US Punishes Russia for Election Hacking Ejecting Operatives

[seemslikeadream]

answer my question

[barracuda]

Still smells like Poppy.

In this case, the request for opposition research on Donald Trump came from one of his Republican opponents in the primary campaign. The research firm then hired one of its sub-contractors who it used regularly on all things Russian: a retired western European former counter-intelligence official, with a long history of dealing with the shadow world of Moscow’s spooks and siloviki (securocrats).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... tn_twSorry

[seemslikeadream]

James Comey Just Exposed His Own Hypocrisy On Hillary Clinton’s Emails
The FBI director commented on his agency’s investigation of Clinton before the election, but now he won’t do so about Trump.
01/11/2017 12:28 pm ET | Updated 32 minutes ago

Amanda Terkel
Senior Political Reporter, The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON ― FBI Director James Comey refused to tell senators on Tuesday whether his agency is looking into reported contact between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, saying he could not comment on such an inquiry.

“I would never comment on investigations, whether we have one or not, in an open forum like this,” Comey told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.

The problem for Comey, however, is that he has commented on open investigations. He did so just days before the 2016 election, when he told Congress that the FBI was looking into emails found on a computer belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) that might or might not be pertinent to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server and handling of classified information while she ran the State Department.

The announcement caused a firestorm and cast an ethical cloud over Clinton that never fully evaporated, even when the FBI cleared her ― again ― a few days later. It was an unprecedented step into the political process by the FBI that generated intense criticism from both sides.

And Comey’s decisions before the election have now put him in a bind as he tries to avoid commenting on other political cases.

“Jim Comey’s answer to Senator Wyden on Tuesday was actually the right answer,” former Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said. “That answer has been given countless times over the years by scores of federal law enforcement officials sitting in the same witness chair as Comey. The problem is, Comey has no credibility to fall back on protocol anymore because he so egregiously deviated from it in his handling of Hillary Clinton’s email investigation.”

That point wasn’t lost on senators Tuesday.

“The irony of your making that statement here I cannot avoid, but I’ll move on,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said she understood why Comey couldn’t normally comment on ongoing investigations, but argued that he had set a new standard for when he should.

“It seems that despite past precedent, the new standard that was created over the summer and fall regarding the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s email server was that there was a unique public interest in the transparency of that issue,” Harris said. “Particularly given the findings of your report, I’m not sure I can think of an issue of more serious public interest than this one. This committee needs to understand what the FBI does and does not know about campaign communications with Russia.”

Last July, Comey took the unusual step of publicly delving into detail about why the FBI was recommending no charges against Clinton in her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

“I am going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would,” Comey said then, “because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest.”

“The bitter mockery that greeted his response to Senator Wyden is a perfect example of how Comey’s actions have compromised not only his own reputation, but that of the whole Bureau,” Fallon said this week.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jam ... 8a02d44523

[Rory]

answer my question

Please pose your question

[seemslikeadream]

would you do something I ask of you?

Leave me the fuck alone now

yea it's a favor now do me a favor

[Rory]

would you do something I ask of you?

Leave me the fuck alone now

yea it's a favor now do me a favor

I'll not quote you, or engage with you if that's what you want. I'll still comment on threads you're on

[seemslikeadream]

fine ..if you do not like the way I reply to a post of yours....do not quote me again

[seemslikeadream]

For Russian hold on Trump, follow the Money, not the Sex tapes
By Juan Cole | Jan. 11, 2017 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Buzzfeed has published the unverified allegations by a former MI6 analyst with good Russian contacts, contained in a two-page hitherto secret annex to the US intelligence community’s report on Russian hacking and interference in the 2016 election. These two pages have circulated in Washington for months. David Corn talked about them, though not with salacious detail, in October, and then Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote a sharp letter to FBI director James Comey about them.

The notion that Donald J. Trump might have been recorded doing kinky things on business trips to Moscow or St. Petersburg is plausible, but people should be careful here. It isn’t proven, and intelligence professionals gather a lot of raw intelligence that is nonsense. The specific allegations in the annex don’t make much sense (urolagnia is a fetish for sexual satisfaction, not an instrument of revenge on a political opponent).
Note, too, that it is just as plausible that the National Security Agency and/or the Central Intelligence Agency have data on Trump in Russia. If Trump were in contact with Russians whom the NSA was monitoring then they would have ended up monitoring him, as well.
That is,if the worry is that foreign intelligence agencies could blackmail someone like Trump, why isn’t it equally worrying that the US government could? J. Edgar Hoover used to blackmail congressional representatives all the time.
The unusual thing here is that even if Russia had such video, it is difficult to see how they could damage Trump. The people who elected him knew that he had appeared in pornographic videos, liked to tour the dressing rooms of the Miss Teen contests when the contestants were naked, and gropes random women in public places. That he paid for a golden shower or two isn’t even the most disgusting thing in his closet (at least if it was paid for it was consensual). So I think if Russia threatened him with being outed, he could just brush them off. The evangelical ministers who encourage their flocks to vote Republican have decided that they are all about forgiveness when it comes to Trump. I wouldn’t have said this last year this time, but the guy is teflon on the right.
If Trump has a vulnerability with regard to Russia, it is far more likely to be financial. He kept going bankrupt (six times!) as a strategy to avoid paying creditors, and understandably real banks stopped wanting to lend to him. The Financial Times alleges that Trump then got in bed with very wealthy figures from, e.g., Kazakhstan, who loaned him money or licensed his name for, e.g., the Trump Soho, in which he was a partner with a shadowy Kazakh figure. But FT suggests that the quid pro quo was that he got them into the New York real estate market, which they then used for money laundering. Money earned from embezzling (say, from the Kazakh ministry of petroleum) or criminal activity needs to be laundered before it can be openly invested. The criminal claims that the ill-gotten funds are profits from an investment, e.g. The FT thinks Trump may have, knowingly or naively, facilitated this kind of activity. If it was knowingly, of course, that was a heavy duty crime.
Or there is the Washington Post‘s expose of Trump’s relationship with a Russian “businessman” whom the Post characterizes as possibly having links to organized crime and whom, the Post alleges, former business partners accuse of routinely threatening to kill them.
In fact, big business people often seal deals at strip clubs, and sex parties in St. Petersburg were likely to be sweeteners for a business deal. Only puritan Americans would think it was the sex party that was the important thing.
James S. Henry in The American Interest surveyed several cases of Trump’s sketchy financial relationships with Russian or Former Soviet Union Oligarchs. Henry doesn’t allege criminality in these relationships, though the accounts he gives heavily hint at it. And if there was ever a place where Honore de Balzac’s maxim in Le pere Goriot was true, it is post-Soviet lands. Balzac said, “the secret of great fortunes with no apparent explanation is a crime forgotten because it was well executed.” Mario Puzo paraphrased it to “behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
Mark Sumner at Daily Kos also rounds up these oligarch/ organized crime links.
So if Russia has a hold on Trump, I’d look at the business angle, myself. The idea that they could shame him by attacking his reputation for sexual propriety seems a little far-fetched.
—-
Related video:
USA Today: “Intel chiefs told Trump that Russia targeted him”
http://www.juancole.com/2017/01/russian ... ollow.html

[brekin]

Still smells like Poppy.

In this case, the request for opposition research on Donald Trump came from one of his Republican opponents in the primary campaign. The research firm then hired one of its sub-contractors who it used regularly on all things Russian: a retired western European former counter-intelligence official, with a long history of dealing with the shadow world of Moscow’s spooks and siloviki (securocrats).

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... tn_twSorry

Shit that was funny.

[Luther Blissett]

The Bush family and the neocon power brokers engineered this whole thing with the most entertaining fix possible in order to install their splendid boy Pence after a few months.

[seemslikeadream]

From the home of David Corn

Trump Says Climate Change Is a Hoax. Rex Tillerson Just Disagreed.
"No one country is going to solve this alone," said the former Exxon Mobil CEO and secretary-of-state nominee.

REBECCA LEBER
JAN. 11, 2017 2:36 PM


At his confirmation hearing Wednesday to become secretary of state, Rex Tillerson contradicted President-elect Donald Trump's positions on climate change and his promise to withdraw the United States from global climate action.

Although Exxon Mobil, where Tillerson served as CEO, has been accused of impeding efforts to address global warming, Tillerson has acknowledged the threat posed by climate change. When Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Tillerson whether the United States should lead international efforts to address climate change, Tillerson responded, "I think it's important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address the threats of climate change, which do require a global response. No one country is going to solve this alone."

One of the most important places where this conversation took place was during negotiations for the United Nations' 2015 Paris climate agreement, which Trump disparaged on the campaign trail. Trump promised in a May campaign energy speech to "cancel the Paris Climate Agreement." After winning the election, he told the New York Times that he's "looking at it very closely" and said, "I have an open mind to it." But his appointment of climate change deniers to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy indicates that Trump is unlikely to reconsider his views.

"The president-elect has invited my views on climate change," Tillerson said. "He knows I am on the public record with my views. I look forward to providing those, if confirmed, to him and policies around how the United States should carry it out in these areas."

Trump has also pledged to "stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs." Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) asked Tillerson if he would suspend State Department funding to the Green Climate Fund, a major feature of the Paris agreement. Tillerson replied only that he would conduct a thorough review from the "bottom up."

Tillerson hedged in his assessment of the threat of climate change, but his stance clearly differed from Trump's claims that climate change is a "hoax."

"I came to the decision a few years ago that the risk of climate change does exist and the consequences could be serious enough that it warrants action," Tillerson said. "The increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect are very limited."

Pressed on his past statements in favor of a carbon tax, Tillerson, who at first suggested that the issue would be outside his purview at the State Department, said it would be better to replace "the hodgepodge of approaches we have today" on climate policy.

Compare Tillerson's stance with the one taken by Trump three years ago:


In a debate with Hillary Clinton last year, Trump denied ever calling climate change a hoax.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked Tillerson about reporting from the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News that Exxon Mobil had internally acknowledged climate science while publicly waging a campaign to undermine it. Tillerson demurred. "Since I'm no longer CEO of Exxon Mobil, I can't speak on their behalf," he said. "You'll have to ask them." Asked if he was refusing to answer or simply lacked the knowledge to do so, Tillerson quipped, "A little of both."



In his opening statement, Tillerson made no mention of the climate change, despite military experts' view that climate change is a threat to national security. Russia was the main focus at the hearing's morning session, but protesters occasionally interrupted the questioning to bring up climate change. "My home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy," one said as she was escorted out of the room. "Rex Tillerson, I reject you."
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... e-position

[seemslikeadream]

SURPRISE! it wasn't 4ch

Ex-spy behind Trump intelligence dossier identified: report
BY MARK HENSCH - 01/11/17 03:22 PM EST 248


Ex-spy behind Trump intelligence dossier identified: report
© Getty Images
A former British intelligence officer who prepared a dossier about President-elect Trump’s ties to Russia has been identified, according to a new report.

Christopher Steele created the controversial document about the Russian government’s alleged power over Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The dossier, which alleges links between Trump's campaign and the Russian government, as well as the existence of compromising Russian-owned material on Trump, created a stir Tuesday. CNN reported that the dossier's contents came up in an intelligence meeting with Trump, and BuzzFeed later published the unverified document — two reports Trump and his staff denounced in a press conference today.

Steele is now a director at a private security and investigations firm in London, according to the Journal.

Steele, 52, is one of two directors at Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. The dossier's creator has been repeatedly described in reports as having a good reputation in intelligence circles.
Orbis was formed in 2009 by former British intelligence professionals, according to the firm’s website. The company mounts “intelligence-gathering operations” and conducts “complex, often cross-border investigations."

A source told the Journal that Steele created the dossier, which is a series of unsigned memos seemingly written between June and December 2016.

Steele also devised a plan for disseminating the document to U.S. and European law enforcement officials, they added, including the FBI.

Orbis’s other co-director is Christopher Burrows, 58, a former counselor in Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth office.

Burrows told the publication he would not “confirm or deny” Orbis had a role in the report.

“We have no political ax to grind,” he said, adding that Orbis “sees what’s out there first” when conducting an investigation and then performs a “stress test” on its results.

CNN reported Tuesday, meanwhile, that top intelligence officials presented Trump with a two-page synopsis of the dossier last week.

The synopsis was reportedly attached as an appendix to the intelligence community’s report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race.

The controversial dossier alleges the Russian government possesses compromising financial and personal information about Trump. It also claims that people close to Trump kept touch with Moscow during last year’s presidential campaign.

U.S. intelligence officials have not verified the dossier's details, however, and it remains unclear how reliable they are.

Trump on Wednesday fiercely criticized the dossier's leak to media outlets.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... ied-report

Alastair Reid
‏@ajreid
ICYMI: BBC correspondent says there's more than one source, more than one tape & more than one date of allegations in Trump intel dossier


https://twitter.com/ajreid/status/81922 ... 68/video/1

REMINDER

OCT. 31 2016 5:36 PM

Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting.

By Franklin Foer
U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, U.S. October 24, 2016.
Donald Trump gives a fist-pump to the ground crew as he arrives on his plane in St. Augustine, Florida, on Oct. 24.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Read Franklin Foer's follow-up story for new statements from the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank and analysis of the competing theories about the server and its activity.⁠⁠

The greatest miracle of the internet is that it exists—the second greatest is that it persists. Every so often we’re reminded that bad actors wield great skill and have little conscience about the harm they inflict on the world’s digital nervous system. They invent viruses, botnets, and sundry species of malware. There’s good money to be made deflecting these incursions. But a small, tightly knit community of computer scientists who pursue such work—some at cybersecurity firms, some in academia, some with close ties to three-letter federal agencies—is also spurred by a sense of shared idealism and considers itself the benevolent posse that chases off the rogues and rogue states that try to purloin sensitive data and infect the internet with their bugs. “We’re the Union of Concerned Nerds,” in the wry formulation of the Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp.

In late spring, this community of malware hunters placed itself in a high state of alarm. Word arrived that Russian hackers had infiltrated the servers of the Democratic National Committee, an attack persuasively detailed by the respected cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

Hunting for malware requires highly specialized knowledge of the intricacies of the domain name system—the protocol that allows us to type email addresses and website names to initiate communication. DNS enables our words to set in motion a chain of connections between servers, which in turn delivers the results we desire. Before a mail server can deliver a message to another mail server, it has to look up its IP address using the DNS. Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors. These databases can give a useful, though far from comprehensive, snapshot of traffic across the internet. Some of the most trusted DNS specialists—an elite group of malware hunters, who work for private contractors—have access to nearly comprehensive logs of communication between servers. They work in close concert with internet service providers, the networks through which most of us connect to the internet, and the ones that are most vulnerable to massive attacks. To extend the traffic metaphor, these scientists have cameras posted on the internet’s stoplights and overpasses. They are entrusted with something close to a complete record of all the servers of the world connecting with one another.

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

More data was needed, so he began carefully keeping logs of the Trump server’s DNS activity. As he collected the logs, he would circulate them in periodic batches to colleagues in the cybersecurity world. Six of them began scrutinizing them for clues.

Trump Tower.
Trump Tower.
Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

(I communicated extensively with Tea Leaves and two of his closest collaborators, who also spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, since they work for firms trusted by corporations and law enforcement to analyze sensitive data. They persuasively demonstrated some of their analytical methods to me—and showed me two white papers, which they had circulated so that colleagues could check their analysis. I also spoke with academics who vouched for Tea Leaves’ integrity and his unusual access to information. “This is someone I know well and is very well-known in the networking community,” said Camp. “When they say something about DNS, you believe them. This person has technical authority and access to data.”)

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

The researchers had initially stumbled in their diagnosis because of the odd configuration of Trump’s server. “I’ve never seen a server set up like that,” says Christopher Davis, who runs the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc. and won a FBI Director Award for Excellence for his work tracking down the authors of one of the world’s nastiest botnet attacks. “It looked weird, and it didn’t pass the sniff test.” The server was first registered to Trump’s business in 2009 and was set up to run consumer marketing campaigns. It had a history of sending mass emails on behalf of Trump-branded properties and products. Researchers were ultimately convinced that the server indeed belonged to Trump. (Click here to see the server’s registration record.) But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says.

“I’ve never seen a server set up like that.”
Christopher Davis of the cybersecurity firm HYAS InfoSec Inc.
That wasn’t the only oddity. When the researchers pinged the server, they received error messages. They concluded that the server was set to accept only incoming communication from a very small handful of IP addresses. A small portion of the logs showed communication with a server belonging to Michigan-based Spectrum Health. (The company said in a statement: “Spectrum Health does not have a relationship with Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. We have concluded a rigorous investigation with both our internal IT security specialists and expert cyber security firms. Our experts have conducted a detailed analysis of the alleged internet traffic and did not find any evidence that it included any actual communications (no emails, chat, text, etc.) between Spectrum Health and Alfa Bank or any of the Trump organizations. While we did find a small number of incoming spam marketing emails, they originated from a digital marketing company, Cendyn, advertising Trump Hotels.”)

Spectrum accounted for a relatively trivial portion of the traffic. Eighty-seven percent of the DNS lookups involved the two Alfa Bank servers. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not an open mail server,” Camp told me. “These organizations are communicating in a way designed to block other people out.”

Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie. In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive. This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance.

* * *

While the researchers went about their work, the conventional wisdom about Russian interference in the campaign began to shift. There were reports that the Trump campaign had ordered the Republican Party to rewrite its platform position on Ukraine, maneuvering the GOP toward a policy preferred by Russia, though the Trump campaign denied having a hand in the change. Then Trump announced in an interview with the New York Times his unwillingness to spring to the defense of NATO allies in the face of a Russian invasion. Trump even invited Russian hackers to go hunting for Clinton’s emails, then passed the comment off as a joke. (I wrote about Trump’s relationship with Russia in early July.)

In the face of accusations that he is somehow backed by Putin or in business with Russian investors, Trump has issued categorical statements. “I mean I have nothing to do with Russia,” he told one reporter, a flat denial that he repeated over and over. Of course, it’s possible that these statements are sincere and even correct. The sweeping nature of Trump’s claim, however, prodded the scientists to dig deeper. They were increasingly confident that they were observing data that contradicted Trump’s claims.

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a rally at The Champions Center Expo in Springfield, Ohio, on October 27, 2016.
Donald Trump speaks at a rally at in Springfield, Ohio, on Thursday.
Paul Vernon/Getty Images

In the parlance that has become familiar since the Edward Snowden revelations, the DNS logs reside in the realm of metadata. We can see a trail of transmissions, but we can’t see the actual substance of the communications. And we can’t even say with complete certitude that the servers exchanged email. One scientist, who wasn’t involved in the effort to compile and analyze the logs, ticked off a list of other possibilities: an errant piece of spam caroming between servers, a misdirected email that kept trying to reach its destination, which created the impression of sustained communication. “I’m seeing a preponderance of the evidence, but not a smoking gun,” he said. Richard Clayton, a cybersecurity researcher at Cambridge University who was sent one of the white papers laying out the evidence, acknowledges those objections and the alternative theories but considers them improbable. “I think mail is more likely, because it’s going to a machine running a mail server and [the host] is called mail. Dr. Occam says you should rule out mail before pulling out the more exotic explanations.” After Tea Leaves posted his analysis on Reddit, a security blogger who goes by Krypt3ia expressed initial doubts—but his analysis was tarnished by several incorrect assumptions, and as he examined the matter, his skepticism of Tea Leaves softened somewhat.

I put the question of what kind of activity the logs recorded to the University of California’s Nicholas Weaver, another computer scientist not involved in compiling the logs. “I can't attest to the logs themselves,” he told me, “but assuming they are legitimate they do indicate effectively human-level communication.”

Weaver’s statement raises another uncertainty: Are the logs authentic? Computer scientists are careful about vouching for evidence that emerges from unknown sources—especially since the logs were pasted in a text file, where they could conceivably have been edited. I asked nine computer scientists—some who agreed to speak on the record, some who asked for anonymity—if the DNS logs that Tea Leaves and his collaborators discovered could be forged or manipulated. They considered it nearly impossible. It would be easy enough to fake one or maybe even a dozen records of DNS lookups. But in the aggregate, the logs contained thousands of records, with nuances and patterns that not even the most skilled programmers would be able to recreate on this scale. “The data has got the right kind of fuzz growing on it,” Vixie told me. “It’s the interpacket gap, the spacing between the conversations, the total volume. If you look at those time stamps, they are not simulated. This bears every indication that it was collected from a live link.” I asked him if there was a chance that he was wrong about their authenticity. “This passes the reasonable person test,” he told me. “No reasonable person would come to the conclusion other than the one I’ve come to.” Others were equally emphatic. “It would be really, really hard to fake these,” Davis said. According to Camp, “When the technical community examined the data, the conclusion was pretty obvious.”

It’s possible to impute political motives to the computer scientists, some of whom have criticized Trump on social media. But many of the scientists who talked to me for this story are Republicans. And almost all have strong incentives for steering clear of controversy. Some work at public institutions, where they are vulnerable to political pressure. Others work for firms that rely on government contracts—a relationship that tends to squash positions that could be misinterpreted as outspoken.

* * *

The researchers were seeing patterns in the data—and the Trump Organization’s potential interlocutor was itself suggestive. Alfa Bank emerged in the messy post-Soviet scramble to create a private Russian economy. Its founder was a Ukrainian called Mikhail Fridman. He erected his empire in a frenetic rush—in a matter of years, he rose from operating a window washing company to the purchase of the Bolshevik Biscuit Factory to the co-founding of his bank with some friends from university. Fridman could be charmingly open when describing this era. In 2003, he told the Financial Times, “Of course we benefitted from events in the country over the past 10 years. Of course we understand that the distribution of state property was not very objective. … I don’t want to lie and play this game. To say one can be completely clean and transparent is not realistic.”

To build out the bank, Fridman recruited a skilled economist and shrewd operator called Pyotr Aven. In the early ’90s, Aven worked with Vladimir Putin in the St. Petersburg government—and according to several accounts, helped Putin wiggle out of accusations of corruption that might have derailed his ascent. (Karen Dawisha recounts this history in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy.) Over time, Alfa built one of the world’s most lucrative enterprises. Fridman became the second richest man in Russia, valued by Forbes at $15.3 billion.

Alfa’s oligarchs occupied an unusual position in Putin’s firmament. They were insiders but not in the closest ring of power. “It’s like they were his judo pals,” one former U.S. government official who knows Fridman told me. “They were always worried about where they stood in the pecking order and always feared expropriation.” Fridman and Aven, however, are adept at staying close to power. As the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia once ruled, in the course of dismissing a libel suit the bankers filed, “Aven and Fridman have assumed an unforeseen level of prominence and influence in the economic and political affairs of their nation.”
Unlike other Russian firms, Alfa has operated smoothly and effortlessly in the West. It has never been slapped with sanctions. Fridman and Aven have cultivated a reputation as beneficent philanthropists. They endowed a prestigious fellowship. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American-government funded think tank, gave Aven its award for “Corporate Citizenship” in 2015. To protect its interests in Washington, Alfa hired as its lobbyist former Reagan administration official Ed Rogers. Richard Burt, who helped Trump write the speech in which he first laid out his foreign policy, previously served on Alfa’s senior advisory board.* The branding campaign has worked well. During the first Obama term, Fridman and Aven met with officials in the White House on two occasions, according to visitor logs.

Fridman and Aven have significant business interests to promote in the West. One of their holding companies, LetterOne, has vowed to invest as much as $3 billion in U.S. health care. This year, it sank $200 million into Uber. This is, of course, money that might otherwise be invested in Russia. According to a former U.S. official, Putin tolerates this condition because Alfa advances Russian interests. It promotes itself as an avatar of Russian prowess. “It’s our moral duty to become a global player, to prove a Russian can transform into an international businessman,” Fridman told the Financial Times.

* * *

Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.

pol_161031_screenshotlarge
Start: DNS lookup history start date.

RFC from Alfa-Bank: Alfa-Bank rep provided with 2 ips, hostname, count.

Errors: 4:11 a.m. UTC: DNS lookup errors Trump-Email.com.

Errors: 1:12 a.m. UTC: DNS lookup errors Trump-Email.com.

Taken down: 9:53 a.m. EST USA time: Trump-Email.com deleted from Trump authoritative name server zone.
In September, the scientists tried to get the public to pay attention to their data. One of them posted a link to the logs in a Reddit thread. Around the same time, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers began chasing the story.* (They are still pursuing it.) Lichtblau met with a Washington representative of Alfa Bank on Sept. 21, and the bank denied having any connection to Trump. (Lichtblau told me that Times policy prevents him from commenting on his reporting.)

The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. When the scientists looked up the host, the DNS server returned a fail message, evidence that it no longer functioned. Or as it is technically diagnosed, it had “SERVFAILed.” (On the timeline above, this is the moment at the end of the chronology when the traffic abruptly spikes, as servers frantically attempt to resend rejected messages.) The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

As one of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”
Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.

* * *

Last week, I wrote to Alfa Bank asking if it could explain why its servers attempted to connect with the Trump Organization on such a regular basis. Its Washington representative, Jeffrey Birnbaum of the public relations firm BGR, provided me the following response:

Alfa hired Mandiant, one of the world's foremost cyber security experts, to investigate and it has found nothing to the allegations. I hope the below answers respond clearly to your questions. Neither Alfa Bank nor its principals, including Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, have or have had any contact with Mr. Trump or his organizations. Fridman and Aven have never met Mr. Trump nor have they or Alfa Bank had any business dealings with him. Neither Alfa nor its officers have sent Mr. Trump or his organizations any emails, information or money. Alfa Bank does not have and has never had any special or exclusive internet connection with Mr. Trump or his entities. The assertion of a special or private link is patently false.
I asked Birnbaum if he would connect me with Mandiant to elaborate on its findings. He told me:

Mandiant is still doing its deep dive into the Alfa Bank systems. Its leading theory is that Alfa Bank's servers may have been responding with common DNS look ups to spam sent to it by a marketing server. But it doesn't want to speak on the record until it's finished its investigation.
It’s hard to evaluate the findings of an investigation that hasn’t ended. And of course, even the most reputable firm in the world isn’t likely to loudly broadcast an opinion that bites the hand of its client.

I posed the same basic questions to the Trump campaign. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks sent me this in response to my questions by email:

The email server, set up for marketing purposes and operated by a third-party, has not been used since 2010. The current traffic on the server from Alphabank's [sic] IP address is regular DNS server traffic—not email traffic. To be clear, The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.
I asked Hicks to explain what caused the Trump Organization to rename its host after the New York Times called Alfa. I also asked how the Trump Organization arrived at its judgment that there was no email traffic. (Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “regular” DNS server traffic, at least not according to the computer scientists I consulted. The very reason DNS exists is to enable email and other means of communication.) She never provided me with a response.

What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.

We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.

Update, Oct. 31, 2016: The article has been updated to make clear that the New York Times reporters learned of the logs independently, not from the Reddit thread. (Return.)

Correction, Nov. 1, 2016: The article originally stated that Richard Burt serves on Alfa’s senior advisory board. He no longer sits on that board. (Return.)

Read Franklin Foer's follow-up story for new statements from the Trump campaign and Alfa Bank and analysis of the competing theories about the server and its activity.⁠⁠

See more of Slate’s election coverage.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ussia.html

The law firm that spoke at Trump's Press Conference was named Russia's LAW FIRM OF THE YEAR.

https://www.morganlewis.com/news/chambe ... f-the-year

In total there are 108 users online :: 3 registered, 6 hidden and 99 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[Rory]

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/01/th ... .html#more

As remarked on January 6:

When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump.

The ultimate aim of the cabal is to kick him out of office and have a reliable replacement, like the Vice-President elect Pence, take over. Should that not be possible it is hoped that the delegitimization will make it impossible for Trump to change major policy trajectories especially in foreign policy. A main issue here is the reorientation of the U.S. military complex and its NATO proxies from the war of terror towards a direct confrontation with main powers like Russia and China.

The deep state campaign against Trump opened new grounds today with the publication of completely fake and thereby unverifiable anonymous assertions which include the smear that Trump had some fun in a Moscow hotel and that Russian secret services is using that to manipulate him.

Like many smears against Trump via proxies of the Clinton presidential campaign these new ones seem to origin from Ukraine related sources and Ukrainian "nationalist" (aka fascist) putsch supporters.

The new assertions about Trump come in 35 pages of "reports" by an anonymous (claimed) former British intelligence operator working for a private U.S. company with dates ranging from June 20 2016 to December 13 2016. They say that Russia has some tapes of Trump watching sex games in 2013, they claim that Trump campaign officials coordinated the Clinton campaign leaks with Russia and that the Russian President Putin was highly involved in all of this.

Here is how the claimed former intelligence operator typically describes his sources in these "reports":

Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting U.S. Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least five years. Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN.

The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous asserted compatriot what two anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claim to have heard somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin.

They assert that Trump was supported and directed by Putin himself five years ago while even a year ago no one would have bet a penny on Trump gaining any political significant position or even the presidency.

There is a lot more of such nonsense in these new Hitler diaries. It is bonkers from a to z.

Neocon senator John McCain, friend of Ukrainian fascists and Trump enemy, passed (<-details) the "report" to the FBI and thereby made it into an official document.

Even as they are obvious fake the FBI tried to use these "reports" to get a wide warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (FISA) court to listen in on Trump campaign officials. The court thankfully denied or at least narrowed down the request.

The first "reports" were created as part of the opposition research paid by a Republican candidate running in the primaries against Trump. They were later produced for and paid by the Democratic campaign. They have been shopped around in Washington for several month. The NYT, the WSJ, CNN and the FBI all investigated the assertions in them. Despite those considerable combined capacities they could verify none of them. All publications refrained from publishing the claims during the campaign because there was no evidence at all that supported them. Buzzfeed now pushed these out despite also saying that they have found nothing verifiable in them.

Even worse, the Director of National Intelligence Clapper (who once claimed Saddam's non-existing WMDs were shipped to Syria) presented these to Congress and the president elect Trump as "annex" to his baseless U.S. Intelligence report of "Russian hacking".

A murky preview of the assertions had been given by David Corn in a Mother Jones piece in October. He talked with the said-to-be author of the "reports":

"It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."

The current publication of this full barrel of bullshit comes a day after members of the Trump cabinet have been successfully confirmed by Congress and hours before his long expected press conference. It is thereby destined to overshadow a successful start of the Trump presidency.

There are signs that the "reports" were written with some Ukrainian nationalist and anti-semitic background. Just consider this passage from the July 26 "report":

In terms of the FSB's recruitment of capable cyber operatives to carry out its, ideally deniable, offensive cyber operations, a Russian IT specialist with direct knowledge reported in June 2016 that this was often done using coercion and blackmail. In terms of 'foreign' agents, the FSB was approaching U.S. citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin on business trips in Russia.

Such tropes are typical of the anti-semitic Ukrainian "nationalist" (aka Nazi) narrative. ("All Soviet/Communist ideologues/functionaries are Jews.") Russian services would, unlike Mossad, not recruit IT hackers conditioned on "Jewish" ethnic relations or believe. They would hire anyone competent who they think they could trust.

We have seen more Ukrainian "nationalists" involved in the "Russian hacks" propaganda claims. A July 2016 Yahoo piece by (Clinton campaign mouthpiece) Michael Isikoff wrote:

Just weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa got an alarming message when she logged into her personal Yahoo email account.
...
Chalupa — who had been drafting memos and writing emails about Manafort’s connection to pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine — quickly alerted top DNC officials.
...
“I was freaked out,” Chalupa, who serves as director of “ethnic engagement” for the DNC, told Yahoo News in an interview, noting that she had been in close touch with sources in Kiev, Ukraine, including a number of investigative journalists, who had been providing her with information about Manafort’s political and business dealings in that country and Russia.

Chalupa is also somewhat involved with the ProPornOT list, promoted by the Washington Post, of alleged pro-Russian propaganda websites. This website, Moon of Alabama, is also on that list (see at end of piece). (Unfortunately though we have never received a penny, or anything else, from Russian sources, are critical of Putin's neoliberal economic policies and have been plagiarized by the Russian government financed Russia Today without any compensation.) The ProPornOT Twitter account says it is “Ukrainian-American” and it used the Ukrainian fascist salute of the OUN-Bandera killer gangs "Heroiam Slava!" to hail Ukrainian hackers attacking Russia. The ProPornOT list is designed after a Ukrainian model used to smear Ukrainian anti-fascist media and journalists.

Chalupa is a main promoter of the "Russia hacked the Democratic campaign" allegations based on thin if any evidence. She was named by the same Isikoff of Yahoo as one of 16 people who shaped the 2016 election.

Chalupa is also:

founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

Moreover Chalupa coordinated her anti-Trump/anti-Russian campaign with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative[, Alexandra Chalupa,] who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

One must thereby categorize Chalupa as a Ukrainian agent or at least as naive manipulated by the Ukrainian government and read her accordingly.

The foreign influence on the presidential race through the Ukrainian (fascist) connection to the Clinton campaign is thereby much more grounded in reality than the alleged but completely unproven Russian connections to the Trump campaign.

We have a Ukrainian-American nationalist Democratic campaign operator promoting anti-Russian and anti-Trump claims in cooperation with the Ukrainian government, a Ukrainian-American ProPornOT blacklist for smearing random website of being "Russian propaganda" and Ukrainian fascist tropes used in fact-less "reports" intended to smear Trump as a Russian puppet. Above all of this we have a U.S intelligence community that is feverishly fighting against a Trump presidency which is likely to cut back its many excrescences and excesses.

The CIA, the MI-6 and the German BND (a CIA controlled service) have pampered and promoted the again very active anti-Russian Ukrainian fascist circles since (at least) the late 1940s. A U.S. National Archive book about Hitler's Shadows - Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War (PDF) notes:

British operations through Bandera expanded. An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations and although the intelligence dividend was low it was considered worthwhile to proceed....”
...
In June 1985 the General Accounting Office mentioned Lebed’s name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the United States with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year. The CIA worried that public scrutiny of Lebed would compromise QRPLUMB and that failure to protect Lebed would trigger outrage in the Ukrainian émigré community. It thus shielded Lebed by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis and by arguing that he was a Ukrainian freedom fighter. The truth, of course, was more complicated. As late as 1991 the CIA tried to dissuade OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records related to the OUN. OSI eventually gave up the case, unable to procure definitive documents on Lebed. Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

There is no open evidence yet of a direct connection between the three anti-Russian/anti-Trump items above, the Ukrainian-fascist movement and John Brennan's deep-state CIA. There are consistencies in tone and message, some common history including the 2014 putsch in Ukraine and a connecting Ukrainian-American person in bowels of the Clinton campaign.

But even that is more than the baseless assertions of "Russian hacking" in the DNI intelligence reports and the now published MI-6 smears. Seen from a distance the "Intelligence Community" is more compromised by these "leaks" than the President elect Trump.

It is not predictable who will win this fight, the "deep state" cabal that wants to keep the U.S. on an anti-Russian course or the somewhat outsider isolationist Trump. My bet is on the bullshit artist Trump.

In the bigger international picture the fight itself, and the publicity it gets, lets the U.S. look like the Banana republic it is destined to become.

UPDATE:

The BBC Washington reporter Paul Wood on BBC radio today:

has seen the "report" in October
was told in August by U.S. intelligence that East-European(!) intelligence head claimed Russia had kompromat on Trump
there are allegedly audio and video tapes made in Moscow and Petersberg which nobody has seen

We are left to guess what "east-European intelligence" service he was talking about ...

2nd UPDATE:

There are claims that the Trump sex story involved in the 35 pages originates from alt-right or 4chan circles.

That does not fit the timeline.

The "reports" have circulated since August. The sex claim is an July part of the report. The 4chan story originated in November (as far as I can tell) and was pushed from 4chan to one political actor aligned with the Democratic party. But that was old news by then and everyone relevant was already aware of the story. It is very likely that the 4chan story was just a rehash of the already known "report" story and has no additional validity.

[seemslikeadream]

REPEATING MYSELF

Ex-spy behind Trump intelligence dossier identified: report
BY MARK HENSCH - 01/11/17 03:22 PM EST 248


Ex-spy behind Trump intelligence dossier identified: report
© Getty Images
A former British intelligence officer who prepared a dossier about President-elect Trump’s ties to Russia has been identified, according to a new report.

Christopher Steele created the controversial document about the Russian government’s alleged power over Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

http://thehill.com/policy/national-secu ... ied-report

[Rory]

http://thesaker.is/the-neocons-declarat ... nst-trump/

After several rather lame false starts, the Neocons have now taken a step which can only be called a declaration of war against Donald Trump.

It all began with CNN published an article entitled “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him” which claimed that:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN. The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible (…) The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government, according to two national security officials.

When I first read the document my intention was to debunk it sentence by sentence. However, I don’t have the time for that and, frankly, there is no need for it. I will just provide you here with enough simple straightforward evidence that this is a fake. Here are just a few elements of proof:

The document has no letterhead, no identification, no date, no nothing. For many good technical and even legal reasons, sensitive intelligence documents are created with plenty of tracking and identification information. For example, such a document would typically have a reference to the unit which produced it or an number-letter combination indicating the reliability of the source and of the information it contains.
The classification CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE is a joke. If this was a true document its level of classification would be much, much higher than “confidential” and since most intelligence documents come from sensitive sources there is no need to specify that.
The allegation that “The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on PUTIN’S orders” is beyond laughable. Clearly the author of this fake has no idea how the Russian intelligence and security services work (hint: the Presidential spokesman has no involvement in that whatsoever)
On page 2 there is this other hilarious sentence “exploit TRUMP’s personal obsession and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable ‘kompromat’ (compromising material) on him.” Nobody in a real intelligence document would bother to clarify what the word “kompromat” means since both in Russian and in English it is obviously the combination of the words “compromising” and “materials”. Any western intelligence officer, even a very junior one, would know that word, if only because of the many Cold War era espionage books written about the KGB entrapment techniques.
The document speaks of “source A”, “source B” and further down the alphabet. Now ask yourself a simple question: what happens after “source Z” is used? Can any intelligence agency work with a potential pool of sources limited to 26? Obviously, this is not how intelligence agencies classify their sources.

I will stop here and submit that there is ample evidence that this is a crude fake produced by amateurs who have no idea of what they are talking about.

This does not make this document any less dangerous, however.

First, and this is the really crucial part, there is more than enough here to impeach Trump on numerous grounds both political and legal. Let me repeat again – this is an attempt at removing Donald Trump from the White House. This is a political coup d’etat.

Second, this documents smears everybody involved: Trump himself, of course, but also the evil Russians and their ugly Machiavellian techniques. Trump is thereby “confirmed” as a sexual pervert who likes to hire prostitutes to urinate on him. As for the Russians, they are basically accused of trying to recruit the President of the United States as an agent of their security services. That would make Trump a traitor, by the way.

Third, within one short week we went from allegations of “Russian hacking” to “having a traitor sitting in the White House”. We can only expect a further Tsunami of such allegations to continue and get worse and worse every day. It is interesting that Buzzfeed has already preempted the accusation of this being a smear and demonization campaign against Trump by writing that “Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” as if most Americans had the expertise to immediately detect that this document is a crude forgery!

Fourth, unless all the officials who briefed Trump come out and deny that this fake was part of their briefing with Trump, it will appear that this document has the official imprimatur of the senior US intelligence officials and that would give them a legal, probatory, authority. This de-facto means that the “experts” have evaluated that document and have certified it as “credible” even before any legal proceedings in court or, worse, in Congress. I sure hope that Trump had the foresight to audio and video record his meeting with the intelligence chiefs and that he is now able to threaten them with legal action if they now act in a way contradicting their behavior before him.

Fifth, the fact that CNN got involved in all this is a critical factor. Some of us, including yours truly, were shocked and disgusted when the WaPo posted a list of 200 websites denounced as “fake news” and “Russian propaganda”, but what CNN did by posting this article is infinitely worse: it is a direct smear and political attack on the President Elect on a worldwide level (the BBC and others are already posting the same crap). This again confirms to be that the gloves are off and that the Ziomedia is in full state of war against Donald Trump.

All of the above further confirms to me what I have been saying over the past weeks: if Trump ever makes it into the White House (I write ‘if’ because I think that the Neocons are perfectly capable of assassinating him), his first priority should be to ruthlessly crack down as hard as he legally can against those in the US “deep state” (which very much includes the media) who have now declared war on him. I am sorry to say that, but it will be either him or them – one of the parties here will be crushed.

[Sidebar: to those who wonder what I mean by “crackdown” I will summarize here what I wrote elsewhere: the best way to do that is to nominate a hyper-loyal and determined FBI director and instruct him to go after all the enemies of Trump by investigating them on charge of corruption, abuse of power, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and all the other types of behavior which have gone on forever in Congress, the intelligence community, the banking world and the media. Deal with the Neocons like Putin did with the Russian oligarchs or how the USA dealt with Al Capone – get them on tax evasion. There is no need to open Gulags or shoot people when you can get them all on what is their normal daily behavior ]

I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and I admit that I might be, but I don’t have the gut feeling that Trump has what it takes to hit hard enough at those who are using any and every ugly method imaginable to prevent him from ever making it into the White House or to have him impeached if he tries to deliver on his campaign promises. I cannot blame him for that either: the enemy has infiltrated all the level of power in the US polity and there are strong sign that they are even represented in Trump’s immediate entourage. Putin could do what he did because he was an iron-willed and highly trained intelligence officer. Trump is just a businessman whose best “training” to deal with such people would probably be his exposure to the mob in New York. Will that be enough to allow him to prevail against the Neocons? I doubt it, but I sure hope so.

As I predicted it before the election, the USA are about to enter the worst crisis in their history. We are entering extraordinarily dangerous times. If the danger of a thermonuclear war between Russia and the USA had dramatically receded with the election of Trump, the Neocon total war on Trump put the United States at very grave risk, including civil war (should the Neocon controlled Congress impeach Trump I believe that uprisings will spontaneously happen, especially in the South, and especially in Florida and Texas). At the risk of sounding over the top, I will say that what is happening now is putting the very existence of the United States in danger almost regardless of what Trump will personally do. Whatever we may think of Trump as a person and about his potential as a President, what is certain is that millions of American patriots have voted for him to “clear the swamp”, give the boot to the Washington-based plutocracy and restore what they see as fundamental American values. If the Neocons now manage to stage a coup d’etat against Trump, I predict that these millions of American will turn to violence to protect what they see as their way of life, their values and their country. In spite of the image which Hollywood likes to give of them, most Americans are peaceful and non-violent people, but if they are pushed too far they will not hesitate and grab their guns to defend themselves, especially if they lose all hopes in their democracy. And I am not talking only about gun-toting hillbillies here, I am talking about the local, state and county authorities, who often care much more about what their local constituents think and say than what the are up to in DC. If a coup is staged against Trump and some wannabe President à la Hillary or McCain gives the order to the National Guard or even the US Army to put down a local insurrection, we could see what we saw in Russia in 1991: a categorical refusal of the security services to shoot at their own people. That is the biggest and ultimate danger for the Neocons: the risk that if they give the order to crack down on the population the police, security and military services might simply refuse to take action. If that could happen in the “KGB-controlled country” (to use a Cold War cliché) this can also happen in the USA.

I sure hope that I am wrong and that this latest attack against Trump is the Neocon’s last “hurray” before they finally give up and leave. I hope that all of the above is my paranoia speaking. But, as they say, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they are not after you“.