Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

[seemslikeadream]

And we're off to the races...

yes we are

can't shut up a republican member of the Senate Intel Committee

Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday called for an exhaustive investigation into connections between President Donald Trump and Russia and said the Intelligence Committee should immediately speak with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

top democrat says expect more to come out about Gen. Yellowkekc in the next few days

Hmmm. That's Weird
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedFEBRUARY 14, 2017, 12:04 PM EST
Why doesn't Mike Flynn's resignation letter say he misled the President?

Also worth noting: Flynn is the third member of the Trump campaign/administration to resign over issues related to Russia: Manafort and Page.

hold on to your babushka

VIDEO AT LINK

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's Resignation Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other House Democrats spoke to reporters about National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s decision to resign over communication he had with Russian officials prior to taking office.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?424013-1/ ... esignation

The Russians knew more about what Gen. Yellowkekc was doing than the American public

[seemslikeadream]

news

trumpty dumbty campaign aides had repeated contact with Russian intelligence at the time Russia was trying to disrupt the election

MANAFORT

Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, MARK MAZZETTI and MATT APUZZOFEB. 14, 2017


President Trump spoke with Vladimir V. Putin on Jan. 28. His national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, right, resigned Monday. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time that they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the Russian government outside of the intelligence services, the officials said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Russia and Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the D.N.C. hack, according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the accounts of the American officials in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”

Mr. Manafort added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia, and it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts may have been about business.

Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, which Russian intelligence officials were on the calls, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

A published report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.

The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. During those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.


Paul D. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
But the cases are part of the routine electronic surveillance of communications of foreign officials by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

Two days after the election in November, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said that “there were contacts” during the campaign between Russian officials and Mr. Trump’s team.

“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Mr. Ryabkov said in an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency.

The Trump transition team denied Mr. Ryabkov’s statement. “This is not accurate,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said at the time.

The National Security Agency, which monitors the communications of foreign intelligence services, initially captured the communications between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russians as part of routine foreign surveillance. After that, the F.B.I. asked the N.S.A. to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls, and to search through troves of previous intercepted communications that had not been analyzed.

The F.B.I. has closely examined at least four other people close to Mr. Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Mr. Flynn.

All of the men have strongly denied they had any improper contacts with Russian officials.

As part of the inquiry, the F.B.I. is also trying to assess the credibility of information contained in a dossier that was given to the bureau last year by a former British intelligence operative. The dossier contained a raft of salacious allegations about connections between Mr. Trump, his associates and the Russian government. It also included unsubstantiated claims that the Russians had embarrassing videos that could be used to blackmail Mr. Trump.

The F.B.I. has spent several months investigating the leads in the dossier, but has yet to confirm any of its most explosive allegations.

Senior F.B.I. officials believe that the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier, Christopher Steele, has a credible track record, and he briefed F.B.I. investigators last year about how he obtained the information. One American law enforcement official said that F.B.I. agents had made contact with some of Mr. Steele’s sources.

The F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring as an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. The investigation has focused on why he was in such close contact with Russian and Ukrainian intelligence officials.

The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort’s communications, but it had the N.S.A. closely scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met.

The F.B.I. investigation is proceeding at the same time that separate investigations into Russian interference in the election are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Those investigations, by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are examining not only the Russian hacking but also any contacts that Mr. Trump’s team had with Russian officials during the campaign.

On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said that the news surrounding Mr. Flynn in recent days underscored “how many questions still remain unanswered to the American people more than three months after Election Day, including who was aware of what, and when.”

Mr. Warner said that Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/p ... trump.html

25 days into this administration and 4 aides are being investigated by Intelligence and national security guy is gone



"As part of its inquiry, FBI has obtained banking & travel records." So FBI looking at possible criminal behavior.

[seemslikeadream]

“I’ve never been so nervous in my lifetime about what may or may not happen in Washington,” said Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as chief of staff, secretary of defense and C.I.A. director during a 50-year career that spanned nine presidents from both parties. “I don’t know whether this White House is capable of responding in a thoughtful or careful way should a crisis erupt,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “You can do hit-and-miss stuff over a period of time. But at some point, I don’t give a damn what your particular sense of change is all about, you cannot afford to have change become chaos.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/p ... house.html



you cannot afford to have change become chaos

[8bitagent]

the Huffpo left/Democrats and the Mccain-Graham GOP come off like 1950's Mccarthyites running in circles yelling about Pinko commie Russians as of late.
I just don't want to see World War 3 with Russia. (nor NK, Iran, or China) People should get a look at the Ukraine neo Nazi Azov army if they think the Russians are scary

[RocketMan]

“I’ve never been so nervous in my lifetime about what may or may not happen in Washington,” said Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as chief of staff, secretary of defense and C.I.A. director during a 50-year career that spanned nine presidents from both parties. “I don’t know whether this White House is capable of responding in a thoughtful or careful way should a crisis erupt,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “You can do hit-and-miss stuff over a period of time. But at some point, I don’t give a damn what your particular sense of change is all about, you cannot afford to have change become chaos.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/p ... house.html



you cannot afford to have change become chaos

Are you positing Leon Panetta as a person whose public assessments and pronouncements we should take seriously...?

[semper occultus]

FWIW site looks a bit Breitbarty...not to mention this must go waaaaaay beyond just Iran....and what's stopping Flynn going public anyway ?


http://freebeacon.com/national-security/former-obama-officials-loyalists-waged-campaign-oust-flynn/

The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes—the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber—included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn's credibility, multiple sources revealed.

The operation primarily focused on discrediting Flynn, an opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, in order to handicap the Trump administration's efforts to disclose secret details of the nuclear deal with Iran that had been long hidden by the Obama administration.

"It's actually Ben Rhodes, NIAC, and the Iranian mullahs who are celebrating today," said one veteran foreign policy insider who is close to Flynn and the White House. "They know that the number one target is Iran … [and] they all knew their little sacred agreement with Iran was going to go off the books. So they got rid of Flynn before any of the [secret] agreements even surfaced."

Flynn had been preparing to publicize many of the details about the nuclear deal that had been intentionally hidden by the Obama administration as part of its effort to garner support for the deal, these sources said.

Flynn is now "gone before anybody can see what happened" with these secret agreements, said the second insider close to Flynn and the White House.

"[Flynn] was a withering critic of Obama's biggest foreign policy initiative, the Iran deal," Lake said. "He also publicly accused the administration of keeping classified documents found in the Osama bin Laden raid that showed Iran's close relationship with al Qaeda. He was a thorn in their side."

A third source who serves as a congressional adviser and was involved in the 2015 fight over the Iran deal told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration feared that Flynn would expose the secret agreements with Iran.

"The Obama administration knew that Flynn was going to release the secret documents around the Iran deal, which would blow up their myth that it was a good deal that rolled back Iran," the source said. "So in December the Obama NSC started going to work with their favorite reporters, selectively leaking damaging and incomplete information about Flynn."

People should get a look at the Ukraine neo Nazi Azov army if they think the Russians are scary

...also FWIW Roger Stone's story is that the Paul Manafort "secret ledger" payments from Yanukovych was cooked up by Ukrainian intelligence

funnily enough that google search also leads back to :

Site Behind Washington Post’s McCarthyite Blacklist Appears To Be Linked to Ukrainian Fascists and CIA Spies

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/site-behind-washington-posts-mccarthyite-blacklist-appears-to-be-linked-to-ukrainian-fascism-and-cia-spying.html

Mark Ames is pretty credible afaik - so Ukraine is earning its corn as the neo-cons outsourced intel psy-op kitchen / skunk-works then

[semper occultus]

A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru

BY THOMAS E. RICKSAUGUST 17, 2016

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/17/a-stunning-profile-of-ben-rhodes-the-asshole-who-is-the-presidents-foreign-policy-guru-2/

The profile of one Ben Rhodes running in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is not unsympathetic, which makes it all the more devastating.

Perhaps the key sentence is this: “His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling.”

Rhodes comes off like a real asshole. This is not a matter of politics — I have voted for Obama twice. Nor do I mind Rhodes’s contempt for many political reporters: “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

But, as that quote indicates, he comes off like an overweening little schmuck. This quotation seems to capture his worldview: “He referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.” Blowing off Robert Gates takes nerve.

I expect cynicism in Washington. But it usually is combined with a lot of knowledge — as with, say, Henry Kissinger. To be cynical and ignorant and to spin those two things into a virtue? That’s industrial-strength hubris. Kind of like what got us into Iraq, in fact.

Rhodes and others around Obama keep on talking about doing all this novel thinking, playing from a new playbook, bucking the establishment thinking. But if that is the case, why have they given so much foreign policy power to two career hacks who never have had an original thought? I mean, of course, Joe Biden and John Kerry. I guess the answer can only be that those two are puppets, and (as in Biden’s case) are given losing propositions like Iraq to handle.

Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped get us into the Vietnam War. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.

[seemslikeadream]

Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, MARK MAZZETTI and MATT APUZZOFEB. 14, 2017


President Trump spoke with Vladimir V. Putin on Jan. 28. His national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, right, resigned Monday. Credit Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

Hawkeye 8 minutes ago
Be careful, Republicans in Congress are only concerned with the "leaks" not the subject of talking to the Russians......this will be the...
Dart 8 minutes ago
ILLEGITIMATE PRESIDENT!!Illegitimate Pres Grows More Illegitimate Each Passing Day
Alexander Garza 9 minutes ago
So let me get this straight.The FBI knew there was contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives BEFORE the election. They knew...
signation, the 47-day fall of Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the officials’ accounts in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”

He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia. And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.

The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

A report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.

The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.

But the cases are part of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ routine electronic surveillance of the communications of foreign officials.

The F.B.I. declined to comment. The White House also declined to comment Tuesday night, but earlier in the day, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, stood by Mr. Trump’s previous comments that nobody from his campaign had contact with Russian officials before the election.

“There’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period,” Mr. Spicer said in response to a question.

Two days after the election in November, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said “there were contacts” during the campaign between Russian officials and Mr. Trump’s team.

Photo

Paul D. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Mr. Ryabkov told Russia’s Interfax news agency.

The Trump transition team denied Mr. Ryabkov’s statement. “This is not accurate,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said at the time.

The National Security Agency, which monitors the communications of foreign intelligence services, initially captured the calls between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russians as part of routine foreign surveillance. After that, the F.B.I. asked the N.S.A. to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls, and to search through troves of previous intercepted communications that had not been analyzed.

The F.B.I. has closely examined at least three other people close to Mr. Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Mr. Flynn.

All of the men have strongly denied that they had any improper contacts with Russian officials.

As part of the inquiry, the F.B.I. is also trying to assess the credibility of the information contained in a dossier that was given to the bureau last year by a former British intelligence operative. The dossier contained a raft of allegations of a broad conspiracy between Mr. Trump, his associates and the Russian government. It also included unsubstantiated claims that the Russians had embarrassing videos that could be used to blackmail Mr. Trump.

The F.B.I. has spent several months investigating the leads in the dossier, but has yet to confirm any of its most explosive claims.

Learn More
Senior F.B.I. officials believe that the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier, Christopher Steele, has a credible track record, and he briefed investigators last year about how he obtained the information. One American law enforcement official said that F.B.I. agents had made contact with some of Mr. Steele’s sources.

The agency’s investigation of Mr. Manafort began last spring as an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. It has focused on why he was in such close contact with Russian and Ukrainian intelligence officials.

The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort’s communications, but it had the N.S.A. scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met.

The F.B.I. investigation is proceeding at the same time that separate investigations into Russian interference in the election are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Those investigations, by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are examining not only the Russian hacking but also any contacts that Mr. Trump’s team had with Russian officials during the campaign.

On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said the news about Mr. Flynn underscored “how many questions still remain unanswered to the American people more than three months after Election Day, including who was aware of what, and when.”

Mr. Warner said Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election.”

Correction: February 14, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people (in addition to Paul Manafort) whom the F.B.I. has examined. It is at least three, not at least four.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/p ... trump.html

[seemslikeadream]

One afternoon, 3 investigations? The Trump White House’s ominous day.


By Aaron Blake February 15 at 7:04 AM

President Trump hands Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (R) an executive order that directs agencies to ease the burden of Obamacare. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)
In the space of a little more than an hour on Tuesday afternoon, life was breathed into three separate and distinct potential investigations of the Trump administration.

First came the independent Office of Government Ethics's recommendation that the White House should investigate Kellyanne Conway's plug of Ivanka Trump's fashion line and “consider taking disciplinary action.” The letter was first tweeted by the House Oversight Committee's Democrats at 2 p.m.


A half-hour later, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), announced a letter probing Trump's apparent discussion of sensitive information out in the open this weekend at Mar-a-Lago.

Finally, a little after 3 p.m., Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said it was “highly likely” the Senate would deepen its Russia investigation after now-former national security adviser Michael Flynn's resignation and questions about whether his December discussion of sanctions with Russia's ambassador broke the law.

Senate Republicans: Intelligence Committee will investigate Flynn contact with Russia Embed Share Play Video1:23
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told members of the media that the Senate Intelligence Committee will likely include former national security adviser Michael Flynn's contact with Russian officials as part of a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, on Feb. 14 at the Capitol. (The Washington Post)
Three separate controversies, all coming to a head at once, and all potentially becoming investigative headaches for the White House. Within 25 days of Trump being sworn in as president. Meet the Trump administration.

The Obama White House, toward the end of its eight years, liked to pride itself on being “scandal-free” and avoiding the kind of drama that has marked Trump's first weeks. That claim — while perhaps oversimplifying what actually happened during the Obama years — almost seemed designed to create a lasting contrast with what lay ahead. Basically, they knew this would happen to Trump. And plenty of others saw it coming too, especially given Trump's many potential conflicts of interest and penchant for controversy on the campaign trail. If you play fast and loose — and Trump certainly does that, for good or bad — this is the result.

Trump supporters will gladly dismiss much of this as politics and the price of Trump doing big things/rocking the boat/Draining The Swamp. But in two of these cases, it's Republicans inching toward broader investigations. The pressure on Chaffetz and McConnell is too much, and the concern is too great to simply ignore these episodes. In both cases, national security is at issue.

What's most remarkable is that all of this is the result of unforced errors. It's one thing to do something for an advantage and have it go south; it's another to mess up for no discernible benefit. In each case, there didn't seem to be a better angel telling anyone, 'Hey, maybe this isn't a good idea.'

When Trump broached a gray area by defending his daughter against Nordstrom dropping her fashion line, nobody apparently told Conway that going too far with it could violate ethics rules.

When Trump was told three weeks ago that Flynn has misled people about his talks with Russia's ambassador, he apparently didn't do much of anything — including inform Vice President Pence, who had gone on TV and regurgitated Flynn's false claims. This lack of action and disclosure only makes it look like the Trump White House had something to hide.

What led to Michael Flynn's undoing? Embed Share Play Video2:15
The resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn comes on the heels of reports that he discussed U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador while a civilian, before President Trump took office. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
And when news of North Korea's ballistic missile test broke over the weekend, nobody apparently suggested to Trump that discussing it in the open might not be the greatest idea.

The point is that the Trump White House, either through negligence or design, seems to be almost walking into potential investigations right now. We're less than a month into his presidency, and he's already spurring even Republicans to talk about diving deep into troubling matters within his administration.

And at this rate, there's really no reason to believe this won't be the new normal. If three possible investigations can move forward in one afternoon three weeks into Trump's presidency, that's a bad omen for what lies ahead.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... 53259335d9

[Luther Blissett]

It's becoming increasingly hard to predict much of anything these days, let alone do any research or investigation into current deep state machinations.

[seemslikeadream]

IT’S TIME FOR A PROPER INVESTIGATION OF TRUMP’S RUSSIA TIES
By John Cassidy February 14, 2017
Donald Trump and Michael Flynn on the campaign trail in September. Flynn resigned as national-security adviser on Monday night.
Donald Trump and Michael Flynn on the campaign trail in September. Flynn resigned as national-security adviser on Monday night.
Photograph by Damon Winter / The New York Times / Redux
With Washington still agog at the news that Michael Flynn was forced to resign his post as Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, following revelations about his contacts with Russian officials, the Times, on Tuesday night, dropped another shocker on the capital. Citing four current and former American officials as their sources, the paper’s Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzo wrote, “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

U.S. intelligence agents, who discovered this information from electronic intercepts, haven’t so far turned up any evidence that the Trump campaign aides colluded with Russian efforts to influence the election, such as hacking, the Times report said. But it went on: “The intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part, because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.” One of the Trump associates picked up on the intercepts was Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, the report said.

All this came at the end of a day that had been dominated by reactions to Flynn’s resignation, in which electronic intercepts also played a role. In a piece published Tuesday morning, my colleague Ryan Lizza wrote that a White House official he spoke to made Flynn out to be a “rogue operative, duping everyone in the White House about his contact with Russian officials.” This contact includes calls between Flynn and Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, on December 29th, the day that the Obama Administration imposed sanctions on some of Vladimir Putin’s cronies in response to revelations about Russian hacking during election season.

Flynn’s calls, which he and the White House originally claimed were no more than exchanges of pleasantries, turned out to have been recorded, presumably by the National Security Agency. We don’t know precisely what Flynn said to Kislyak, although reports say that the White House, the Justice Department, and the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division have had access to transcripts. Last Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Flynn discussed the Obama Administration’s sanctions with Kislyak—a clear breach of diplomatic protocol and a possible breach of the law.

In retrospect, the revelation in the Post’s report made Flynn’s departure inevitable. But the more important point to grasp, as Lizza suggests, is that the “Flynn went rogue” narrative is risible. He was always a bit player in the much larger and more consequential story of Trump’s efforts to cozy up to Putin. His resignation, far from putting an end to that story, only makes more urgent the need for a proper investigation into the President’s ties to Russia. And the new revelations in the Times further underline the point.

As recently as last Friday, speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump claimed not to have seen the reports that Flynn brought up sanctions in his conversations with Kislyak. We now know, however, that F.B.I. agents interviewed Flynn in late January, and that the Justice Department then warned the White House that Flynn’s accounts of his phone calls were misleading and could potentially open him up to blackmail by the Russians. On Monday night, the Washington Post reported that Sally Yates, then the acting attorney general (whom Trump subsequently fired for refusing to defend his anti-Muslim travel ban), and “a senior career national security official” had delivered this warning to Donald McGahn, the White House Counsel.

It’s far from clear what happened after Yates delivered this message. According to Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, senior officials had been “reviewing and evaluating this issue on a daily basis, trying to ascertain the truth.” But what truth was there left to ascertain? If Trump regarded Flynn’s telephone diplomacy not as a rogue operation but as a faithful carrying out of his wish to curry favor with the Russians, there would be no reason to punish him. The only danger was that details of the Flynn–Kislyak conversations would leak, which would place Vice-President Mike Pence in an invidious position, as he had publicly claimed that the two men did not discuss sanctions. And, indeed, Trump strongly implied in a Tweet on Tuesday morning that just such a leak was the real reason for Flynn’s departure. “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?” he wrote. “Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?”

One line of inquiry, then, is this one: Who knew what—and when—during the past couple of weeks? But, while the White House press corps gnaws at that bone, a much larger issue also needs to be addressed: What lies at the bottom of Trump’s Putinophilia?
close dialog
To get more of the latest
stories from The New Yorker,
sign up for our newsletter.

Get access.


The benign explanation is that Trump and his aides think normalizing relations with Russia would serve America’s strategic interests and enable it to team up with the Kremlin in various parts of the world, such as in Syria. After Trump and Putin spoke in January, the Kremlin issued a statement saying, “The presidents spoke in favor of setting up genuine coordination between Russian and American actions with the aim of destroying Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria.” Although the policy of pursuing a rapprochement with Russia is unpopular in American foreign-policy circles, it does have some defenders. “Unlike China, Russia is not an emerging peer competitor to the United States,” Anatol Lieven, a British foreign-policy analyst, wrote in the Times on Tuesday. “A reduction of tension with Russia would allow the United States to concentrate on more important geopolitical issues.”

Another explanation for Trump’s behavior is that he sees the authoritarian Putin as a role model. Republican Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who interviewed with Trump for the post of Secretary of State, offered a cautious endorsement of this idea in an interview with Politico on Monday. “I do think there is a degree of admiration for a strongman,” Corker said. “I’m sorry. And I think that part is somewhat real.” Corker also said that Trump is eager to demonstrate that he is a transformative figure, and that for “him to create a different kind of relationship with Russia, and especially someone who is strong like Putin, I think he views that as something that would show that he has the ability to do things that no other President has been able to do.”

A third theory is that the Russian government has some kind of hold over Trump. The unverified opposition-research dossier put together by a former British intelligence agent which was published by BuzzFeed, in January, said that the Kremlin may have gathered compromising material about the new President. On the Internet, there is now a cottage industry devoted to tracking and illustrating Trump’s alleged connections to Russian individuals and firms. Trump, of course, strenuously denies having any ties to Russia, and he has dismissed the dossier as “phony.”

This is an area heavy in speculation and light on confirmed facts, but we do know some things for sure. For one thing, American intelligence services believe that Russian intelligence agencies, at Putin’s direction, tried to help get Trump elected. It is also well-established that Trump has had numerous financial dealings with rich and well-connected Russians. (For details on these dealings, see a long piece in The American Interest by the author and investigator James S. Henry.)

There is additional information that hasn’t been publicly confirmed but which hasn’t been denied by Trump or his Administration, either. Last month, in a story that was a precursor to its latest blockbuster, the Times reported that the F.B.I. was investigating contacts between Russian officials and at least three people who worked for Trump’s campaign or had close ties to it. (The Times named the individuals as Manafort; Carter Page, a Wall Street financier; and Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and ally of Trump.) And, last week, CNN reported that U.S. counterintelligence officials continue to investigate the claims made in the opposition-research dossier, and have corroborated some of them—although not the most salacious allegations about Trump.

The only way to clear things up is to hold a proper independent investigation, with a broad remit to look at Russian interference in the election, Trump’s ties to Russia, and the Administration’s emerging Russia policy. To this end, the best option would be to set up a bipartisan select committee in the Senate, made up of representatives from various other committees. Back in December, after a round of revelations about the Russian hacking, Senator John McCain and a few other Republicans said they would support this idea. But Mitch McConnell, the Senator Majority Leader, squashed it.

In the wake of Flynn’s resignation and the new revelations in the Times, it is time to set partisanship aside. Americans deserve to know the truth.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cass ... ussia-ties

[seemslikeadream]

Requiem for a Backbone

Cowardice and neglect: So hot right now.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
FEB 14, 2017

Now that Camp Runamuck has firmly established itself on one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, let's see what the Republican majorities in the Congress are up to these days. One thing they're not doing is anything substantial that will rein in the free-range crazy in the Executive Branch. They're rubber-stamping the evil, the unqualified, and Betsy DeVos, who is both, to run the various departments. The sub-Cabinet appointments look to be even worse.

A guy was appointed Ambassador to Austria because he liked The Sound of Music, and I guarantee you his appointment will sail through on a rousing chorus of "So Long, Farewell," the worst song in the history of musical theater. They are preparing to confirm a guy who's presently suing the EPA to be its administrator, and to hand the Department of Energy (and responsibility for the nation's nukes) over to Rick Perry, which is a joke that writes itself.


Republicans Won't Stand Up and Stop Donald Trump

You have to feel just a little bit sorry for them. Here they are, with all their wishes fulfilled. A Republican president, solid majorities in both Houses, one justice away from a Supreme Court of their dreams, and a Democratic Party incapable of mounting any more than token opposition to any of it. It's all right there, inches from their fingertips, and they have Toonces the Driving Cat in the Oval Office, picking fights with department stores and up to his neck in an whirlpool of allegations that his administration is the Kremlin's socket-wrench.

So, we get a preposterous press conference from the House Republican leadership on Tuesday morning about their eternally amorphous plan to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act. Quite naturally, the departure of Michael Flynn hijacked the proceedings, and Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, did a half-gainer into a wading pool of flopsweat. From The Hill:

"I'm not going to prejudge the circumstances surrounding this. I think the administration will explain the circumstances that led to this," Ryan said. "The intelligence community has been looking into this thing all along, by the way, just the involvement with respect to Russia. "I think it's really important to realize that as soon as they were being misled by the national security adviser, they asked for his resignation."
This, of course, has nothing to do with the chaos down the street, or with the fact that Republican congresscritters have been getting run out of their own town meetings back home. It also has nothing to do with the fact that Ryan has a rebellion on his hands by members of the House Freedom Caucus, who won't agree to any repeal and/or replace unless it contains the gratuitous cruelty of eliminating the Medicaid expansion money.

Luckily, of course, there is the House Oversight Committee, which certainly will get to the bottom of this whole Michael Flynn business because, Hell, if they were willing to spend eleventy-gazillion dollars investigating Hillary Rodham Clinton, certainly they can't wait to get their teeth into a genuine national-security scandal, right?

Enter Jason Chaffetz, the least excusable man in the federal government. From The Hill:

"It really is the purview of the Intel Committee. They really are the only ones that can look at that type of information, particularly when you're talking about interactions with a nation-state like that. It's not something the Oversight Committee can actually look at because sources and methods are the exclusive purview of the Intel Committee," Chaffetz said. But House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) indicated Tuesday that he doesn't plan to launch a separate investigation of Flynn. Nunes cited executive privilege, according to CNN.
And 'round and 'round we go. I'm old enough to remember when legislators of both parties used to laugh at executive privilege arguments emanating from the Executive. Now, they get used as part of a circular alibi for nobody's doing the job of oversight.

"We can't do it because it's his job."

"I won't do it because I can't."

National security as run by the folks down at the DMV.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... ns-russia/

[Iamwhomiam]

Next, please.

[seemslikeadream]

Senate Democrats reject push for outside probe of Trump-Russia links

By Karoun Demirjian and Sean Sullivan February 15 at 2:11 PM

Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday rejected a push by some of their members to appoint an independent commission to investigate the charges that people linked to Donald Trump — including ousted national security adviser Michael T. Flynn — had frequent contacts with Russia during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.

Instead, Democrats largely agreed to handle the inquiry of Trump officials’ links to Russia inside the Senate — specifically, through an investigation started by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The decision was made at a Democratic conference meeting Wednesday morning hastily called by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.). Schumer aimed to get his colleagues on the same page following a fresh report from the New York Times that Trump campaign aides spoke frequently with Russian intelligence operatives during the campaign. Flynn resigned Monday night after The Washington Post revealed that he spoke about sanctions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States after the election.

For now, Democrats seem to agree that the best approach to investigating President Trump lies with lawmakers instead of an independent entity of some sort.

Democrats also want the Justice Department — specifically, the FBI — to continue investigating the allegations that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win. But they are insisting that former senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now the attorney general, recuse himself from the proceedings.

Schumer; Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee; and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, stood together after Wednesday’s caucus meeting, signaling that they are unified in their approach. They demanded that all committee investigations related to allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and contacts with Trump surrogates be bipartisan and comprehensive and that panel members be “committed to making their findings as public as possible.”

Senate Republican leaders, meanwhile, responded to Flynn’s resignation by saying that the Intelligence Committee probably will examine the circumstances. They reiterated that position Wednesday.

“I don’t think we need a select committee. We know how to do our work. We have an Intelligence Committee,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said in an interview on MSNBC.

One Republican, however, said lawmakers should establish a “joint select committee” — consisting of members of the House and the Senate — to examine the allegations in the Times report.

“Now, was this outside the norm? Was this something damaging to the country?” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a Fox News Channel interview Wednesday morning. “I don’t know, but if there were contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign operatives that [were] inappropriate, then it would be time for the Congress to form a joint select commission to get to the bottom of all things Russia and Trump.”

The Daily 202 newsletter
A must-read morning briefing for decision-makers.
Sign up
Democrats are insisting on some ground rules in any committee investigations of the Trump administration’s ties to Russia — which they insist must take place in other panels as well, even if the Intelligence Committee takes the lead.

Lawmakers call for preserving sanctions against Russia Embed Share Play Video8:55
House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) urged Democrats and Republicans to unite to oppose dropping sanctions on Russia at a news conference, Feb. 15. (The Washington Post)
They are demanding that the Trump administration preserve all its records from the transition period, citing “real concern” that officials might “try to cover up ties to Russia” by deleting emails, texts and other documents establishing links between the Trump White House and the Kremlin, Schumer said. Democrats also are demanding that Flynn, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and other campaign officials make themselves available to testify before the committees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpos ... 8028bb035b

[seemslikeadream]

A turf war breaks out in the Senate: Who will investigate Russia’s connections to the Trump campaign?

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) addresses the media on Capitol Hill Wednesday about the fallout from the resignation of Michael Flynn as national security adviser. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
By Paul Kane February 15 at 6:38 PM
The real world is full of hot wars and cold wars, but the Senate is now fully engaged in a turf war.

The battle lines are being drawn by the very powerful leaders of the committees that oversee national security matters, who are trying to assert jurisdiction over the unfolding saga surrounding U.S. assertions that Russia tried to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign.

Before this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), seeking to cordon off the probe inside the most secretive of panels, the Senate Intelligence Committee, had faced off against Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who for weeks had called for a more sweeping public investigation.

But the pressure for more immediate and visible action has intensified with Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser after revelations that he spoke repeatedly with the Russian ambassador last year.

With new details coming almost daily, frustration has grown on Capitol Hill with the slow pace of the Intelligence Committee’s work, under its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). And that has sparked new interest in whether other committees should get a piece of the action — or whether a select committee should be created that would pull in the top members of all the relevant committees.

After a pair of bipartisan, closed-door huddles, Burr still had the lead role on the investigation. But doubt was creeping in.

[Senate Democrats unify around congressional probe of Trump ties to Russia]

“I guess the question is, is that the best way to have a fulsome look, 360, at everything that’s been going on? And I don’t know,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters before the GOP’s luncheon.

Corker said he is “mulling” the right path, whether it’s a select committee or just giving out more pieces of the investigation to other panels. “I’m telling you that I’m not sure we have the most efficient situation right now on this,” he said.

Burr said he’s doing just fine. “We’re into it and we will methodically continue,” he told reporters. But while other senators, both Republicans and Democrats, have called for Flynn to testify about his discussions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December about economic sanctions, Burr also acknowledged that his panel has not decided whether to do so. “We don’t even know what to ask Mr. Flynn,” Burr said.

[Pence remains above the fray, but is he outside the inner circle?]

Turf wars don’t split on ideological lines. They often hinge more on which committees get the clout and glamour that come with a high-profile investigation.

These are moments that can often define a senator’s career. Even before Flynn’s resignation landed at 11 p.m. Monday, commentators were demanding, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” — parrying the infamous line uttered in 1973 by Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) when he served on the special committee to investigate the Watergate scandal.

Burr has the backing of the top Democrat on his committee, Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), who said he told Democrats that there was no need to expand the investigation beyond his panel.

“We’ve already started this process. We’re already starting to review the raw intelligence. We are well down this path,” Warner said. He also told his colleagues that creating a new select committee would be cumbersome, requiring new legislative authority, a staff and a retread of much of the ground that the Intelligence Committee is already covering.

Warner’s comments came after a previously unscheduled gathering of the Democratic caucus, which Schumer’s aides trumpeted as “an emergency” meeting because of Tuesday’s report in the New York Times that intelligence officials had traced contacts between Trump advisers and Russian intelligence officials throughout the 2016 campaign.

Yet Schumer emerged with nothing new to add to the investigative spectrum other than to say that Democrats would push other committees to weigh in at times. In December, as intelligence officials confirmed their belief that Russian cyberattacks and other efforts were designed to help Trump win, Schumer and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) led an unsuccessful call for the creation of a select committee.

Some Democrats and Republicans latched onto the idea again in light of the latest media reports, including The Washington Post’s report Monday that senior officials had warned the Trump administration that Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador left him open to potential blackmail by Moscow.

[It’s bigger than Flynn. New Russia revelations widen Trump’s credibility gap.]

One’s position on the issue can sometimes be determined by membership on the committee in question. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee who remains a senior member, rejected calls for new a committee or commission to wade into the matter.

“I think it’s fair to say there are differences of opinion in the caucus,” she said after the Democratic meeting. “The question is how soon can you get started, in my mind.”

Critics of that committee’s recent history have noted that its work is often done in secret and takes years to flesh out, such as the multiple reports issued on interrogation techniques used in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Daily 202 newsletter
A must-read morning briefing for decision-makers.
Sign up
“This has consequences that are immediate,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), noting that the 2018 elections need protection from Russian interference. Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, joined Schumer, McCain and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in the initial push for a new select committee to handle the matter. Now, he has resigned himself to the reality that it will reside exclusively under Burr and Warner — so long as the work gets done.

“Now we have to make sure that that actually is purposeful and accomplishes a full and complete investigation,” Reed said.

Warner said he understands the concern, and he has promised Democrats that he will revisit the creation of a new investigative panel if he feels Burr and the Republicans are not acting in good faith.

“If at any point we are not able to get the full information and we’re not pursuing the information to where the intelligence leads, we’ll look at other options,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpos ... b177a4fe76