Trump’s Foreign Policy Philosophy Hard to Pin Down

Trump at CPAC: "I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me"

3 hours later: WH blocks CNN, NYTimes, others from press gaggle

BUT WAIT...
White House Deputy Comms. Dir. Raj Shah denies reports of a gaggle block against CNN, NYT, Politico and others:

NOTICE Spicer did not state this as he was the one that instituted the block...

CNN on exclusion from White House briefing: "This is an unacceptable development from the Trump White House."

NYT executive editor: “We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations" from White House briefing.

DEVELOPING: White House Correspondents' Association "protesting strongly" over numerous news outlets blocked from White House briefing.

The Guardian was also denied access to today's gaggle, despite holding hard pass. Told by WH it was limited to pool "and a few others"

Even his own party is running away from their voters.....

Congress members refuse constituent town halls, offer meetings to donors paying $1000+
http://interc.pt/2lSbhpd

BUT WAIT....did they all not shout along with Trump...."drain the swamp"...and blame Clinton for everything they are themselves now actually doing...

Trump accuses the MSM of lying and being dishonest YET he himself lies apparently about everything....

During his CAC speech he stated the following...."there was a line to get into CPAC to see his speech SIX blocks long and the media would probably not report on it"......

Photos taken by the so called lying and dishonest MSM basically show no such line that Trump claims existed....

So why does he constantly lie to cover up the lack of public interest in him....WHY does he have the need to lie?

THIS harps back to his twitter rage about the number of inaugural spectators being the largest ever WHEN it was not...and proven not to be...

Adm McRaven, commander of bin Laden raid: Trump view of media may be “greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”
http://www.mystatesman.com/news/chancellor-mcraven-calls-trump-media-co… 

This is the former JSOC & SOCOM commander. He oversaw & helped design the operation that killed bin Laden.

WHEN an exSOF Admiral starts to say this then maybe some might just wake up and ask why?

BUT THEN THIS HAPPENED .....

IMPORTANT...a blatant and deliberate open Trump/Bannon attack on the US pillars of democracy called freedom of the press and free speech...AFTER attacking the FBI today.

Reporters held out of today's White House briefing.

No CNN, New York Times, BuzzFeed News, Politico.

Expanded pool and "some select invites" sure did include a lot of right wing outlets and left out major news orgs.

Reporter on the phone saying Trump admin today "excluded a number of news organizations that have been targeted by the president."

AP and Time boycotted the gaggle today because of the way it was handled.

Spicer requiring sign up for an 'expanded pool gaggle' -- w/ right to exclude reporters, after berating smaller pool this morning.

NOTE
White House Correspondents Association statement "protesting strongly" how this gaggle happened.

BLUF
Can’t remember any press secretary from Clinton, Bush or Obama canceling briefing and handpicking small group for gaggle.

IMPORTANT..notice the increased allowance of right wing media outlets which are usually white nationalists and anti-Semitic in nature....

Former Border Patrol officials question Trump plan to add agents
http://reut.rs/2lihya6

Reference the Trump WH Deputy assistant to the President Gorka......In any other admin having ties to fascists & anti-semites would be disqualifying. In this WH it's a recommendation.

http://forward.com/news/national/364085/sebastian-gorka-trump-aide-forg…

Exclusive: Senior Trump Aide Forged Key Ties To Anti-Semitic Groups In Hungary

Lili BayerFebruary

When photographs recently emerged showing Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trump’s high-profile deputy assistant, wearing a medal associated with the Nazi collaborationist regime that ruled Hungary during World War II, the controversial security strategist was unapologetic.
“I’m a proud American now and I wear that medal now and again,” Gorka told Breitbart News. Gorka, 46, who was born in Britain to Hungarian parents and is now an American citizen, asked rhetorically, “Why? To remind myself of where I came from, what my parents suffered under both the Nazis and the Communists, and to help me in my work today.”
But an investigation by the Forward into Gorka’s activities from 2002 to 2007, while he was active in Hungarian politics and journalism, found that he had close ties then to Hungarian far-right circles, and has in the past chosen to work with openly racist and anti-Semitic groups and public figures.
Gorka’s involvement with the far right includes co-founding a political party with former prominent members of Jobbik, a political party with a well-known history of anti-Semitism; repeatedly publishing articles in a newspaper known for its anti-Semitic and racist content; and attending events with some of Hungary’s most notorious extreme-right figures.
When Gorka was asked — in an email exchange with the Forward — about the anti-Semitic records of some of the groups and individuals he has worked with, he instead pivoted to talk about his family’s history.
“My parents, as children, lived through the nightmare of WWII and the horrors of the Nyilas puppet fascist regime,” he said, referring to the Arrow Cross regime that took over Hungary near the very end of World War II and murdered thousands of Jews.
In the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group. The newly formed group consists of figures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president.
Gorka, who views Islam as a religion with an inherent predilection for militancy, has strong supporters among some right-leaning think tanks in Washington. “Dr. Gorka is one of the most knowledgeable, well-read and studied experts on national security that I’ve ever met,” Joseph Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, told the Forward. Humire has known Gorka for nearly a decade, and considers him “top-notch.”
Born in London to parents who fled Hungary’s post-World War II Communist regime, Gorka has had a career that’s marked by frequent job changes and shifting national allegiances. The U.S. government is the third sovereign state to hire him in a national security role. As a young man, he was a member of the United Kingdom’s Territorial Army reserves, where he served in the Intelligence Corps. Then, following the fall of Communism in Hungary, he was employed in 1992 by the country’s Ministry of Defense. He worked there for five years, apparently on issues related to Hungary’s accession to NATO.
Gorka’s marriage in 1996 to an American, Katharine Cornell, an heir to Pennsylvania-based Cornell Iron Works, helped him become a U.S. citizen in 2012.
A Web of Deep Ties to Hungary’s Far Right
It was during his time in Hungary that Gorka developed ties to the country’s anti-Semitic and ultranationalist far right.
During large-scale anti-government demonstrations in Hungary in 2006, Gorka took on an active role, becoming closely involved with a protest group called the Hungarian National Committee (Magyar Nemzeti Bizottság). Gorka took on the roles of translator, press coordinator and adviser for the group.
Among the four Committee members named as the group’s political representatives was László Toroczkai, then head of the 64 Counties Youth Movement. Toroczkai founded that group in 2001 to advocate for the return of parts of modern-day Serbia, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine to form a Greater Hungary, restoring the country’s pre-World War I borders.
In 2004, two years before the Movement’s involvement in the 2006 protests, Hungarian authorities opened an investigation into the Movement’s newspaper, Magyar Jelen, when an article referred to Jews as “Galician upstarts” and went on to argue: “We should get them out. In fact, we need to take back our country from them, take back our stolen fortunes. After all, these upstarts are sucking on our blood, getting rich off our blood.” At the time of the article’s publication, Toroczkai was both an editor at the paper and the Movement’s official leader.
Toroczkai currently serves as vice president of Jobbik and is the mayor of a village near the border Hungary shares with Serbia. Last year, he gained notoriety in the West for declaring a goal of banning Muslims and gays from his town.
In January 2007, inspired by the 2006 protests and his experience with the Hungarian National Committee, Gorka announced plans to form a new political party, to be known as the New Democratic Coalition. Gorka had previously served as an adviser to Viktor Orbán, now Hungary’s right-wing nationalist prime minister. But following Orbán’s failed attempts to bring down Hungary’s then-Socialist government, Gorka grew disenchanted with Orbán’s Fidesz party.
In his email exchange with the Forward for this article, Gorka explained: “The Coalition was established in direct response to the unhealthy patterns visible at the time in Hungarian conservative politics. It became apparent to me that the effect of decades of Communist dictatorship had taken a deeper toll on civil society than was expected.”
Gorka co-founded his political party with three other politicians. Two of his co-founders, Tamás Molnár and Attila Bégány, were former members of Jobbik. Molnár, a senior Jobbik politician, served as the party’s vice president until shortly before joining Gorka’s new initiative, and was also a member of the Hungarian National Committee during the 2006 protests, issuing statements together with extremist militant figures such as Toroczkai.

Jobbik has a long history of anti-Semitism. In 2006, when Gorka’s political allies were still members of Jobbik, the party’s official online blog included articles such as “The Roots of Jewish Terrorism” and “Where Were the Jews in 1956?”, a reference to the country’s revolution against Soviet rule. In one speech in 2010, Jobbik leader Gabor Vona said that “under communism we licked Moscow’s boots, now we lick Brussels’ and Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s.”
In founding the New Democratic Coalition, Gorka and the former Jobbik politicians aimed to represent “conservative values, decidedly standing up to corruption and bringing Christianity into the Constitution,” according to the party’s original policy program. At the time, Hungary’s constitution was secular.
The party’s founders did not see themselves as far right or anti-Semitic.
“I knew Gorka as a strongly Atlanticist, conservative person,” Molnár, the former Jobbik vice president and co-founder of Gorka’s party, told the Forward in a phone conversation. He added that he could not imagine Gorka having anti-Semitic views.
Molnár first met Gorka at a book launch event for Gorka’s father, Pál Gorka, in 2002. The younger Gorka and Molnár became friends, bonding over their shared interest in the history of Hungary’s 1956 revolution and the fact that both had parents who were jailed under the country’s Communist regime.
Molnár became involved with Jobbik in 2003, in the far-right party’s early days, and quit in 2006. In his words, “Jobbik went in a militant direction that I did not like.”
Gorka rejects the notion that he knew any of his political allies had connections to the far right.
“I only knew Molnár as an artist and Bégány as a former conservative local politician (MDF if I recall),” Gorka wrote in response to a question regarding the Jobbik affiliations of his former party co-founders. “What they did after I left Hungary is not something I followed.” (MDF is an acronym for the Hungarian Democratic Forum, a now-defunct center-right party.)
In fact, both Molnár and Bégány were members of Jobbik before, and not after, they founded the new party with Gorka. Molnár was Jobbik’s high-profile vice president until September 2006, before he, Gorka and Bégány launched the New Democratic Coalition in early 2007.
Gorka appeared at a press conference with Molnár on September 21, 2006 — one day after Molnár resigned his position as Jobbik’s vice president. Gorka was also photographed on September 23, 2006, wearing a badge with the Hungarian National Committee’s logo as he was standing next to Molnár at a podium while Molnár briefed the press on the Committee’s activities. At the time Gorka was making these public appearances with the Hungarian National Committee’s leadership, extreme-right leader Toroczkai was already a top member of the Committee.
Bégány, meanwhile, had indeed been a member of MDF for a time, but in 2005 he joined Jobbik and served formally as a member of Budapest’s District 5 Council representing the far-right party. Bégány’s formal party biography, posted on the Jobbik website in 2006, said it is his “belief that without belonging to the Hungarian nation or to God it is possible to live, but not worth it.” Like Molnár, Bégány left Jobbik only a few months before starting the new party with Gorka.
Molnár, Bégány and the Hungarian National Committee were not Gorka’s only connection to far-right circles. Between 2006 and 2007, Gorka wrote a series of articles in Magyar Demokrata, a newspaper known for publishing the writings of prominent anti-Semitic and racist Hungarian public figures.
The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, András Bencsik, is notorious in Hungary for his own long-standing anti-Semitic views. In 1995, the Hungarian Jewish publication Szombat criticized Bencsik for writing that “the solid capital, which the Jews got after Auschwitz, has run out.” That same year, Szombat noted, Bencsik wrote in Magyar Demokrata, “In Hungary the chief conflict is between national and cosmopolitan aspirations.” In Hungarian society, “cosmopolitan” is generally a code word for Jews.
In December 2004, the U.S. State Department reported bluntly to Congress that, “the weekly newspaper Magyar Demokrata published anti-Semitic articles and featured articles by authors who have denied the Holocaust.”
In the summer of 2007, Bencsik became one of the founders of the Hungarian Guard, a now-banned paramilitary organization known for assaulting and intimidating members of Hungary’s Roma community. The perpetrators in a spate of racially motivated murders of Roma in 2008 and 2009 were found to have connections to the Guard.
Gorka’s articles for Magyar Demokrata focused not only on decrying Hungary’s then-Socialist government, but also on highlighting the perceived injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, the post-World War I agreement that led to the loss of two-thirds of prewar Hungary’s territory.
“We fought on the wrong side of a war for which we were not responsible, and were punished to an extent that was likely even more unjust — with the exception of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire — than any other punishment in the modern age,” Gorka wrote in a 2006 article in Magyar Demokrata.
Asked about his choice of journalistic outlets, Gorka wrote, “I am […] unfamiliar with Bencsik. I believe it was one of his colleagues who asked me if I wanted to write some OpEds.” Gorka told the Forward that his writing at the time shows “how everything I did was in the interests of a more transparent and healthy democracy in Hungary. This included a rejection of all revanchist tendencies and xenophobic cliques.”
Gorka’s claim to be unfamiliar with Bencsik must be weighed against his deep immersion in Hungarian politics and Benscik’s status as a major figure in Hungary’s right-wing political scene. At the time, Gorka gave public interviews as an “expert” on the Hungarian Guard, which Bencsik helped to found. In one 2007 interview, Gorka clarified his own view of the Guard, saying, “It’s not worth talking about banning” the group. Despite its extreme rhetoric against minorities, Gorka said, “The government and media are inflating this question.”
An Affinity for Nationalist Symbols
It was in mid-February that Gorka’s affinity for Hungarian nationalist and far-right ideas first came to the American public’s attention. Eli Clifton of the news website Lobelog noticed from a photograph that the new deputy assistant to the president had appeared at an inauguration ball in January wearing a Hungarian medal known as Vitézi Rend. The medal signifies a knightly order of merit founded in 1920 by Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s longtime anti-Semitic ruler and Hitler’s ally during World War II. Notwithstanding this alliance, and the group’s designation as Nazi-collaborators by the U.S. State Department, many within Hungary’s right revere Horthy for his staunch nationalism during the overall course of his rule from 1920 to 1944.
Breitbart, the “alt-right” publication, where Gorka himself served as national security editor prior to joining the White House staff, defended his wardrobe choice, writing on February 14 that, “as any of his Breitbart News colleagues could testify, Gorka is not only pro-Israel but ‘pro-Jewish,’ and defends both against the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”
“In 1979 my father was awarded a declaration for his resistance to a dictatorship, and although he passed away 14 years ago, I wear that medal in remembrance of what my family went through and what it represents today, to me, as an American,” Gorka told Breibart on February 15, as the controversy regarding his choice to wear a Horthy-era medal intensified.
But the medal was not the first time Gorka expressed appreciation for symbols that many associate with Hungary’s World War II-era Nazi sympathizers. In 2006, Gorka defended the use of the Arpad flag, which Hungary’s murderous Arrow Cross Party used as their symbol. The Hungarian Arrow Cross Party killed thousands of Jews during World War II, shooting many of them alongside the Danube River and throwing them into the water. Gorka told the news agency JTA at the time that “if you say eight centuries of history can be eradicated by 18 months of fascist distortion of symbols, you’re losing historic perspective.”
Gorka’s Unlikely Transformation
After the failure of his new party in 2007, Gorka moved to the United States and over the past 10 years has worked for the Department of Justice, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, and Joint Special Operations University.
Former colleagues in the States questioned the quality of Gorka’s work on Islam, and said that he shied away from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, according to the Washington Post.
Retired Lt. Col. Mike Lewis told the Post that when Gorka was lecturing to members of the armed forces, he “made a difficult and complex situation simple and confirmed the officers’ prejudices and assumptions.”
But Humire, of the Center for a Secure Free Society, defended Gorka’s worldview. “Since I’ve known him he has been emphasizing a point that is not properly understood by most conventional counterterrorism experts,” said Humire, “that the modern battlefield is fought with words, images, and ideas, not just bombs and bullets. If you study asymmetric war, this emphasizes the mental battle of attrition and the moral battle of legitimacy over the physical battle for the terrain. Dr. Gorka understands this at a very high level and has taught this to our war fighters for several years,” said Humire.
Over the past few weeks, Gorka has become an informal spokesman for the White House, appearing on radio and television shows to defend Trump’s rhetoric and policy choices — including those that are relevant to the Jewish community.
Asked during a February 6 talk show to acknowledge that it was “questionable” for the White House to leave out any specific mention of Jews as the Nazis’ target in its Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, which referred only to “innocent people” being victimized, Gorka called the criticism “asinine”.
“No, I’m not going to admit it,” he said. “It’s absurd. You’re making a statement about the Holocaust. Of course it’s about the Holocaust because that’s what the statement’s about. It’s only reasonable to twist it if your objective is to attack the president.”
It remains unclear whether the White House ever took a deep look into Gorka’s activities in Hungary. Six White House staffers have reportedly been dismissed for failing FBI background checks; Gorka was not among them.
In 2002, Hungary’s intelligence service denied Gorka a security clearance. Gorka was nominated by the right-wing Fidesz party as its candidate to be an expert in an investigation into allegations that then-Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy had served as a counterintelligence officer during the Communist era. At the time, Gorka’s earlier ties to British intelligence were considered a concern, and he was ultimately not allowed to take part in the investigation.
Gorka’s friends and close associates in the United States do not believe that he is ideologically part of Hungary’s far right.
“I am pretty certain that SG [Sebastian Gorka] has some major differences with aspects of what you call the far-right,” Alejandro Chafuen, who has known Gorka for nearly two decades, wrote the Forward in an email exchange. However, Chafuen, who serves as president of the U.S.-based Atlas Network, added that he does not know whether these ideological differences also include Gorka’s perspective on minority issues and historical memory.
Meanwhile, Gorka’s former political partners in Hungary are pleased with his successes in Washington.
“I am happy, because this could be good for Hungarian-American relations,” said Molnár, the former Jobbik vice president and co-founder of Gorka’s short-lived party, in his conversation with the Forward. “But I was surprised…No Hungarian public figure has ever been so close to the White House.”

'We are going to chose which ones hurt': Mexico considers how to counter Trump's trade plans

http://read.bi/2mln4tm

Can anyone truly state with a certain measure of sanity that the Trump WH is completely sane????

Trump; apparently addressing America's Vulcan minority: "No matter what the color of the blood we bleed," we're all patriots.

"We are fighting the fake news. They are phony. They are the enemy of the people." —

Trump cites "Jim," "a friend," "a pretty substantial guy," who says you can't visit Paris anymore cos it's too dangerous.

When the Russians overreach in their comments we tend to say they are in "an altered state of reality"

There truly has to be something better to describe the Trump overreach other than he is an outright lair....because this public statement is in fact a lie....it does not even reach the level of "alternative facts"..just a straight lie....

QUOTE
This is bizarre. Trump says WaPo made up sources on the Flynn story, which resulted in WH confirming story and firing Flynn over it.

NOW we have even Russian looking Trump CPAC flags being waved on TV.....

Crowd at CPAC waving these little pro-Trump flags that look exactly like the Russian flag. Staffers quickly come around to confiscate them.

The WH media team cannot even get the right flags????

BUT WAIT....who distributed the Russian flags to the CPAC crowd in the first place?

Keep in mind I've heard conservatives frequently criticize immigrants for waving flags from their home countries.

This is next-level crazy......tons of Russian flags being waved by CPAC participants?????

Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-co… 

But Trump does not even have a coherent Russian FP in place yet ......

BUT WAIT...even the Russians are starting to see a coming arms race with the US.....

Pro-Kremlin politicians warn Trump could unleash new arms race
http://reut.rs/2lhwbu4

BUT WAIT...on the other hand......
Russia/Putin seems to be doing anything and everything just to try to get a conversation going with Trump so Trump can then say the Russians are friendly thus I am lifting sanctions.....

"Dear Bashar, we're doing this." There's your coordination.
http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-open-us-plan-create-safe-zones-syria-bash… 

Trump really does need to get his act together when he bashes the "leakers"...

Trump at CPAC: Press "shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name."

WH officials briefed anonymously 2 hrs ago

CONFIRMED by the journalists who were being talked to anonymously....

State Department writes anti-leak memo, which promptly leaks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/02/24/state-depa… 

"Leaky leaks sink ships"....

Those pesky Russian connection stories that the Trump WH tried to get the FBI to kill the MSM stories on that lead to the Trump tweeter blast below...are still connecting Trump to the Russians in surprising ways it seems....

The Crook Behind the Trump-Russia 'Peace' Plan
Sater is one of the most notorious and shady characters in the American president’s past, including his very recent past.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/24/meet-felix-sater-the-r…

Michael Daly
Michael Weiss
02.24.17 1:00 PM ET

QUOTE:
Felix Sater is an Russian immigrant who did prison time for stabbing a man in the face with the broken stem of a margarita glass, and he would surely qualify for the label “bad hombre” were he from Mexico instead of Russia.
It was only by becoming a federal informant that Sater avoided an otherwise 20-year mandatory term for a $40 million fraud in which most of the victims were elderly, a number of them Holocaust survivors.  
Sater’s father also became an informant after being convicted of joining a Mafia soldier shaking down small businesses in Brooklyn for nearly a decade. 

None of that stopped Donald Trump from having extensive business dealings with Sater that included the high-rise Trump SoHo New York hotels and condos. Then, after Sater’s rap sheet was widely publicized, Trump said he hardly knew the man.
“If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like," Trump says in court papers from a 2013 law suit.
Yet, even as the Trump administration was preparing plans to ramp up deportations, the president’s longtime personal attorney sat down for coffee in a Manhattan hotel with this Russian immigrant.
According to the New York Times, Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Sater were party to some amateur diplomacy aimed at settling the Russian war on Ukraine with a plan to push Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko out of office.
Cohen insisted to The Daily Beast that the Times account was wrong and that he had not been involved in the peace plan. He declined to comment on whether he was troubled by Sater’s criminal background and organized crime ties.
“I will not respond to this question as I am not knowledgeable of all aspects to his past,” Cohen told The Daily Beast via email.

Cohen did acknowledge sitting down briefly with Sater at a Manhattan hotel last month. 
“I was asked to meet him for a quick coffee and agreed,” Cohen told The Daily Beast. “When asked, I was unaware who was going to be joining the meeting and never agreed to or worked on any diplomatic plan for Ukraine.”
The person who joined the meeting was Andrii Artemenko, a rich Ukrainian member of parliament of dubious reputation in his home country. Artemenko claims to have material evidence of Poroshenko’s corruption so compelling as to force the Ukrainian president from office. 
The Times stands by its account, saying that Cohen had told the paper that he delivered a copy of the plan to the office of then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn shortly before Flynn was fired.  The plan is said by the Times to involve Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine and a referendum on the fate of occupied Crimea: namely, whether or not the peninsula, which Russian forces seized almost bloodlessly in 2014, would be “leased to Russia for a term of 50 or 100 years” Artemenko reportedly insists that their peace proposal has met with approval among senior aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sater did not respond to a request for an interview with The Daily Beast. He was quoted elsewhere denying that he had been engaged in actual diplomacy. He did tell Fox News that the effort is just his latest contribution to his adopted land.
“What could be wrong in helping stop a war and trying to achieve peace?” he said. “I have done so much for my country and thought that promoting peace was a good thing.”
Sater is certainly experienced in promoting things, principally himself. And what he has done for his country—two big Mafia cases for the FBI, a failed effort to buy Stinger misses in Afghanistan on the black market for the CIA, and supposedly obtaining Osama bin Laden’s cell phone number—seems to have been undertaken largely to escape punishment for what he has admitted in court having done to this country. 
Much about Trump’s presidency, and the cast of characters it has assembled, challenges even the most imaginative Hollywood screenwriting, but Sater’s backstory is an especially remarkable example. Having emigrated to Brighton Beach from the Soviet Union when he was eight years old, he might have been the archetype of the self-made immigrant Trump has nothing but admiration for, provided of course they’re from certain non-Muslim countries.
In his early 20s, Sater had a three-year stint as a successful broker on Wall Street before he slashed that man’s face open in El Rio Grande, a Manhattan bar, causing the victim a wound which required 110 stitches and earning the perpetrator a felony conviction for assault. 
Sater served 15 months at Edgecombe Correctional Facility. He was released on parole, prison records seen by The Daily Best show, in September 1995.  A month later, his investment firm, White Rock Partners, changed its name to State Street Capital Markets.
Sater mostly escaped public notice until 1998, when the manager at a Manhattan Mini-Storage in SoHo opened a cubicle Sater had rented under a false female name (the account was in arrears and made an interesting discovery. In addition to a 12-gauge shotgun and two 9-millimeter pistols were a box and gym bag containing documents that led the FBI to a massive “pump-and-dump” stock fraud, racketeering and international money laundering scheme, the architects of which were later shown to be Sater and two of his longtime business colleagues, Gennady “Gene” Klotsman and Salvatore Lauria. Both were with Sater at El Rio Grande the day he turned a margarita glass into a weapon. By the time the evidence was uncovered in SoHo, Sater and Klotsman had gone to Russia; Lauria had also skipped town. They returned and were arrested. 
According to a 1998 indictment of Sater filed in the U.S. District Court Eastern District of New York, Sater violated the terms of his agreement with the National Association of Securities Dealers, which instructed him to restrict his activities at White Rock “largely to clerical duties, for which he would receive a minimal salary. In fact, [Sater] received substantial compensation greatly exceeding his agreed-upon salary, and he took part in activities at White Rock and State Street, including the handling of securities and account statement.”
As Sater and his co-defendants would later admit when pleading guilty, White Rock and State Street made money by lying about the worth and ownership of securities, encouraging brokerage firms to peddle the artificially inflated stocks, then laundering the proceeds through various off-shore accounts.  All told, they stole about $40 million, much of it from elderly investors, including Holocaust survivors. 
Moreover, their illicit activities involved four different Italian mafia crime families, as a subsequent grand jury indictment in 2000 stated. Specifically, from March 1993 to October 1996, Frank Coppa, Sr., a captain in the Bonnano crime family; Eugene Lombardo, an associate of that family; Daniel Perisco, an associate of the Colombo family; Joseph Polito, Sr., an associate of the Gambino family, Ernest “Butch” Montevecchi, a soldier in the Genovese family among others, “devised, implemented and oversaw fraudulent schemes to manipulate the price of securities” of four different companies and “fraudulently induc[ed] investors to buy and hold these securities,” according to the indictment, also filed in the Eastern District of New York. 
Sater, Klotsman and Lauria, who had already pleaded guilty to the 1998 complaint, were listed as unindicted co-conspirators in this later case, which clearly netted much bigger fish for the feds based on an accidental haul at the mini-storage. They all turned on their former mob accomplices, as did Sater’s father, Mikhail Sater, also known as Michael Sheferofsky. 
The father was indicted in 2000 on two counts by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch. Sheferofsky’s accomplice in that case was Butch Montevecchi, who also figured in the younger Sater’s case. Both men pleaded guilty to extorting “restaurants, food stores, and a medical clinic” in the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn through intimidation and violence from December of 1990 to January of 1999. The father got off with three years’ probation in exchange for cooperation that included wearing a wire in a case against a group of Polish immigrants perpetrating major Medicaid fraud in Greenpoint in Brooklyn. 
In separate court documents, Mikhail Sater is named as an accomplice of Semion Mogilevich, one of Russia’s most notorious mobsters who, up until 2015, was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for his own stock fraud scheme run out of Pennsylvania. Mogilevich now lives openly in Russia, which refuses to extradite him.
U.S. Attorney Lynch seemed to make ample use of the Saters, who were a unique father and son team, both working as informants with the same Mafia henchmen, but different FBI handlers on different cases. In a letter addressed to U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch during her confirmation hearing to become Barack Obama’s attorney general, she wrote that as a decade-long informant Felix Sater provided “information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”
If the reference to “national security” seems a bit out of place in characterizing a domestic crackdown on organized crime, then that might be because of what Sater, Klotsman and Lauria allegedly got up to when they were overseas.
As recounted in The Scorpion and the Frog: High Crimes and High Times, a 2003 book Lauria later coauthored with former Associated Press journalist David Barry, the three associates became spies for the CIA, tasked with offering U.S. taxpayer money to buy Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that had gone missing from the covert U.S. campaign to oust the Soviets in Afghanistan. Those missiles, it was feared, were destined for Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The idea, according to the book, was to give the Russian government the funds to purchase 10 Stingers on the black market in Afghanistan, and then turn them over to the Sater, Klotsman and Lauria, who would then relinquish them to their Langley handlers.
“I think it was Felix who made the deal to buy 10 Stingers and originally the total sale price was going to be $350,000,” Barry told The Daily Beast. “So $35,000 per Stinger, which is about what somebody would have to pay for one of those things back then.”
The quid pro quo with the U.S. government was purportedly as follows: in exchange for helping to secure the very weapon that helped defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan and thus hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sater, Klotsman and Lauria would buy a “get-out-of-jail-free” card for their Wall Street malfeasance.
Lauria has since repudiated his own book, whose publication he tried to have stopped, calling it a work of fiction. Barry insists, however, that based on his independent corroborative spadework, featuring court documents, interviews and open source material, the story of espionage-for-freedom is true.
“The Russians would go to Afghanistan to handle this because that's where the missiles were — without tipping off bin Laden that the Stingers were ultimately going to the CIA,” says Barry. They supposedly photographed the serial number of one or more of the Stingers “so that the person they were dealing with in the Agency would be able to verify it.”
Barry said that while the CIA was eager to exploit any and all contacts, even among those connected to the New York underworld, the FBI, which had embarked on a similar and more notorious collaboration with Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, wasn’t as keen. “The feds still wanted to nail them all.”

Continued.......

First Trump attacks the media and THEN he attacks the judicial system...NOW he attacks the FBI for not doing as he says they should be doing...

NOTICE a distinct trend...

Donald J. Trump
Verified account
‏@realDonaldTrump 2h
2 hours ago
The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security "leakers" that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even......

Donald J. Trump
Verified account
‏@realDonaldTrump 2h
2 hours ago
find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW

BUT WAIT he praised them for attacking Clinton and her emails now he bashes them????

The @FBI must have something big on President Trump if he's pressuring them on Twitter like this first thing in the morning

While this article is from MAY 2016 before the Trump win...it does in fact go to the heart of why we will be seeing a chaotic and constantly changing Trump FP for the next four long years....meaning what he says and tweets being constantly countered/reinterpreted by his own Cabinet members being carried across the world of social media and white nationalist blogs....

The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy

The American republic was long safeguarded by settled norms, now shattered by the rise of Donald Trump.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-seven-broken-g…

David Frum May 31, 2016

A long time ago, more than 20 years in fact, the Wall Street Journal published a powerful, eloquent editorial, simply headlined: “No Guardrails.”

"In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control."

Twenty years later, that same newspaper is edging toward open advocacy in favor of Donald Trump, the least self-controlled major-party candidate for high office in the history of the republic. And as Trump forged his path to the nomination, he snapped through seven different guardrails, revealing how brittle the norms that safeguard the American republic had grown.

Here’s the part of the 2016 story that will be hardest to explain after it’s all over: Trump did not deceive anyone. Unlike, say, Sarah Palin in 2008, Trump appeared before the electorate in his own clothes, speaking his own words. When he issued a promise, he instantly contradicted it. If you chose to accept the promise anyway, you did so with abundant notice of its worthlessness. For all the times Trump said believe me and trust me in his salesman patter, he communicated constantly and in every medium that there was only thing you could believe and trust: If you voted for Donald Trump, you’d get Donald Trump, in all his Trumpery and Trumpiness.

The television networks that promoted Trump; the primary voters who elevated him; the politicians who eventually surrendered to him; the intellectuals who argued for him, and the donors who, however grudgingly, wrote checks to him—all of them knew, by the time they made their decisions, that Trump lied all the time, about everything. They knew that Trump was ignorant, and coarse, and boastful, and cruel. They knew he habitually sympathized with dictators and kleptocrats—and that his instinct when confronted with criticism of himself was to attack, vilify, and suppress. They knew his disrespect for women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities. They knew that he wished to unravel NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and that he speculated aloud about partial default on American financial obligations. None of that dissuaded or deterred them.

Continued.....

The question of truth and honesty just keeps coming up in this Trump WH....

Yesterday Trump states there will be a large military operation to remove "bad dudes".....

Kelly Dir DHS in Mexico City...states there will be no military operation and no mass deportations...

BUT THEN ICE who works for Kelly evidently lied to someone about something???

Santa Cruz Police Chief is accusing Homeland Security of lying about immigration raids that ICE was conducting:
http://www.ksbw.com/article/santa-cruz-police-chief-blasts-homeland-sec… 

So does one really believe anything that comes out of this WH???

Wow..."outrage"...it cannot simple be "outrage" as Trump did not fire off one of his famous tweets....

Besides he has missed a number of opportunities to critique Putin but passed on them so why now???

Trump outraged by Russian deployment of cruise missiles, vows to raise issue with Putin
https://www.unian.info/world/1793741-trump-outraged-by-russian-deployme… 

BUT THEN when Putin offered to lengthen New Start....Trump waved off stating it hurt the US when the exact opposite was in fact true..it limited the actual number of nukes on both sides...

NOW just what will be the Trump WH response to the use of VX by NK in killing someone...????

AND when will he move against the Assad use of CWs....???

If you set a red line on chemical weapons and don't enforce it, that lesson isn't only taken by Assad:

http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2017/01/13/analysis-international-taboo-… 

NOW it appears that those Generals Trump has working for him are constantly correcting their own CinC...and publicly....

Trump states there will be a large military operation to remove those hundreds of "bad dudes"....

Kelly in Mexico City states there will be no military used and no mass deportations...

Trump states NATO is obsolete and Bannon states the EU will fail and the Euro will fail in the next 18 months....

Mattis and Tillerson completely stated the opposite at the Munich Security Conference last week.

Trump states and uses the term "radical Islamic terrorism" and says his administration will always use the term that Obama was afraid of using.

TEHN McMaster told NSC staff today, we shouldn't be using the term "Radical Islamic Terrorism," says @ColinKahl

APPEARS Trump did not believe his Generals would not speak truth to power????

Trump was not in the WH Situation Room when on his orders ST6 was fighting hard in Yemen.......

Trump can tweet but he is not a CinC....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-yemen-raid-twitter_us_58ae0ac…?

As SEALs Fought For Their Lives, Trump’s Account Sent And Deleted A TV Tweet

WASHINGTON ― As a team of elite U.S. commandos found themselves under unexpectedly heavy fire in a remote Yemeni village last month, eight time zones away, their commander in chief was not in the Situation Room.

It’s unclear what he, personally, was doing. But his Twitter account was busy promoting an upcoming appearance on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

“I will be interviewed by @TheBrodyFile on @CBNNews tonight at 11pm. Enjoy!” read a tweet from President Donald Trump’s personal account on Saturday, Jan. 28.

Whether it was Trump himself or an aide who sent out that tweet at 5:50 p.m. ― about half an hour into a firefight that cost a Navy SEAL his life ― cannot be determined from the actual tweets, and the White House isn’t saying. Likewise, it’s not clear who deleted the tweet some 20 minutes later, or why the new president, just a week on the job, chose not to directly monitor the first high-risk military operation on his watch.

The CBN interview did not actually air until the following night, Jan. 29, and Trump or an aide may have realized the error and deleted the tweet for that reason. Alternatively, Trump or an aide might have realized that the

Yemen operation was going badly and deleted the tweet to avoid looking callous. The tweet appears to have been sent via an iPhone, not via Android. Tweets sent from an iPhone are generally from the president’s staff, often taking his dictation, while tweets sent by Android are usually composed by Trump himself.

The White House did not respond to The Huffington Post’s queries on the issue.

“He was obviously aware of the strike occurring,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the day after the raid. “He was kept in constant contact Saturday night of the status of the mission, both of the success that it had and the tragic loss of life that occurred to that member.”

Spicer, though, has not specifically said what Trump was doing between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 28, other than to say he was in the White House residence ― not in the Situation Room. That’s the hour ― 1:30 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. local time ― when the firefight in Yemen resulted in the deaths of some 30 people, according to news reports. U.S. forces had called in air strikes because of the ferocity of the resistance they encountered. At least 10 of those killed were women or children.

The last event on the presidential schedule released to the media for that Saturday was a phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at 5 p.m. According to the White House pool reporter that day, Trump was on the phone with Turnbull at 5:11 p.m. when reporters were taken to witness the call through the Oval Office windows.

“Obviously, if a raid is only 20 minutes in, you should wait to see how it turns out before tweeting,” said one former National Security Council participant under former President Barack Obama. The staffer added that while Obama did not monitor every operation from the Situation Room (as he did during the one that killed Osama bin Laden), it seemed odd that Trump did not monitor this operation. “It is your first one.”

The timing of the CBN tweet and its deletion is the latest detail in the story of a military special operation that went not at all as planned.
Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens was killed in the raid, and four U.S. service members were wounded. A $75 million Osprey aircraft was damaged and had to be destroyed to keep it from falling into enemy hands.

Subsequent reports pointed out that Trump did not participate in a formal National Security Council review of the plan, but instead was briefed over a dinner meeting three nights before the raid.

Spicer on Feb. 2 said that Defense Secretary James Mattis, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, CIA director Mike Pompeo, then-national security adviser Mike Flynn, National Security Council chief of staff Keith Kellogg, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen Bannon took part in that dinner, as did Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

“Doing it over dinner with Kushner and Bannon, without someone from the State Department present? I considered that a little odd,” said Luke Hartig, a former senior director for counterterrorism at the NSC under Obama. He added that more comprehensive planning might not have averted problems, but could have ensured that better contingency strategies were in place.

In any event, Spicer on Feb. 2 essentially described the raid as something planned and approved under Obama (a characterization that Obama aides dispute). That places it about midway along the evolution of the White’s House description of the operation ― from immediately afterward, when Spicer declared the raid a complete success, to the following week, when he accused anyone who questioned that assessment of dishonoring the fallen serviceman.

In the initial aftermath, Spicer said the raid had killed 14 fighters with the group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Within a few days, as reports spread of civilian deaths which the Defense Department acknowledged, Spicer said the whole point of the mission was “intelligence gathering,” in the form of laptops and cellphones that were taken.

By the following week, amid reports that Yemen had withdrawn permission for U.S. troops to conduct raids there and that the purported main target of the raid, AQAP leader Qassim al-Rimi, had escaped and was now taunting Trump, Spicer denounced criticism of the raid of any kind.

“The life of Chief Ryan Owens was done in service to this country and we owe him and his family a great debt for the information that we received during that raid,” Spicer said on Feb. 8. “I think any suggestion otherwise is a disservice to his courageous life and the actions that he took, full stop.”

Listen to Controversial White House Terrorism Adviser Sebastian Gorka’s Angry Call to a Critic

And this person has access to a USG TS/SCI?????

http://europe.newsweek.com/sebastian-gorka-white-house-terrorism-advise…

In a recording provided to Newsweek, Gorka threatened terrorism propaganda expert Michael S. Smith with legal action for criticizing him in a series of tweets.

By Jeff Stein On 2/23/17 at 10:16 AM

Michael Smith And Sebastian Gorka Have A Friendly Phone Call

Updated | An embattled White House terrorism advisor whose academic credentials have come under widespread fire telephoned one of his main critics at home Tuesday night and threatened legal action against him, Newsweek has learned.

Sebastian Gorka, whose views on Islam have been widely labeled extremist, called noted terrorism expert Michael S. Smith II in South Carolina and expressed dismay that Smith had been criticizing him on Twitter, according to a recording of the call provided to Newsweek.

“I was like a deer in the headlights,” Smith, a Republican who has advised congressional committees on the use of social media by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and al-Qaeda, tells Newsweek. “I thought it was a prank. He began by threatening me with a lawsuit.”

Gorka apparently used his personal cell phone, with a northern Virginia area code, rather than making the call from his White House office or government-issued cell phone, where it would be officially logged, Smith says. The terrorism expert says he suspected Gorka “was trying to conceal the call.”

Smith says he did not begin recording the call until after Gorka allegedly threatened to sue Smith. In an email to Newsweek, Smith said that, “Gorka asserted my tweets about him merited examination by the White House legal counsel. In effect, he was threatening to entangle me in a legal battle for voicing my concerns on Twitter that he does not possess expertise sufficient to assist the president of the United States with formulating and guiding national security policies.”

Gorka did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Smith has been a regular contributor to think tank and TV discussions on terrorism, particularly the use of social media by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State militant group. Last year Foreign Policy magazine included him in its list of “100 Leading Global Thinkers.”

Smith has kept up a steady stream of jabs at Gorka since he learned that the Hungarian born, British-educated terrorism specialist had been hired by President Donald Trump’s top adviser Steve Bannon. Both Bannon and Gorka came from the far-right Breitbart News, where Bannon was editor-in-chief and Gorka was national security editor.

On his Twitter page, Gorka describes himself as “deputy assistant to the 45th president of America” and an “Irregular Warfare Strategist.”

His views on the “global jihadist movement,” as he calls it, align with a small cadre of right-wing observers who depict Islamist militants and extremists as being driven principally by passages from the Koran, rather than by government repression, or sectarian, tribal, political or economic factors.

On Tuesday, Smith tweeted that Gorka “doesn't know the enemies' ideologies well enough to combat them.” In an earlier tweet directed at Trump, Smith wrote: “You are endangering the lives of Americans by hiring fake ‘terrorism experts.’”

Gorka earned his doctorate from a Hungarian university in 2008 and “a few months later landed a faculty job at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), a new Pentagon-funded school that was still working toward accreditation,” The Washington Post reported. According to an online biography, he is also an associate fellow at the Joint Special Operations University, at the U.S. Special Operations Command, and holds the Major General Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University Foundation, which was funded by Thomas Saunders III, a major Republican Party donor and chairman of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The program’s current director, James Howcroft, also a retired Marine colonel, told Politico that Gorka only “periodically delivered lectures or served as a seminar leader.”

The White House advisor was clearly wounded by Smith’s taunts. “Why is this vitriol popping out of you, every day now?” Gorka asked Smith in his call. ”I look at your Twitter feed once or twice a day and it’s half a dozen tweets about me, and I’ve never even met you.”

“Wow,” Smith responded. “Are you defeating jihad by monitoring or trolling my Twitter feed?”

Gorka expressed puzzlement several times that he was being attacked “by someone who’s never met me.”  

“I’ve never met you and I’ve never attacked you,” he said to Smith, his voice rising in frustration and anger. “And your Twitter feed is an incessant berating of my professional acumen. Put yourself in my shoes, Mr. Smith. Have you done that? How would you like it if someone you’ve never met, daily and professionally attacked you?”

“Happens all the time,” Smith responded. Generally speaking, academics and journalists laboring in the field of public policy expect to be criticized for their views.

"It's not happened to me,” Gorka said, “I can tell you. Maybe you can show me some trick on how you deal with it. This is the first time ever.”

In fact, questions about Gorka’s views and credentials to speak authoritatively on Islam and terrorism were severely criticized in lengthy feature articles in The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal in recent days.

He also received a wave of unfavorable publicity in January 2016 when he was arrested for trying to pass through a TSA checkpoint at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. carrying a loaded handgun. He was charged with a misdemeanor and sentenced to six months probation.

One of his most influential critics is Cindy Storer, a leading former CIA expert on the relationship between religious extremism and terrorism.

“He thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts,” Storer was quoted as saying in the Post.

Smith asked Gorka why he didn’t telephone Storer, "who called you nuts in the Washington Post,” to complain. Gorka responded that Storer’s remark wasn’t “in a Twitter feed that is being sent to people on Capitol Hill.”

Gorka’s scholarship has also come under scrutiny by Mia Bloom, an expert on “transcultural violence” at Georgia State University. “He doesn’t understand a fraction of what he pretends to know about Islam,” Bloom was quoted as saying by the Journal. Bloom has participated in TV appearances with Gorka and at a panel last year at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Nor has Gorka—who does not speak Arabic and has never lived in a Muslim-majority nation, according to news accounts—submitted any of his articles for review in scholarly journals, says Lawrence P. Rubin, associate editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, the leading journal in that field.
“Gorka has not submitted anything to the journal in the last five or so years, according to my records and we have never used him as a reviewer,” Rubin tells Newsweek. “We would not have used him as a reviewer because he is not considered a terrorism expert by the academic or policy community.”

A government expert on Middle East radical movements, who asked not to be named for fear of being fired, tells Newsweek she was disturbed to hear Gorka suggest at a talk he gave in Israel a few years ago that he knew of a “specific person in the [Obama White House] who was deliberately misleading the government” on terrorism issues.

“He said he wouldn’t name the person on stage but would provide the particulars” privately to anyone there who wanted to know, she said. Noting the audience was full of potential adversaries, she called Gorka’s remark “‘beyond the pale.”

Several times during his call with Smith, Gorka invited him to the White House to hash out their differences “face to face, man to man,” as he put it in one exchange. They set a tentative date for March 8.

But Smith warned Gorka that “in absolute fairness to you, what you will hear is that I have very serious concerns about our national security,” and in particular Gorka’s role “as an adviser to the president of the United States.”

“If you make a devastating case, then so be it,” Gorka said.

“So be it?” Smith answered. “Then what, you’ll acknowledge you're out of your league?”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Gorka said. “Bring it on."

Late Wednesday, Gorka withdrew his invitation.

“Given your statements for the latest attack piece and continued disparaging Tweets against not only myself but the administration and the President,” Gorka wrote Smith, “consider your invitation to meet withdrawn.”

Well worth listening to the full 22 minutes as Gorka is truly out of his league and he was never an Irregular Warfare Strategist....

AND BTW Breitbart.com was never an Irregular Warfare blogsite....

Trump calls deportation effort a "military operation" to get “really bad dudes" out of US

http://hill.cm/SRpEqsS
 

A startling number of Americans think the US will get into another major war under Trump

http://read.bi/2luJGtf
 

Trump's envisioned Syrian Russian partner hard at work with it's own FP....

HYPOCRISY PURE.....first they bomb it to the ground and then want the West to pay for it.....

There is that old china shop saying......"if you break it you own it"....

Russia asks world powers to pay for Syria reconstruction
[url]https://www.ft.com/content/47933554-f847-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65#[/url]

Mexico: "We won't accept Trump's plan because we don't have to."

Spicer: "Relationship with Mexico is phenomenal."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-u-s-officials-get-chilly-reception-in-… 

Sometimes one does have to truly wonder what "altered state of reality" both Trump and his spokesperson Spicer are in?????

AND this is called the new Trump/Bannon FP????

Major,unprecedented letter to Trump from 24 Senators on how defunding the arts will assault American culture

http://explore.brainpickings.org/post/157581515298/enormously-important… 

REMEMBER Bannon stated himself he is a "Leninist" intent on destroying the "establishment".....

Russian mafia has run scams from Trump Tower since 1992, when Vyacheslav Ivankov AKA Yaponchik set up shop there.

Yaponchik was sent 2 NYC by Mogilevich 2 bring order 2 RU mob in USA. FBI learned his other home was the Taj Mahal.

Fugitive Russian mobster Trump denied knowing (Yaponchik)was busted for running an illegal gambling, money laundering ring right out of Trump Tower

Shell companies bought 60% of condos in Trump's Florida property-Ukrainian money launderers called it home

AND yet the Republican house does not want to investigate...????

From a former NSA CI type......

Over 15 years ago -- I was there -- IC knew Trump was deep in bed with Russian organized crime. Not legally.

Imagine what they know now.

Interestingly this Trump National Security Advisor sits on the SIG that Bannon has formed as a counterweight to the NSC AND the SIG writes all Executive Orders...none going through the NSC review process....

BTW..Bannon also formerly from breitbart.com a white nationalist/anti-Semitic blogsite hired Gorka away from Breitbart.com where he was an Editor NOT a well known national security analyst....

A must be read article...

http://www.businessinsider.de/sebastian-gorka-trump-bio-profile-2017-2?…

Sebastian Gorka, Trump's combative new national security aide, is widely disdained within his own field

Pamela Engel

It was May 2016 and Sebastian Gorka, a former editor at Breitbart News who is now a senior official in President Donald Trump's White House, had been invited to speak at a Defense Intelligence Agency conference.
Gorka was joined on a panel by two well-respected counterterrorism and national-security experts — Georgia State University professor Mia Bloom and Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow Clint Watts.
But he showed up unprepared, Bloom and Watts said, refusing to answer the questions that had been provided to the panelists weeks in advance.
Bloom told Business Insider that before things got underway, the panel organizer started to discuss which panelists would answer which questions. Gorka, she said, refused to answer anything.
"Gorka stood up after me and said, 'Well, I've been invited here under false pretenses. I couldn't possibly address this level of granularity,'" Bloom said. "He made it sound like he had no idea that they were going to ask us these questions."
Watts, a former Army officer and FBI agent, confirmed this description of events, characterizing Gorka's performance as a "disaster."
"Instead of participating in the panel the way he was supposed to, he was kind of grandstanding," Watts said. "He said, 'I'm going to stand up because I'm a lecturer and I want to see the crowd,' and I thought, this is bulls---. You don't act like that."
Bloom and Watts also said he tried to use the panel as a platform to sell his book.
"He actually carried around his book and was basically trying to sell his book to people in the crowd," Watts said. "It was low class."
The episode encapsulates the concerns that several people in the national-security community have about Gorka.
In conversations with Business Insider, several national-security experts questioned Gorka's credibility in their field, saying he is often dismissed as an outspoken conservative pundit who lacks the chops to serve in the highest levels of the White House advising on national-security policy.
Gorka is a deputy assistant to the president for the Strategic Initiatives Group, a new White House organization that US officials have said is like a parallel National Security Council (NSC). The organization has the power to write executive orders, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Gorka reports to Trump's chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who first noticed Gorka through his appearances on Fox News and later offered him a job at Breitbart, according to The Washington Post. Gorka told The Journal that he also reports to Trump adviser Jared Kushner and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. Gorka also advised the Trump campaign during the election.
When Business Insider asked him for comment by email, Gorka called Bloom's and Watts' characterization of events at the 2016 panel "fallacious" but did not dispute any specific points. He did, however, advise Business Insider not to report on his participation in the conference because it was a closed event.

'The Simon Cowell of counterterrorism'
Terrorism and national-security experts have been going after Gorka on Twitter for weeks.
"I call him the Simon Cowell of counterterrorism," Watts told Business Insider.
Watts said he's met Gorka about a half-dozen times on panels and conferences over the past several years and added that he's "always very negative and very controversial."

CONTINUED.....a long read but worth it....

Republicans set to kill resolution demanding details on Trump’s ties to Russia: report

http://hill.cm/glGHak4

Strange is it not that while both the USG IC and the FBI CI have over four investigations ongoing and a FISA warrant which the FBI cannot get unless they show probable cause.....

Senate seems to be far more interested than a Senate...maybe holding on to power is far more important that the country as a whole?

Adm McRaven, commander of bin Laden raid: Trump view of media may be “greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/chancellor-mcraven-calls-trump-media-co… 

This is the former JSOC & SOCOM commander. He oversaw & helped design the operation that killed bin Laden.

WHEN an exSOF Admiral starts to say this then maybe some might just wake up and ask why?

I had posted here the potential that the Trump Muslim Ban was going to harm the US tourism industry which employees thousands and earns Billions....

What was an initial dip is increasing,,,,,

Trump slump": #Travelers are shunning US in droves, and it's hitting tourist-industry jobs, says Arthur Frommer
http://tinyurl.com/hn9kq3l

Mexican foreign minister says 'will not accept' new U.S. immigration proposals, speaking ahead of Tillerson, Kelly meeting

Mexico foreign minister says will not hesitate to approach U.N. to defend the rights of immigrants.
http://reut.rs/2lpcCCS

So will Mexico actually charge the US in the UN with human rights violations with the UNCHR???

NOTE...a developing threat actually not a threat...just a blunt Mexican statement that the US needs listen to as Mexico can in fact hurt the US..AND Trump is not telling his voters of those Mexican options starting the US corn growers..

Mexico says it 'will not accept' Trump's new immigration plans, and it could retaliate
http://read.bi/2mcGBMM

Trump tweeting FP is just no longer working for him..actually creating more of a nightmare...

Trump's first month: Golf - 25 hours. Tweeting - 13 hours. Intel briefings - 6 hours.

https://wpo.st/tv8d2

No wonder there is no focused set of FP strategies.....unless it has to do with golf????

AND that Trump and GOP repeal and replace Obama Care/ACA thingy......

Poll: Sharp drop in support for ObamaCare repeal
http://hill.cm/uNZbZ8T

Appears the Trump/GOP voters are running away from them right now on key issues....

Share of Americans who believe foreign trade is good for the U.S. economy is at a record high.

Via Gallup
https://goo.gl/Z4eeqv

BUT WAIT...Trump and the GOP all want a border tax on imports...that will in turn drive other nations to place import taxes on US products coming into their own countries...thus a trade war and protectionism...THUS destroying US jobs.....

Tillerson's State Dept. goes silent. He has spoken once and there has been no State Dept. briefing since Jan. 19

http://cnn.it/2llmddK

Appears they have closed up for business an gone basically home as the top management positions are all unfilled......thus all Embassies and Consulates are on their own....especially on the security side....
 

AND suddenly Russian connections are everywhere in the Republican Party now.....REMEMBER there was a functioning set of servers one on Trump Towers and one in Alpha Bank Moscow until it became public and then went silent????

BREAKING
MARCO RUBIO GOT CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ACCESS INDUSTRIES OWNED BY BLAVATNIK AND FRIDMAN (ALFABANK)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-17/who-you-calling-an-o…

This is already on top of say Congressmen King and Rohrbacher who are adamantly proRussian and anti Ukraine and who also received campaign donations from a US Russian lobbying firm in DC... 

EXCLUSIVE: There is no Deep State in DC trying to evict Trump from the Oval Office. He's doing that all by himself.

http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-cia-deep-state/

Rebellion Brews in Washington—But American ‘Deep State’ Is Only a Myth
No secret entrenched bureaucracy is plotting to overthrow Donald Trump

By John R. Schindler • 02/22/17 8:45am

As Donald Trump’s White House fumbles mounted in his first month in office, including several insults casually aimed at our Intelligence Community, something close to all-out war between the president and the country’s spies has broken through the surface.

Faced with a commander-in-chief who compares them to Nazi Germany and accuses them of being “very anti-American,” intelligence professionals have fought back with leaks, per time-tested tradition.

In particular, IC sources have informed journalists—this one included—about signals intelligence intercepts of phone calls to the Russian embassy in Washington which led to the early downfall of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

Additional SIGINT collected by the National Security Agency demonstrated that several members of Trump’s inner circle maintained contacts with Moscow in the months before the November 8 election. In neither case did anyone inform the media of the content of those calls, but the mere fact that they had been intercepted posed problems for the new administration.

These revelations have been highly embarrassing to the White House, and led to denunciations of leakers by the president on down, as well as assurances that the malefactors who talked to the press without authorization will be tracked down and punished. This drama has an unavoidably Nixonian flair, since that vindictive president, too, waged a war on leakers—ultimately leading to the break-in at the Watergate, which unraveled Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Many Trump backers have professed outrage at America’s leaky spies, whom they claim are acting out of loyalty to the previous administration. That charge is absurd, since there are hardly any political appointees in the IC.

Save a few very high-ranking IC personnel, our spies are professionals—not donors appointed to cushy Washington jobs. In this sense, the Intelligence Community is very unlike other parts of the Federal government.

One charge, however, is more serious, and that is the claim from certain Trump supporters that the president is the target of a conspiracy hatched by the “deep state” in Washington.

According to this take, the IC and related elements of our secret government have gone rogue and are acting beyond their remit.

In this telling, resentful spies are spreading stories about President Trump, especially regarding his mysterious ties to Russia, in order to remove him from office.

When spies in Washington leak to the media, they do so to protect bureaucratic turf and to settle personal scores.

This viewpoint seems to be backed by the president himself, who last week at his one-of-a-kind press conference make it clear that he is the victim of “fake news” peddled by the mainstream media, and the entire Russia issue is a fraud.

As Trump explained: “You can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a, you know, fake news, fabricated deal…Russia is fake news. Russia—this is fake news put out by the media.”

The issue of the alleged “deep state” in Washington has important political implications and requires a bit of unpacking. Of course, a Deep State of a sort exists in the United States, as it does in every country, even the most democratic and law-based ones.

Everybody spies, therefore pretty much every country has intelligence services. Security agencies by their nature are secretive, and must remain so in order to function in the SpyWar. Their activities are not subject to the usual public releases of information that accompany nearly all other Federal activities in this country.

Moreover, the IC is run by career employees promoted up the ranks, without much interference from political appointees. In general, this is a good thing, since nobody sensible wants to put powerful intelligence agencies in the hands of politically motivated neophytes—or worse, hacks—without any background in the spy trade.

Not to mention that America’s spy agencies have plenty of oversight by elected officials in Congress. For more than four decades, intelligence committees in both the House and Senate have had full access to all IC activities, and have squashed spy operations that seemed potentially illegal or poorly thought out.

This is yet another by-product of Watergate, when Congressional hearings revealed IC shenanigans that were curtailed for good in the mid-1970s. The current intelligence oversight system is that legacy.

Indeed, the term Deep State isn’t American or even Western in origin, rather Turkish. It’s called derin devlet in that language, and for decades it’s meant the military and intelligence officials who have worked behind the scenes in Ankara to maintain the country’s secular institutions and values, as enshrined by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic in 1923.

Serving as a state-within-a-state, derin devlet reputedly has been the hidden hand which has thwarted efforts aimed at weakening Turkey and its secular Kemalist values. That Deep State has been at war with Islamists and Kurdish separatists for years, using subversion and propaganda—and on occasion, violence—to blunt enemies.

While some aspects of the derin devlet myth are based in reality, over time it’s become the all-purpose bogeyman for Turks unhappy with the Kemalist system. Its shadowy and sinister hand is easily detected behind any activity—no matter how trivial—that Islamists in particular dislike.

It’s therefore no surprise that the Deep State has served as the ubiquitous enemy of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who during his 13 years of power in Ankara has waged repeated campaigns against this elusive and wily foe.

Erdoğan’s pervasive efforts to re-Islamize Turkey, thereby undoing Kemalism in fact if not in name, have been met with vociferous Deep State opposition, according to the government.

To fight back, Ankara has purged the military and security services repeatedly, most notoriously in the so-called Ergenekon trials, which lasted from 2008 and 2013, and led to prison terms for several top generals, who were said by Erdoğan supporters to be the sharp end of the derin devlet.

That this complex conspiracy to subvert the system seems not to have existed outside the regime’s imagination was immaterial in Ankara.
Similarly, last summer’s mysterious coup, said by Erdoğan to have been the last gasp of the all-but-defeated Deep State, offered the Islamists one more opportunity to purge the military, the security services, and the whole state apparatus of those it considered stumbling-blocks to its far-reaching, back-to-the-Ottoman-future domestic agenda. Whether or not the

Deep State exists in Turkey—few doubt that it does in some form—its myth unquestionably has been a huge boon to Erdoğan in his ceaseless quest for enemies to crush in order to consolidate his power.

It would be terrible for the United States if the Trump administration convinces citizens that any sort of derin devlet in Turkish fashion exists in our country. Since it certainly does not. In the first place, American spies exhibit no political unity.

There are Republicans, there are Democrats, there are Independents. Nearly every political viewpoint under the sun is represented in the IC, and while generalizations can be made—e.g. FBI agents are mostly conservatives while CIA analysts are largely liberals—they are so broad, and so marred by exceptions, as to be almost useless.

When spies in Washington leak to the media, they do so not out of any ideology, much less overt partisanship, but to protect bureaucratic turf and to settle personal scores.

Mark Felt, the senior FBI official whose leaks to The Washington Post as the infamous Deep Throat made Watergate a national scandal, spilled the beans on the Nixon White House for entirely personal reasons. President Nixon repeatedly refused to appoint Felt—who was no liberal—the Bureau’s director, the top post that the bitter leaker felt he deserved. Exposing the Watergate scandal was Felt’s careerist vendetta.

Today, the Intelligence Community is deeply unhappy with President Trump.

They dislike his repeated public insults and impugning of their professional integrity—something no president has ever done before. Many spies distrust the commander-in-chief, which is why some of our secret agencies are withholding highly classified intelligence from a White House they think is penetrated by Russian intelligence.

The Russia angle is most troubling to the IC. Behind closed doors, plenty of American intelligence experts believe that President Trump is the pawn of the Kremlin, wittingly or not, and assess that it’s only a matter of time before unseemly Moscow ties are exposed and the White House enters unsurvivable political crisis.

Rebellion is brewing in Washington. The resignation of the CIA’s spokesman, a career intelligence analyst, is a sign of how fragile IC morale has gotten under the new administration.

If President Trump keeps upping the ante in his war on the spies, he can expect more damaging leaks to reach the media.

Leaks happen in every administration, and Nixon’s ignominious fall ought to serve as a cautionary tale to any president who thinks he can find the right “plumbers” to fix the leaky faucet.

WHAT Trump is not telling the American people about ALL of those illegal Mexicans he wants to deport....

A large really large number have jobs and have used a fake SS card to have SS taxes deducted....

SSA estimates that those SS taxes paid by illegals working legally and using fake SS cards amount to between an estimated 2B to 3B USDs annually into the SSA funds...

AND those that have paid the taxes will never be able to collect it because they are illegal.....SO they are in fact supporting every American who is receiving SS retirement or SSD monthly payments.....

THEN this hits today.....

Trump deportation plan could cost the economy $5 trillion over 10 years. Yes, $5 trillion.
https://bloom.bg/2l6nH94
 

Trump claims to want to "drain the DC swamp"...BUT the Office of government ethnics has stated Trump still has not fully detached himself legally from his global businesses...SO no conflict of interests in his FP is there....??

From Trump the Nationalist, and a hater of globalization ....a Trail of Global Trademarks
https://nyti.ms/2lsRiuo