Let’s make this an open thread for GA-6. Sounds like Ossoff’s a long shot to go over 50%, but let’s see what happens. I had good luck with the NYT coverage last time, so I’ll give a link here.
Election 2017
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Things Do Improve, However Slowly
Great video—50 yrs after becoming 1st woman to officially run the Boston Marathon, Kathrine Switzer finishes again. pic.twitter.com/SR46bw8YUB
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 17, 2017
She’s seventy years old. (I couldn’t have finished a marathon when I was twenty!)
Georgia special election today, finally…
Georgia’s Special Election: What to Watch For https://t.co/l71JxP5e63
— Michael Tackett (@tackettdc) April 18, 2017
Apart from that, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Oh, yeah, one less glibertarian in California…
The leader of the Calexit campaign, Louis Marinelli, just announced he's settling in Russia permanently & withdrawing his ballot petition. pic.twitter.com/zHwtUjcm5p
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 17, 2017
You tried to put this guy in a satirical novel, any decent editor would reject him as “entirely too broad.”
… Marinelli, who campaigned for Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders but said he ultimately voted for President Donald Trump, described Yes California as a progressive initiative aimed at establishing a “liberal republic” independent of the United States. But his decision to align Yes California so publicly with Russia alienated him from the other, albeit smaller, California separatist movement known as the California Nationalist Party…
He added that he hopes that “after the false allegations about me vanish, and after this period of anti-Russian hysteria subsides,” it will be “said of this campaign that we spoke the truth” and “set in motion a series of events that led California to independence from the United States.”…
Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Things Do Improve, However SlowlyPost + Comments (206)
The Maskirovka Slips XIV: Susan Rice is Once Again Public Enemy #1
Nothing in this story indicates anything improper whatsoever nor does it explain or justify Nunes's bizarre conduct. https://t.co/tlMh2TduMR
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) April 3, 2017
Bloomberg‘s Eli Lake, who seems to have become the Congressman Nunes whisperer, reports:
White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”
The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
…The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice’s unmasking requests were likely within the law.
Here’s an important question: who ordered Cohen-Watnick, a junior DIA analyst promoted to a senior directorship on the National Security Staff by former National Security Advisor LTG Flynn way above his level of expertise and experience, to conduct this review? Was it LTG Flynn before he was fired on 13 February 2017? Was it the now reassigned KT McFarland? Was it someone above Cohen-Watnick in the Administration chain of command? This is an important question that needs to be answered! Unless Cohen-Watnick had a need to know this – as in was ordered to conduct such a review – as part of his duties as the NSC’s Senior Director for Intelligence Policy, his accessing of this material is a violation of classification and compartmentalization protocols. As is his dissemination of such information.
.@EliLake Backers of Cohen-Watnick insist he was conducting a review, not reverse-engineering POTUS tweets. Other sources contradict that.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 3, 2017
Bradley Moss, an attorney specializing in cases regarding security clearances and national security, has made a most prescient observation and prediction:
How is it a scandal for the NatSec Advisor to request info on a matter of counterintelligence significance? https://t.co/INW8ybbzWo
— Bradley P. Moss, Esq (@BradMossEsq) April 3, 2017
…. now we're going to have two years of investigations into Susan Rice's unmasking requests, aren't we?
— Bradley P. Moss, Esq (@BradMossEsq) April 3, 2017
Noah Rothman has made an important discovery and is reporting that:
The biggest unspoken detail in Eli Lake's report: someone in the White House counsel's office really is talking to Mike Cernovich.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) April 3, 2017
Rothman is referring to this Medium post from yesterday, 2 APR 2017, by Mike Cernovich. It now appears that Cernovich’s claims that he, at least, and other prominent members of the alt-right have ongoing contacts with senior White House/Administration officials. What Rothman is reporting, that, at least, Cernovich’s ties are accurate, this is important news. It shows that the white nationalist/white supremacist/neo-NAZI community that goes by the more respectable name the alt-right actually has a solid connection to the new Administration. This is disturbing on many levels. Not least is where the flow of information went: Cernovich, Zero Hedge, InfoWars, Gateway Pundit.
— Jay W. Cobb (@JayWCobb) April 3, 2017
What is even more interesting is that someone seems to have fed the info to Fox and Friends, which is where the President saw it:
Such amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us by @foxandfriends. "Spied on before nomination." The real story.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2017
Back to Susan Hennessy a former attorney in the US Intelligence Community and now a Senior Fellow at Brookings:
Trump team's apparent plan is to try to make this about specific Obama officials, to provide attack targets and further muddy the waters.
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) April 3, 2017
But what we're seeing here is US officials doing jobs to respond to what had markers of a counterintelligence threat: the Trump campaign.
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) April 3, 2017
OF COURSE the National Security Advisor had questions about SIGINT regarding Trump's foreign ties.#duhhttps://t.co/96Lgqfabm5
— John Schindler (@20committee) April 3, 2017
@BradMossEsq Correct
— John Schindler (@20committee) April 3, 2017
A lot of unpleasant material is going to be thrown at a lot of walls today in very short order.
Stay frosty!
The Maskirovka Slips XIV: Susan Rice is Once Again Public Enemy #1Post + Comments (435)
Well This is Awkward…
@sarahcpr @justinsink @MajorCBS https://t.co/D0z9TEKWAA
— Kim Caloca (@kcaloca) March 31, 2017
The Maskirovka Slips XIII: A Few Thoughts
In the comments to the Maskirovka Slips XI post, PJ wrote:
Even a Putin critic like Masha Gessen has claimed that Russophobia is behind the allegations connecting Trump with the Russians, and that there’s nothing to see here, folks.
This is a good point to raise and something to keep in mind as everything continues to play out. My guess is that PJ was referencing this article by Gessen at The NY Review of Books. Gessen’s essential thesis is that:
Russia has become the universal rhetorical weapon of American politics. Calls for the release of Trump’s tax returns—which the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hopes to have subpoenaed as a result of its lawsuit alleging the violation of the Emoluments Clause—are now framed in terms of the need to reveal Trump’s financial ties to Russia. And the president himself is recapturing the campaign debate’s “No, you are the puppet” moment on Twitter, trying to smear Democratic politicians Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi with Russia.
The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome.
And that this almost unrelenting focus is obscuring equally, if not more important matters:
Imagine if the same kind of attention could be trained and sustained on other issues—like it has been on the Muslim travel ban. It would not get rid of Trump, but it might mitigate the damage he is causing. Trump is doing nothing less than destroying American democratic institutions and principles by turning the presidency into a profit-making machine for his family, by poisoning political culture with hateful, mendacious, and subliterate rhetoric, by undermining the public sphere with attacks on the press and protesters, and by beginning the real work of dismantling every part of the federal government that exists for any purpose other than waging war. Russiagate is helping him—both by distracting from real, documentable, and documented issues, and by promoting a xenophobic conspiracy theory in the cause of removing a xenophobic conspiracy theorist from office.
Gessen has likely forgotten more about Putin and how he operates than most people will ever know, and I doubt she’s forgotten much if anything. And her concerns and caveats are important to keep in mind going forward. However, I think her concerns, as rooted in her excellent column on autocracy from November 2016, are also missing something: the overwhelming, open source reporting and documentation about the connection between the President, his business the Trump Organization, his children, and both senior and peripheral members of his campaign, his transition, and now his Administration with Russian government officials, Russians connected to Russian Intelligence – formally and informally, Russian oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian Oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin, and people – Russian and non-Russian tied to Russian organized crime.
As I’ve been stating here, and Malcolm Nance has been tweeting and stating on a variety of news platforms:
Nance's Law: Coincidence take allot of planning. https://t.co/OCLwMNN1X8
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) March 5, 2017
And, to quote Ian Fleming, as many have:
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
As Evan McMullin tweeted:
Interesting phenom: without a serious Congressional Russia/Trump investigation, it's been organically crowdsourced to the media and public.
— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) March 25, 2017
While I think it is important to keep Gessen’s concerns in mind, we have significant amounts of circumstantial evidence as a result of open source reporting and documentation. What we don’t have, what we don’t really know, is what the material that the Interagency Counterintelligence (CI) Task Force investigating all of this has. And here, I think, is where some of Gessen’s concerns begin to break down: a lot of the leaking hasn’t been anything that wasn’t either already known in the open source reporting and documentation for those that knew where to look or were looking and/or were intended as warning shots across various people’s bows. For instance, the leaks about Attorney General Sessions were the latter. They were intended to put him on notice that if he tried to muck about with the CI investigation the next shot wouldn’t be for range, it would be for effect. And to his credit, AG Sessions was smart enough to recognize this and recused himself.
As I’ve written here before, several times:
As a national security professional, what I would like to see is the President-elect address the now long standing and ongoing allegations regarding his connection to Russia. If the allegations are spurious, as he and his team have claimed every time they’ve come up, or if there is a straightforward and simple explanation that can be made, he needs to make it. I think a lot of the foreign, defense, and national security policy concerns that many across the political spectrum have with the President-elect’s longstanding policy preferences dating back to 1987 arise from all of the smoke around the claims of Russian connections and interference for Russia’s, not the US’s, not the President-elect’s, interests.
The sooner the President-elect and his team can either provide evidence for why the allegations and rumors are spurious or provide a simple and straightforward explanation for the seeming preference for Russia and the abandonment of the post WW II and post Cold War international order the better.
Unfortunately we’ve reached a point where I’m not sure a straightforward and simple explanation can be made. The circumstantial evidence we’re all able to review from the open source reporting and documentation seems to have obliterated that possibility. Yesterday several of the surviving members of the investigative reporting team that included the late Wayne Barrett provided even greater details and granularity into the Trump Organizations connections to Russian organized crime via Felix Sater and Sater’s ties to the Department of Justice and the FBI, specifically the New York Field Office. Today WNYC reported on some of Paul Manafort’s real estate transactions that appear to follow the same patterns as those done to launder money. These stories broke almost at the same time as Richard Engel’s reporting on Manafort’s financial dealings in Cyprus, USA Today‘s reporting on the Trump Organizations alleged ties to Russian and other state’s organized crime,* The New Yorker‘s multiple reports, and Michael Issikoff’s reporting on the ongoing mess that Congressman Nunes’ actions and statements have made of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This includes functionally shutting the committee down so that the House of Representatives no longer conducts oversight of the US Intelligence Community given that all future business of the committee has now been postponed indefinitely.
For those of us that have been following these things for a while, a lot of this wasn’t new, surprising, or both. And that’s really why I think Gessen’s caveats and concerns are important to keep in mind, but that she is also missing the forest for the trees. There is just too much coincidence here. The US Intelligence Community does not form Interagency Counterintelligence investigations willy nilly. Nor do judges approve FISA warrants for spurious or frivolous reasons. I honestly have no idea where all this will lead. And I do agree with Gessen and others that even if these investigations ultimately demonstrate actual connections and collusions between the President’s campaign and the Russians which given how things have been intertwined under Putin basically includes the Russian government, Russian intelligence, Russian oligarchs, and Russian organized crime, we may not see the resolution that many are hoping for. These connections are all linked together, which also makes unravelling this ball of yarn difficult. Part of the problem going forward is exactly why we have been in a Constitutional crisis for months. It is unclear which, if any, of the institutional protections and remedies that the Constitution delineates actually could be used to resolve what we have been watching slowly unfold since last Summer when the leaks of hacked DNC, DSCC, DCC, and John Podesta emails began to trickle out. If there is nothing to see here, as Gessen attests, then there certainly is a whole lot of a very specific type of nothing** all around the President, his family, his business, his campaign, his transition, and his Administration.
* The Who, What, Why?, USA Today, and WYNC reporting are not actually breaking news. They do provide substantially more details about things that have been previously reported, documented, and/or known.
** And this nothing doesn’t even get into financial ties between the President and PRC state owned banks, which are facially violations of the emoluments clause as a result of the President’s failure to properly and fully divest from his business.
The Maskirovka Slips XIII: A Few ThoughtsPost + Comments (168)
Oy Vey! Transactional Politics Edition
Apparently the President tried to dun Angela Merkel and Germany for what he thinks are Germany’s unpaid NATO dues.
Trump printed out made-up £300bn Nato invoice and handed it to Merkel https://t.co/Q05aA6QVf2
— The Independent (@Independent) March 26, 2017
The Independent reports:
The US President is said to have had an “invoice” printed out outlining the sum estimated by his aides as covering Germany’s unpaid contributions for defence.
Said to be presented during private talks in Washington, the move has been met with criticism from German and Nato officials.
While the figure presented to the Germans was not revealed by either side, Nato countries pledged in 2014 to spend two per cent of their GDP on defence, something only a handful of nations – including the UK, Greece, Poland and Estonia – currently do.
But the bill has been backdated even further to 2002, the year Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, pledged to spend more on defence.
Mr Trump reportedly instructed aides to calculate how much German spending fell below two per cent over the past 12 years, then added interest.
Estimates suggest the total came to £300bn, with official figures citing the shortfall to be around £250bn plus £50bn in interest added on.
As you might imagine this did not go over well with the Germans.
The bill — handed over during private talks in Washington — was described as “outrageous” by one German minister.
“The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister said.
A couple of important points to keep in mind here, which the President and whichever senior advisors he’s listening to on this stuff do not seem to know:
- NATO is not a club. It is an alliance. The US does not own it. None of the member states pay due.
- Each member state has agreed to dedicate at least 2% of their budgets to defense. The vast majority of NATO member states, including Germany, do not meet this pledge. The US and its NATO allies have spent years working on how to resolve them. While it is still not resolved, progress has been made. That progress is now in jeopardy because of a stupid, dominance* politics stunt like this
- There is a very American reason that Germany in particular does not meet its 2% pledge: we taught them not to. That’s right, after WW II as we were working with the Germans to rebuild Germany and then basing significant US forces there during the Cold War, one of the initiatives we spent the most time on was teaching the Germans to think about and use the other, non military forms of National power (diplomatic, information, and economic power). As a result the Germans in 2017 are acculturated and socialized to the concept that they do no need to be and should not be a military power, that they should resort to the use of military power last, and that it should always be through the NATO alliance. We have been very successful in working with the Germans to break the socio-cultural systems that contributed to WW I and WW II so as to keep them from happening again. The downside, if it is one, is that Germany doesn’t get close to its 2% NATO budgetary commitment.
* Just a brief note about these dominance displays from the President and members of his senior staff/some of his senior advisors: if you have to constantly, loudly, and publicly tell everyone that you are tough, you aren’t. What you are is insecure and weak. Chancellor Merkel is the current leader of the free world because the President of the United States has abdicated that responsibility. She’s not scared of the President. The body language during last week’s photo spray in the Oval Office demonstrates that is the case. If anything, it is the other way around. Americans, through the mechanisms of the electoral college, may have decided that it didn’t want a woman as the leader of the free world, but they got that result anyway.
The Maskirovka Slips XI*: Updates to Four Ongoing Components
Three quick updates to our ongoing coverage of Putin’s campaign of active measures, dezinformatziya, kompromat, and cyberwarfare against the US, the EU and its member states, and NATO and its member states.
First up, if you’re going to try for clever keep your mouth shut!
I know that Nunes's Monday testimony was coordinated with WH because top WH official told me, "Watch the predicate that is set" by Nunes.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) March 24, 2017
Additionally Congressman Nunes had not actually seen anything that he talked about at his two press conferences or with the President on Wednesday. He does not actually know what, if anything, was incidentally collected or if anything even was.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, R-Calif., does not know “for sure” whether President Donald Trump or members of his transition team were even on the phone calls or other communications now being cited as partial vindication for the president’s wiretapping claims against the Obama administration, according to a spokesperson.
“He said he’ll have to get all the documents he requested from the [intelligence community] about this before he knows for sure,” a spokesperson for Nunes said Thursday. Nunes was a member of the Trump transition team executive committee.
Nunes *retracts* claim Trump was monitored.
So the only news left is how Nunes acted – not info he claimed to have: https://t.co/Xnwcyuq8vD
— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) March 24, 2017
And that was before he destroyed what was left of his committee this morning.
BREAKING: Chairman just cancelled open Intelligence Committee hearing with Clapper, Brennan and Yates in attempt to choke off public info.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) March 24, 2017
It is important to note that Congressman Schiff is a former Federal prosecutor who has successfully prosecuted an FBI agent who was working for the Russians. He understands counterintelligence and he has successfully prosecuted a criminal case that arose out of a counterintelligence investigation. Congressman Nunes has a masters degree in agricultural science.
Secondly, and still involving the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Paul Manafort wants to come in out of the cold.
Manafort statement on House intel: wants to "provide information voluntarily regarding recent allegations about Russian interference" pic.twitter.com/9kbvL8cF0v
— Tim Mak (@timkmak) March 24, 2017
And now Roger Stone and Carter Page are looking to get a foot in the door to play let’s make a deal!
Roger Stone tells me we wants to voluntarily testify before house intel. And in public. Letter from his lawyer will say that.
— Gloria Borger (@GloriaBorger) March 24, 2017
NEWS: Carter Page willing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee to "set the record straight" on Russia https://t.co/acu0mSMTbv
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 24, 2017
But, you ask, what about LTG Flynn? Surely you couldn’t forget LTG Flynn? No, I have not. Our third entry this Friday afternoon is that LTG Flynn, while working for both the Turkish government as an unregistered foreign agent and the President as his campaign’s national security advisor, proposed kidnapping Fethullah Gulen from his home in Pennsylvania and rendering him back to Turkey – outside of the actual, formal, and required by law extradition process. This is usually referred to as kidnapping. It is also, usually, a crime!
James Woolsey, former CIA director, told me the most amazing story about Mike Flynn and Turkey. https://t.co/Nm8XwViXep
— JamesVGrimaldi (@JamesVGrimaldi) March 24, 2017
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, while serving as an adviser to the Trump campaign, met with top Turkish government ministers and discussed removing a Muslim cleric from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey, according to former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey, who attended, and others who were briefed on the meeting.
The discussion late last summer involved ideas about how to get Fethullah Gulen, a cleric whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed military coup, to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process, according to Mr. Woolsey and those who were briefed.
Mr. Woolsey told The Wall Street Journal he arrived at the meeting in New York on Sept. 19 in the middle of the discussion and found the topic startling and the actions being discussed possibly illegal.
Top-notch reporting from @DailySignal @nolanwpeterson on Russia's targeted aggression against Ukraine this weekhttps://t.co/CPKV5OXGll
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) March 24, 2017
Air-defense systems up in #Belarus. These guys are not preparing for a demonstration.. https://t.co/rc4XmPCOkg
— Petri Mäkelä (@pmakela1) March 24, 2017
One last note: I’ve mentioned in comments a couple of times that all of the open source reporting and documentation is showing more and more penetration and penetration at all levels. This includes conservative organizations such as the NRA. If anyone was wondering how Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and Trump campaign surrogate wound up in Moscow getting a briefing from Russia’s Foreign Ministry, well we now know:
In March 2014, the U.S. government sanctioned Dmitry Rogozin—a hardline deputy to Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia’s defense industry and longtime opponent of American power—in retaliation for the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Eighteen months later, the National Rifle Association, Donald Trump’s most powerful outside ally during the 2016 election, sent a delegation to Moscow that met with him.
The NRA delegation’s 2015 trip to Russia took place the same week, lasting from Dec. 8-13, according to Clarke’s public financial disclosure forms, (PDF), and included not only the people who met with Rogozin but a number of other NRA dignitaries, including donors Dr. Arnold Goldshlager and Hilary Goldschlager, as well as Jim Liberatore, the CEO of the Outdoor Channel.
The Maskirovka Slips XI*: Updates to Four Ongoing ComponentsPost + Comments (319)