rigorousintuition.ca

Karl Sharro ‏@KarlreMarks 14m14 minutes ago

The Trump allegations are seen as particularly offensive to Americans because in Western culture it's considered demeaning to be urinated on

But according to CNN, U.S. intelligence agencies recently deemed “his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.”

Malcolm NanceVerified account
‏@MalcolmNance
2.Inclusion of @DavidCornDC data was a safe way for CIA to reveal confirmed data but save Top Secret/SCI sources. Amounts to confirmation.

NotMyPresidentElect ‏@Chris6375 14h14 hours ago
@Head_Sanford @MalcolmNance @DavidCornDC If this level of info is disinformation to obfuscate then they must've found dead bodies in Trump Tower.

Penthouse Offers $1 Million For a Trump Piss Tape

Matt Novak
Today 8:21amFiled to: DONALD TRUMP

Cardboard cutouts of the US presidential nominees at a pub in London in March 2016 (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images)
Russian intelligence agencies allegedly have a video showing several prostitutes who were hired by Donald Trump to urinate on each other. And if this video really exists, then Penthouse, America’s most venerable pornography magazine, is willing to spend $1 million for it.
http://gizmodo.com/penthouse-offers-1-m ... 1791062953

UPDATE Michael Cohen has now stated he has never been to Prague in his life. If that is true the extremely weak credibility of the entire forgery collapses in total. What is more, contrary to the claims of the Guardian and Washington Post that the material is “unverifiable”, the veracity of it could be tested extremely easily by the most basic journalism, ie asking Mr Cohen who has produced his passport. The editors of the Washington Post and the Guardian are guilty of pushing as blazing front page news the most blatant forgery to serve their own political ends, without carrying out the absolutely basic journalistic checks which would easily prove the forgery. Those editors must resign.

The mainstream media’s extreme enthusiasm for the Hitler Diaries shows their rush to embrace any forgery if it is big and astonishing enough. For the Guardian to lead with such an obvious forgery as the Trump “commercial intelligence reports” is the final evidence of the demise of that newspaper’s journalistic values.

I suspect that we are supposed to “conclude” falsely that the reports were written by Mark Allen at BP. Here are a short list of six impossible things we are asked to believe before breakfast:

1) Vladimir Putin had a five year (later stated as eight year) plan to run Donald Trump as a “Manchurian candidate” for President and Trump was an active and knowing partner in Putin’s scheme.
2) Hillary Clinton is so stupid and unaware that she held compromising conversations over telephone lines whilst in Russia itself.
3) Trump’s lawyer/adviser Mr Cohen was so stupid he held meetings in Prague with the hacker/groups themselves in person to arrange payment, along with senior officials of the Russian security services. The NSA, CIA and FBI are so incompetent they did not monitor this meeting, and somehow the NSA failed to pick up on the electronic and telephone communications involved in organising it. Therefore Mr Cohen was never questioned over this alleged and improbable serious criminal activity.
4) A private company had minute by minute intelligence on the Manchurian Candidate scheme and all the indictable illegal activity that was going on, which the CIA/NSA/GCHQ/MI6 did not have, despite their specific tasking and enormous technical, staff and financial resources amounting between them to over 150,000 staff and the availability of hundreds of billons of dollars to do nothing but this.
5) A private western company is able to run a state level intelligence operation in Russia for years, continually interviewing senior security sources and people personally close to Putin, without being caught by the Russian security services – despite the fact the latter are brilliant enough to install a Manchurian candidate as President of the USA. This private western company can for example secretly interview staff in top Moscow hotels – which they themselves say are Russian security service controlled – without the staff being too scared to speak to them or ending up dead. They can continually pump Putin’s friends for information and get it.
6) Donald Trump’s real interest is his vast financial commitment in China, and he has little investment in Russia, according to the reports. Yet he spent the entire election campaign advocating closer ties with Russia and demonising and antagonising China.

As forgeries go, this is really not in the least convincing. I might add I do not include the golden showers among the impossible aspects. I have no idea if it is true and neither do I care. Given Trump’s wealth and history, I think we can say with confidence that he has indulged whatever his sexual preferences might be all over the world and not just in Russia. It seems most improbable he would succumb to blackmail over it and not brazen it out. I suppose it could be taken as the sole example of trickledown theory actually working.

A Few Thoughts On the Big Story

ByJOSH MARSHALL
PublishedJANUARY 10, 2017, 8:59 PM EDT

I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts on today's Trump/Russia revelations, or rather some guideposts for how to approach a true mess of information which is undigested, wildly inflammatory and in many cases seemingly fantastical. Let me start by saying that this is the rawest kind of 'intel', if that is even the right word for it. I would caution everyone to maintain a sensible skepticism even if you rightly believe that Trump is a danger to the republic. So with that, a few thoughts.

1: I've seen various comments that this is a document prepared by someone who claims to be a former British intelligence officer. That's not right. If nothing else the CIA knows who served in the intelligence organization of a close ally. There's no reason to doubt that this former MI6 officer is just that and that he's someone who the US Intelligence Community has judged reliable in the past. That alone tells us pretty little. But I see no reason to doubt this specific piece of information.

2: The published reports say that the US Intelligence Community finds the former British intelligence officer credible and that they've spoken to or investigated some of his sources and also found them credible. I think what we should draw from that is that US intelligence personnel have looked at this and found that the sourcing wasn't obviously ridiculous, no red flags that would make them dismiss it out of hand. In other words, this is a very low threshold of credibility. This is nothing like the judgment multiple intelligence agencies have made about Russia being behind the hacking campaign. Just as clearly, no one in the US intelligence world has vouched for any of this being true.

3. What seems to be the case though - and this I take from a number of sources - is that various details in this document are being taken very seriously by the people who are paid to protect the country from foreign subversion, blackmail, cooptation, etc. That's worth knowing because there are certain claims in this document that strike me as highly exuberant and highly implausible. The overall tone of the document reads to me like a raw report in which solid information and highly questionable information is all piled in together. I say that not as anyone who has familiarity with intelligence work, simply as a journalist who has many times been shown opposition research, which is actually what this is.

4. The most salacious details in the document probably can't ever be confirmed or refuted. Mainly that doesn't matter though since they're really not relevant. But the document is full of details that should be fairly straightforward to check. Hotel stays in specific hotels on specific or near specific dates by public figures. Those are bits of information that should be ascertainable - if not by journalists than certainly by law enforcement and certainly by the people who control the vast information vacuum created by American spy agencies. That seems like the most concrete thing to do.

5. Similarly, there are specific claims about internal conflicts within the Russian government - people who wanted more aggressive or less aggressive attacks on the US election process. Those are the kinds of details a US spy agency might well know. If what is claimed in the document matches what US spies know from human or signals intelligence that might be why American intelligence agencies are taking this report seriously.

6. Some people are saying that we shouldn't be looking at these news reports through the prism of the credibility of the document but rather the intelligence community's retaliation or warning to Trump. I don't think we can rule that out. But as much as we may dislike Trump, intelligence agencies using the information they gather against an elected President is a very bad thing. We shouldn't lose sight of that. Of course, we should also not expect our spy apparatus to cover for presidential wrongdoing or leave the country vulnerable to foreign subversion. Regardless this is extreme high-wire behavior for the whole country, whatever the underlying facts. It's bad from every different direction that we're here.

7. A lot of the information in this document matches up pretty well with circumstantial evidence about Trump's business dealings with Russian oligarchs and organized crime, and the leverage they have over him.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-f ... -big-story

>/pol/acks mailed fanfiction to anti-trump pundit Rick Wilson about trump making people piss on a bed obama slept in

>he thought it was real and gave it to the CIA

>the central intelligence agency of the united states of america put this in their official classified intelligence report on russian involvement in the election

>donald trump and obama have both read this pol/acks fanfiction

>the cia has concluded that the russian plans to blackmail trump with this story we made up

just let that sink in what we have become.

Vice columnist Michael Tracey wrote that WikiLeaks had been “relentlessly attacked” for publishing verified, authentic information, while BuzzFeed was being “cheered for publishing what appears to be a total sham.”

...

In an era when trust in the media is already in the gutter, this does absolutely nothing to help.