to a policy,” said James Carafano, director of foreign policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation who advises the Trump transition team on foreign affairs. “That’s very frustrating because the people want to know what’s this guy going to do.”
With the new administration yet to take office, McFarland, too, cautioned that Trump’s foreign policy is in an early stage of development.
“That’s what a new administration does: It takes time to rethink things and to come up with policies,” she said.
If history is any guide, Trump could quickly find himself facing a set of foreign policy crises different from the issues he campaigned on. Political scientists have a term for an unexpected world event that drives a new president into uncharted territory: “strategic surprise.”
For former President George W. Bush, who campaigned on pursuing a “humble foreign policy,” the strategic surprise came September 11, 2001.
For President Barack Obama, who vowed to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the “Arab Spring” protests in North Africa and the Middle East marked a strategic surprise, leaving his administration more deeply mired in the region than he’d hoped.
What international crisis might alter the trajectory of the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda has become a guessing game, with the number of scenarios exceeded only by the variety of foreign policy labels attributed to Trump.
A game-changing terrorist attack on American interests is one possible candidate. Another contender: an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launch by North Korea.
“I think the world is not necessarily going to allow President Trump to do everything he’s planned on,” said Blaise Misztal, director of the national security program at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “I think you’re going to see a triangulation between what he’s said, what he’s advised to do, and what is actually feasible on the world stage.”
Flip Flopping on Issues
While Trump has flip flopped on some issues, NATO and torturing terrorists, for example, he’s held steady on others. Among them: terrorism, trade, China and Russia.
In the weeks since his election, he’s reiterated his pledge to make terrorism a focus of his foreign policy, talked tough on trade, challenged the “One China” policy, and iterated again a desire to reset relations with Russia even as he embraced intelligence findings that Moscow interfered in last year’s presidential election.
Brian Katulis of Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank, said the “most radical shift” Trump will likely undertake will be “engagement and involvement” with Russia, something Obama unsuccessfully attempted during his first term in office.
But former CIA director Michael Hayden said Trump is likely to reconsider his approach to Russia once he learns from intelligence agencies and allies that Russia and Syria are not committed to fighting IS.
“I’m personally very, very skeptical of any convergence between American and Russian interests in this part of the world,” Hayden said. “In fact, I’d offer the view that American and Russian interests are actually heading in different directions.”
Another major change: downplaying a postwar American foreign policy tradition of promoting democracy and freedom around the world.
“Trump has signaled as a candidate and in the transition a proclivity to appreciate authoritarian and repressive leaders around the world,” Katulis said. “And this may be the biggest departure that is historic, that there really won’t be as much of a values-based approach that focuses on human rights democracy and freedom in other countries. And that I think puts the United States itself on shaky territory.”
But McFarland played down those concerns, saying “the three bedrocks of (postwar) American foreign policy” — American leadership, American values and international alliances — will remain under the Trump administration.
Unpredictability
There is usually some continuity between administrations on foreign policy, but “that rule actually may not apply under Trump,” Katulis said.
“We’re dealing with something here that is just fundamentally different and off the charts,” Katulis explained.
That 'something' is Trump’s well-known unpredictability. Trump has criticized President Obama for telegraphing his policy moves and has vowed to remain unpredictable. But experts say unpredictability can be dangerous in the international arena where both allies and adversaries expect a certain degree of predictability from the United States.
"Predictability is the cornerstone of deterrence," said Clarke. "You need to be predictable if you’re the United states, both in what your allies know you’ll do and in what your adversaries know you’ll do and how you’ll respond."
Comments
Hmmmm
"it’s a mistake to say simply that Trump’s accusation against Obama is protected by the First Amendment."
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-06/trump-s-wiretap-twee…
QUOTE:
And an allegation of potentially criminal misconduct made without evidence is itself a form of serious misconduct by the government official who makes it.
When candidate Trump said Hillary Clinton was a criminal who belonged in prison, he was exposing himself to a libel suit. And the suit might not have succeeded, because Trump could have said he was making a political argument rather than an allegation of fact.
But when President Trump accuses Obama of an act that would have been impeachable and possibly criminal, that’s something much more serious than libel.
If it isn’t true or provable, it’s misconduct by the highest official of the executive branch.
How is such misconduct by an official to be addressed? There’s a common-law tort of malicious prosecution, but that probably doesn’t apply when the government official has no intention to prosecute.
The answer is that the constitutional remedy for presidential misconduct is impeachment.
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php
A study done by the Columbia Journalism Review...well researched and everyone needs to fully understand what is being explained....
Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda
QUOTE
The 2016 Presidential election shook the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victory—with theories ranging from Russian hacking to “fake news.”
We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.
This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.
While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric.
Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.
Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading.
Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it.
The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”
Continued.....
BLUF...this ties nicely into the fact that approximately 37% of all proTrump social media tweets came from a Russian funded Macedonian company using locals with English language skills....
BLUF...it has been also noted that the twitter spike in proTrump Congress speech approval comments was being driven by a large Russian created and controlled twitter botnet from outside the US....
Data visualization is indeed helpful
http://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2017/3/6/14820506/trump-russia-…
Mapping the Trump-Russia network
Applying data visualization tools to the onslaught of information about team Trump’s ties to Russia helps us understand what’s happening.
Updated by Jennifer N. Victor
[email protected]
Mar 6, 2017, 11:00am EST
The Trump WH should finally realize that when your world can be suddenly network link analyzed then you have some serious issues....especially IF as they claim there were never any connections and contacts to begin with.....
Louise Mensch
Verified account
@LouiseMensch 1m
1 minute ago
Video of me discussing the FISA warrant - did Bannon leak top secret wiretap info to his pals at Breitbart?
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5349863108001/?#sp=show-clips
Pay real close attention to this video as there was in fact prior reporting from this journalist on the existence of a FISA warrant to monitor communications between two servers...one in Alpha Bank Moscow and one in Trump Towers and any secondary incidental US citizens who might be using those targeted servers....
This journalist is the one who first broke the story in November 2016...AT no time has she or others who also broke similar stories HAVE ever said there was a targeted FISA warrant for wire tapping...
ONLY the WH has broken that news with the Trump tweets...SO just how exactly did then Breitbart.com get the "leaked story"....????
Imagine serving your country twice on the GWOT battlefield only to be deported by some 4X draft dodging (bone spur but he could not remember which foot during a recent interview)elected president with help from Russia.
Actually is occurring to an active duty US combat veteran.....make sense to anyone????
Are CBP..INS and Customs going rouge on non Muslims.....????
1. we had a well known French professor deported back to France after TEN hours of questioning and he was headed to a University speech....and he was no Muslim...
2. we had a 70year old grandmother questioned for hours before she was also deported...not a Muslim....
3. WE had the Australian CIA Director aggressively searched and questioned EVEN on a diplomatic passport....he was a non Muslim...
NOW this....
PEN America: artists, writers, poets, cultural and intellectual figures worried about making trips to the U.S.
https://pen.org/interrogation-us-border/
AND they are non Muslims...
Interesting article from Russian media...in Russian....
Zakharova: civil war will break out in the US if all Kislyak's American contacts are made public.
https://www.rusdialog.ru/news/99194_1488871087
Clapper says Trump asked him to publicly refute the Steele dossier on Russia ties, "which I couldn't do and didn't"
http://abcn.ws/2mPrb4v
Actually there are major pieces of that dossier that have in fact been proven to be accurate and correct....
MORE interesting is the fact that four named Russians in that dossier are in fact now dead....just dropped dead of "heart attacks"...
A fifth dropped dead who was tied to the proRussian Ukrainian peace proposal passed to Flynn via Trump's own personal lawyer...
Not the first time Trump has taken credit for a corporate decision made under the Obama Administration and announced years ago and just repackaged for the Trump PR....
Trump takes credit for Exxon jobs investment that began four years ago
http://thkpr.gs/d25bdc367cc2
Trump has now reached the level of being delusional...nothing like self hype.
ALL those jobs he talks about...never happening and yet notice when Boeing lays off 1100 he says nothing .........OR when GM loses 1000 employees due to a model shift and production location shift....nothing is said...but wow millions sounds great...
WHAT he is not telling the US job market is that this Exxon plan is spread over 10 years and is really what they should have done years ago in the Gulf Coast refineries which are functioning with old technology and mostly capable of only handling heavy crude not the light crude that is easy to sell in the global markets....AND it all depends on which direction the price of oil is going...
A vast amount of all US oil imports is heavy crude going to the Gulf Coast refineries....and always draws a lower price on the global markets...when it is sold as refined back to the marketplace...AND cost a lot to refine...
We have had countless Trump statements about those millions of jobs he has landed but none of those millions has suddenly and magically appeared...
SO I guess if you are living in the run down Rust Belt and have a low paying job YOU must now pack up and move to the Gulf Coast and better make sure you are a pipefitter with a union card or a union welder or a union member of Chemical Workers Union as well....
Thank you to @exxonmobil for your $20 billion investment that is creating more than 45,000 manufacturing & construction jobs in the USA!
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump 8h
8 hours ago
There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping the country right now—we're bringing back the JOBS!
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump 4h
4 hours ago
Buy American & hire American are the principles at the core of my agenda, which is: JOBS, JOBS, JOBS! Thank you @exxonmobil.
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump 11h
11 hours ago
45,000 construction & manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. $20 billion investment. We are already winning again, America!
Donald J. Trump
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump 11h
11 hours ago
'President Trump Congratulates Exxon Mobil for Job-Creating Investment Program'
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/06/president-trump-… …
NOTICE that Sessions...Trump and the entire Trump WH has conveniently forgotten about a 1999 interview video WHAT Sessions stated about perjury...
Here is Jeff Sessions in 1999 talking about the seriousness of committing perjury under oath
IN it Sessions is stating that any and I mean ANY perjury committed while under oath is a major criminal offense......
BUT in 2016....it is now declared..."I simply forgot"...and I will provide you now AFTER being reminded... a new highly polished WRITTEN statement...NOT under oath naturally.....as if that then cancels out his own personal "perjury under oath"....
The current Trump and his WH appears to be in the middle of an Alzheimer's outbreak....
One Russian paper today compliments Donald Trump's nose, but warns him that "witches & sorcerers" are plotting to remove him from office.
Interesting that Russian media calls FBI...US IC....the US Federal judiciary....and MSM journalists "witches and sorcerers"....
And Russia calls itself "democratic"...
Who hired Carter Page to Team Trump? http://observer.com/2017/03/kremlingate-donald-trump-russia-white-house… …
Last week I explained in this column how President Donald Trump, despite facing serious political challenges over his murky ties to the Kremlin, was fortunate to have opponents more motivated by partisanship than truth-telling. As long as that state of affairs continued, the commander-in-chief was likely to avoid the thorough scrutiny which his apparent links to Moscow actually merit.
A lot has changed in just a few days. Last week began promisingly for the president, with his joint address to Congress on Tuesday evening earning better reviews than many had anticipated. Then it all unraveled the next day, when it was reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a key member of the White House inner circle, had two discussions with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador in Washington, during the 2016 election campaign.
It’s hardly abnormal for sitting senators—as Sessions was last year—to meet with foreign diplomats, even Russian ones, but the precise capacity in which he chatted with Kislyak suddenly became important. Was Sessions parleying with the Kremlin’s emissary as a senator or as a top advisor to Donald Trump?
To make matters worse, Sessions couldn’t exactly recall what he and Moscow’s man in Washington had discussed. To say nothing of the fact that Sessions seemed to have recently failed to tell the complete truth under oath when he was asked about some of this during his Senate confirmation hearings as attorney general. Sessions volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians”—a statement that seems untrue by any normal definition.
The president’s bizarre efforts to make his links to Moscow a non-story have only made it a bigger one.
Additionally, Kislyak is known in Western espionage circles to have a close relationship with Russia’s intelligence services, as many Kremlin diplomats do. Roughly one-third of the “diplomats” in any given Russian embassy are actually full-time spies masquerading as diplomats, while the remaining two-thirds are bona fide diplomats who are nevertheless expected to share information with their spy-colleagues. The line between routine diplomacy and espionage can therefore get rather blurry.
New York Politics
That Sessions’ discussions with Putin’s emissary to our country may have had an espionage flavor to them seems plausible, given that they occurred when Vladimir Putin’s clandestine efforts to swing the election Trump’s way were at their peak, according to the consensus assessment of our Intelligence Community.
By last Friday, in an effort to make the mounting scandal go away, Sessions had recused himself from any Department of Justice investigations into Russian interference in our election. This recusal reportedly sent the president into paroxysms of rage, yet in reality Sessions had little choice, as even prominent Republicans accepted that he had to recuse himself—while leading Democrats were demanding the attorney general’s resignation.
To make matters worse, it turns out that Sessions was but one of seven members of Trump’s inner circle who had hush-hush discussions with Moscow’s emissaries in 2016. Several of those meetings happened at the Republican convention in Cleveland last July, which Ambassador Kislyak attended. It was much noted at the time that the GOP party platform on Ukraine—where Moscow continues its not-quite-frozen conflict, which began in 2014 after Putin’s theft of Crimea—suddenly shifted to a markedly more pro-Russian position. Suspicions of a Kremlin hand influencing Trump emerged at once, but the then-candidate flatly denied anything of that kind had occurred, telling a journalist that he “wasn’t involved” in the Ukraine policy shift.
Now, it turns out that several members of Team Trump met with Russian officials, including Kislyak, in Cleveland last summer, and according to members of his own policy team, Trump himself was involved in changing the party platform on Ukraine to something more pleasing to Moscow.
One of Trump’s people who met with Kislyak in Cleveland was Carter Page, a big-shot investor-manqué whose exact role in the Trump campaign was never precisely clear, but who possesses abundantly clear ties to the Kremlin. Page is so reliably pro-Putin that a speech he gave in Moscow last summer got top billing at a propaganda website run by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
On Friday evening, Page went on CNN to push back the latest allegations regarding the president and his increasingly apparent ties to Moscow, but the interview turned into a debacle. Page was unable to keep his story straight about his meetings with Russian officials, and appeared confused about his own role in the Trump campaign. His incompetent effort to quash this story only made it a bigger and stranger one.
Perhaps in response to this setback, the president was up before dawn on Saturday, having fled Washington on Friday for his Florida hideaway at his Mar-a-Lago resort – and he was tweeting. In a stunning series of four incendiary tweets, President Trump accused his predecessor of high crimes, specifically “wiretapping” him at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the election campaign.
In perhaps the most bizarre public statements from any American president, Trump claimed that Obama had violated the law, “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” then added for good measure the accusation of “McCarthyism” perpetrated by his predecessor. The irony of Donald Trump—whose mentor was Roy Cohn, the notorious attorney who served as McCarthyism’s public face in the 1950s—making such a claim was not lost on many observers.
Trump offered no evidence for his far-reaching accusations, and while the Obama camp predictably asserted they were wholly false, that view was echoed on Sunday morning by James Clapper, who served as the Director of National Intelligence from mid-2010 until January 20 of this year. In the spy trade, flat-out public denials are rare, but that was exactly what Clapper said to NBC: “There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.”
As DNI, Clapper certainly would have known if something extraordinary like wiretaps on the Republican presidential candidate or his team had been authorized, so his account seems persuasive. Even worse for the president, it’s been reported that FBI Director James Comey was driven to fury at the White House over Trump’s casual use of Twitter to accuse Obama—and by extension the FBI—of gross illegalities.
According to the New York Times, Comey was so incensed that he asked the Department of Justice to intervene and issue a public denial that any wiretapping against Team Trump occurred. DoJ has not yet done so, which may have something to do with the fact that it’s headed by Jeff Sessions, who’s caught up in KremlinGate too, but the unprecedented situation where an FBI director feels compelled to ask for a public retraction of the president’s accusation indicates how off the rails the new administration has gone in just six weeks.
Comey’s outrage is felt across the Intelligence Community, which has been repeatedly maligned and attacked by the president, who seems blissfully unaware of the consequences of his harsh tweets and utterances. Trump’s latest fact-free assertion of high crimes perpetrated by the IC at the behest of President Obama has heightened already inflamed passions among America’s spies.
Let’s be perfectly clear here: The scenario painted by President Trump of his predecessor tasking the IC with wiretapping Trump Tower simply could not have happened without a far-reaching and highly illegal conspiracy involving the White House and several of our spy agencies, above all the National Security Agency. My friends still at NSA, where I served as the technical director of the Agency’s biggest operational division, have told me without exception that Trump’s accusation is wholly false, a kooky fantasy.
In the first place, the White House doesn’t ask for such wiretaps, ever; such requests come directly from NSA, the FBI, or the Justice Department. Involvement of any White House in such highly classified requests would immediately set off enormous red flags in the IC and DoJ due to their glaringly political—and therefore illegal—aim.
There’s a special top secret Federal court that handles such sensitive warrant requests, which are issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which allows for intelligence gathering against foreign spies and terrorists. They key words in FISA are the first two: foreign intelligence. Warrants are only issued against foreign targets which are deemed to be plausibly involved in espionage or terrorism against the United States.
However, Americans who call or email those suspicious foreigners may appear in signals intelligence collection, although under FISA their identities are concealed in SIGINT reports in a process the IC terms “minimization.” In other words, your civil liberties as an American do not include the right to communicate with foreign bad guys without possible monitoring. Keep in mind, though, that under FISA the people being targeted are foreign spies and terrorists, not Americans.
Having worked with a lot of FISA collection during my time in the spy business, I can state without reservation that President Trump’s accusations are so inherently implausible as to render them an absurdity. He needs to offer hard evidence for such incendiary claims or back down publicly, preferably with an apology to his predecessor, whom he has maligned without cause.
That said, given the now-known contacts between Team Trump and high-ranking Russians last year, it’s very plausible that NSA and other spy agencies intercepted Kremlin communications which might have incidentally involved associates of our current president. But neither Donald Trump nor his surrogates were being spied on as themselves. If they didn’t realize their shady Russian friends might be considered foreign intelligence targets by NSA and other Western intelligence services, that’s on them.
Where, then, did President Trump get the far-fetched, conspiracy-driven idea that Obama was “wiretapping” him? Like so many other “facts” he cites when they are convenient for him, Trump seems to have picked it up in the far-right echo chamber of Breitbart and related alt-right websites where evidence isn’t required to substantiate claims, no matter how absurd they appear to anybody who understands how our Intelligence Community actually works.
Trump has demanded a Congressional investigation of his allegations regarding Obama, though it’s mysterious why he would want more inquiry into anything even tangentially involving the Russians and 2016. What happens next is anybody’s guess, and will be heavily dependent upon how much public Trumpian drama Congressional Republicans can keep tolerating.
What’s certain is that KremlinGate isn’t going away, and the president’s bizarre efforts to make his links to Moscow a non-story have only made it a bigger one. Now the media is more curious than ever about Trump’s Russian connections, and no amount of chanting “fake news” will alter that. Neither will Team Trump’s obsession with the alleged “deep state” save them from awkward questions. Today the White House will seek to redirect again by talking about immigration and other Trump policy initiatives, hoping the press plays along and forgets about last week. It won’t work.
NOW it appears that even Trump's Cabinet members want to change US history.....
On this very day in 1857 the Supreme Court said African Americans were not recognized as humans or citizens of the country.
160 yrs later this............
A black man stated his ancestors arrived in the US as "immigrants"...
So the term "immigrants" are the "new slaves".....what world does he live in..certainly not the US world....
Carson calls slaves 'immigrants' in speech, drawing criticism
http://reut.rs/2mZH8SG
WikiLeaks
✔
@wikileaks
ENCRYPTED RELEASE
Use a 'torrent' downloader on:
https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/WikiLeaks-Year-Zero-2017-v1.7z.torre…
…
And '7z' to decrypt.
Passphrase will be made public at Tue 9am ET.
Will be interesting to see what is in this WikiLeaks email dump....
Especially since WikiLeaks is a defined Russian Intelligence Service media outlet...AND especially interesting in what they do not release on say the RNC.....
Learned fm very reliable IC sources that Trump WH, w/help fm Russian intel, is targeting US journalists.
Rough road ahead.
Get ready
AND as long as the two Congress so called Intelligence Committees do not immediately start a true investigation with special prosecutor the US democracy is seriously endangered.
And this is the result of a US political party that power is far more important that the continued US democracy...
This reversal of the perception of Russia among democrats & republicans is fascinating to behold
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/06/politics/trump-approval-rating-russia…
Michael Hayden: "we are off the map here in terms of normal governmental activity."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-directed-alleged-wire-tapping-cia-… …
WHAT the heck does he mean by this comment??????
Sean Spicer on basis for Trump’s claims: “If we start down the rabbit hole of discussing this stuff, we end up in a very difficult place."
BUT WAIT...either Trump has knowledge of something then he should state it or just admit he was following guidance from the ultra right wing blogsite Breitbart.com.
Did President Trump mean to imply FBI may have broken the law with wiretapping?
Spicer: “I’m just going to let the tweet speak for itself"
So at this point President Trump is basically calling on Congress to investigate what his sourcing was for his own tweet.
An administration that had a background briefing with anonymous sources earlier today is ridiculing reporters for using anonymous sources.
Question: Does President Trump think President Obama himself was behind wiretapping?
Spicer: “We’re going to let Congress look into that."
Trump: OBAMA WIRETAPPED ME!
Reporters: What is the evidence?
Spicer: Congress should investigate.
(But…)
“Let Congress work its will."
Question: “What is the sourcing for the presidents tweet?”
Sean Spicer: “It could be FISA, it could be warrants."
WHAT the heck does he mean by this comment??????
Sean Spicer on basis for Trump’s claims: “If we start down the rabbit hole of discussing this stuff, we end up in a very difficult place."
BUT WAIT...either Trump has knowledge of something then he should state it or just admit he was following guidance from the ultra right wing blogsite Breitbart.com.
Did President Trump mean to imply FBI may have broken the law with wiretapping?
Spicer: “I’m just going to let the tweet speak for itself"
So at this point President Trump is basically calling on Congress to investigate what his sourcing was for his own tweet.
An administration that had a background briefing with anonymous sources earlier today is ridiculing reporters for using anonymous sources.
Question: Does President Trump think President Obama himself was behind wiretapping?
Spicer: “We’re going to let Congress look into that."
Trump: OBAMA WIRETAPPED ME!
Reporters: What is the evidence?
Spicer: Congress should investigate.
(But…)
“Let Congress work its will."
Question: “What is the sourcing for the presidents tweet?”
Sean Spicer: “It could be FISA, it could be warrants."
NOTICE the following has not even been mentioned by the Trump WH.....
US SOF and USAF supporting Assad and Russian and two US named Terror Groups...Hezbollah and PKK.....
Trump did not even take credit for the drone strike killing the AQ second in command in Syria.....
Manbij: Syrian Democratic Forces not only handed over some parts of the area to #Assad, #SDF also gave him gifts; some of its fighters.
photo1
Hilarious!
The guy in the middle is also a #SDF/#YPG fighter,posing as a regime militia man!
Or the other way around for 2 years,@OIRSpox?!
photo
Please help, @CJTFOIR & @OIRSpox: WHO ARE YOUR "Syrian Democratic Forces"???
#Assad men or #Assad supporters, #YPG men or #YPG supporters!?!
Some #SDF militants just took their insignia off and became "government forces", SEPARATING ES FROM SDF!
http://baladi-news.com/ar/news/details/16692/ …
So it's settled #Al_Hajana (Regime Borderline Guards) will be based in the line between #SDF and #Euphrates_shield
Many #Obama admin officials used to defiantly proclaim the #SDF’s anti-#Assad credentials.
That position is slowly becoming untenable.
Complicated: More US troops deploy to Manbij as local US allies cede nearby villages to Russia/regime troops & Turkey pledges push on Manbij
Today..BMW announced referring to the Trump threatened 35% import tax he threatened against BMW....the following as a not so subtle warning to Trump and his merry WH band.....
REMEMBER BMW has a modern US plant with thousands of employees and the US supply/logisitcs side with also thousands of jobs at strake.....
QUOTE
WE remind the US that we can at any time due to business changes instituted by the US....our US production to production plants in Mexico...Germany and China....
End of subtle threat.....
More evidence that the Trump WH simply does not understand multi lateral trade agreement and currency issues.....
Seemingly they also do not fully understand exactly how the EU works.....
Germany will continue to smile and point to the ECB as the main controller of the Euro and that they cannot do bilateral deals outside of the EU if they are EU members....
US is pushing hard for stricly bilateral deals in a multilateral trading agreement world...will simply not work....
Trump adviser Navarro: U.S, Germany should discuss trade outside EU http://reut.rs/2mXLjht
Trump administration trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Monday the $65 billion U.S. trade deficit with Germany was "one of the most difficult" trade issues, and bilateral discussions were needed to reduce it outside of European Union restrictions.
Navarro, the director of the new White House National Trade Council, said that Germany has used the argument that the EU dictates its trade policy and that it does not control the value of the euro.
"I think that it would be useful to have candid discussions with Germany about ways that we could possibly get that deficit reduced outside the boundaries and restrictions that they claim that they are under," Navarro told a National Association for Business Economics conference in Washington.
"But it's a serious issue. Germany is one of the most difficult trade deficits that we're going to have to deal with but we're thinking long and hard about that."
He said an upcoming visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel could include discussions on how to improve the U.S.-German economic relationship as part of the administration's agenda to make trade "free, fair and reciprocal."
Navarro's comments follow his complaints last month that Germany was exploiting a weak euro to gain a trade advantage.
But the Trump adviser, who shares the trade policy spotlight with new U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, said he would wait until a Treasury currency report due in mid-April to learn whether China is manipulating its currency and the yuan is undervalued.
Trump had said during his election campaign that he would declare China a currency manipulator on his first day in office, a move that would require demands from the administration for negotiations with Beijing. He has not made such a declaration, despite telling Reuters in an interview last month that China was the "grand champion" of currency manipulation.
Navarro said that according to classic trade theory, in his view, the yuan's value should rise and the dollar should fall so that trade equalizes. He said the current capital outflow pressure in China was largely due to China's drive to acquire companies abroad.
"If you look at it through that lens, it's clear that the Chinese currency is undervalued. Navarro said, adding that he would wait for the Treasury report for a final verdict.
Navarro also called out India for its high tariffs and Japan for its non-tariff trade barriers, and said negotiations to use U.S. leverage as the world's largest market were needed to bring these down and boost U.S. exports.
"If we are able to reduce our trade deficits through tough, smart negotiations, we should be able to increase our growth," Navarro said.
If current trade trends continue, foreign interests will eventually acquire wide swaths of the U.S. economy, he said, ultimately driving down wages and living standards for Americans in a grim "conquest by purchase" scenario.
This is exactly why Trump will not be able to add millions of great paying jobs.....
World Economic ForumVerifizierter Account
After replacing 90% of employees with robots, this company's productivity soared
http://wef.ch/2meISJ3
Employees before robots...650 after robots 60
650 workers down to 60 and a "250 percent increase in productivity and a significant 80 percent drop in defects."
Studies indicate that noramlly every new installed robot replaces an average of 5 employees......
JUST IN: Gold Star father Khizr Khan cancels scheduled speech in Toronto after being told his "travel privileges are being reviewed."
CTV News reached out to Mr. Khan. His response: "I have no comments to make."
After 30 years living in US and losing a son in war, this is how this man is treated? It is indeed a sad day in American.
A naturalized citizen can be "denaturalized," usually only for lying on orig app.
Trump organization's Azeri hotel partners had ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, reports today's New Yorker:
Meticulous reporting from @adamdavidson on the U.S. sanctions-busting, FCPA-violating, $-laundering Trump Tower Baku http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal …
Donald Trump’s Worst Deal
The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
QUOTE
A former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism says that, when he learned of the Trump hotel project, he asked himself, “Why would someone put a luxury hotel there? Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”
Just keeps on getting worse......
Azeri case isn't only Iran link. @ICIJorg reported Trump group did business w Iranian bank that funded Rev Guards:
http://bit.ly/2dkuZrl
Trump’s organization did business with Iranian bank later linked to terrorism
Donald Trump’s real estate organization rented New York office space from 1998 to 2003 to an Iranian bank that U.S. authorities have linked to terrorist groups and Iran’s nuclear program.
Trump inherited Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-controlled banks, as a tenant when he purchased the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, according to public records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Center for Public Integrity. The Trump Organization kept the bank on as a tenant for four more years after the U.S. Treasury Department designated Bank Melli in 1999 as being controlled by the Iranian government.
U.S. officials later alleged that Bank Melli had been used to obtain sensitive materials for Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. authorities also alleged that the bank had been used between 2002 and 2006 to funnel money to a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that has sponsored terrorist attacks — a period that overlapped with the time the bank rented office space from Trump.
The Trump Organization’s dealings with the Iranian bank shed more light on Trump’s wide-ranging business interests, which sometimes stand at odds with his blunt declarations on the campaign trail. Trump has denounced Iran as a “big enemy,” blasted Hillary Clinton for not taking a harder line against the Iranian regime and charged that donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation amounted to evidence of corruption. His five-year stint as Bank Melli’s landlord provides an example of the Trump Organization itself doing business with a government hostile to the United States.
“It’s a pretty hypocritical position to take,” said Richard Nephew, who served from 2013 to 2015 as principal deputy coordinator of sanctions policy at the U.S. State Department and spent nearly a decade working on Iran sanctions in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “It suggests that his principles are pretty flexible when it comes to him getting paid.”
A court document obtained by ICIJ indicates that Bank Melli’s rent on more than 8,000 square feet on the GM Building’s 44th floor may have topped half a million dollars a year.
The legal ramifications of the Trump Organization taking rent payments from Bank Melli are unclear.
At the time, the U.S. had a sweeping embargo in place which prohibited Americans from doing business with Iran, including receiving rent payments. However, some Iranian organizations were granted licenses exempting specific transactions from sanctions. If the payments were licensed, it may have been legally difficult for the Trump Organization to evict the bank.
The Treasury Department does not publicly disclose individual licenses granting companies exemptions from sanctions rules. The Treasury Department, the Trump campaign and Bank Melli all declined to answer whether the agency had issued a license to the Trump Organization or the bank permitting rent payments during Trump’s ownership of the building.
The Trump campaign declined to answer any questions about Bank Melli for this story, but said Trump would take steps to avoid any conflicts of interest with his business dealings if he is elected president.
“Mr. Trump’s sole focus is and will be on making our country great again,” campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email. “He has already committed to putting his assets in a blind trust and will have no involvement whatsoever in the Trump Organization.”
Bank Melli did not respond to repeated telephone and email inquiries by ICIJ to its offices in Tehran, London and Paris.
GM Building, Manhattan
The General Motors Building in midtown Manhattan in 2008. Donald Trump’s real estate organization rented office space in the building to Bank Melli from 1998 to 2003. Photo: Seth Wenig/AP
Bank Melli’s office in the GM Building was listed by the Treasury Department among financial institutions “owned or controlled” by the Iranian government and subject to U.S. economic sanctions, according to the Code of Federal Regulations from the years 1999 through 2003. Trump owned the GM Building from July 1998 until September 2003, New York City property records show.
Under U.S. sanctions rules, Bank Melli was forbidden from conducting banking transactions within the U.S., but the bank may have maintained its New York offices in the hope that the U.S. government would someday ease sanctions against Iranian businesses.
The bank moved out of the GM Building sometime after 2003. A spokesperson for Boston Properties, Inc., which is currently the building’s majority owner, said Bank Melli was not a tenant when Boston Properties and other partners bought the building in 2008.
Bank’s ties to terror
U.S. sanctions against Iran date back to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when Islamic fundamentalists seized power and held more than 50 Americans hostage for more than a year. After briefly lifting restrictions when the hostages were released, President Ronald Reagan designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism and imposed new sanctions in 1984 and 1987.
At the time, Donald Trump called for the U.S. take a tougher line against the Iranian regime.
In 1987, he suggested in a speech in New Hampshire that the U.S. should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields to hit back for what he described as Iran’s bullying of America.
“I’d be harsh on Iran. They've been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools,” Trump told The Guardian in 1988. “It’d be good for the world to take them on.”
In the years that followed, Iran stepped up its support for international terrorist attacks, according to authorities in the U.S. and other Western nations.
In 1994, a suicide bomber killed 85 people at a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, an attack that Argentine prosecutors later charged was coordinated by the Iranian government.
In 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 American servicemen at the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Saudi Arabia. A U.S. court later held that the bombing had been “planned, funded, and sponsored by senior leadership in the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
As Iran supported terror attacks abroad, the U.S. moved to punish the regime economically. President Bill Clinton approved a sweeping embargo in 1995 that banned Americans from conducting trade with Iranian businesses.
Bank Melli, one of Iran’s largest state-owned banks, had long had an office in the GM Building in midtown Manhattan. In 1998, Trump’s real estate organization bought the building and inherited Bank Melli as a tenant.
It is not clear if Trump knew personally that Bank Melli was renting an office from his company, but he was the Trump Organization’s chairman and president, and has described himself as a hands-on manager who pays attention to details.
Nephew, who worked on sanctions and nuclear nonproliferation issues for the U.S. government from 2003 to 2015, said there was less awareness in the 1990s about Iran’s nuclear program and the role of banks in financing terrorism. But he said that accepting payments from Bank Melli should have raised a red flag, even in 1998.
“Should someone in America have known better than to do business with Iran? Yeah,” Nephew said.
George Ross, the longtime executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, said he was not aware that Bank Melli had been a Trump tenant.
“We had any number of tenants in the GM Building,” Ross said in a brief telephone interview. “They might have been in there, but I have no knowledge of them.”
Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert on Iran at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said that it was “remarkable” that the Trump Organization had kept Bank Melli as a tenant for four years after the Treasury Department had listed the bank as an Iran-controlled entity.
“I just don’t think that a company of that size and means should be able to hide behind a ‘we didn’t know’ kind of argument,” Ottolenghi said.
Bank Melli Iran
Two men pass by the main branch of Bank Melli Iran, the National Bank of Iran, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, during July 2008. Photo: Kamran Jebreili/AP
In 2007, U.S. authorities charged that Bank Melli had facilitated purchases for Iran’s nuclear program, and that it had been used to send at least $100 million to the Quds Force, the feared special operations unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
The Quds Force was designated as a supporter of terrorism by President George W. Bush weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for providing support to the Taliban, Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that the U.S. has labeled as terrorist organizations.
Bank Melli played an important role in Iran’s nuclear program and support for international terrorism in the years before it was singled out by Treasury in 2007, experts told ICIJ.
“It was allowing the entities that were shopping for the regime to make payments,” said Ottolenghi, who described Bank Melli as “critical” to Iran’s past nuclear and terrorist activities.
A representative for Glodow Nead Communications, a public relations firm representing the Trump Organization, told an ICIJ reporter that the Trump Organization would only comment if the story was positive. She declined as a matter of policy to provide contact information for any of its employees.
The Trump Organization continued renting office space to Bank Melli until the insurance company Conseco, which had provided financing for the 1998 purchase, took control of the GM Building in 2003 and sold it to the Macklowe Organization, a New York City real estate developer.
Trump talks Iran
As a presidential candidate, Trump has been a fierce critic of Iran, denouncing its government as “the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism.” He has vowed to take a more warlike posture against the regime, threatening on Sept. 9 to shoot Iranian ships out the water if their sailors made rude gestures toward U.S. Navy ships.
Last week, during the first of three face-to-face debates with Clinton, Trump panned the United States’ 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, calling it “one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history.”
In June, a statement by the Trump campaign blasted Clinton for her work in support of the Iran nuclear deal after the airline Iran Air struck an agreement to purchase aircraft from Boeing, a company that has contributed to the Clinton Foundation.
“This is another example of Clinton’s pay-to-play governing style,” the Trump campaign said. “She will cut deals with our foreign adversaries as long as they are willing to line her pockets.”
At the same time, news reports published in the course of the presidential campaign have shown that the Trump Organization has been entangled with a number of foreign governments that are hostile to the United States.
Trump tried to raise money for the Trump Organization from the regime of Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator who provided support for the 1988 Pan Am flight bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 189 Americans, Buzzfeed News reported in June.
A company owned by Trump violated the embargo against Cuba with a business trip to the island in 1998, shortly before he gave a speech in Miami expressing his support for the embargo, Newsweek reported in September. In addition, Bloomberg News has reported that Trump Organization executives may have also violated the Cuban embargo by scouting out a possible investment in a golf course near Havana in late 2012 or early 2013. The deal ultimately fell through, according to the report.
The Trump Organization has also made millions selling apartments to the government of Saudi Arabia, the New York Daily News reported in September. The Saudi government is formally a U.S. ally but is suspected of supporting militant Islamic groups, and Trump has called on the Clinton Foundation to return Saudi donations because of the government’s poor human rights record.
Other Trump Organization entanglements in India, Russia and Dubai create conflicts of interest that could threaten American national security if Trump becomes president, Newsweek reported in September.
Information on all of these ventures is limited because Trump has not released his tax returns. He is poised to become the first major party candidate not to do so by Election Day since Richard Nixon in 1972.
Trump pledged on Sept. 15 that he would “absolutely sever” his connections with the Trump Organization if he is elected president. “I will sever connections, and I’ll have my children and my executives run the company and I won’t discuss it with them,” he said on the television program "Fox and Friends."
Important, well-researched piece from @cjcmichel on Russian efforts to infiltrate right-of-center groups worldwide.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/report/the-rise-of-the-traditionalist-int… …
JUST a simple side comment....Trump as President does not apparently realize he can ask for a Intel briefing and ask the direct question during that briefing are there any outstanding FISA and or TITLE 3 warrants against me.....
INSTEAD he distracts and deflects with blatant lies and defers to Congress.....
APPEARS WH is now totally avoiding anything like a live press conference to avoid having to answer any questions about Trump's twitter rant.......
So ... there is no on-camera WH briefing today. And @StateDept, has cancelled its briefing today, which was to be the 1st since January 19
This is the perfect example of just how poorly Americans are informed hese days......
40 Secret Service agents illegally tapped into my information according to the the Inspector General. - Jason Chaffetz
BUT WAIT Secret Service can in fact wire tap because of criminal activities...they do not need a FISA Warrant...
You simply do not need a FISA Warrant to arrest say currency counterfeiters...or arrest individuals for threats against the President....etc....
Someone needs to teach Chaffetz what the Secret Service actually does....
"The Obama administration has been notorious on this type of stuff, and we're going to look hard at it." quoted by Chaffetz on FOX -@jasoninthehouse
Really sad that a Congressman does not know this basic simple fact....
Trump is basically fishing to see what the FBI has as there are a number of comments concerning "transcripts" being available on the Flynn calls thus Trump assumes there is in fact at least one FISA Warrant floating out in space and it might still be active which it probably is....rumors are talking about a total of THREE FISA Warrants.......
Problem is he wants NUNES as Chairman of HISC to conduct an investigation which NUNES states he will not conduct....
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/wh-spokeswoman-i-dont-think-trum…
WH spokeswoman: 'I don't think' Trump accepts Comey's denial of wiretapping claims
QUOTE
A White House spokeswoman on Monday said she doesn't think President Trump accepts the FBI Director's denial of the president's claims that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower before the election.
"No, I don't think he does," Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America."
She said the president "wants the truth to come out to the American people and he is asking that it be done through the House Intelligence Committee and that that be the process that we go through."
The president claimed Saturday that Obama has his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower before his presidential victory.
In a series of tweets Saturday morning, the president presented his allegations with no evidence and questioned whether it was legal for a sitting president to be wiretapping "a race for president prior to an election."
"How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process," the president tweeted. "This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"
A New York Times report Sunday said FBI Director James Comey asked the Justice Department to publicly reject the president's claims.
Senior American officials told The New York Times that Comey has said the president's wiretapping allegations are false and asked the Justice Department on Saturday to publicly correct the record.
The FBI and DOJ declined to comment to The Times.
Trump aide Kellyanne Conway also called for Comey to share any information he might have on Trump's allegations.
"If Mr. Comey has something he'd like to say I'm sure we're all willing to hear it," Conway said on Fox News. "All I saw was a published news report. I didn't see a statement from him. I don't know what Mr. Comey knows.
"If he knows, of course he can issue a statement," Conway said. "We know he's not shy."
White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Sunday called the reports about "potentially politically motivated investigations" before the 2016 presidential election "very troubling."
In a series of tweets, he said the president is "requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigation powers were abused in 2016."
Spicer said that neither the White House nor the president would "comment further until such oversight is conducted."
BLUF...he should not be pushing so hard as now a majority of Americans really want a special prosecutor not NUNES....
Also more Breitbart.com articles that Trump and his WH normally are reading....
WH Spox on Obama’s Denial of Wiretap Claim: ‘They Don’t Have the Best Track Record’
DeepStateGate: Democrats’ ‘Russian Hacking’ Conspiracy Theory Backfires…
…FLASHBACK: Whistleblower Says NSA ‘Absolutely’ Tapping Trump’s Calls
Chris Wallace Accuses Dem Sen of ‘More Than a Whiff of McCarthyism’
Taken from the Trump main source of information Breitbart.com
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/05/trump-ends-innuendo-…
DeepStateGate: Trump Ends the Wiretapping Innuendo Game by Dealing Himself In
QUOTE
The White House statement on “DeepStateGate” — President Donald Trump’s allegations that former President Barack Obama ordered surveillance on him during his 2016 presidential campaign — has the feel of cards and chips thumping down on the table:
The White House is placing a substantial bet on what Congress will uncover. Don’t expect those cards to be dealt swiftly because such investigations take time. The Obama administration was highly adept at stalling investigations until the Democratic media could pronounce them “old news” and ignore the outcome.
The Trump administration can distinguish itself by cooperating energetically with this one and helping it move forward quickly. Rest assured that no matter how long it takes, the media will never consider it “old news” as long as there remains any chance for anyone connected with the Trump 2016 campaign to get in trouble over contacts with the Russians.
It’s possible one reason Trump issued his explosive tweets on surveillance was to make everyone put up or shut up. That might already be working, as some of the more aggressive dealers in unsubstantiated innuendo are suddenly admitting they don’t have any actual evidence. There can’t be any hard evidence if Trump is super-duper wrong about Obama administration surveillance:
Until now, Democrats and their media have been pleased to create the impression that all kinds of wiretapping operations were conducted against the Trump campaign, uncovering many scandalous, possibly illegal connections. Only by reading those articles carefully does one discover the sources are highly speculative and the evidence is thin at best.
The much-discussed New York Times piece from January 19 is a perfect example of this. It begins by matter-of-factly confirming the existence of the wiretaps everyone in Obamaworld is now swearing are a figment of Donald Trump’s imagination. Mountains of innuendo about connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence have been spun out of what these abruptly non-existent intercepts contained, according to the anonymous leakers who currently drive almost 100 percent of mainstream media coverage.
But if you read that New York Times article carefully, it admits the communications intercepts may not exist, and if they do, no one can confirm what they actually say (emphasis added):
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.
It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November. The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C.
Whatever President Trump’s intentions were in using Twitter to touch off this firestorm, one of the immediate effects has been letting the gas out of all those speculative Trump stories. The Democratic media is now furiously working to prove all of its own previous coverage of the Trump-Russia allegations was little more than idle speculation, every bit as lacking in hard evidence as Trump’s accusation that Obama was tapping his phones.
After months of unfounded allegations and badly sourced speculation intended to cripple his administration, maybe Trump wanted to prove that only one side of the partisan divide is permitted to make “wild allegations.” Obama’s plants in the Deep State can leak whatever they please, law and truth be damned. They can get an avalanche of hostile coverage moving with a few phone calls or emails. The media feels no contrition when the story turns out to be exaggerated or completely false, eagerly turning to the same Obama holdovers as sources for the next big phony scoop.
No one on Trump’s team, including the president himself, is allowed to reciprocate in kind. We are meant to feel bottomless outrage that Trump would level unsubstantiated allegations against Obama, but apparently, Obama’s minions can launch a constant barrage of unsubstantiated allegations against Trump.
Intentionally or accidentally, Trump just forced the press to admit how weak the bulk of those allegations were. The wiretapping timeline that has drawn so much attention since Saturday night was largely based on mainstream media reporting. The media is effectively saying, “Hey, wait, we were just blowing smoke. We didn’t think anyone would take those reports seriously and build a case that Obama was wiretapping Trump. We just wanted to make Trump look bad by pumping up vague rumors that he and his campaign might have been under observation!”
Amazingly, the same media that just went through 48 hours of convulsions over a bogus “perjury” charge against Attorney General Jeff Sessions is happy to cite an actual, admitted perjurer, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, as an unimpeachable source on the exact issue he lied about to Congress. They also expect the American people to trust former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, who openly bragged of his ability to mislead credulous reporters and construct phony narratives to sell the Iran nuclear deal.
The Obama administration’s enthusiasm for surveillance and using government power against its political enemies is a matter of shameful record. The no-holds-barred “Resistance” mindset among Democrats is painfully obvious. If they are running a “silent coup” against Trump, it’s the loudest silent coup in history. You can scarcely sleep at night over the racket this silent coup makes.
Sorry, DNC Media, no sale. In the absence of hard evidence one way or the other, Team Obama is not going to win a credibility shootout with Team Trump.
One of the best and most even-handed observers of the wiretapping drama is Andy McCarthy, who writes for the decidedly non-Trumpian National Review. McCarthy’s Sunday post on the matter is well worth reading in full. His key point is that some highly unusual FISA requests for surveillance on the Trump campaign were made and were denied by the court, as very few such requests are. The Obama administration was persistent and eventually obtained the authorization it wanted, but there is reason to suspect it was not entirely candid with the FISA court on its final, successful request.
McCarthy points out that if Obama believed half of what the Democrats tout as sacred truth about the Russians working with Trump’s campaign, he would have been negligent not to authorize the kind of surveillance Trump is angry about, and there is “a less than zero chance” surveillance could have been imposed “without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House.”
Robert Barnes at LawNewz also explores the idea of the FISA court approving a warrant that was submitted without Trump’s name but “which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump.” He suggests the most serious legal jeopardy that might be facing the people involved in such an effort would be perjury for lying to the FISA court and the dissemination of collected intelligence that should have been kept tightly classified. Instead, he cites reports that Obama acted to reduce the restrictions on sharing this information and to preserve material that should have been destroyed.
What McCarthy and Barnes are describing is plausible and consistent with the behavior of the Obama administration over many years. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically true, but it should be investigated, every bit as thoroughly as Russian activity in the 2016 election cycle. Trump’s weekend tweets may have finally put an end to speculative reporting, strategic leaking, and innuendo. Perhaps the only way to end that game was for Trump to deal himself in.
The Atlantic
✔
@TheAtlantic
Attempts to delegitimize Barack Obama are a classic page in the Trump playbook.
http://theatln.tc/2m8pYlq
And Trump should not be viewed as a racist....
https://adrianweale.com/2017/03/05/sebastian-gorka-and-his-distinguishe…
Gorka might not be what he claims to be.....YET he is Trump's DAP.....
Sebastian Gorka and his distinguished military career.
QUOTE
One of the curious paradoxes of the Trump administration is that, at the very top, there is a mixture of supremely competent professionals – James Mattis and HR McMaster spring to mind – working in the same national security space as quirky ideological warriors like Stephen Bannon. Sebastian Gorka, the British-born commentator of Hungarian extraction, who was named as a Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump in January 2017, seemed to straddle this apparent divide: an academic specialist in counter-terrorism with some apparently radical ideas about how to defeat Jihadi Islamism.
I took a mild interest in Gorka because he had apparently served in an Intelligence Corps unit of the British Territorial Army (TA) in the early 1990s. For non-British readers, the Territorial Army* was the name of the part-time British Army reserve established in the early years of the 20th century primarily for home defence but which became, during the Cold War, an integral part of the British orbat in our plans to defend western Europe from Soviet aggression as part of NATO; it was and is similar to the US National Guard in many respects. As it happens, I was commissioned as a regular army Intelligence Corps officer in 1985 and it’s always nice to see chaps from the Corps doing well for themselves.
Last month, someone on twitter posted a link to this profile of Gorka in the Washington Post and my ‘spidey senses’ immediately began to tingle. It’s a throwaway sentence: “He went to college in London and spent three years as a reserve intelligence soldier in the British army, focused on the conflict in Northern Ireland”. This struck me as extremely unlikely: no part of the TA, to my knowledge, was ever committed to the conflict in Northern Ireland. The only part-time soldiers to be directly involved were members of the Ulster Defence Regiment and their successors in the Home Service battalions of the Royal Irish Regiment, who had a different legal status to the TA.
A little digging revealed that Gorka had actually been a member of 22 Intelligence Company, of the Intelligence and Security Group (Volunteers) between 1990 and 1992, as he told a Hungarian newspaper. 22 Company was a unit I knew well from my own service. Back then, in the dying days of the Cold War, it was a specialist unit of interrogators and ‘tactical questioners’ with a NATO role. It was an eclectic group of people, recruited largely on the basis of their language skills, who were trained under the auspices of the Joint Service Interrogation Wing at Ashford in Kent. As the son of Hungarian exile parents and a Hungarian speaker, Gorka would have been a good fit. But it had nothing to do with Northern Ireland, so if Gorka was claiming this in the US, he was being somewhat economical with the truth.
In itself, this is kinda, sorta understandable. Gorka took a first degree in Theology and Philosophy at a theological college of London University and his subsequent transformation into a counter-terrorism theorist seems to have taken place whilst he was studying for a Master’s degree, and subsequently a PhD, in Budapest which might be seen by some to lack the credibility of equivalent qualifications from, say, Harvard or Cambridge. I can see why he might want to have credentials as an operational counter-terrorism specialist from one of the world’s leading armies. It doesn’t make it true though.
A week or so back I asked a friend, who was in 22 Company at that time, whether he remembered him. “I don’t recall Gorka immediately, but that’s not to suggest that we may not have collided at some time in the great Venn diagram of life”, was his response.
As it happens, Gorka was profiled (paywalled) today by the Sunday Times in London. It’s a soft piece, written as a kind of ‘hometown boy makes good’ story, but interestingly, it presents a new version of his military service. According to the Sunday Times: “Gorka spent three years from 1990 as a part-time soldier with the Territorial Army. Part of 22 Military Intelligence Company, he used his language skills (he speaks German and some French as well as Hungarian) to collect evidence for the war crimes tribunal set up after the collapse of Yugoslavia”.
Once again, the spidey senses twitched. Would members of 22 Company really have been collecting war crimes evidence between 1990 and 1992 when Gorka was a member? It seems unlikely to me: their role was collecting intelligence, a very different task to collecting evidence that could be used in a court. A couple of other easily checkable facts also seem to suggest this isn’t true: firstly, there were no significant deployments of British military personnel to the former Yugoslavia until September 1992 when 1 Cheshires Battlegroup deployed under the command of Lt Col Bob Stewart (now a Conservative MP) on Operation GRAPPLE as part of UNPROFOR; secondly, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia wasn’t actually set up until May of 1993.
It seems to me possible that Gorka might have been employed interviewing – ‘debriefing’ in intelligence jargon – individuals returning from the former Yugoslavia to gain snippets of information from them. Members of 22 Company certainly did this with returnees from Iraq and Kuwait at the start of the Gulf War in 1990 (I know this because I was one of the people who organised it) and I’m told the ‘Defence Debriefing Team’ was put on a more formal footing thereafter (by which time I’d moved on). Even so, at this stage it wasn’t about acquiring war crimes evidence but rather basic situational awareness, so he is evidently dramatising his role, if indeed he ever did this work.
So what? In the grand scheme of life an individual exaggerating his military service is no big deal. It’s kind of distasteful, I suppose, but it happens an awful lot and most military veterans I know find it funny, more than anything else. But there are special circumstances in Gorka’s case. He is a senior advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful armed forces that have ever existed. Gorka’s views appear to have been formed by his studies at a university that is not renowned as a centre for the study of counter-terrorism and, despite his attempts to suggest otherwise, he has never been an operational practitioner of counter-terrorism. By all accounts that I have read, Gorka has never done any academic fieldwork in counter-terrorism either. His real expertise seems to be in getting gigs as a ‘talking head’ on right wing news media, the rest is pretty much flim-flam.
It’s up to President Trump to decide who he wants to advise him, of course, but my experience over the years has been that proven bullshitters are rarely a good choice.
Has DHS...CBP...INS and Customs now gone completely rouge?????
Australia's equivalent of CIA director endures the full treatment at US border. So much for allies @realDonaldTrump
http://www.afr.com/brand/rear-window/asis-directorgeneral-nick-warner-c…
QUOTE
Children's writer Mem Fox made headlines last week as a victim of Donald Trump's tyrannical tightening of the United States borders, having been detained at LAX en route to a conference. Turns out Tony Abbott was right – there is such a thing as a suppository of all wisdom! Presumably it was a random check and customs officials weren't discriminating against her just because she's married to a convicted sex offender. "The treatment of people in that room while I was there, which I observed, made me ashamed," she said.
But if the Possum Magic author feels cheesed by her "terrifying ordeal", spare a thought for Nick Warner, the Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. You'd think being the top government spy of a staunch US ally – travelling on a diplomatic passport – would spare you the latex welcome, but no. Not even. Warner got the full treatment last month at LAX arrivals, transferring for meetings in the capital (including, you'd safely assume, at Langley, Virginia). Could you imagine the uproar in Washington if John Brennan or Meroe Park copped a solid frisking at Tullamarine? Yeah right – as if they'd even countenance the indignity of flying commercial!
Hey, we can all sleep soundly knowing that not even one of our most decorated public servants and security officials can accidentally pack his nail scissors as carry-on. But who knew the Five Eyes included the brown eye and the Jap's eye?
REMEMBER those Trump comments on Sweden fueled by FOX News.....
APPEARS the Russians were fishing for supporting backup information to help Trump defend them.....
Russian TV-station offered youths in #Rinkeby #Sweden money to do some "action" in front of the camera.
This was on Feb 22, a few days after the statement about #Sweden by @realDonaldTrump and two days after the riots
http://www.radio24syv.dk/udvalgte-nyhedshistorier/russisk-tv-hold-ville…
APPEARS that the riot that occurred might have been "paid for"......
How US intel sees the Russian ambassador: not a spy per se "but takes advantage of overly talkative U.S. officials."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/05/u-s-warned-of-foreign-…
One Trump WH staffer admitted that Russian ambassador was everywhere during the campaign....
Interestingly enough....if you are on a US government sponsored visit to Russia and or you are getting a Russian sponsored Russian group visit YOU automatically get a US IC CI security briefing on do's and don'ts when you are around Russians....APPEARs this never happened inside the Trump campaign and or Trump WH....
BUT WAIT.....
U.S. Warned of Foreign Intel Operations After Russian Met With Team Trump at RNC
Trump was very pleased his allegations against Obama were the dominant story in the papers. Think the Russian term dezinformatsiya
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-fury-the-presiden…
Appears that NUNES now has a serious problem on his hands....
Trump has a huge problem. Half of Republicans (& 43% of Trump supporters) in this CNN poll want a Special Prosecutor
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/06/politics/trump-approval-rating-russia…
REMEMBER these Trump voters do remember that Trump slogan...."drain the swamp" and that includes a "Russian swamp"...
NUNES sides with Trump: “It’s not paranoia at all... It’s leak after leak after leak from the bureaucrats".
The HISC chairman has effectively stated he is biased...
OR does he want to explain to the American public that this so called "paranoia" that he claims comes from "nameless deep state bureaucrats" are actually coming from inside the Trump WH....Or were those 17 individuals who spoke with the Washington Post about the chaos inside the Trump WH....some "nameless bureaucrats"???
"Deep state" is now the latest right wing "conspiracy theory" being used to basically paper over all of Trump's so called problems that he himself is creating to include those undefined and denied Russian contacts...
Trump on Tuesday: American pipelines will be made w/ American steel.
W.H. on Friday: Except the Keystone Pipeline.
http://reut.rs/2mWLA3z
Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said on Twitter that allowing non-U.S. steel was "important for companies like Evraz Steel," a local subsidiary of Russia's Evraz PLC, which had signed on to provide 24 percent of the steel before Keystone XL's rejection by Obama.
NOTE...Russian EVRAZ PLC is owned by a Russian oligarch who claims he is a close Trump friend....
BLUF after the set of rage tweets Trump fired at Obama....
BREAKING:US Allies Shaken by Trump's wiretap tweets about Obama
Right now there is a serious doubt among many of the NATO member state leaders that if something arose in the world of political events and the US via Trump asked them to support him...many would not... they now believe the man is truly crazy and simply distrust him....
That is what Trump has driven the image of the US into...lies and distrust....inside just five weeks...
This is how they viewed this Trump weekend....and you wonder why they now distrust him?
POTUS makes wild accusation w/zero evidence
WH searches for evidence & cant find any
WH tells Congress to find evidence/no further comment