How an Internet ‘Persona’ Helped Birth Russiagate
By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | June 15, 2020
Four years ago today, on June 15, 2016, a shadowy Internet persona calling itself “Guccifer 2.0” appeared out of nowhere to claim credit for hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee on behalf of WikiLeaks and implicate Russia by dropping “telltale” but synthetically produced Russian “breadcrumbs” in his metadata.
Thanks largely to the corporate media, the highly damaging story actually found in those DNC emails — namely, that the DNC had stacked the cards against Bernie Sanders in the party’s 2016 primary— was successfully obscured.
The media was the message; and the message was that Russia had used G-2.0 to hack into the DNC, interfering in the November 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.
Almost everybody still “knows” that — from the man or woman in the street to the forlorn super sleuth, Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, who actually based indictments of Russian intelligence officers on Guccifer 2.0.
Blaming Russia was a magnificent distraction from the start and quickly became the vogue.
The soil had already been cultivated for “Russiagate” by Democratic PR gems like Donald Trump “kissing up” to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and their “bromance” (bromides that former President Barack Obama is still using). Four years ago today, “Russian meddling” was off and running — on steroids — acquiring far more faux-reality than the evanescent Guccifer 2.0 persona is likely to get.
Here’s how it went down:
1 — June 12: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced he had “emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”
2 — June 14: DNC contractor CrowdStrike tells the media that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
3 — June 15: Guccifer 2.0 arises from nowhere; affirms the DNC/CrowdStrike allegations of the day before; claims responsibility for hacking the DNC; claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that forensic examination shows was deliberately tainted with “Russian fingerprints.” This to “corroborate” claims made by CrowdStrike executives the day before.
Adding to other signs of fakery, there is hard evidence that G-2.0 was operating mostly in U.S. time zones and with local settings peculiar to a device configured for use within the U.S., as Tim Leonard reports here and here.)
Leonard is a software developer who started to catalog and archive evidence related to Guccifer 2.0 in 2017 and has issued detailed reports on digital forensic discoveries made by various independent researchers — as well as his own — over the past three years. Leonard points out that WikiLeaks said it did not use any of the emails G2.0 sent it, though it later published similar emails, opening the possibility that whoever created G2.0 knew what WikiLeaks had and sent it duplicates with the Russian fingerprints.
As Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) told President Trump in a memorandum of July 24, 2017, titled “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?”:
“We do not think that the June 12, 14, & 15 timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it suggests the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been ready to publish and to ‘show’ that it came from a Russian hack.”
We added this about Guccifer 2.0 at the time:
“The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original ‘Guccifer 2.0’ material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any sign that the ‘hand-picked analysts’ from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the misnomered ‘Intelligence Community’ Assessment dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.”
Guccifer 2.0 Seen As a Fraud
In our July 24, 2017 memorandum we also told President Trump that independent cyber investigators and VIPS had determined “that the purported ‘hack’ of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else. Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider. Information was leaked to implicate Russia. We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI.” [Emphasis added.].
Right. Ask the FBI. At this stage, President Trump might have better luck asking Attorney General William Barr, to whom the FBI is accountable — at least in theory. As for Barr, VIPS informed him in a June 5, 2020 memorandum that the head of CrowdStrike had admitted under oath on Dec. 5, 2017 that CrowdStrike has no concrete evidence that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016 were hacked — by Russia or by anyone else. [Emphasis added.] This important revelation has so far escaped attention in the Russia-Russia-Russia “mainstream” media (surprise, surprise, surprise!).
Back to the Birth of G-2
It boggles the mind that so few Americans could see Russiagate for the farce it was. Most of the blame, I suppose, rests on a thoroughly complicit Establishment media. Recall: Assange’s announcement on June 12, 2016 that he had Hillary Clinton-related emails came just six weeks before the Democratic convention. I could almost hear the cry go up from the DNC: Houston, We Have a Problem!
Clinton at the 2016 convention. (Wikimedia Commons)
Here’s how bad the problem for the Democrats was. The DNC emails eventually published by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just three days before the Democratic convention, had been stolen on May 23 and 25. This would have given the DNC time to learn that the stolen material included documents showing how the DNC and Clinton campaign had manipulated the primaries and created a host of other indignities, such that Sanders’ chances of winning the nomination amounted to those of a snowball’s chance in the netherworld.
To say this was an embarrassment would be the understatement of 2016. Worse still, given the documentary nature of the emails and WikiLeaks’ enviable track record for accuracy, there would be no way to challenge their authenticity. Nevertheless, with the media in full support of the DNC and Clinton, however, it turned out to be a piece of cake to divert attention from the content of the emails to the “act of war” (per John McCain) that the Russian “cyber attack” was said to represent.
The outcome speaks as much to the lack of sophistication on the part of American TV watchers, as it does to the sophistication of the Democrats-media complicity and cover-up. How come so few could figure out what was going down?
It was not hard for some experienced observers to sniff a rat. Among the first to speak out was fellow Consortium News columnist Patrick Lawrence, who immediately saw through the Magnificent Diversion. I do not know if he fancies duck hunting, but he shot the Russiagate canard quite dead — well before the Democratic convention was over.
Magnificent Diversion
Patrick Lawrence
In late July 2016, Lawrence was sickened, as he watched what he immediately recognized as a well planned, highly significant deflection. The Clinton-friendly media was excoriating Russia for “hacking” DNC emails and was glossing over what the emails showed; namely, that the Clinton Dems had pretty much stolen the nomination from Sanders.
It was already clear even then that the Democrats, with invaluable help from intelligence leaks and other prepping to the media, had made good use of those six weeks between Assange’s announcement that he had emails “related to Hillary Clinton” and the opening of the convention.
The media was primed to castigate the Russians for “hacking,” while taking a prime role in the deflection. It was a liminal event of historic significance, as we now know. The “Magnificent Diversion” worked like a charm — and then it grew like Topsy.
Lawrence said he had “fire in the belly” on the morning of July 25 as the Democratic convention began and wrote what follows pretty much “in one long, furious exhale” within 12 hours of when the media started really pushing the “the Russians-did-it” narrative.
Below is a slightly shortened text of his article:
“Now wait a minute, all you upper-case “D” Democrats. A flood light suddenly shines on your party apparatus, revealing its grossly corrupt machinations to fix the primary process and sink the Sanders campaign, and within a day you are on about the evil Russians having hacked into your computers to sabotage our elections …
Is this a joke? Are you kidding? Is nothing beneath your dignity? Is this how lowly you rate the intelligence of American voters? …
Clowns. Subversives. Do you know who you remind me of? I will tell you: Nixon, in his famously red-baiting campaign — a disgusting episode — … during his first run for the Senate, in 1950. Your political tricks are as transparent and anti-democratic as his, it is perfectly fair to say.
I confess to a heated reaction to events since last Friday [July 22] among the Democrats, specifically in the Democratic National Committee. I should briefly explain …
The Sanders people have long charged that the DNC has had its fingers on the scale, as one of them put it the other day, in favor of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. The prints were everywhere — many those of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has repeatedly been accused of anti-Sanders bias. Schultz, do not forget, co-chaired Clinton’s 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. That would be enough to disqualify her as the DNC’s chair in any society that takes ethics seriously, but it is not enough in our great country. Chairwoman she has been for the past five years.
Last Friday WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 DNC email messages providing abundant proof that Sanders and his staff were right all along. The worst of these, involving senior DNC officers, proposed Nixon-esque smears having to do with everything from ineptitude within the Sanders campaign to Sanders as a Jew in name only and an atheist by conviction.
Wasserman fell from grace on Monday. Other than this, Democrats from President Obama to Clinton and numerous others atop the party’s power structure have had nothing to say, as in nothing, about this unforgivable breach.They have, rather, been full of praise for Wasserman Schultz. Brad Marshall, the D.N.C.’s chief financial officer, now tries to deny that his Jew-baiting remark referred to Sanders. Good luck, Brad: Bernie is the only Jew in the room.
The caker came on Sunday, when Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and … CNN’s “State of the Union” to assert that the D.N.C.’s mail was hacked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” He knows this — knows it in a matter of 24 hours — because “experts” — experts he will never name — have told him so. …
What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.
Is that what disturbs you, Robby? Interesting. Unsubstantiated hocus-pocus, not the implications of these events for the integrity of Democratic nominations and the American political process? The latter is the more pressing topic, Robby. You are far too long on anonymous experts for my taste, Robby. And what kind of expert, now that I think of it, is able to report to you as to the intentions of Russian hackers — assuming for a sec that this concocted narrative has substance?
Making lemonade out of a lemon, the Clinton campaign now goes for a twofer. Watch as it advances the Russians-did-it thesis on the basis of nothing, then shoots the messenger, then associates Trump with its own mess — and, finally, gets to ignore the nature of its transgression (which any paying-attention person must consider grave).
Preposterous, readers. Join me, please, in having absolutely none of it. There is no “Russian actor” at the bottom of this swamp, to put my position bluntly. You will never, ever be offered persuasive evidence otherwise.
Reluctantly, I credit the Clinton campaign and the DNC with reading American paranoia well enough such that they may make this junk stick. In a clear sign the entire crowd-control machine is up and running, The New York Times had a long, unprofessional piece about Russian culprits in its Monday editions. It followed Mook’s lead faithfully: not one properly supported fact, not one identified “expert,” and more conditional verbs than you’ve had hot dinners — everything cast as “could,” “might,” “appears,” “would,” “seems,” “may.” Nothing, once again, as to the very serious implications of this affair for the American political process.
Now comes the law. The FBI just announced that it will investigate — no, not the DNC’s fraudulent practices (which surely breach statutes), but “those who pose a threat in cyberspace.” … it is the invocation of the Russians that sends me over the edge. My bones grow weary …
We must take the last few days’ events as a signal of what Clinton’s policy toward Russia will look like should she prevail in November. … Turning her party’s latest disgrace into an occasion for another round of Russophobia is mere preface, but in it you can read her commitment to the new crusade.
Trump, to make this work, must be blamed for his willingness to negotiate with Moscow. This is now among his sins. Got that? Anyone who says he will talk to the Russians has transgressed the American code. … Does this not make Hillary Clinton more than a touch Nixonian?
I am developing nitrogen bends from watching the American political spectacle. One can hardly tell up from down. Which way for a breath of air?”
A year later Lawrence interviewed several of us VIPS, including our two former NSA technical directors and on Aug. 9, 2017 published an article for The Nation titled, “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.”
Lawrence wrote, “Former NSA experts, now members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.”
And so it was. But, sadly, that cut across the grain of the acceptable Russia-gate narrative at The Nation at the time. Its staff, seriously struck by the HWHW (Hillary Would Have Won) virus, rose up in rebellion. A short time later, there was no more room at The Nation for his independent-minded writing.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst included preparing and briefing The President’s Daily Brief and leading the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Cut Overseas Police Training Programs
Photograph Source: Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States – CC BY-SA 2.0
By Jeremy Kuzmarov | CounterPunch | June 15, 2020
The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has ignited protests across the United States and calls to demilitarize and defund the police.
A similar demand should be made to cut overseas police training programs including in Afghanistan.
The U.S. government has long adopted overseas police training as a cornerstone of nation building and counterinsurgency programs.
The idea is that American police will instill professional and democratic standards, including a respect for civil liberties among foreign counterparts and help stabilize violence prone countries.
The Floyd killing has exposed, however, that American police lack professional and humane standards and need to be retrained and reformed. They are ill suited to improve other countries’ police.
In Afghanistan, where the U.S. has spent an estimated $87 billion dollars over nineteen years training security forces, the police are notorious for corruption, sectarianism, incompetence and brutality.
In an interview quoted in the Afghanistan Papers, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said that Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan.
This latter outcome resulted in part from the militarized tactics promoted by American advisers and their importation of police technologies which could be used for repressive ends.
In Honduras, where the U.S. expanded police aid following a 2009 coup d’états that ousted the mildly progressive José Manuel Zelaya, American trained units have been implicated in torture and drug related corruption, and carried out predawn raids of activists involved in protesting contested elections.
These units were trained under an initiative promoted by President Obama and extended by Trump that provided hundreds of millions of dollars for law enforcement training and assistance, mostly under the War on Drugs.
In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration created the United States Agency for International Development’s infamous Office of Public Safety (OPS), to modernize the police forces in countries considered vulnerable to communist subversion.
Headed by CIA agent Byron Engle, who combined a deep commitment to civilian police work with an appreciation for the darker areas of political police intelligence, the OPS initially employed liberal reformers.
As political policing gained primacy, however, OPS agents became contemptuous of human rights and imported policing technologies that were used to hunt down dissidents and violently quell protests.
Charles Maechling Jr., staff director of the Special Group on Counterinsurgency under Kennedy, acknowledged that in failing to “insist on even rudimentary standards of criminal justice and civil rights, the United States provided regimes having only a façade of constitutional safeguards with up-dated law enforcement machinery readily adaptable to political intimidation and state terrorism. Record keeping in particular was immediately put to use tracking down student radicals and union organizers.”
By 1973, the OPS was abolished by Congress because of its connection to torture carried out by U.S. trained police forces in South Vietnam and Brazil.
Many OPS veterans subsequently returned to work for police forces back in the U.S., where some continued to promote tactics that encouraged police abuse, including in the suppression of urban riots.
Unfortunately, there is a long pattern of abuse in American police forces, that overseas police programs have helped to compound.
As momentum grows for a transformation of the police, activists should be demanding an end to the practice of exporting police repression and a change to the American approach towards foreign policy more broadly.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (Monthly Review Press, 2018) and Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting for the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019).
The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest
“Warning shots will not be fired”
By Larry Romanoff – Global Research – November 27, 2019
Preparing For Civil War?
US authorities have for decades become increasingly prepared for mass civil disturbances resulting from government and corporate attacks on American society. We can recall that in the early 1980s the Hidden State launched its open war on the middle class by the savage FED-induced recession and the unilateral revocation of the social contract that had existed since 1946. At that time, the US government had already anticipated widespread public unrest, fully expecting mass protests and riots, and had made preparations to deal with them in the form of internment camps. In a real sense, the government had prepared for another civil war.
Like most of the “Great Transformation”, it began during Reagan’s reign with what was called “Rex 84”, an abbreviation for Readiness Exercise 1984, a plan by the US government to detain large numbers of American citizens in case of civil unrest. This master plan involved the FBI, Department of Defense, the Emergency Measures group, the Secret Service, the CIA and altogether 34 government agencies.
It was presented as an exercise to test military assistance in civil defense in times of national emergency, but in fact the plan was anticipating civil disturbances, major demonstrations and labor strikes that would affect continuity of government. The anticipated civil unrest from the FED-induced financial crisis that devastated the middle class was considered “subversive”, REX-84 being an authorisation for the US military to implement government-controlled movements of civilian populations at both state and regional levels, the arrest of many segments of the American population, and the imposition of martial law. (1) (2)
The Rex-84 program was created under the pretense of a possible mass exodus of illegal aliens attempting to cross into the US from Mexico, but when the program accidentally became public during the Iran-Contra Congressional hearings in 1987 it was revealed that it was in fact a secret federal government program
“to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, assign military commanders to take over state and local governments, and detain large numbers of American citizens determined by the government to be ‘national security threats’.”
This was part of a master contingency plan for which the FBI today has a primary list of more than 100,000 Americans, and a secondary list ten times larger, who are targeted to be rounded up as subversives, including labor leaders, scholars and public figures, the incarceration designed to isolate political dissidents and to contain civil unrest.
And these are prison camps, ringed with fences, barbed wire and armed guards, not places from which escape would be likely, and they were designed to hold Americans, not Mexicans. (3)
There is no question the US government is prepared for the possibility of widespread and uncontrollable domestic disorder. This program in place and building for years was encouraged by fears of a massive public uprising in the wake of the 2008 banking fraud.
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said some years ago that concentration camps were a likely future reality for Americans and that the Supreme Court would not do anything about the tyranny should the executive branch think it necessary. He mentioned the World War II internment of Japanese in the US and said of these camps,
“you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again”. (4) (5)
In 2009, as the US financial crisis deepened and concern about public unrest was increasing, the US National Guard was posting job opportunities for “Internment/Resettlement Specialists” to work in “civilian internee camps” within the United States, and Halliburton [former] subsidiary KBR was seeking subcontractors to staff “emergency environment” camps located in five regions of the US. Earlier, in 2006, KBR was contracted by Homeland Security to build detention centers designed to deal with “the rapid development of unspecified “new programs” that would require large numbers of people to be interned.” (6) (7)
The US has for many years been dangerously close to a situation where, if the American people take to the streets in protest, these internments can be easily carried out. By 2004, there were more than 800 of these internment camps in the US, all empty, but all fully operational, staffed, and surrounded by full-time guards, ready to receive prisoners. I have seen photos. As well, many military bases are slated to be closed down and used as extra civilian prisons if the need arises, all intended for the internment of dissidents and others deemed “potentially harmful to the state”. Some camps can each hold 20,000 or more prisoners, a massive effort at civilian population control, and the program is still expanding. The US is very near the point today where political dissidents questioning the actions of their government will risk being rounded up and forced into these prison camps, essentially a government plan to forcibly suppress political dissent under the guise of rooting out domestic “terrorism”.
The US government defines many Americans as having become “pre-revolutionary” from their outrage at the 2008 government-approved housing collapse, with increasing concern that massive civil unrest would emerge from both the poverty-stricken lower classes and the eviscerated middle class, leading to what would become an internal civil war. This is the reason that the FBI and DHS increasingly focus their “anti-terror” apparatus on white middle-class Americans like the Occupy Wall Street protestors who were categorised as “low-level terrorists”.
In 2008, the Washington Post reported government plans to station many tens of thousands of troops inside the country for purposes referred to as “domestic security” in the light of massive civil unrest that would follow an economic collapse or serious financial crisis, perhaps stemming from 2008.
According to the government document,
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security”,
stating that the military may be needed to quell “purposeful domestic resistance”. To prepare for this quelling of resistance, the US has resorted to demonising its own citizens, a recent study funded by DHS conveniently identifying those Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and who exhibit signs of being “reverent of individual liberty”, and re-categorising them as “extreme right-wing” terrorists. (8) (9) (10)
The program is designed to “reduce and eliminate” all domestic resistance to the US government. “Crowd control agents” will be used for this purpose, and government agencies will be involved in “gathering information on dissidents” to identify all those who have either “threatened or are creating disturbances”. The US military produced a manual on what it termed “Civil Disturbance Operations” that outlines how military assets will be used to “help local and state authorities to restore and maintain law and order” in the event of mass riots and civil unrest. Military and other law-enforcement will be tasked with “breaking up unauthorized gatherings” and restoring order by
“presenting a show of force, establishing roadblocks, breaking up crowds, employing crowd control agents, and other operations as required”.
The same government manual describes how prisoners will be processed through these internment camps, and outlines how these internees would be “re-educated” while detained in prison camps inside their own country by their own government. A leaked military document titled ‘FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations’, outlined a program for “re-education camps” in the US which contained plans for “political activists” to be “pacified” by various psychological officers into “sympathising” with the government and into “developing an appreciation of US policies” while detained in prison camps inside the US. The document was restricted to Department of Defense personnel but was been leaked and posted online. It outlined policies for “processing detainees into internment camps” and made clear these operations would be used for domestic civilian situations. (11) (12) The full document is available here: (13)
“Once the detainees have been processed into the internment camp, the manual explains how they will be “indoctrinated”, with a particular focus on coercing political dissidents into expressing support for U.S. policies.”
Part of the stated role of the psychological officers would be to identify political activists, political leaders, ‘malcontents’, and other agitators, and to develop and execute appropriate
“indoctrination programs to reduce or remove antagonistic attitudes”.
However, their first task would be to “pacify and acclimate detainees to accept the internment facility’s authority and regulations”.
There are also disturbing insights into the government’s intention to use brutal force to violently quell any civil political unrest. The manual includes a long list of weapons meant to be used against protesting American civilians, including anti-riot grenades. Page 20 of the manual authorises the use of “deadly force” in confronting these peaceful political “dissidents”, the murderous intent made disturbingly clear with the directive that “Warning shots will not be fired” first. Northcom itself, in a September 8, 2008 Army Times article, said the first wave of the deployment, which was put in place on October 1st at Fort Stewart and at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, would be aimed at tackling “civil unrest and crowd control”.
In November of 2013, Forbes Magazine ran an article based on the AP newswire, detailing that DHS had been assembling a massive weapons arsenal since 2011 or 2012. (14) The AP reported that Homeland Security had been stockpiling ammunition by buying more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition in addition to a prior purchase of 1.5 billion rounds, for a staggering total of more than three billion rounds. This is more ammunition than the US military used collectively in all its wars in the last decade, and represents about ten shots for every man, woman and child in America. There were also confirmed purchases by various government agencies, of hundreds of millions of hollow-point rounds to be delivered to dozens of locations around the US. These bullets are so lethal they are banned for battlefield use during wars because they mushroom and fragment on impact, their only purpose being to cause the maximum possible damage to internal organs. Also purchased were large numbers of magnum rounds with the power to penetrate walls, and a frightening hundreds of millions more rounds of specialty sniper ammunition.
Even more, it was reported in early 2015 that DHS had placed orders for massive amounts of other kinds of anti-civilian weaponry termed “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions”, which were described as “an arsenal of specialized weaponry for training and deployment against crowds”. These included flash grenades, light bursts, gas and chemical grenades, riot rounds, rubber bullets, and much more. These are all heavy-duty crowd control and civilian intimidation weapons. They have no other purpose and, in the volume in which they are being purchased, it is clear the US government is expecting some very serious civil disturbances, possibly a revolution, and soon.
As recently as 2018, Forbes was reporting more of the same, that these purchases have reached an astonishing ubiquity. It isn’t only Homeland Security who is arming to the teeth. Thousands of agents at the IRS now have tactical assault rifles and heavy weaponry.
Screenshot Forbes, October 20, 2017
The Small Business Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs have purchased thousands of Glock handguns. The Health Services agencies purchased millions of dollars worth of Glock handguns – equipped with silencers. The US Geological Survey, which is a weather bureau, purchased millions of dollars worth of Winchester Black Shadow shotguns with large bulk ammunition orders in addition to Glock handguns. Even the Department of Education purchased millions of dollars worth of Glock handguns, shotguns and body armor. I am unaware of any nation in the world where the income tax department or the departments of education and health care require huge amounts of military-grade weapons, much less body armor and gun silencers.
In June of 2016, RT reported that non-military federal agencies had more firepower than the entire US Marine Corps, this including agencies like education, health and income tax. (15) RT documented, a new report where 67 non-military federal US agencies spent $1.50 billion purchasing guns, ammunition and military-style equipment. The details came from the Militarization of America: non-military federal agencies purchases of guns, ammo, and military-style equipment, published by the non-profit good government group OpentheBooks.com. (16) (17)
In addition to the massive purchase of ammunition, DHS was showing off its acquisition of heavily armored and mine-resistant personnel carriers which have been seen on streets all across America and verified with photos and video. Forbes noted that these vehicles are equipped with gun ports and are “designed to withstand IEDs, mine blasts and 50 caliber hits to bullet-proof glass”, and asked why they would be necessary on American streets. The DHS also purchased large amounts of riot gear and bullet-proof checkpoint booths, as well as a purchase of 7000 automatic rifles, and 2700 armored vehicles, and the deployment of drones with allowance for their use on US citizens.
The DHS is becoming a massive domestic army to handle domestic conflict. In the words of Ellen Brown,
“somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest …”
DHS chief Janet Napolitano claimed this was to prepare for a mass influx of immigrants into the United States that would require the “shelter and processing” of large numbers of people, but this is nonsense. By whom will the US be attacked that Homeland Security would be responsible for defense, and from where would arise a mass of peaceful immigrants so large as to require more than three billion bullets to repel them?
This is the same government that recently shut down many of its operations including most of the National Parks, for lack of funds, yet had sufficient money to purchase billions of bullets for a non-existent civilian army. A spokesperson was quoted as justifying this massive purchase to “help the government get a low price for a big purchase”, and claimed DHS used “as many as 15 million rounds every year in training exercises”. Someone should ask DHS to divide 3 billion by 15 million, which tells us the ammunition purchase will supply DHS needs for the next 200 years. The authorities naturally attribute criticism and hard questions to mentally-unbalanced ‘conspiracy theorists’, but this is one more instance where actions appear irrational and the official story is so full of holes that it makes no sense.
Another DHS purchase that produced a firestorm of anger when its news went viral, was the supply of what we might call ‘unconventional’ paper targets which were used as practice shooting targets in ‘training exercises’. These targets consisted of figures of American civilians in residential settings. They included small children, a young pregnant mother, old women in robes, grandmothers and grandfathers in their kitchens and front yards, teenagers in parks, little girls and more, perhaps the most frightening part being that all these were termed “no hesitation targets”, meaning to fire without hesitation at the sight of these enemies. What could possibly justify the supply of such targets to a military force, with such an instruction? The US fedbiz.op website took down the solicitation after Infowars broke the story, and eventually apologized publicly for creating these targets of small children.
In early 2014 it was reported that the US military had built a $100 million fake city of about 300 acres in Virginia, for use in training troops for the occupation of cities, complete with a sports stadium, bank, school, and an underground subway in order to train for future combat scenarios in American urban areas. The subway carriages even carry the same logo as those in Washington DC. More disturbingly, it was reported that
“soldiers are being taught that Christians, Tea Party supporters and anti-abortion activists represent a radical terror threat, mirroring rhetoric backed by the Department of Homeland Security which frames “liberty lovers” as domestic extremists.”
The DHS is also building a 176-acre secure compound in the lowest-income area of Washington, DC, which seems almost certainly a preparation for civil war. (18) (19)
The trigger could be an economic collapse that causes angry Americans to flood the streets similar to the Occupy Wall Street and other scenes witnessed across both the US and Europe during the last FED-induced economic crisis. It is worth noting that the Occupy Wall Street protest had the right idea but the wrong target. Wall Street is just an idea, and a bit player. The ultimate cause is the FED, and that should have been their focus. But the FED, the bankers and the FBI saw this coming and infiltrated and financed the protest groups as a way to take control and deflect them from any useful action or focus.
In the middle of 2013 several US local media reported the DHS was conducting widely public but still “top secret” exercises categorised as “full scale terrorism drills” across the entire nation with the stated purpose of making citizens “feel safe”, but which resulted in thousands of terrified people not knowing how to respond to what appeared as a domestic invasion by the US military. People were capriciously apprehended and released after having their belongings searched, but nevertheless urged to celebrate their “independence” from tyranny. These drills were presented as readiness training for potential terrorist incursions, though DHS failed to mention the New York Times observation that all the domestic terror plots in the United States over the last decade were “hatched by the FBI”.
One other worrying development was the appearance of US military C-130 cargo planes apparently spraying mosquitoes over various Florida cities at an altitude of less than 50 meters. Pest control is hardly a military duty, these events immediately reminding me of the US military spraying bacterial and other pathogens over many parts of the US in various CIA-related experiments on the domestic population. These low-altitude overflights are almost certainly practice runs for potential crowd control in the future, for dispensing tear gas or other non-lethal (or lethal) material that would disperse or disorient protestors. I cannot imagine all the possibilities, but the US military most certainly is not going into the mosquito-spraying business. (19) (20)
US Major General Curry was quoted as stating,
“We have local police, backed up by each state’s National Guard, backed up by the Department of Defense. So in addition to all these forces why does Homeland Security need its own private army? Why do the SSA, NOAA and other government agencies need to create their own civilian security forces armed with hollow nose bullets?”
Some may want to dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory, but we might recall the words of Senator Daniel Inouye in 1987,
“There exists a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.”
The threats to civil liberties go much farther and are much more ominous than I’ve related so far. Another factor is the spate of secret Executive Orders that Obama signed without Congressional approval, observers claiming those orders violated existing laws and were therefore illegal but that the powers behind the White House considered themselves above all law. One of the most sinister was Executive Order 13603 which granted authorization to seize possession of every possible resource, including property and “all food storage facilities”. One author wrote that “This extremist, maniacal edict is designed to enforce our submission, rendering us totally dependent on Big Brother government or face the obvious – starvation and extermination.”
What could possibly have instigated such an order, unless the government is preparing for an all-out war against the American people? What possible excuse, during peace-time, would a “democratic” government have, for the initiation of a program to seize all the “food, water and food storage facilities” of a nation? If we add these to the internment camps and the bullets, what conclusions are possible?
Another ominous threat is that much of the NSA’s illegal intelligence-gathering activities were transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, the same people with the 800 internment camps and the 3 billion bullets. The apparent reason is that the NSA can collect information on domestic political dissidents but has no police powers to act on them, whereas DHS has legislative authority to gather, arrest and incarcerate anyone on their watch lists. DHS is apparently creating a “graded list” of these targeted so-called “security threats”, with those at the top of this list assessed according to how widely disseminated are their anti-establishment views, the followers they appear to have, and these will be the first to disappear into the internment maze. This new policy gives Homeland Security full authority to effectively terrorise the American people under a pretense of controlling domestic terrorism. When we consider these two items, Executive Order 13603 and the new powers granted to DHS, the only possible response can be fear.
If all this isn’t enough, DHS was revealed to have a secret procedure for the instant shutting down of all private communications in America, including mobile phone networks, a program accidentally revealed when government officials in San Francisco disabled all mobile phone calls during a peaceful protest against yet another man shot dead by the police. The administration insisted it had the legal authority to control these communications “during times of national crisis”, “for the purpose of ensuring public safety”, but it has also given DHS the power to actually “seize” all privately-owned communications facilities in order to prevent any civilian communications occurring. Some individuals applied to the courts for further information on these new procedures and policies, but DHS claimed it was “unable to locate or identify any records” in relation to the matter. Nothing more to be said, but it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the US government is quickly becoming fully prepared for war against its civilian population.
With the NSA revelations by Edward Snowdon, there is no longer any question that many US government agencies have been monitoring and gathering information on large numbers of known American political dissidents, these agencies including the NSA, FBI, CIA, DHS, various military groups and another 70 or 80 so-called “public-private fusion centers” scattered around the US. Former NSA Technical Director William Binney claimed in an interview that the NSA had a list of 500,000 to one million people in the US who were closely watched and whose every communication and bit of personal data were recorded. These are not terrorists in any sense, but potential leaders of political dissension and therefore potential suspects in the event of civil disturbances.
There also exists a database known as “Main Core”, containing names of Americans who might be considered troublesome, and which knowledgeable sources claim contains the names and communication information of more than eight million Americans who would be potential suspects of political activism, which would include “national opposition to US military invasion abroad”. It includes political dissidents, environmental and other activists, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, and many more who are most likely harmless, average people.
The database apparently contains all to and from email addresses, all email content, all in and out phone numbers plus duration of calls, the amounts and locations of ATM withdrawals, all credit card purchases and much more. It appears that this dissident surveillance program dates back to the early 1980s, the time of our Great Transformation, when it was revealed that Oliver North, operating from a secure White House site, had been using a database called PROMIS which was part of the REX-84 plan, to track dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. This database was meant to identify and immediately locate perceived “enemies of the state” if mass civil disturbances were to break out. (21) (22)
The Middle-Class Revolt
In late 2008 a leaked internal memo from Tom Fitzpatrick, Citibank’s chief technical strategist, contained ominous predictions for American civil society after the vicious financial crisis. He wrote,
“The world is not going back to normal ‘after the magnitude of what they have done’”.
Fitzpatrick claimed that the massive destruction of the middle class, the draining of all the wealth from the population, and the QE money creation by the FED would either bring about a resurgence of inflation or that the US would fall into “depression, civil disorder and possibly war”. He claimed that with the passing of each week and month there was a growing danger that could lead to political instability, a risk of domestic unrest because people were becoming increasingly disenfranchised and impoverished.
Lest we succumb to the temptation of accepting the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting loss of homes as an accident of fate, it would be wise to consider these quotes by Montagu Norman, Governor of The Bank of England prior to the crash of 1929, addressing the United States Bankers’ Association, New York, Idaho Leader, 26 August 1924.
“Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of the government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men, who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world.”
And his thoughts on democracy:
“By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance.” “It is thus, by discrete action, we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.”
The US government has developed an increasing fear of its own middle class, wide awake to the protests and uprisings in other nations where governments have colluded with the international bankers and large multi-nationals to gut their middle classes and effect the same transfer of wealth to the top 1% as occurred in America. People in many Western societies have become disgruntled and bitter at the increasing evidence that their vaunted democracies have been usurped by the unrestrained capitalists, creating intolerable situations where the people are sacrificed for the increasing wealth of that same top 1%.
At first, the US government exhibited a grim and rather reprehensible kind of satisfaction at watching the misery in other nations where the FED and IMF and the International Bankers had succeeded in their aims of wealth transference, but it also realised that the same boiling rage existed in America and perhaps much less controllable.
US citizens were protesting against a government that was no longer democratic in any sense, and was both unwilling and unable to repair a hopelessly corrupt and inefficient system. They finally awoke en masse and objected to ingrained corruption, shoddy public services, high taxes, homelessness, unemployment, rising inflation, the development of a police state, and more. It is public rage at the realisation of having been betrayed by a “democratic” government that converts civil unrest into political activism and revolution, and it is this that lies at the heart of the FBI’s categorisation of US political dissent as “domestic terrorism”. This terminology is important because the US, in all its hypocrisy for democracy, free speech and freedom of assembly, cannot face the world with open and apparent suppression of political dissent. Therefore, US citizens protesting against their own government cannot be exercising free speech but rather anarchy and terrorism, thereby justifying the use of deadly force to control dissension. The powers that control America have no interest in fairy-tales of freedom. They are interested in wealth and control, and the people in any country are irrelevant – including those in the US.
Americans have experienced first-hand the destruction of their quality of life; they see clearly the disappearance of future opportunity for their children, and they recognise better than most the loss of their freedom of expression which they have so valued. And they know it is precisely the retraction of that expression that is necessary for their no-longer-democratic government to maintain control. This is where their economic and social dissatisfaction mutates into political activism – revolution, in fact – and it is this realisation among the authorities that has spawned the internship camps, the billions of bullets purchased, and the “shoot to kill” orders.
Revolution – The Struggle for Class Power
Buried in the litany of troubles the US is facing today is the primary fact that the nation is engaged in a brutal class war, a struggle for class power that the bottom 99% are losing. This war was declared in the late 1970s, gained great momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and is still accelerating toward its final desperate conclusion. There are few signs on the horizon that cause hope for a change in direction, and I fear it may be too late.
There is still power with the people themselves, and indeed without the both active cooperation and silent complicity of the people, none of the pathological descent into despair would have been possible. Probably the only force in America that can change what is happening is the combined force of labor. This isn’t so easy today, since the government killed most labor organisations and there is now little if any leadership. A total withdrawal of labor succeeded in forcing a new social contract in 1946 and may be the only power remaining today, but times have changed and tactics must change too. If all unions withdrew their services with the full cooperation of unorganised labor, change might be possible.
But realistically, there is no hope that such a mass protest could be organised even though it is the only possible way to get the attention of whatever remains of a conscientious government and force through a reversal of the tide. In any case, taking to the streets is unlikely to produce pleasant results. If the police don’t have enough bodies to beat up and arrest everyone, DHS has its internment camps, its 3 billion bullets, its years of practice with “no-hesitation” human targets, and it will use all of them.
The only safe way for Americans to go on strike today is to stay at home. On this topic, one internet commenter wrote,
“Just don’t go to work. There is no need to picket in the streets to be on strike, and the factories and offices will be just as quiet and empty, and the profits just as non-existent. The police cannot possibly conduct home-by-home visits to beat up strikers one by one, and no military, even the DHS, is efficient when trying to blow up houses scattered all over the county, one by one. Strikers are probably safe if they stay at home and lock their door.”
Another wrote,
“Another tactic is for Americans to simply quit shopping. They don’t have the money anyway, and don’t need all that useless junk. Don’t buy anything you don’t actually need, and delay even those purchases as long as possible, especially the big-ticket items like cars and furniture. If at all possible, delay every purchase for at least one year. As much as is practicable, stop driving your car. Cancel your cable TV and read a book.” Your grandmother gave you advice 100 years ago that is still valid today: “Use it up, wear it out. Make it do. Do without.”
A third commenter gave this advice:
“One thing you can do to get their attention is to stop paying your bills. VISA and MasterCard can’t cancel 800 million credit cards at the same time, and no bank can process 100 million mortgage defaults. No system can cope with massive non-payment of debt. You are their only source of money and you can ensure they don’t get any of it. That will wake them up. Tell them you’ll begin paying when the overseas corporate tax holiday is over, when high income taxes are reinstated for the rich, when the individual bankers are in prison and when the lost jobs begin returning. This isn’t foolproof, but it’s the best I can do.”
And finally, a more ambitious poster offered these comments:
“Today, the US State Department, the CIA and the FBI pride themselves on their ability to use Twitter and Facebook to cause civil unrest, chaos, violence, and even revolutions, in other countries. It may not have occurred to them that the same tools they use against everyone else can be just as easily used against them. The CIA used Gene Sharp and his Einstein Institute to prepare the Otpor civil disobedience manuals that our government used as the gunpowder to destroy Jugoslavia, and as the template for a dozen other “color revolutions” of which it was so proud. Copies are freely available on the internet.”
William Blum again:
“As I’ve said before: Inasmuch as I can’t see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn’t quite match the government’s firepower, not to mention its viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial beast other than this: Educate yourself and as many others as you can, raising their political and ideological consciousness, providing them with the factual ammunition and arguments needed to sway others, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it raises the political price for those in power, until it reaches a critical mass, at which point … I can’t predict the form the explosion will take or what might be the trigger … But you have to have faith. And courage.”
Rebuilding America
This is an amended list of actions Americans must take if they want to bring their country into the community of nations as a civilised member instead of its present status as a genocidal bully, and to begin healing the nation itself. It is compiled from my own notes with the inclusion of excerpts from a speech made by Chris Hedges at Northeastern University. (23)
Discard the existing two-party political system as diseased and useless, and form one new party with a totally new slate of legislators not formerly involved in government. Their first tasks would be to:
1. Arrest all war criminals on American soil. Begin with both Bushes, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice, both Clintons, Kissinger, Albright, and a long list of other White House and Congressional staff, on charges of treason, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
2. Disband the Federal Reserve Banking System and repudiate all outstanding debt to the FED. The government would, according to the law and constitution, issue its own currency from this point forward.
3. Force the break-up of all the big banks and eliminate interstate banking. Nationalise the so-called investment banks like Goldman Sachs, confiscate their assets and shut them all down. Reintroduce banking sector regulations as was done after the 1930s, to ensure a catastrophe cannot recur, with violations punished by mandatory prison sentences. Outlaw program stock trading by the banks. Force the banks to revert to simple banking functions to serve the economy.
4. Disband the CIA and all its clandestine projects by cutting off all funding. Confiscate all CIA records, files, computers, data, and make the details public. Emasculate the FBI and all its executives and officers. Arrest the planners and perpetrators of all false-flag ops. Kill the NSA. Immediately cease all domestic espionage on US citizens. Cut off all funding, seize all bank accounts and confiscate all records and documents. Bomb the Arizona data storage facility to rubble. Kill the Department of Homeland Security and dismantle and close all internment camps within the continental US.
5. Disband the NED, USAID, the VOA and the 100+ other subversive NGOs that are used today to destabilise the governments and societies of other nations. Recall all CIA espionage agents from foreign embassies and consulates, who constitute about 80% of all US foreign “diplomatic” staff. Designate all Foundations and Think Tanks as enemy aliens, and shut them down.
6. Reduce the military budget by 85% and close all foreign military bases. Bring home all foreign-based military personnel and give them jobs guarding the bankers.
7. Totally eliminate the private sector from infrastructure and social services and confine it to commerce where it belongs. Roll back deregulation and privatisation, reclaiming all public infrastructure to be operated by the government for the common good. Especially kill the despicable private prison system, and free the more than one million who should never have been in prison at all. Kill the movements to debtor’s prisons and civil forfeiture before they gain any more momentum, and pass harsh legislation that holds policemen individually responsible for their crimes.
8. Begin immediate construction of a system of publicly-owned and operated hospitals and medical clinics, and guarantee that all citizens have access to free or easily-affordable health care. Eliminate all insurance companies from the health-care process. Restore funding for universal education.
9. Make all lobbying illegal, with automatic prison sentences for influence-peddling. Designate lobby groups like AIPAC as criminal organisations and hostile enemy aliens, and treat them accordingly. Kill the SuperPacs and corporate donations. Eliminate all corporate contributions to election campaigns, and limit individual contributions to $1,000 maximum. Break the corrupt Zionist control of Congress, Wall Street, the media, the World Bank and the IMF. Terminate their globalism and any reference to a New World Order. Eliminate immediately all funding and financial support for Israel.
10. Eliminate legal immunity for the elites. Make illegal the payment of corporate fines for personal crimes. Put the people in prison. Levy an 85% income tax on all corporate profits being held outside the country by US-based multinationals. Reinstate the taxes on the rich and very rich. Eliminate personal tax breaks on capital gains and institute an 85% tax on all income over $500,000 per year.
11. The media monopoly must be broken by forcing de-centralisation and pushing the ownership once again into thousands of individual companies owned by totally unrelated parties. The current control of the media must be dismantled because of the Zionists’ propaganda and the Hidden State’s political agenda. Force the disintegration of all media holding groups and wide dispersion of all media, restricting ownership to only one newspaper or TV station per market. Outlaw opinion-based journalism and make untruthful news reports punishable by public flogging.
12. Eliminate GM food, or at least legislate full disclosure on food labels. Eliminate factory farms; institute extensive monitoring and harsh penalties for food chemical violations.
13. Use the money collected from the rich, the bankers and the FED to begin repairing America’s dilapidated infrastructure before any more dams and bridges collapse.
14. Close all the torture prisons. Close Guantanamo, Diego Garcia, Abu Ghraib, and the other torture prisons and demand an accounting of all prison ships and their human cargo. Close the School of the Americas and destroy all the torture manuals.
15. Emasculate the US President, the Presidency, and the White House, and return all power to Congress because it is the concentration of power in the office of the President that has permitted the total alien control of all vital parts of the US government.
16. Eliminate all US-sponsored sanctions against other nations, especially China, Russia, Syria and Iran. End the illegal occupation of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Get out of the Ukraine. Dismantle immediately all organised interference in the internal affairs and elections of other nations. Refund the $100 billion of Iraqi gold and cash seized, and the similar amount from Libya.
*
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Notes
(1) Rex 84: FEMA’s Blueprint for Martial Law in America
(2) Rex 84 – Your Internment Camp Awaits You
(3) U.S. Concentration Camps: FEMA and the REX 84
(5) https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/feb/3/justice-scalia-to-lecture-at-univ-of-hawaii/
(6) Army National Guard Advertises for “Internment Specialists”
(7) Video: Become a FEMA Camp Internment/Resettlement Specialist
(8) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217_2.html?hpid=topnews
(9) Pentagon Plans To Keep 20,000 Troops Inside US To Bolster domestic security
(10) Washington Post: 20,000 More U.S. Troops To Be Deployed
(11) FM 3-39.40 INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT
(12) FM 3-39.40 INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS
(13) https://www.infowars.com/yes-the-re-education-camp-manual-does-apply-domestically-to-u-s-citizens/
(14) Why Are Federal Bureaucrats Buying Guns And Ammo? $158 Million Spent By Non-Military Agencies
(15) 24 Jun, 2016; Non-military federal agencies have more firearm authority than entire US Marine Corps
(16) https://www.openthebooks.com/the-militarization-of-america–open-the-books-oversight-report/
(17) https://www.openthebooks.com/openthebooks_oversight_report_-_the_militarization_of_america/
(17) Asymmetric Warfare Group Built a Fake City in Virginia
(18) US army builds fake city to shoot at during training
(19) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-enlists-u-s-air-force-to-spray-for-mosquitoes-after-harvey/
(20) Pentagon Misinformation Ops Target Press and Public
(23) http://calendar.northeastern.edu/event/political_economy_forum_presents_chris_hedges
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, 2020
EXPLOSIVE transcripts show Flynn wanted to work with Russia against ISIS, Kislyak warned Trump ‘Russiagate’ was targeting HIM
RT | May 29, 2020
Transcripts of conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak show that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was looking out for US interests and sought Russian help against terrorists, while the FBI framed him.
Flynn and Kislyak spoke several times in December 2016 and January 2017, during the presidential transition. Within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the FBI interviewed Flynn with an intent – as shown by recently published documents – to catch him in a perjury trap. After a description of his call with Kislyak was leaked to the Washington Post, Flynn was accused of misleading the White House about the calls and pressured to resign.
Those invested in the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory have claimed for years that Flynn discussed easing US sanctions against Moscow.
Actual transcripts of the calls, made public on Friday by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), paint a drastically different picture. They show Flynn asking Moscow to not play the game of “tit-for-tat” escalation triggered by outgoing President Barack Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats, that would have “boxed in” the incoming president – and seeking to work together with Russia against “a common threat in the Middle East,” which from the context appears to be a reference to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists.
“Do not allow this administration to box us in, right now, okay?” Flynn tells Kislyak in a call on December 29, 2016, asking Russia to make its response “reciprocal.” He doesn’t want to create a situation where “everybody’s got to go back and forth and everybody’s got to be the tough guy here, you know?”
“We don’t need that right now,” Flynn says. “We need cool heads to prevail, and uh, and we need to be very steady about what we’re going to do because we have absolutely a common uh. threat in the Middle East right now.”
Two days later, on December 31, Kislyak informs Flynn that their conversation “was taken into account” in Moscow. In fact, President Vladimir Putin decided not to retaliate at all, saying he didn’t want to ruin the holidays for American diplomats and their families.
Flynn called this decision “wise.” Kislyak then said something that would turn out to be prophetic – that Russia judged these actions by the Obama administration to be aimed not just against Moscow, but against Trump.
“And I just wanted to tell you that we found that these actions have targeted not only against Russia, but also against the president-elect… and with all our rights to respond we have decided not to act now because, it’s because people are dissatisfied with the loss of elections and, and it’s very deplorable,” the ambassador said.
The events that unfolded proved Kislyak correct. The pretext for the FBI and DOJ to go after Flynn was that he supposedly violated the Logan Act – an archaic law banning ordinary Americans from conducting foreign policy, but which did not apply to him as the incoming presidential adviser anyway. Instead, what the transcripts show is that the outgoing administration was seeking to sabotage the incoming one.
On January 4, 2017, FBI agent Peter Strzok – who had previously vowed to “stop” Trump from getting elected in texts with colleague and lover Lisa Page – improperly ordered the FBI background investigation of Flynn to stay open. The following day, FBI chief James Comey went to the White House and discussed investigating Flynn with Obama personally. On that same day, January 5, the president’s chief of staff sent a request to the NSA to “unmask” Flynn. All of this was revealed only a month ago, in documents presented as evidence in the trial of Flynn for allegedly lying about the calls.
Russia eventually retaliated only in July 2017, when a Republican-majority Congress overrode Trump and passed a toxic sanctions bill based entirely on unsubstantiated ‘Russiagate’ claims of meddling in the presidential election. Just as Flynn feared, this would trigger a chain of “tit for tat” expulsions and closures that left both countries short of diplomatic staff – and cut off all avenues of further cooperation against IS, for peace in Syria, or anything else.
The Case of General Michael Flynn: The Use of Law as a Political Weapon
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | May 20, 2020
The audacious corruption of the FBI and the US Department of Justice (sic) is demonstrated by their frame-up of the three-star general, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump.
US Department of Justice (DOJ) documents that the department was forced to turn over to General Michael Flynn’s attorney reveal that the FBI found no wrongdoing by Flynn in its investigation of him and recommended the investigation be closed. Corrupt FBI official Peter Strzok, a leader of the anti-Trump cabal in the FBI, intervened. Strzok convinced the official managing the investigation not to close the case as it was the wishes of the “7th floor” (top FBI officials) to keep the case open. In the absence of evidence against Flynn, released FBI documents prove that the FBI leadership decided to frame General Flynn. The documents reveal that the FBI’s plan is “to get him (Flynn) to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired. . . . we should try to frame them in a way we want.” General Flynn was forced to incriminate himself with a guilty plea. Otherwise, the corrupt DOJ prosecutors threatened to indict Flynn’s son.
When this proof of egregious government misconduct came to light, the DOJ had no choice but to drop the case against General Flynn. Otherwise it would be clear that law in the US is a weapon in the hands of government. This would mean that control of government would be a life and death matter for the two political parties as it is in Ecuador and Bolivia where incoming presidents arrest or attempt to arrest outgoing presidents.
But we didn’t hear a word about the frame-up of General Flynn from the corrupt presstitutes. On May 7 the editorial board of the New York Times published the largest and most egregious collection of lies in the entire history of the disreputable organization. The editorial— “Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guillty. Twice.” —claimed the lies coerced from Flynn proved Flynn’s guilt, and that Attorney General William Barr is a “personal fixer for the president” and used the Department of Justice to protect friends and to go after political enemies.
The New York Times has it backwards. Going after political enemies is precisely what the Obama Regime’s concocted case against General Flynn (and Trump) was all about. Remember, it was General Flynn who said on television that it was a “willful decision” of the Obama Regime to send the mercenary jihadists to attack Syria, a decision Obama made in the face of contrary advice by General Flynn, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. When Flynn revealed this, it blew up the fake news story spread by the Obama Regime and the presstitutes that the Obama-supported invasion of Syria by CIA mercenaries was an uprising by Syrian moderates fighting for democracy. Flynn’s blood is blood that the corrupt Obama Regime wanted very badly.
Obama’s role in the frame-up of Flynn and the orchestration of the Russiagate hoax is now coming to light, making the former president nervous. On May 10 the Wall Street Journal editorial board asked if Obama’s nerves are getting in the way of his judgment:
“Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn. Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.”
The Democrats’ frame-up of General Flynn and their two attempted frame-ups of President Trump show an extraordinary audacity and a corruptly compliant FBI and DOJ. They thought that they could get away with it, and, of course, they had all the help possible from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the presstitute scum for whom lies are the currency of their fake news realm. The presstitutes have made clear that the US media is devoid of integrity.
After high officials such as James Clapper, Susan Rice, Samatha Power, and others repeatedly claimed evidence of Trump and Flynn’s guilt, when under oath their story changed 180 degrees. Here is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper:
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
Susan Rice, Obama’s incompetent National Security Adviser, and Samatha Power, Obama’s Russia-baiting ambassador to the UN, along with the rest of the disreputable Obama cabal, have admitted that they saw no specific evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia. The entire thing was an orchestrated hoax that proves beyond all doubt that the Democrat Party and the US media are corrupt beyond redemption.
When the case against Flynn was dropped as a result of the damning evidence of egregious government misconduct in framing a senior official of the US government, the corrupt prosecutors who had prosecuted the innocent Flynn all resigned in a huff, pretending that it was Barr, not them, who used the Department of Justice for self-interested political purpose.
Two Georgetown University law professors, Kean K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer, totally discredited themselves and the Obama contingent in the DOJ, by alleging in the New York Times that the dropped charge against Flynn has resulted in the “utter demoralization” of “the law enforcement community.” In other words, for these law professors and “the law enforcement community” for which they claim to speak, dropping a case consisting entirely of an orchestrated frame-up, a contrived perjury trap, and threats against family members is demoralizing. The professors are so thoroughly dishonest that they use the lies coerced from Flynn—the price of his “cooperation with the investigation” in order that his son would not also be framed-up—as “evidence” of Flynn’s guilt and proof of the political use of the Justice Department by Trump and Barr in dropping the contrived case.
The frame-up of Flynn is not acknowledged by the law professors as political use of the Justice Department.
Instead the law professors describe the vindication of an innocent man on the basis of undeniable evidence as political use of the Justice Department.
If this is the kind of law Georgetown University teaches, the law school should be promptly shut down.
The question that demands an answer is how do people as corrupt and devoid of integrity as Comey, Mueller, and Strzok get into top FBI positions?
New tapes of Poroshenko-Biden calls reveal ‘independent’ Ukraine was total US client
© Reuters / Jonathan Ernst
RT | May 19, 2020
On top of firing a prosecutor on orders from US Vice President Joe Biden, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also robbed his own people by raising tariffs to please his US overlords, according to audio of their alleged calls.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian parliamentarian Andrii Derkach published audio recordings of what sounds like Poroshenko’s conversations with various Obama administration officials in 2015 and 2016. Derkach said he got the audio from investigative journalists, who told him that Poroshenko personally recorded the calls. They have not been independently verified.
If true, however, they show the president in Kiev literally taking orders from Washington, even as the US insisted Ukraine was a sovereign and independent nation free to decide its own destiny.
“[I’m] very well indeed, as usual when I hear your voice,” Poroshenko tells Biden in a May 13, 2016 conversation, where he rushes to tell the US vice president how much “progress” he has made in reforming Ukraine to Washington’s liking.
As one of the examples, Poroshenko cites that he has imposed tariffs of 100 percent, even though the IMF asked for only 75 percent, adding “Give us a yard, please!”
“Poroshenko was willing to strip the Ukrainians naked, and even make money on the tariffs,” Derkach said on Monday, noting that they were indeed raised twice.
Raising tariffs on Russian gas imports – and cutting subsidies to poor Ukrainians – was one of the major demands by the IMF in 2013, which the government of President Viktor Yanukovych balked at, before it was ousted in a US-backed coup in February 2014.
Derkach argues that the tariffs and other concessions Poroshenko made to Washington were intended to unblock the $1 billion IMF loan to Ukraine of which the US was a guarantor. Biden had already leveraged the loan to demand the firing of prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was looking into corruption at the gas company Burisma – which had hired Biden’s son Hunter as a board member earlier that year, presumably as a shield against prosecution.
It became clear after Poroshenko fired Shokin that this would not be enough, and that he would have to give even more, Derkach told reporters in Kiev, pointing to the recordings.
Biden himself boasted about getting Shokin fired at an event in Washington, and his remarks were caught on camera. When current US President Donald Trump brought up the issue of Shokin’s firing with Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky, the Democrats claimed he was improperly seeking foreign assistance in the 2020 election – as Biden was seeking their nomination – and had him impeached in the House of Representatives in December 2019. Trump stayed in office after the Senate acquitted him in February this year. Biden only became the presumptive Democrat nominee in mid-April.
COMEY urged probe into Flynn by misrepresenting Russian contacts, declassified memo shows
RT | May 19, 2020
Ex-FBI director James Comey pushed to investigate Trump’s incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn despite lacking any evidence Flynn had shared classified info with Russian officials, a newly-declassified memo reveals.
It was Comey who told President Barack Obama and other administration officials that “incoming NSA Flynn is speaking frequently with Russian Ambassador Kislyak” in a meeting documented in the January 2017 memo by National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the unredacted first page of which was obtained by CBS on Tuesday.
The FBI director admits he “has no indication thus far that Flynn has passed classified information to Kislyak,” and no real basis for his insistence that the probe must go on.
The only thing backing his hunch that the meetings between the general and the Russian diplomat “could be an issue”?
“The level of communication is unusual,” Comey tells Obama, according to Rice, hinting that the National Security Council should “potentially” avoid passing “sensitive information related to Russia” to Flynn.
The FBI director did not elaborate on what is supposed to be “unusual” about an incoming foreign policy official speaking with a Russian counterpart, especially in the midst of what was then a rapidly-unraveling diplomatic relationship between the two countries with Obama expelling 35 Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions over alleged-but-never-substantiated “election interference.” Given the circumstances, an absence of communication might have been more unusual. But the timing is certainly auspicious.
Rice, Flynn’s predecessor who authored the memo, relates that the January 5 meeting followed “a briefing by [Intelligence Committee] leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election.”
The previous day, the FBI field office assigned with investigating Flynn attempted to close the case against him, called CROSSFIRE RAZOR, after having found “no derogatory information” to justify continued inclusion in the overarching CROSSFIRE HURRICANE probe (the “Russian collusion” investigation). They were blocked from doing so by Agent Peter Strzok, who added that the orders to keep the investigation going came from the “7th floor” – i.e. agency leadership. The Flynn investigation had been underway since August, beginning the day after Strzok discussed an ‘insurance policy’ that was supposed to keep then-candidate Donald Trump out of office with Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe.
While Comey describes his probe of Flynn as “proceeding ‘by the book’” after Obama repeatedly stresses he wants only a “by the book” investigation – both parties presumably hoping to avoid exactly the sequence of revelatory events that are currently unfolding – recently-unsealed documents from the case against Flynn indicate the general was entrapped, with the FBI’s goal being to “prosecute him or get him fired” with an ambush-style interview.
They got both their wishes – after agents tricked him into sitting for questioning without a lawyer present, Flynn was accused of lying about his contacts with Kislyak, fired from his post in the White House, and subsequently pled guilty to lying to a federal agent.
The Department of Justice has dropped its charges against Flynn, citing gross misconduct and abuse of power at the FBI, which it claims had no basis for launching its investigation. However, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan has attempted to block the dismissal, appointing a retired judge as independent prosecutor to both argue against the Justice Department’s move and pursue perjury charges against Flynn – essentially charging him with lying about lying.
On Tuesday, Flynn’s attorney filed a writ of mandamus with the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, urging them to force Sullivan to step aside and allow the dismissal of the charges.
Obamagate Shows Biden Is Inadequate in Challenging Trump
By Paul Antonopoulos | May 16, 2020
Former U.S. President Barack Obama is coming under increasing pressure, led by what President Donald Trump is calling “Obamagate.” This comes as Mexico has requested to finally clarify the affair with the secret sale of American weapons to Mexican drug cartels. Mexico is asking for the case to be clarified after almost ten years.
In this secret operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, weapons from the U.S. were sold to Mexican drug cartels. The U.S. claimed that about 2,000 automatic weapons were sold to Mexicans so that the Barack Obama administration could follow their path to the drug cartels. Instead, these weapons were used in massacres. Mexican authorities are now seeking answers from the United States.
In addition to selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels, Obama is responsible for a lot of global upheaval on the world stage – primarily the so-called “Arab Spring” that should be more accurately described as the “Arab Winter” as it brought death and destruction across the Arab world.
The sale of these weapons to Mexican drug cartels is another ugly legacy of Obama’s rule that liberals like to view as one of the best periods of American history. Let’s not forget that in 2009 Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his apparent “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.”
The majority of U.S. media will most likely try and find appropriate excuses so they can minimize Obama’s role in these scandals. It is completely clear that the battle over who will be in the White House in the next four years is now taking focus on the Obama era as opposed to Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed the lives of over 80,000 Americans and infected more than 1.3 million people.
With endless tweets by Donald Trump dedicated to Obama over the past few days, it is as if the presidential battle in November will be fought between him and Obama, and not Democrat сandidate Joe Biden.
The reason for Trump’s many tweets against the former president was because of Obama’s private conversation that was leaked to the public in which he criticized the suspension of the investigation against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, while he called Trump’s fight against the coronavirus epidemic a “chaotic disaster.”
The American president started tweeting on the morning of May 10 and stopped late in the evening, making over a hundred tweets against Obama. This exchange between Obama and Trump is not common in American politics as former presidents usually do not interfere in the politics of their successors. However, there are suggestions that Obama still has connections to the deep state and is actively undermining Trump.
Obama, who openly admitted he would remain active in politics and wished he could contend for a third term, could be exerting influence through Hillary Clinton and Biden. It is likely Obama is becoming more public as Trump’s opponent Biden is proving inadequate and incapable of defeating Trump.
The battle between Obama and Trump started with the announcement that the Ministry of Justice is terminating the investigation against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn, who was probably the shortest-serving national security adviser in history, was sacked at the beginning of his term on charges of lying to Vice President Mike Pence about talks with the Russian ambassador to Washington. His removal triggered a chain of failed investigations and campaigns against Trump and his alleged links to Russian interference during the U.S. presidential election, which also ended in a failed impeachment.
In private conversations that leaked to the public, Obama described Flynn’s acquittal as a threat to the rule of law.
Trump also retweeted statements from CIA agent Buck Sexton, in which he accused Obama of sabotaging the Trump administration in the first days of his term. Sexton also called former FBI Director Andrew McCabe “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”
Trump then continued with accusations on Twitter and said that Obama committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far!” and ended briefly with “Obamagate.”
As for the affair with the secret operation of selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels, journalists of Forbes in 2011 wondered whether that operation would become Obama’s “Watergate,” and it appears that it very well could be. Obama’s attempts to smear Trump has not only backfired, but it could have very serious legal ramifications against him and others in his administration.
Flynn ‘unmasking’ documents show involvement of senior Obama administration officials, including Joe Biden
RT | May 13, 2020
A newly published list of US officials who were interested in National Security Agency (NSA) records on Trump adviser Michael Flynn includes President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, as well as Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden is listed as requesting the unmasking on January 12, 2017, the same day the Washington Post published a story claiming that Flynn had misreported his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, based on leaked NSA information.
Flynn unmasking documents f… by RT America on Scribd
Yet on Tuesday, Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he “knew nothing” about the investigation of Flynn, and accused the Trump administration of using the former adviser’s case as a “diversion” from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The unmasking log was provided by the NSA to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, and sent by the Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell to two senators who requested it, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who published it on Wednesday.
In addition to Biden, the document shows that then-DNI James Clapper made three unmasking requests about Flynn, CIA Director John Brennan made two, and FBI Director James Comey made one.
Biden’s campaign reacted at first by lashing out against the CBS reporter who published the documents, with his rapid response director Andrew Bates calling Catherine Herridge “a partisan, rightwing hack who is a regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys.”
Bates later removed the tweet and issued a follow-up, calling the unmasking perfectly normal behavior by US officials concerned “over intelligence reports of Michael Flynn’s attempts to undermine ongoing American national security policy.”
The documents show Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff at the time, made an unmasking request on January 5 – the very day Obama met with all the intelligence principals, and a day after FBI agent Peter Strzok intervened to keep the case on Flynn open despite the lack of any “derogatory” evidence. Strzok would later be sent by Comey to interview Flynn and edit the notes of that interview (the “302”) to imply Flynn had lied to him, resulting in the former general’s prosecution by special counsel Robert Mueller.
What the documents also show is that the Obama administration’s interest in what the NSA might have on Flynn began soon after the November 2016 election, with then-US envoy to the UN Samantha Power filing an unmasking request on November 30. She filed six more after that, the last dated January 11, 2017.
Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak about US sanctions against Russia was on December 29, 2016, after Obama suddenly announced the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats and seizure of two diplomatic properties, citing Moscow’s alleged “meddling” in the presidential election.
Evidence that only recently emerged in the Flynn case showed that the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice sought to interview him using the pretext of the Logan Act, an 18th-century law which has never been used to prosecute anyone, and did not apply in this instance since Flynn was not a private citizen, but an official of the incoming administration conducting routine business during the presidential transition. This new evidence led the DOJ to announce last week it was dropping all charges against Flynn.
Between the manufactured pretext to go after Flynn and the prior revelation that four FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign via adviser Carter Page had been entirely based on the discredited ‘Steele dossier’, the Trump administration has argued that they were unfairly targeted by its predecessor in what amounted to an illegal coup.
‘The Biggest Political Crime’: Does Obamagate Mean Treason, Sedition or Both?
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 13.05.2020
On Sunday, President Donald Trump lashed out at his predecessor Barack Obama on Twitter accusing him of “the biggest political crime in American history” and calling it “Obamagate”. Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel has explained what the president may have meant and why former Obama officials should prepare themselves for a political storm.
Donald Trump’s ire came on the heels of Obama’s leaked conference call in which the ex-president lambasted the DOJ’s decision to drop charges against ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Commenting on the audio leak released by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff on Friday, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said that Obama “should’ve kept his mouth shut”: “I think it’s a little bit classless, frankly, to critique an administration that comes after you”, the senator said.
‘The Biggest Political Crime in American History’
By accusing Obama of “the biggest crime” President Trump may have alluded to either treason or sedition or both, described in 18 US Code Chapter 115, suggests Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel.
“With many months behind them, and ample resources, John Durham and others likely have found solid evidence that Barack Obama violated his oath of office numerous ways, and subsequently attempted to overthrow the results of the 2016 election”, the analyst believes.
Echoing Ortel’s assumption, Flynn’s defence attorney Sidney Powell presumed that President Obama was in on a plot to ‘frame’ Michael Flynn during her interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures”.
“The whole thing was orchestrated and set up within the FBI, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, [Former CIA Director John] Brennan, and in the Oval Office meeting that day with President Obama,” Powell noted.
Having said that “Powell is a brilliant, honest lawyer who does homework assiduously and well” the Wall Street analyst does not rule out that the defence attorney has evidence supporting her assertion.
“I believe that Michael Flynn, appointed by Obama, grew to protest many reckless foreign policies, having access to damaging classified information that most of us have not seen and may never see”, Ortel says. “Flynn’s refusal to stand down after being fired in 2014, and his stubbornness infuriated Obama, suggesting that Flynn may hold secrets that Obama cannot have revealed. In short, Barack Obama is scared because he should be scared”.
Obama Distorts Facts While Speaking About Flynn’s “Crime”
Speaking to the 3,000-member Obama Alumni Association the former president highlighted: “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free”. However, Obama was immediately called out by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for making a grave mistake.
“Mr. Flynn was never charged with perjury, which is lying under oath in a legal proceeding. Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI in a meeting at the White House on 24 January 2017 that he was led to believe was a friendly chat among colleagues”, the editorial board stressed.
While one can only guess whether intentionally or unintentionally Obama distorted the facts, he and many his supporters “hold the public in contempt, sure that most who follow politics never call politicians out for their lies and for their misdeeds”, Ortel remarks.
The Trump administration seems determined to get to the bottom of the outgoing Obama administration’s role in targeting Trump campaign aides, according to the Wall Street analyst.
Thus, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has recently declassified a list of former Obama administration officials involved in the “unmasking” of Michael Flynn in his talks with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to ABC News. The list – which was apparently delivered to AG William Barr – is believed to be “much larger than anything involving Flynn”.
“Unmasking (exposing the names of Americans who are associated with targets of counter-intelligence investigations) is a serious potential offence, especially when the investigation in question is launched on spurious pretences”, Ortel explains. “What we are likely soon to find is that many Obama co-conspirators obstructed investigations that were opened or should have been opened, and then rigged or attempted to rig elections inside and outside the United States”.
Republicans Pushing for Further Declassifications
Having expressing gratitude to the DNI Grenell and AG Barr for their effort “to bring transparency to the Russian investigation”, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley requested even more materials to be declassified, including:
· the transcript of Flynn-Kislyak conversation;
· the Susan Rice memo about the 5 January 2017 meeting between President Obama, Vice President Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and Deputy AG Yates on the Russian investigation;
· the mysteriously missing original transcript of Flynn-FBI interview (302) authored by agent Joe Pientka.
“The underlying records to the Flynn case and Russia investigation are more important than ever”, Grassley insisted in his 12 May letter. “Congress, and most importantly the public, must fully understand the wrongdoing that occurred so that it is never repeated”.
According to Ortel, the revelations are likely to have a domino effect and may even affect “major allied nations including Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia”, which presumably played a role in the “Spygate” scandal.
“Fearing consequences of a Trump victory, Obamagate co-conspirators manufactured hoaxes to turn eyes away from their own massive crimes”, the analyst says. “Soon we may learn how many fair critics of Obama and of unregulated globalism were illegally targeted and harmed by the Obama presidency”.
Although the mainstream left-leaning media have denounced “Obamagate” as Trump’s “favourite distraction tactics”, it seems that very soon many people, especially Barack Obama and the Clintons, will found themselves between a rock and a hard place, the Wall Street analyst believes.
Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble
For two and a half years the House Intelligence Committee knew CrowdStrike didn’t have the goods on Russia. Now the public knows too.
By Ray McGovern – Consortium News – May 9, 2020
House Intelligence Committee documents released Thursday reveal that the committee was told two and half years ago that the FBI had no concrete evidence that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee computers to filch the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in July 2016.
The until-now-buried, closed-door testimony came on Dec. 5, 2017 from Shawn Henry, a protege of former FBI Director Robert Mueller (from 2001 to 2012), for whom Henry served as head of the Bureau’s cyber crime investigations unit.
Henry retired in 2012 and took a senior position at CrowdStrike, the cyber security firm hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to investigate the cyber intrusions that occurred before the 2016 presidential election.
The following excerpts from Henry’s testimony speak for themselves. The dialogue is not a paragon of clarity; but if read carefully, even cyber neophytes can understand:
Ranking Member Mr. [Adam] Schiff: Do you know the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data from the DNC? … when would that have been?
Mr. Henry: Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated from the DNC, but we have no indicators that it was exfiltrated (sic). … There are times when we can see data exfiltrated, and we can say conclusively. But in this case, it appears it was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.
Mr. [Chris] Stewart of Utah: Okay. What about the emails that everyone is so, you know, knowledgeable of? Were there also indicators that they were prepared but not evidence that they actually were exfiltrated?
Mr. Henry: There’s not evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. There’s circumstantial evidence … but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated. …
Mr. Stewart: But you have a much lower degree of confidence that this data actually left than you do, for example, that the Russians were the ones who breached the security?
Mr. Henry: There is circumstantial evidence that that data was exfiltrated off the network.
Mr. Stewart: And circumstantial is less sure than the other evidence you’ve indicated. …
Mr. Henry: “We didn’t have a sensor in place that saw data leave. We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence. That was the conclusion that we made.
In answer to a follow-up query on this line of questioning, Henry delivered this classic: “Sir, I was just trying to be factually accurate, that we didn’t see the data leave, but we believe it left, based on what we saw.”
Inadvertently highlighting the tenuous underpinning for CrowdStrike’s “belief” that Russia hacked the DNC emails, Henry added: “There are other nation-states that collect this type of intelligence for sure, but the — what we would call the tactics and techniques were consistent with what we’d seen associated with the Russian state.”
Not Transparent
Try as one may, some of the testimony remains opaque. Part of the problem is ambiguity in the word “exfiltration.”
The word can denote (1) transferring data from a computer via the Internet (hacking) or (2) copying data physically to an external storage device with intent to leak it.
As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has been reporting for more than three years, metadata and other hard forensic evidence indicate that the DNC emails were not hacked — by Russia or anyone else.
Rather, they were copied onto an external storage device (probably a thumb drive) by someone with access to DNC computers. Besides, any hack over the Internet would almost certainly have been discovered by the dragnet coverage of the National Security Agency and its cooperating foreign intelligence services.
Henry testifies that “it appears it [the theft of DNC emails] was set up to be exfiltrated, but we just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”
This, in VIPS view, suggests that someone with access to DNC computers “set up” selected emails for transfer to an external storage device — a thumb drive, for example. The Internet is not needed for such a transfer. Use of the Internet would have been detected, enabling Henry to pinpoint any “exfiltration” over that network.
Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPS member, filed a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. Binney said: “WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive.”
The So-Called Intelligence Community Assessment
There is not much good to be said about the embarrassingly evidence-impoverished Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017 accusing Russia of hacking the DNC.
But the ICA did include two passages that are highly relevant and demonstrably true:
(1) In introductory remarks on “cyber incident attribution”, the authors of the ICA made a highly germane point: “The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation — malicious or not — leaves a trail.”
(2) “When analysts use words such as ‘we assess’ or ‘we judge,’ [these] are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. … Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.” [And one might add that they commonly ARE wrong when analysts succumb to political pressure, as was the case with the ICA.]
The intelligence-friendly corporate media, nonetheless, immediately awarded the status of Holy Writ to the misnomered “Intelligence Community Assessment” (it was a rump effort prepared by “handpicked analysts” from only CIA, FBI, and NSA), and chose to overlook the banal, full-disclosure-type caveats embedded in the assessment itself.
Then National Intelligence Director James Clapper and the directors of the CIA, FBI, and NSA briefed President Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017, the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump.
On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama saw fit to use lawyerly language on the key issue of how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks, in an apparent effort to cover his own derriere.
Obama: “The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”
So we ended up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point. What Obama was saying is that U.S. intelligence did not know—or professed not to know—exactly how the alleged Russian transfer to WikiLeaks was supposedly made, whether through a third party, or cutout, and he muddied the waters by first saying it was a hack, and then a leak.
From the very outset, in the absence of any hard evidence, from NSA or from its foreign partners, of an Internet hack of the DNC emails, the claim that “the Russians gave the DNC emails to WikiLeaks” rested on thin gruel.
In November 2018 at a public forum, I asked Clapper to explain why President Obama still had serious doubts in late Jan. 2017, less than two weeks after Clapper and the other intelligence chiefs had thoroughly briefed the outgoing president about their “high-confidence” findings.
Clapper replied: “I cannot explain what he [Obama] said or why. But I can tell you we’re, we’re pretty sure we know, or knew at the time, how WikiLeaks got those emails.” Pretty sure?
Comey briefs Obama, June 2016 (Flickr)
Preferring CrowdStrike; ’Splaining to Congress
CrowdStrike already had a tarnished reputation for credibility when the DNC and Clinton campaign chose it to do work the FBI should have been doing to investigate how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks. It had asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s struggle with separatists supported by Russia. A Voice of America report explained why CrowdStrike was forced to retract that claim.
Why did FBI Director James Comey not simply insist on access to the DNC computers? Surely he could have gotten the appropriate authorization. In early January 2017, reacting to media reports that the FBI never asked for access, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee there were “multiple requests at different levels” for access to the DNC servers.
“Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company would share with us what they saw,” he said. Comey described CrowdStrike as a “highly respected” cybersecurity company.
Asked by committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey said it would have. “Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved, so it’s the best evidence,” he said.
Five months later, after Comey had been fired, Burr gave him a Mulligan in the form of a few kid-gloves, clearly well-rehearsed, questions:
BURR: And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate — did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?
COMEY: In the case of the DNC, … we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn’t get direct access.
BURR: But no content?
COMEY: Correct.
BURR: Isn’t content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?
COMEY: It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks — the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.
In June last year it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.
By any normal standard, former FBI Director Comey would now be in serious legal trouble, as should Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. Additional evidence of FBI misconduct under Comey seems to surface every week — whether the abuses of FISA, misconduct in the case against Gen. Michael Flynn, or misleading everyone about Russian hacking of the DNC. If I were attorney general, I would declare Comey a flight risk and take his passport. And I would do the same with Clapper and Brennan.
Schiff: Every Confidence
But No Evidence
Both pillars of Russiagate–collusion and a Russian hack–have now fairly crumbled.
Thursday’s disclosure of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee shows Chairman Adam Schiff lied not only about Trump-Putin “collusion,” [which the Mueller report failed to prove and whose allegations were based on DNC and Clinton-financed opposition research] but also about the even more basic issue of “Russian hacking” of the DNC.
[See: “The Democratic Money Behind Russia-gate” republished today.]
Five days after Trump took office, I had an opportunity to confront Schiff personally about evidence that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails. He had repeatedly given that canard the patina of flat fact during an address at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta “think tank,” The Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Fortunately, the cameras were still on when I approached Schiff during the Q&A: “You have every confidence but no evidence, is that right?” I asked him. His answer was a harbinger of things to come. This video clip may be worth the few minutes needed to watch it.
Schiff and his partners in crime will be in for much tougher treatment if Trump allows Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham to bring their investigation into the origins of Russia-gate to a timely conclusion. Barr’s dismissal on Thursday of charges against Flynn, after released FBI documents revealed that a perjury trap was set for him to keep Russiagate going, may be a sign of things to come.
Given the timid way Trump has typically bowed to intelligence and law enforcement officials, including those who supposedly report to him, however, one might rather expect that, after a lot of bluster, he will let the too-big-to-imprison ones off the hook. The issues are now drawn; the evidence is copious; will the Deep State, nevertheless, be able to prevail this time?
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A former CIA analyst, his retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Did Obama Defense Deputy Lie To Protect Her Fraudulent Russiagate Sources?
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | May 9, 2020
Newly declassified congressional transcripts from the Russia investigation include testimony from former Obama administration defense official, Evelyn Farkas, who testified under oath that she lied in an MSNBC interview when she claimed to have evidence of “the Trump staff dealing with Russians,” and said that the Obama administration was “trying to also get information to the hill” because the incoming Trump administration would try to hide the (nonexistent) evidence.
Former Obama DoD Deputy Evelyn Farkas reveals White House gathered intel on Trump campaign staff and then leaked it! https://t.co/W6FG4IFe5Q pic.twitter.com/VwaF2CnZzn
— ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) March 29, 2017
During closed-door testimony on June 26, 2017, however, Farkas – who was the Clinton campaign’s senior foreign policy adviser – admitted she had nothing.
In an exchange with former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Farkas is pressed on why she said ‘we’ when she said ‘if they found out how we knew what we knew about their staff dealing with Russians.’
Farkas’ response: I didn’t know anything.
In fact, Farkas – who is currently running for a Housee seat in the 17th congressional district of New York – shouldn’t have known anything, because she resigned from the Obama administration in September 2015.
… how did this non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, gain knowledge of intelligence regarding members of Trump’s team and their relations with Russia, when she was the senior foreign policy advisor for Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton?
Farkas was the prime driver behind the anti-Russia phobia inside the Pentagon during the Obama years — shilling hard for the Ukraine — requesting that the President send them anti-tank missiles — which, essentially, would mean outright war with Russia. – iBankCoin
Given all we now know, Occam’s razor suggests that Farkas, while working for the Clinton campaign, was fully aware of the work of Christopher Steele – the former UK spy paid by the Clinton campaign (through their lawyers and Fusion GPS) to fabricate the infamous dossier used by US intelligence to paint Donald Trump as an agent of Russia.
That said, who exactly did she mean by “we” during that interview? And who was scrambling to leak evidence to the hill?
Based on the MSNBC interview, Farkas obviously knew something. But instead of going down that particular rabbit hole during congressional testimony, she thought the best option was to simply say she lied.
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Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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