George Soros and the “Russian” hackers 7
About that fake “Trump in league with the Russians” story put out by the Democrats to illegitimize this presidency: it seems the Democrats commissioned a crooked cyber company to impersonate Russian hackers.
And what is more, that crooked cyber company has links to none other than the earthly satan, George Soros.
William Craddick writes at Disobedient Media:
The cyber firm Crowdstrike has been one of the main proponents of allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 American presidential elections using their cyber capabilities. The analysis performed by Crowdstrike was relied on almost exclusively by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to establish their claims of “Russian hacking”.
It has subsequently been revealed that Crowdstrike has in the past both misrepresented data in an attempt to frame the Russian governmentfor cyber attacks and also failed to account for known capabilities of third parties which enable them to impersonate Russian hackers.
The founder of Crowdstrike is also tied to the Atlantic Council, a think tank supported by George Soros which has been accused of accepting funds in exchange for support of favored policy positions as well as promoting disinformation and propaganda attacks against anti-establishment figures.
On June 14, 2016, Crowdstrike published a study commissioned by the DNC, in which they accused the Russian government of breaching the DNC’s computer systems. The DNC’s choice to rely on Crowdstrike exclusively was incredibly controversial. CNN reported that the DNC actually refused to grant the FBI access to their servers despite the agency’s explicitly stating that they could conduct a satisfactory investigation if they were forced to rely on third party data. The report by Crowdstrike stood as one of the first definitive authorities which [claimed to have] found evidence of Russian cyber infiltration or electronic meddling in the 2016 elections. Rather than confirm the notion that Russia interfered in American elections, a number of other developments since Crowdstrike’s report have cast increasing doubt on their claims and in fact have suggested that they may be part of a widespread attempt to push disinformation for financial gain and benefit to the groups clients and affiliates.
Alarming indicators that Crowdstrike may have been promoting the idea of “Russian hacking” out of ulterior motives began to emerge almost immediately after their report was released. On July 28th, 2016, The Washington Post reported that Crowdstrike was one of a number of cyber security firms making a large profit thanks to widespread fears about Russian hackers. …
Crowdstrike’s analysis also ignored known capabilities, since publicized by Wikileaks in their Day Zero and Marble releases from the Vault 7 series, … that allow programmers to mask the identity of their malware and masquerade it as belonging to foreign intelligence agencies and mimic their online attack methods. They have also shown that many programmers have the ability to create an appearance of “false attribution” which gives the impression that the malware was created by another country, even mimicking the native language of the host country they intend to attribute the attack to.
On December 22nd, 2016, Crowdstrike ran another report, alleging that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s civil war with Russian-backed separatists. The report was intended to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election. The report was immediately contested by Yaroslav Sherstyuk, maker of the Ukrainian military app in question, who called the company’s report “delusional”.
On March 23rd, 2017, Voice of America(VOA) ran a damning piece, citing British think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) which stated that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. Furthermore, the IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also claimed that the combat losses and hacking never happened, meaning that Crowdstrike had apparently fabricated facts and details in the report completely.
Crowdstrike told VOA that they stood by their findings. But the next day VOA noted that Crowdstrike had altered their report, deleting key assertions they had made in the report about Ukrainian army losses, claims that a malware infection contributed to artillery losses and a link to IISS data which they had cited. The humiliating redactions apparently came after Crowdstrike had spoken with an IISS research associate for defense and military analysis.
The apparent misrepresentation of data which had been intended to support Crowdstrike’s claims of Russian hacking creates serious questions about the merits of their claims that Russia was behind alleged hacks of the DNC’s computer systems earlier that year.
Further investigation has revealed that Crowdstrike has deep ties to a think tank which has a history of pay-to-play practices and a track record of seeking to foment confrontation between the United States and Russia.
Crowdstrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch acts as a Senior Fellow for the Atlantic Council. In February, Disobedient Media reported that the Atlantic Council has a troubling history of taking money from foreign special interest groups and government agencies in return for pushing propaganda to support various initiatives around the globe. …
In May 2016, a report by the Associated Press identified the Atlantic Council as one of a number of think tanks which had received funding from the Ploughshares Fund, which was a major player in efforts to sell the Iranian nuclear deal to the American public. The Ploughshares Fund is financed by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. …
The organization has also promoted unsourced and unfounded claims that Russia was responsible for “hacking” the 2016 U.S. presidential elections despite the fact that this conspiracy theory has been resoundingly debunked by various authorities in the intelligence community and by multiple media sources. The Atlantic Council, unfazed by the evidence that their claims of hacking were false, have continued to promote these falsehoods in the aftermath of the election in what appeared to be a possible effort to undermine American democratic institutions.
The tight relationship between Crowdstrike and a think tank which also has a long track record of promoting unproven claims about Russian hacking, their failure to account for false attribution techniques commonly used by programmers to frame other countries for hacking attacks and their history of making factually untrue and misleading claims about Russian hacking creates concerns about their ability to objectively report on whether or not the DNC’s servers were breached by a foreign actor during the 2016 elections.
Their association with the DNC comes at a time when the party has been attempting to craft a narrative of alleged Russian hacking to support their election bids in the upcoming 2018 U.S. midterm elections and delegitimize the victories of their political opponents in 2016.
The Atlantic Council’s past relationship with George Soros is also problematic given that Soros has deep financial ties to groups organizing resistance movements as part of an attempt to enact regime change in the United States.
As former CIA Director Michael Morell, James Clapper and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have all clearly stated that there is not, nor has ever been any evidence that Russian hacking affected any election results in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, the efforts of Crowdstrike to promote claims to the contrary raises serious questions about their research as well as the intentions of the DNC in preventing neutral federal regulatory agencies from examining their servers firsthand to verify the claims.
So the Democrats paid a gang of known cyber crooks, with a chief who has a history of being paid by George Soros, to fake “evidence” that Russia hacked the 2016 elections in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency.
Such is the murky depth to which the Democrats – and their toady media which spread the fake claims – have sunk.
The Democrats don’t love Russia any more 277
Our anti-Trump media accepted the January 6 report, Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections, because it was designed to convey the impression that Trump was favored by the Russians.
But it is the Democrats who have long enjoyed (if that is the right word) a warm relationship with Russian regimes in both their Soviet Socialist and crony-capitalist mode. At least the Dems wanted to. Whether the Russians ever reciprocated the warm feeling remains a matter of conjecture. Skeptics and Republicans will have one opinion, Democrats and other Leftists another.
We quote from an article by Cliff Kincaid at GOPUSA:
The Russians obtained favored nation trading status under President Obama, giving them access to U.S. capital, and New START, a nuclear weapons agreement giving Moscow a strategic advantage.
Historically, the Russians have always found the Democrats to be friendlier to their global ambitions.
Professor Paul Kengor broke a story on how “the liberals’ lover-boy”, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), had “reached out to Victor Chebrikov at the KGB and Yuri Andropov at the Kremlin” to work against President Ronald Reagan.
Remember that, you who are outraged by the notion – born in your own minds – that President-elect Trump conspired with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in the recent election.
Such a charge [of Trump-Putin conspiracy] was welcomed by the liberal media, in particular because it allowed them to divert attention away from the substance of the WikiLeaks revelations that showed how major journalists worked hand-in-glove with Hillary Clinton-for-president staffers. These disclosures were in emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.
Not even the persons most eager to smear Donald Trump claimed that the scandalous contents of the purloined emails (see here and here) were not true or not genuine. In fact the intelligence report positively states that they are true.
The IC report says that WikiLeaks, an alleged Russian agent, disseminated truthful information. “Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries,” the report says.
This is quite a turnaround for the Russians. In the past the Russians would alter or forge documents to make people look bad. This time, the Russians revealed the truth. … Of course, the Russians do not provide accurate and truthful information to their own people and they conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns targeting foreign audiences. Their alleged illegal hacking into the private accounts of Americans cannot be justified. But Podesta and other Democrats can be criticized for failing to safeguard their own information and virtually inviting foreign hacking.
Russian intentions in allegedly providing the emails to WikiLeaks are a subject worthy of attention. But the conclusion that the Russians favored Trump over Clinton cannot be sustained by the evidence in the report. The IC report fails miserably in articulating how the Russians use dialectical maneuvers in playing both sides of the political street in the U.S.
One of the glaring omissions in the report on Russian interference in “recent elections” is the failure to address the evidence that RT [Russia Today] television was giving enormously favorable coverage in the 2012 presidential campaign to then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), a libertarian with pro-Russia views on foreign policy. He ran in the Republican presidential primary. …
Of course, Obama won that election, after dismissing his Republican opponent Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was a geopolitical threat to the United States. Obama had been caught on an open mic before the election promising to be “flexible” in changing his positions to benefit Russia. These comments provide more evidence that Obama was never the anti-Russian figure he postured as in the final days of his second term. …
Obama’s various federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FCC and the FEC, refused to take any direct action against RT over the years when it was engaging in anti-Republican activities and supporting the progressive movement.
But when they saw they could use RT as a weapon against Trump, they suddenly became concerned about foreign interference in the U.S. political process.
Although the IC report insists that the Russians had a “preference” for Donald J. Trump for president … back in August of 2015 … RT was backing “Bolshevik Bernie” Sanders for president. … Yet the intelligence community report makes no mention of RT programs backing Sanders, whose Russian connections included visiting the Soviet Union on his honeymoon. Sanders was a fellow traveler of the Moscow-controlled U.S. Peace Council.
The focus on Trump runs counter to the stated purpose of the report and reflects the political bias therein. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says that “On December 9, 2016, President Barack Obama directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review and produce a comprehensive intelligence report assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent U.S. elections.” (emphasis added). Yet, nothing is said about RT’s involvement in the 2012 contest that Obama won.
The U.S. Intelligence Community is described as “a coalition of 17 agencies and organizations, including the ODNI,” but only three were involved in the report. They were the CIA, FBI and NSA. It is generally believed that CIA Director John Brennan was the guiding force behind the Obama administration effort to blame the Russians for Trump’s election victory. Former CIA officials Michael Morell, Michael Hayden and Philip Mudd had all denounced Trump. …
It certainly looks as if the CIA interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Perhaps blaming the Russians was an attempt to get the attention off the agency.
Brennan was accused of converting to Islam when he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. His CIA under Obama’s orders directed the shipment of arms to jihadist groups in the Middle East. At a congressional panel on diversity in hiring, he admitted voting Communist when he was in college.
His focus at the agency has been on hiring people with “diverse” backgrounds, such as transgenders, and he even signed a policy document on a “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy” for the years 2016 to 2019, beyond his tenure as director.
Rather than go down in history with a reputation for defending America, … Brennan “would prefer his legacy be the way he fought to nurture a workforce that reflected America’s diversity”. The Journal added, “During his tenure he has put particular emphasis on promoting the interests of gay, lesbian, and transgender officers. He was the first CIA director to attend an annual social gathering of LGBTQ employees and has been known to wear a rainbow lanyard around the office as a symbol of solidarity.”
It looks like the focus on “diversity” in hiring has taken precedence over getting the facts right about foreign threats. Indeed, some observers, such as former FBI agent John Guandolo, have suggested that President Trump should abolish and replace the CIA with a new organization. “In 15 years they haven’t gotten a strategic analysis of the threat right — yet” …
The CIA will have to answer to its new director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Trump’s pick to run the agency.
But the media have a lot to answer for as well.
If WikiLeaks has suddenly became a Russian front or conduit, why are American news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post still included among the “partners” with WikiLeaks in distributing its information? Other partners include the British Guardian, The Intercept, The Nation, McClatchy, The Wall Street Journal, and, of course, RT.
If WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a Russian agent, why did major U.S. media organizations partner with him? Why did they not investigate him …? Assange was considered a courageous whistleblower by the liberal press. They hailed WikiLeaks for releasing the classified documents that were stolen by Army intelligence analyst Bradley/Chelsea Manning, whose sentence for espionage has been shortened by Obama.
Obama has commuted Bradley’s 35 year sentence, allowing the convict to be freed in May 2017 – iniquitously, and in contradiction to his outrage at the Russian interference that he alleges.
In addition to these issues and questions, some parts of the report lend themselves to a far different interpretation of Russian motives in U.S. politics.
For example, the IC report notes that RT ran a story against fracking, a technique that has sparked U.S. oil and gas production. The report says, “RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.”
The 2016 Democratic Party platform is highly critical of fracking. So does this mean the Democrats are doing the bidding of Putin? The progressive movement is almost completely against fracking. Does that mean that the progressives are puppets of Putin? …
By [an] objective measure of actual policies,Trump will prove to be more harmful to Russia than Hillary Clinton could ever hope to be. …
And she surely would not have hoped to be harmful to Russia – not to Russia – when she was still in a position to hope for any effect on international relations. Fortunately, that time has passed.
We had noted RT’s favorable coverage of the Occupy movement. Of course, Occupy Wall Street was a left-wing political movement aligned with the progressives and even encouraged by President Obama. So does this mean that Obama was doing the bidding of the Russians?
The IC report explains how RT bypassed American laws such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act “by using a Moscow-based autonomous nonprofit organization to finance its US operations”. The report goes on, “According to RT’s leadership, this structure was set up to avoid the Foreign Agents Registration Act and to facilitate licensing abroad. In addition, RT rebranded itself in 2008 to deemphasize its Russian origin.” Still, the financing for the channel comes from the Russian government, the report says.
So RT is, and has been, a foreign state-funded entity that should be subject to federal oversight from agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FCC, and the FEC. Yet, only now, after Hillary Clinton has lost the presidential election, has the IC been ordered to release a public report on what the Russian channel has been doing in U.S. elections.
The only thing that has changed over the years is that RT is now somehow considered to be a factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. …
If the liberal media are now truly concerned about Russian influence in the U.S. political process, rather than just using the issue as a weapon against Trump, they should … review their own “partner” relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
After this review is complete, they should take another look at the IC report and determine why and how agencies like the CIA became adjuncts of the Democratic Party with a partisan bias against the new Republican president.
Since we know that the media and the Democrats work hand-in-glove, perhaps it’s time to investigate the CIA’s relationship with the media.
Yes. Tomorrow, January 20, 2017, will be the day when that becomes possible, and sometime soon may it become an active process!
Intelligence disservices 109
What disservice have these four men done to the Intelligence Services of the United States – which they have been in charge of under Obama, the Disserver-in-Chief?:
James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who informed Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular”.
Mike Morell, former Director of the CIA, who helped concoct White House lies to cover-up the horrific treachery that was “Benghazigate”.
John Brennan, Director of the CIA, who defends Islam in this age of a renewed Islamic onslaught on the West.
James Comey, Director of the FBI, who protected Hillary Clinton from prosecution for her many serious crimes.
Have they turned the Intelligence Services into the enemies of the new United States administration? A Democratic Senator and a journalist who “held positions as the Germany bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for Time magazine” and is now with the Brookings Institution, claim that that is what has happened.
Cliff Kincaid writes at Canada Free Press:
Echoing New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning that the intelligence community is out to “get” President-elect Trump, a Brookings Institution expert who served in the Clinton administration says that Trump’s treatment of his spies will “come back to bite him” in the form of “devastating” leaks to the media that will make him look foolish or incompetent.
“Leaking by intelligence officials and analysts is, of course, illegal. The intelligence community doesn’t leak as much as the Pentagon or Congress, but when its reputation is at stake, it can do so to devastating effect,” says Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Benjamin previously served as the principal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on counterterrorism and was embroiled in the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s failure to stop the massacre of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
The Bookings Institution is generously funded by Arab governments.
Benjamin’s article, How Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community will come back to haunt him, did not refute the widely held belief that President Obama’s CIA and its director John Brennan were behind the recent leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times depicting Trump as a Russian puppet. In fact, the implication is that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community will seek further revenge on Trump if he continues to criticize them.
At his recent news conference, in regard to the leaks about his meetings with intelligence officials, Trump noted that “I think it’s pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. I think it’s pretty sad. First of all, it’s illegal. You know, these are classified and certified meetings and reports.”
But it appears that some intelligence officials believe they are above the law and can use illegal leaks to damage an elected President who has been critical of their work product. In the most recent case, CNN and BuzzFeed were leaked a document offering unsubstantiated claims of Trump being sexually compromised by Russian officials. CNN summarized the document; BuzzFeed published the whole thing.
Trump denounced these leaks, with Director of the Office of National Intelligence James Clapper disclosing that he had called Trump about them and had declared his “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press …”. He said that he and Trump “both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security”.
Trump said Clapper “called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated.”
“I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC [Intelligence Community],” Clapper said. However, he did not indicate what investigation, if any, he had conducted to make this determination.
“When something goes wrong — say a military deployment to combat jihadi insurgents in the Middle East blows up in the Trump administration’s face — the press will overflow with stories telling of intelligence reports that were ignored by the White House and briefings the president missed,” Benjamin wrote. Such stories, of course, would be based on illegal leaks.
“Imagine what an aggrieved intel community might do to a genuinely hostile president,” he said. Benjamin’s comments suggest that the intelligence community will use the media to blame Trump for things that go wrong in foreign affairs, in order to protect its own reputation. …
It’s reputation? It’s reputation now, thanks to its own leaders, needs improving, not protecting.
The Brookings expert said, “The CIA is usually one of the very first agencies to establish a relationship with new chief executives, because of the briefings it delivers before elections have even occurred and the beguiling prospect it offers of handling missions quietly and efficiently.”
It’s not clear what he means by this. The Obama CIA’s “covert” arms-running program in Syria has backfired in a big way, provoking a Russian military intervention, the loss of up to 500,000 lives, and a refugee crisis which threatens the future of Europe.
Benjamin speculated that Trump will ask the CIA to organize a covert operation to undermine the regime in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, and that the agency will offer him options that don’t guarantee success and which he may have to reject. He wrote that “…it is an iron law of bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if something goes wrong.”
“The answer from the intel community will never be no,” he said. “Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80 percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining in an otherwise dismal story.”
In short, the CIA will look for excuses not to proceed, and then get back to the business of leaking damaging stories to the press when terrorist incidents and other problems occur.
Is the CIA really the “invisible government” that the so-called “conspiracy theorists” have warned about? Is there a “deep state” that tries to run the government behind-the-scenes?
Here is the video clip – we view it gain and again for the sheer pleasure of it – in which President-elect Trump treats journalists who try to traduce him with the powerful scorn they deserve:
Who are the news fakers? 203
CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”.
Right! President-elect Trump says it as it is. (That’s why he’s been elected president.)
Here’s the story as Cliff Kincaid tells it at GOPUSA, somewhat shortened:
On Tuesday, January 10, … the CIA used CNN to air unsubstantiated …
And completely false …
… charges against [President-elect] Trump.
CNN didn’t delineate the bizarre sexual nature of those charges; that was left to a left-wing “news” organization by the name of BuzzFeed, which posted 35 pages of scurrilous lies and defamation.
Demonstrating the sad state of ethical standards at CNN, Wolf Blitzer hyped the story into “breaking news”, when the allegations had been circulating for months, and Jake Tapper was brought on the air, “joining me with a major story we’re following right now.” Blitzer emphasized, “We’re breaking this story.” It was the beginning of CNN regurgitating what President-elect Trump called “fake news”.
What followed was a low point in Tapper’s career, as he willingly participated in a ginned-up controversy using anonymous sources to report on “information” about Trump that started falling apart shortly after CNN aired its “breaking news”.
“That’s right, Wolf, a CNN exclusive,” said Tapper, apparently unaware that he was recycling a document that had been passed around for months. It was CNN, which uses former CIA official Michael Morell as an on-air contributor, that ran with it. Morell has worked for Beacon Global Strategies, a firm founded by former Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines, since November 2013.
Trying to distance himself from the controversy, Morell went on CNN to refer to some of the information as “unverified” in the “private document”.
But the damage had already been done, and Morell knew it. CNN had manufactured a controversy over Trump yet again …
Ironically, CNN is a “partner” in an effort known as the First Draft Coalition that is dedicated “to improving practices in the ethical sourcing, verification and reporting of stories that emerge online”.
Sure it is. It’s the ethical way. Same way Saudi Arabia heads a Human Rights agency of the UN.
“CNN has learned that the nation’s top intelligence officials gave information to President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump,” said Tapper. “The information was provided as part of last week’s classified intelligence briefings regarding Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections.”
Trying to pump up the “claims”, Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent for CNN, said, “To be clear, this has been an enormous team effort by my colleagues here and others at CNN.”
A team effort to verify what? It looks like they were handed a 35-page document from the CIA and decided to publicize it. They failed to reveal the details precisely because they could not verify the document.
Sciutto said, “Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN that classified documents on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election presented last week to President Obama and to President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” …
Later, Tapper said the charges were “uncorroborated as of now”, indicating that they might be confirmed by somebody at some time in the future. There was “no proof” of the claims but “confidence by intelligence officials that the Russians are claiming this”. …
CNN was reporting “news”, since a two-page CIA summary of this dirt was attached to a classified CIA report on Russian hacking and election influence that was given to Trump … But it was “fake” in the sense that CNN had no way of knowing if the charges had been completely made up.
On this basis, the story could and should have turned against the Intelligence Community, with reporters asking why unverified information had been used against Trump and whether this was retaliation for his criticism [of the “Intelligence Community”]. But this course of action by CNN would make it impossible for CNN reporters to go back to these same sources for scurrilous information and false charges in the future. This fact makes it abundantly clear that the news organization was being used by anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community, most likely the CIA.
Since CNN likes anonymous sources, I will use one of my own. “This is a classic CIA blackmail operation where the CIA under Director John Brennan uses someone else’s dirt for the blackmail, and postures themselves as ‘innocent’ in presenting it to Trump,” one observer of the Intelligence Community told me. This is certainly the real story — that an intelligence agency run by Obama’s CIA director would use an American television network to attack the President-elect with scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges. …
Is America a constitutional republic ruled by the people through their elected representatives? Or do the intelligence agencies rule America and try to blackmail our leaders?
The President-elect said it would be “a tremendous blot” on the record of the Intelligence Community if they did in fact release the document to the media. At another point, he said, “I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false” get released in that fashion to CNN and BuzzFeed.
CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”.
The intelligence chiefs are being unintelligent. The media people who are continuing to malign and antagonize President-elect Trump are being foolish.
Thing is, “gentlemen” and “ladies” of the fourth estate, if you like your toadying you can keep your toadying – only change the object of it from crushed Clinton to triumphant Trump. It’s the smart thing to do. If you can’t change your nature, change your idol. Serve your own interest. Be nice where the power lies.
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Post Script: Republican Senator John McCain, who has great guts but little brain, has admitted it was he who gave the FBI the fake dossier that smeared Donald Trump.
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Post Post Script: Newsmax reports that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer posted in Britain’s Moscow embassy in 1990, is the author of the controversial dossier on President-elect Donald Trump. He now runs the private Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. in London. He reportedly prepared the dossier on Trump at the request of Republicans running against him in the presidential primaries and later by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was obtained by a former British ambassador, who forwarded it to Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain last year, who passed it along to the FBI. Steele, fearing anger over the matter by Russia, has fled his London home. Though he is no longer a British agent and compiled the dossier for his private company, the U.K. government was nonetheless concerned the matter could damage relations with the incoming administration, and British security services attempted to block news agencies from reporting Steele’s name.