I love how he is missing teeth. Also wouldn't it be awesome if it was a different guy in the picture on the bedstand?Flip a coin
This is a defining moment in US history. Time to declare sides- America or Russia
- Thread starter THE_DEVIL
- Start date
So.....Republicans are finally figuring out what Dems and Independents have been trying to point out for basically 2 years....
Does this explain why they are so far behind the curve on so many OTHER issues, too?
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Imagine if after 9/11 George W. Bush met w/ Bin Laden and instead of blaming Bin Laden, he blamed the US for the terrorist attack, via a live press conference. That's basically what happened in Helsinki today with Putin.
That's nice of Communist, John Brennan to share that. He spent his years overthrowing other governments. Now, he wants to accomplish the same here.
These neocons are pissed they are not getting their war with Russia. Now, they're in the death throes.
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Ah, big news on the Russian front today - so naturally our biggest russian stooge comes out to defend the motherland.
Not all intel professionals are universal on this. Especially the ones who are not political appointees.
Memo to the President Ahead of Monday’s Summit
July 15, 2018
Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an open letter to President Trump ahead of Monday’s summit.
With Friday’s indictments of Russian intelligence officers, Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an open letter to President Trump making clear that the “evidence” behind the indictments is as fraudulent as the intelligence alleging WMD in Iraq. It is being published exclusively here ahead of the Trump-Putin summit on Monday.
BRIEFING FOR: The President
FROM: Ray McGovern, former CIA briefer of The President’s Daily Brief, and William Binney, former Technical Director at NSA
SUBJECT: Info Your Summit Briefers May Have Missed
We reproduce below one of our most recent articles on “Russia-Gate,” which, in turn, draws from our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Memorandum to you of July 24, 2017.
At the time of that Memorandum we wrote:
“Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.”
“We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI,” we wrote. However, we now have forensic evidence that shows the data provided by Guccifer 2.0 had been manipulated and is a fabrication.
We also discussed CIA’s cyber-tool “Marble Framework,” which can hack into computers, “obfuscate” who hacked, and leave behind incriminating, tell-tale signs in Russian; and we noted that this capability had been employed during 2016. As we pointed out, Putin himself made an unmistakable reference to this “obfuscating” tool during an interview with Megan Kelly.
Our article of June 7, 2018, explains further:
“Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack”
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — including two “alumni” who were former National Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton” via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device — probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the “conclusions” of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were “inconclusive.” Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA “Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections” of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the “handpicked” authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee … to WikiLeaks.” Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA “assessment” became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump presidency, McGovern had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still “can’t share the evidence” with me … or with anyone else, because it does not exist.
It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what we call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton’s PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions “to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.” The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting “The Russians did it,” and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer’ Fox, Bernie didn’t say nothin’.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating “forensic facts” to “prove” the Russians did it. Here’s how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish “emails related to Hillary Clinton.”
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0” affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the “hack;” claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent Investigators
A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the “handpicked analysts” who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the “hack” that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.
Click link for balance:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/15/memo-to-the-president-ahead-of-mondays-summit/
Memo to the President Ahead of Monday’s Summit
July 15, 2018
Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an open letter to President Trump ahead of Monday’s summit.
With Friday’s indictments of Russian intelligence officers, Ray McGovern and Bill Binney have written an open letter to President Trump making clear that the “evidence” behind the indictments is as fraudulent as the intelligence alleging WMD in Iraq. It is being published exclusively here ahead of the Trump-Putin summit on Monday.
BRIEFING FOR: The President
FROM: Ray McGovern, former CIA briefer of The President’s Daily Brief, and William Binney, former Technical Director at NSA
SUBJECT: Info Your Summit Briefers May Have Missed
We reproduce below one of our most recent articles on “Russia-Gate,” which, in turn, draws from our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Memorandum to you of July 24, 2017.
At the time of that Memorandum we wrote:
“Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.
Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.”
“We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI,” we wrote. However, we now have forensic evidence that shows the data provided by Guccifer 2.0 had been manipulated and is a fabrication.
We also discussed CIA’s cyber-tool “Marble Framework,” which can hack into computers, “obfuscate” who hacked, and leave behind incriminating, tell-tale signs in Russian; and we noted that this capability had been employed during 2016. As we pointed out, Putin himself made an unmistakable reference to this “obfuscating” tool during an interview with Megan Kelly.
Our article of June 7, 2018, explains further:
“Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack”
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — including two “alumni” who were former National Security Agency technical directors — have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the “emails related to Hillary Clinton” via a “hack” by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device — probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the “conclusions” of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were “inconclusive.” Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA “Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections” of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the “handpicked” authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing “high confidence” that Russian intelligence “relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee … to WikiLeaks.” Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA “assessment” became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump presidency, McGovern had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still “can’t share the evidence” with me … or with anyone else, because it does not exist.
It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of “emails related to Hillary Clinton,” throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what we call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton’s PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions “to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.” The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting “The Russians did it,” and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer’ Fox, Bernie didn’t say nothin’.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating “forensic facts” to “prove” the Russians did it. Here’s how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish “emails related to Hillary Clinton.”
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: “Guccifer 2.0” affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the “hack;” claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with “Russian fingerprints.”
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent Investigators
A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the “handpicked analysts” who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the “hack” that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.
Click link for balance:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/15/memo-to-the-president-ahead-of-mondays-summit/
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Well, there you go again with false equivalency. I prefer peace than the lies of our Intel agencies who have been caught time and again with lies. You continue to slurp it up quicker than Heather Brooke.
Even if you didn't "trust" US intel, what the hell would make someone trust Putin?
He was extremely "strong" says Trump. What a pussy.
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This Is the Moment of Truth for Republicans
The GOP can either defend the United States or serve the damaged and defective man who is now its president.
JAMES FALLOWS12:40 PM ET
There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.
Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.
Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.
Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions.
Whatever the balance of motivations, what mattered was that Trump’s answers were indistinguishable from Putin’s, starting with the fundamental claim that Putin’s assurances about interference in U.S. democracy (“He was incredibly strong and confident in his denial”) deserved belief over those of his own Department of Justice (“I think the probe is a disaster for our country”).
I am old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon telling lies on TV, about Vietnam in both cases, and Watergate for Nixon. I remember the travails and deceptions of Bill Clinton, and of George W. Bush in the buildup to the disastrous Iraq War.
But never before have I seen an American president consistently, repeatedly, publicly, and shockingly advance the interests of another country over those of his own government and people.
Trump manifestly cannot help himself. This iswho he is.
Those whocoulddo something are the 51 Republican senators and 236 Republican representatives who have the power to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, pass resolutions of censure, guarantee the integrity of Robert Mueller’s investigation, condemn the past Russian election interference, shore up protections against the next assault, and in generaldefend their countryrather than the damaged and defective man who is now its president.
For 18 months, members of this party have averted their eyes from Trump, rather than disturb the Trump elements among their constituency or disrupt the party’s agenda on tax cuts and the Supreme Court. They already bear responsibility for what Trump has done to his office.
But with every hour that elapses after this shocking performance in Helsinki without Republicansdoinganything, the more deeply they are stained by this dark moment in American leadership.
Where's the evidence? High confidence is not a conviction. One of the lies is our government and media telling us he annexed Crimea. That's BS. A referendum was taken by Crimeans and they overwhelmingly voted for Russia to protect them from America. Gallup polls, pre and post coup, support this. Over 90% of Eastern Ukraine voted for Yanukovych, Russia's guy. Victoria Nuland and Obama overthrew him. That's not meddling?
Are you frigging high? With the EU and NATO, we are 30 x's more powerful than Russia. He's not dictating to anyone. We are in their backyard. America isn't an aggressor? We have control over 30% of Syria.
Right nat, everything is our fault. Putin is just a poor defenseless angel trying to defend himself from our aggression. That airliner that was blown out of the air over Ukraine a few years back - probably Hillary's fault.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/29/the-official-and-implausible-mh-17-scenario/
Tell me where I'm wrong. Don't deflect. The link above rips apart the MH-17 accusation.
So do you agree with Trump throwing our intel community under the bus today? Most republicans even agree it was a disaster.
The intel community has been throwing Trump under the bus before he took office. Even so far as to write op-eds calling for America to vote for Hillary.
And, considering they were identifying Russian meddling as far back as 2015, can you blame them?
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Ok let's say this is true (and in alot of ways I agree with you) is it the best option then to do the same thing to them? Hes the president right? Why wouldn't he clean house and take care of it himself.. He has no one to blame but himself for the people that are still around on these intelligence teams
It's a legitimate gripe but not on this day.. and also all the more reason trump should have put his foot down instead of buddying up! Like I mentioned earlier you cant blame Obama yesterday but then say Putin didnt do anything today.
...it's almost like we should have fired FDR for Pearl Harbor, or GW Bush, for 9/11.....Amirite?
I dont think that's the angle as much as it really appears Obama knew and did nothing and let is just go because he didnt want to get in the weeds late in his tenure. Passing along a problem if you will.. But again not the day to defend Donny thats not my intent
this is what happened-
sanctions
expulsions
reports to congress
report to Trump campaign
I don't have enough time left in my days to explain all the ways you are wrong. But yeah, link all you want in defense of the motherland - the phone calls where the russians discuss shooting down the airliner and going thru the wreckage speak for themselves.
We didn't know the exact details when it happened. We didn't know exactly who did it, we didn't know if they had official connections to the Russian government (they do), we didn't know the scope of their crimes, how they did them, or why they did them (because Russian really really didn't want Hillary to be president thinking that Trump would be far easier to manipulate).
But do you know what? We know all of that stuff now. And we learned it under Trump. And he completely turned his back on us by siding with Russia instead.
Yeah but even leading up to that. Obama doesnt have a pot to crap in with Russia either! Again not in any way defending how its being handled now..
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.br.../03/05/dont-rehabilitate-obama-on-russia/amp/
Huey is probably my second least favorite poster but hes absolutely right in his last few sentences here..
Really? Because you don't think Republicans would NOT have screamed like stuck-pigs, if Obama had started investigations on NRA finances and contributions to the GOP, on "links" to Russian businessmen, deleting/censoring MILLIONS of social media accounts that were in favor of Trump or Conservative causes?
Because I cannot imagine HOW any administration could POSSIBLY have done much until there were some VERY clear evidence presented to the US public to do anything.
Let's not rewrite history here. People had NO CLUE how many fake accounts there were on social media; there was limited information on Russian operatives and their Troll Farm. There was conflicting evidence up until the last minutes of the election on Russian intel ops - and EVEN WHEN Obama asked for assistance from 'the other side of the aisle', he got ZERO. He literally got "complicity".
So, let's make sure we are viewing things through the lens 'at the time', and not in the rearview mirror with the additional evidence and information gathered in the meantime.
Anyone can be indicted. Most are for obstruction and Mueller threatening IRS and life imprisonment. Most will make up something to save their hide.
Clinging to Collusion: Why Evidence Will Probably Never Be Produced in the Indictments of ‘Russian Agents’
July 14, 2018
The indictment of 12 Russian ‘agents,’ which included no collusion with Trump’s team, is essentially a political and not legal document because it is almost certain the U.S. government will never have to present any evidence in court, reports Joe Lauria.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Charges against 12 Russian intelligence agents for allegedly hacking emails from the Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential election were announced by the U.S. Justice Department on Friday at the very moment President Donald Trump was meeting Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle and just days before a summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.A central claim of Russia-gate has been that the Russian government with help from the Trump campaign stole emails from the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then gave those emails to WikiLeaks for publication to damage Clinton’s quest for the White House.
Until Friday however, the investigation into the allegations had produced no formal indictment of Russian government interference in the election. Like previous U.S. government accusations against Russia for alleged election meddling, the indictment makes assertions without providing evidence. Indictments do not need to show evidence and under U.S. law, indictments are not considered evidence. And it is highly unlikely that the government will ever have to produce any evidence in court.
Friday’s indictments do not include any charges against Trump campaign members for allegedly colluding with the Russian government to carry out the hacks. That has been at the core of allegations swirling in U.S. media for two years. If the alleged co-conspirators “known” to the DOJ were on the Trump team, the indictments do not say. There is only a hint that “unknown” persons might be.
In announcing the indictments at a press conference Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said: “The conspirators corresponded with several Americans during the course of the conspiracy through the internet. There’s no allegation in this indictment that the Americans knew they were corresponding with Russian intelligence officers.”
The indictment alleges that Russian agents, posing as Guccifer 2.0, communicated on Aug. 15, 2016 with “a person who was in regular contact with senior members” of the Trump campaign, mostly like advisor Roger Stone, who has spoken about communicating with Guccifer 2.0. The indictment says Guccifer offered to “help u anyhow,” apparently indicating that Stone did want Guccifer 2.0’s help.
Clinging to ‘Collusion’
Balance:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/...roduced-in-the-indictments-of-russian-agents/
