Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Another Russian Bombshell. And I don't mean Larissa Antipova.
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January 10, 2017 at 9:18 pm #63071
Billy_TParticipantWe can add this one to the mix, and it comes on the heels of Nittany’s article, which I’ll repost for this thread:
Excerpt from the first link:
US intelligence officials told President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump in classified briefings last week that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information on Trump, according to CNN.
The intelligence officials gleaned their information from a former British intelligence operative who provided the FBI with a series of memos in August 2016 detailing how Russia has tried to cultivate Trump for at least five years.
The British spy’s findings — which were apparently based on conversations he had had with Russian intelligence sources — were summarized in a two-page synopsis that was appended to the US intelligence agency’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, CNN reported.
The material was not corroborated by intelligence agencies and could not be immediately verified independently. CNN said it is working to confirm the details contained in the memos composed by the unidentified British operative, who is apparently considered trustworthy by US intelligence officials.
Only Obama, Trump, and top lawmakers received the version of the report with a summary of the British operative’s memos.
Trump responded to the reports in a tweet Tuesday evening.
“FAKE NEWS — A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” he wrote.
There is waaay too much smoke here not to signal an actual fire. And the Intel community has never expressed a great deal of love for the Democrats, especially not Obama. In fact, I’m guessing much of this would have come out into the open long ago, if the tables had been turned. As in, if the Democratic nominee had done exactly what Trump’s been accused of doing, with the Mob ties, the shady deals, the bankruptcies and bailouts, etc. etc.
Will he even make it to the inauguration?
January 10, 2017 at 9:24 pm #63073
znModeratorIntel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-russia/index.html
(CNN)Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.
The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.
The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the senior-most US intelligence chiefs — Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.
One reason the nation’s intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.
These senior intelligence officials also included the synopsis to demonstrate that Russia had compiled information potentially harmful to both political parties, but only released information damaging to Hillary Clinton and Democrats. This synopsis was not an official part of the report from the intelligence community case about Russian hacks, but some officials said it augmented the evidence that Moscow intended to harm Clinton’s candidacy and help Trump’s, several officials with knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.
The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government, according to two national security officials.
Sources tell CNN that these same allegations about communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians, mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year, prompted then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to send a letter to FBI Director Comey in October, in which he wrote, “It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States.”
CNN has confirmed that the synopsis was included in the documents that were presented to Mr. Trump but cannot confirm if it was discussed in his meeting with the intelligence chiefs.
The Trump transition team declined repeated requests for comment.
CNN has reviewed a 35-page compilation of the memos, from which the two-page synopsis was drawn. The memos originated as opposition research, first commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, and later by Democrats. At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos, as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations. But, in preparing this story, CNN has spoken to multiple high ranking intelligence, administration, congressional and law enforcement officials, as well as foreign officials and others in the private sector with direct knowledge of the memos.
Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer. What has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.
On the same day that the President-elect was briefed by the intelligence community, the top four Congressional leaders, and chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees — the so-called “Gang of Eight” — were also provided a summary of the memos regarding Mr. Trump, according to law enforcement, intelligence and administration sources.
The two-page summary was written without the detailed specifics and information about sources and methods included in the memos by the former British intelligence official. That said, the synopsis was considered so sensitive it was not included in the classified report about Russian hacking that was more widely distributed, but rather in an annex only shared at the most senior levels of the government: President Obama, the President-elect, and the eight Congressional leaders.
CNN has also learned that on December 9, Senator John McCain gave a full copy of the memos — dated from June through December, 2016 — to FBI Director James Comey. McCain became aware of the memos from a former British diplomat who had been posted in Moscow. But the FBI had already been given a set of the memos compiled up to August 2016, when the former MI6 agent presented them to an FBI official in Rome, according to national security officials.
The raw memos on which the synopsis is based were prepared by the former MI6 agent, who was posted in Russia in the 1990s and now runs a private intelligence gathering firm. His investigations related to Mr. Trump were initially funded by groups and donors supporting Republican opponents of Mr. Trump during the GOP primaries, multiple sources confirmed to CNN. Those sources also said that once Mr. Trump became the nominee, further investigation was funded by groups and donors supporting Hillary Clinton.
Spokespeople for the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. Officials who spoke to CNN declined to do so on the record given the classified nature of the material.
Some of the allegations were first reported publicly in Mother Jones one week before the election.
One high level administration official told CNN, “I have a sense the outgoing administration and intelligence community is setting down the pieces so this must be investigated seriously and run down. I think [the] concern was to be sure that whatever information was out there is put into the system so it is evaluated as it should be and acted upon as necessary.”January 10, 2017 at 9:27 pm #63074January 11, 2017 at 1:15 am #63077znModeratorThe bizarre allegations about Trump and Russia, explained
The bizarre allegations about Trump and Russia, explained
So it looks like Russia may have some dirty secrets on Donald Trump — and that they worked to influence the outcome of the election. Here’s a helpful explainer.
WHAT DOES RUSSIA HAVE ON TRUMP?
We don’t know for sure. The reports circulating haven’t been definitively verified. But basically, Russia allegedly has some embarrassing dirt on Trump — both personal and financial.
The key allegation against Trump that’s flying around the Internet is that he apparently had prostitutes urinate on a bed Obama had slept in — the type of act known in the business as “golden showers,” if you didn’t know.
Maybe you think that’s kinky. Maybe you think it’s gross. Maybe you think ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But that’s not all.
OK, WHAT ELSE IS THERE?
Apparently Russia has been gathering intel like this on Trump — and also supporting and helping him — for years, in various ways, including providing intel, and including helping him win the election. One tactic: targeting young Americans specifically to turn them against Hillary Clinton and toward Trump, including convincing pro-Bernie Sanders voters protesting the establishment to support Trump.
One allegation specifically mentions that Trump is happy for Russia to be seen by Americans as a distraction from his “corrupt business ties to China and other emerging countries.”
Put it all together, and at worst you have a president-elect who is vulnerable to pressure or even blackmail by a hostile foreign country. (Russia is not our friend.) At best, Russia can count on Trump for “voluntary co-operation” without even having to blackmail him, according to the intel.
IS THIS NEW INFO?
To many elected officials, the intelligence community and journalists, no. These claims have been flying around for months — since before Election Day. (The website Mother Jones even reported on this in October.) But to most Americans and most of the world, yes, this is new and explosive.
SO WHY ARE WE HEARING ABOUT IT NOW?
President Obama and Trump were both given a synopsis of a report (also being referred to in some media reports as a dossier, which just means a collection of documents) that contained these allegations. The report is 35 pages long. Today, CNN put out a major report on it, as did BuzzFeed, which also published the documents. (They are here.) And that’s when it all exploded.
WHERE DID THIS INFO COME FROM?
“The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible,” reported CNN.
WHY WOULD RUSSIA DO ALL THIS? WHAT DO THEY WANT?
The U.S. government, under Obama, is often at odds with Russia. What the Russian government wants is to move things in their direction. Including changing American opinion in their favor.
WHAT DOES TRUMP SAY ABOUT IT?
A lawyer for Trump laughed about it and called the claims “ridiculous,” according to Mic.
Trump’s first news conference in months is scheduled for tomorrow.
NOW WHAT?
The Huffington Post reports that Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) asked Obama to provide Congress with a classified briefing on the subject.
January 12, 2017 at 1:08 pm #63224znModeratorHere’s Why Russian Intelligence Bombshell on Donald Trump Might Be Believable
http://fortune.com/2017/01/11/donald-trump-intelligence-russian/
The disputed intelligence dossier compiled for the Democratic Party against Donald Trump is obviously unverifiable. Intelligence work is supposed to work that way. Nobody gives receipts for most salacious of the alleged conduct, and nobody says “of course you can quote me on that.” Everything is deniable. And by the time the claims come out, any halfway competent intelligence organization will have ensured that all those who could corroborate it are well out of harm’s way, in this world or the next.
Nor is such cynicism a Russian monopoly, it should go without saying. But for all that the dossier says about Trump and members of his campaign team that is untrue, unverifiable, or illogical, it says plenty about Russia under Vladimir Putin that has the ring of truth.
Few would dispute, in retrospect, that Trump had succeeded in making Europe’s inadequate contributions to NATO more of a campaign issue than Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Few will be surprised by allegations of Putin’s obsession with expat Russians in the U.S., always first in line as suspects for sponsoring revolution at home.Whether such details are just enough to give it a veneer of credibility is another question, because there are also plenty of bits in the dossier that are illogical, or at least contradictory. But then that might equally reflect actual contradictions in the corridors of power in Moscow. It’s impossible to know.
The dossier paints a picture of a “Trump support operation” that was conceived and encouraged by the intelligence services from which Putin himself emerged, against the advice of professional diplomats, past and present. That seems plausible enough, given the respective nature of spies and diplomats, and the respective measure of trust he has shown in both since 2000.
So, the dossier claims, when allegations of Russian involvement in the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s staff’s e-mails exploded, Putin looked for a scapegoat, and found one in his chief of staff, Sergey Ivanov. Ivanov, a long-serving aide who was in any case nearer the end than the start of his career, was indeed sacked in August without any detailed explanation, from Russian media. He was replaced with Anton Vaino, partly because he was not involved in the operation, according to the dossier.
The claim that Putin considered making Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov another scapegoat seems more far-fetched, however. Not only is Lavrov an operator with few equals in world diplomacy, this was all happening when Russia’s military involvement in Syria was intensifying. It seems highly unlikely that Putin would have dropped his chief advisor at the most sensitive time for Russian foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The dossier also claims (on the basis of three separate sources) that Carter Page, a sometime Trump adviser with extensive past ties to gas giant Gazprom, met in July with Igor Sechin, the U.S.-sanctioned CEO of oil giant Rosneft. (Page insists that such claims are “complete garbage.”)
The notion that Sechin, by most people’s reckoning the most powerful man in Russia after Putin, had sought the lifting of U.S. sanctions in return for a renewed energy partnership, is entirely logical. Sanctions have severely crimped Rosneft’s investment (notably in its joint venture drilling for oil in the Arctic with ExxonMobil), and lifting them would benefit no-one more than Rosneft.
Less credible is the claim that Sechin offered the U.S. a sizeable stake in Rosneft in return. True, there was a stake in Rosneft for sale last year. But the state budget was due to receive the money from it by December, and there was never any chance of selling to a U.S. entity in that timeframe. It eventually went to a consortium of Qatar and Glencore, with financing by Italy’s Banca Intesa SanPaolo.
Page, like Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, were withdrawn from Trump’s team after the spotlight on their Russian connections grew too intense, though even the dossier acknowledges there were other factors at work there, too. But one claim regarding Manafort stands out: That Putin refused to believe the reassurances of Viktor Yanukovych, the disgraced ex-president of Ukraine, that there was no paper trail confirming illicit payments made to Manafort that would discredit him in the U.S. Whatever the truth, and Manafort denies any wrongdoing, Putin’s exasperation at Yanukovych’s shortcomings is a matter of record.
Finally, some parts of the dossier’s characterization of relations between Putin and Alfa Group is likely on the mark, or close to it. Alfa Bank, it will be remembered, was rather fancifully linked with Trump by Democrat-leaning publications last year. The dossier paints a picture of a long-standing symbiotic relationship between Alfa Group and the Russian leader. More recently, the dossier claims, Alfa owners Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven have provided Putin with valuable information through their own network of business contacts in the U.S., valued particularly because of the conflicting signals Putin was getting from his diplomats and spies regarding the success of the alleged operation.
Alfa, like the Kremlin on Wednesday, dismissed the dossier’s contents.”The allegations in the dossier with regard to Fridman, Aven and Alfa are fake news,” a source close to the group said.January 12, 2017 at 2:52 pm #63231wvParticipantI agree with Glenn Greenwald.
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