Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

[Admin]

So, either Spicer and Conway were completely out of the loop, or they lied..

Then Tuesday night, Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo report for the New York Times, citing four current and former American officials, that Spicer was wrong. They say that, in fact, “phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” It’s an explosive lead.

Deeper in, the story reveals that American intelligence agencies have “sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election” but that “so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.” That’s a good deal less explosive. Still, the fact is that the contacts were there. And the investigation is apparently ongoing. It appears Spicer either baldly lied to the press about the contacts or else was kept out of the loop entirely.

Kellyanne Conway made similar statements in December to CBS. Either way, the story is certain to intensify both the Trump administration’s complaining about leaks and congressional Democrats’ demands for an investigation on Capitol Hill that could provide an alternative route for information to reach the public.

It looks like the Trump team was in touch with the Russians before the election after all - Vox

And this, of course, is how Trump reacts to all:

President Donald Trump blasted reporting on his campaign's ties with Russian intelligence officials as "conspiracy theories and blind hatred," in a series of tweets Wednesday morning. "The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!," Trump tweeted.

Trump blasts report on campaign Russia ties - Business Insider

If it's all "conspiracy theories and blind hatred,", then why did he have to fire Mike Flynn??

[Admin]

Here is basically the essence of the story:

How can Trump and his crew concede that they were hobnobbing with a foreign government that was waging political warfare against the United States? The "full and complete debrief" that Cillizza advocates would require Trump to acknowledge that he and his team have covered up these contacts and explain why. This "full and complete debrief" could well show that Trump's camp cozied up to a repressive government that was seeking to destabilize US politics to help Trump.

It could reveal that Trump associates directly or indirectly encouraged Putin's attack on the 2016 election. Trump would lose all legitimacy as president were he to admit that anything of this sort transpired. There are some deeds that cannot be acknowledged. Expecting Trump and his lieutenants to confess that his campaign or business associates were networking with the Kremlin or Russian intelligence is not realistic—especially after their months of denial. 

(Trump also for months refused to accept the US intelligence assessment that Russia was behind the hacking and leaking aimed at Democratic targets, and when he finally bent on this point, he downplayed Moscow's meddling in the election.) Trump cannot continue to present himself as the triumphant winner of a fair election if it turns out his own people were palling around with Moscow.  Another famous line is this: You can't handle the truth.

Further revelations about contacts between the Trump camp and Russia could pose an existential threat to the Trump White House. The clear choice for him and his gang is to deny, to stonewall, to distract, to lie. Trump doesn't explain the pre-election contacts; he complains about leaks. He casts all interest in this controversy as merely the revenge of the Clinton losers. He calls reporting on the Russia connection "fake news" and slams journalists pursuing the Flynn story as "fake media." This is not shocking. He might not be able to survive a full accounting. The poison of the cover-up may be less deadly than the poison of the event itself. Only Trump and the people involved can know for sure.

Why Trump Can't Come Clean on Russia | Mother Jones

We don't know, but there are a whole series of uncomfortable facts, especially when taken together:

• The one foreign power Trump hasn't slapped is Russia, in fact, he has consistently spoken in admiring terms about Putin
  
• He egged the Russians on to find the 30,000 emails from Clinton's server
  
• During the Republican Convention, Trump's people softened text on policies towards Ukraine
  
• Paul Manafort has been an adviser for a Russian backed Ukranian president (Yannokovich) and the departure of Manafort from Trump's campaign has never really been explained.
  
• He consistently denied that the Russians were responsible for the hacking of Podesta's emails and slammed the intelligence agencies for this, reminding us that these were the same agencies that argued Irak had weapons of mass destruction.
  
• After endless denying, it turned out that Flynn indeed had contacts with the Russian ambassador before Trump was installed as president and after lying about it, it turned out that he indeed discussed the sanctions.
  

This is just offhand from memory, we're sure there is more.

[Admin]

And here is Krugman:

The story so far: A foreign dictator intervened on behalf of a U.S. presidential candidate — and that candidate won. Close associates of the new president were in contact with the dictator’s espionage officials during the campaign, and his national security adviser was forced out over improper calls to that country’s ambassador... Meanwhile, the president seems oddly solicitous of the dictator’s interests, and rumors swirl about his personal financial connections to the country in question. ...

Maybe ... it’s all perfectly innocent. But if it’s not innocent, it’s very bad indeed. So what do Republicans in Congress, who have the power to investigate the situation, believe should be done? Nothing.

Paul Ryan ... says that Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador were “entirely appropriate.”

Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, angrily dismissed calls for a select committee to investigate contacts during the campaign: “There is absolutely not going to be one.”

Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House oversight committee — who hounded Hillary Clinton endlessly over Benghazi — declared that the “situation has taken care of itself.”

Just the other day Republicans were hot in pursuit of potential scandal, and posed as ultrapatriots. Now they’re indifferent to actual subversion and the real possibility that we are being governed by people who take their cues from Moscow. ...

The point is that you can’t understand the mess we’re in without appreciating not just the potential corruption of the president, but the unmistakable corruption of his party — a party so intent on cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulating banks and polluters and dismantling social programs that accepting foreign subversion is, apparently, a small price to pay. ...

So how does this crisis end? It’s not a constitutional crisis — yet. But Donald Trump is facing a clear crisis of legitimacy. ... And nothing he has done since the inauguration allays fears that he is in effect a Putin puppet. How can a leader under such a cloud send American soldiers to die? How can he be granted the right to shape the Supreme Court for a generation? ...

The thing is, this nightmare could be ended by a handful of Republican legislators willing to make common cause with Democrats to demand the truth. And maybe there are enough people of conscience left in the G.O.P. But there probably aren’t. And that’s a problem that’s even scarier than the Trump-Putin axis.

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: The Silence of the Hacks

[Admin]

Consider what's written directly above, one might think Republicans could be a bit concerned, right? Wrong.

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has refused all calls to hold a hearing on or investigate President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest. Instead, Chaffetz is using his oversight power to continue pursuing Hillary Clinton’s emails. On Thursday, Chaffetz sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking him to bring criminal charges against Bryan Pagliano, the computer specialist at the State Department who helped set up Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Republicans won’t investigate Trump, but they’re still going after Hillary’s emails

[Admin]

Ok, let's just let this sink in a bit:

The story so far: A foreign dictator intervened on behalf of a U.S. presidential candidate — and that candidate won. Close associates of the new president were in contact with the dictator’s espionage officials during the campaign, and his national security adviser was forced out over improper calls to that country’s ambassador... Meanwhile, the president seems oddly solicitous of the dictator’s interests, and rumors swirl about his personal financial connections to the country in question. ... Maybe ... it’s all perfectly innocent. But if it’s not innocent, it’s very bad indeed.

Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

We know that The chairman of the House Oversight Committee Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has refused all calls to hold a hearing on or investigate President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest. Instead, Chaffetz is using his oversight power to continue pursuing Hillary Clinton’s emails.

And here is another reaction from a Republican apparatchik, it's all the fault of the press..

Shortly after Trump's rally wrapped up, CBS News published a segment of an interview with Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who told CBS's John Dickerson that Americans should take "seriously" Trump's recent comments that the media is "the enemy of the American people."

While Trump has long attacked the media, Trump's speech Saturday and Priebus's interview, due to air in full on Sunday's "Face the Nation," demonstrated a new shift in the offensive. Both Trump and Priebus directed their comments at discrediting the anonymously sourced and leaked stories that have plagued Trump's first month in office.

When Dickerson pressed Priebus about whether the media was "the enemy," the chief of staff suggested that anonymous sourcing was the big issue with recent reports. “I think that the media should stop with this unnamed source stuff. Put names on a piece of paper and print it. If people aren't willing to put their name next to a quote, then the quote shouldn't be listed,” Priebus said.

Trump attacks media in rally as he, Priebus question anonymous sources - Business Insider

Now, just imagine. If this was about Hillary Clinton under suspicion that she had improper relations with a foreign power that meddled in the US elections on her behalf, would they say this was all nonsense and the result of a fake press, the enemy of the people?

HAHAHAHA!

Quick reminder. There were no less than seven independent inquiries about Benghazi (none of which delivered any verdict of any wrongdoing from Clinton, but that didn't stop the Republicans to milk this to the extreme). Instead of finding out whether the President is in cohorts with, or beholden to, a foreign power which meddled in the elections, he's refusing to investigate this whilst still going after Hillary's email, a non-issue, basically.

[Admin]

Just to remind those who tend to forget..

An outspoken Kremlin critic who fell into a coma two years after a suspected poisoning has left Russia for treatment abroad. Journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who works for pro-democracy group Open Russia, became ill earlier this month. He has now recovered enough to leave the country to seek further treatment, his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said on Facebook on Sunday. The activist nearly died when he suffered sudden kidney failure in 2015. Mr Kara-Murza, a friend of opposition leader and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in February 2015, fell into a coma for a week, with tests revealing he had ingested a poisonous substance.

'Poisoned' critic Vladimir Kara-Murza leaves Russia for treatment - BBC News

And another reminder:

Donald Trump has once again defended Vladimir Putin against accusations that he is a killer, telling Fox News: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?” The US president appeared to place the US and Russia on the same moral plane in an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl kicked off in Houston, Texas. Asked by the host, Bill O’Reilly, if he respected Putin, Trump replied: “I do respect Putin. “Will I get along with him? I have no idea. It’s very possible I won’t.” O’Reilly said: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.” “There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Donald Trump repeats respect for 'killer' Putin in Fox Super Bowl interview | US news | The Guardian

And some perspective from The Atlantic:

While Fox was airing its pre-Super Bowl interview of President Donald Trump, who refused to accede to Bill O’Reilly’s characterization of Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a killer,” Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. lay in a medically induced coma in a Moscow hospital. Kara-Murza is only 35, but he had been walking with the help of a cane because of something that happened two years ago: a sudden onset of nausea and a quick descent into multiple organ failure and coma. After weeks in intensive care in Moscow in 2015, he was finally examined abroad and was told that he had high levels of heavy metals in his system.

It seemed to confirm his friends’ and family’s worst fear—which the Russian hospital had been pooh-poohing—that Kara-Murza had been poisoned for his relentless opposition to the Kremlin. Shortly before his organs failed in one afternoon in 2015, Kara-Murza had made a trip to Washington to ask lawmakers to sanction eight people he believed were responsible for the assassination of his old friend and ally, Boris Nemtsov.

Now, the fear, and the symptoms, are the same. In 2015, Kara-Murza survived and moved his family to the United States, but went right back to work with the Russian opposition. By Monday evening, the wretched diagnosis came: “acute intoxication with an unknown substance.” Whoever had poisoned him the first time had apparently returned to finish the job.

An Enemy of the Kremlin Dies in London

I seriously doubt that O’Reilly was referring to Kara-Murza when he spoke of Putin being a killer. I seriously doubt he even knows who Kara-Murza is. I seriously doubt that most of the commentators, both liberal and conservative, who exploded at Trump’s response know who Kara-Murza is, or could name any of the people Putin allegedly killed. Remember Oleg Erovinkin? Mikhail Beketov? Galina Starovoytova?

In fact, it’s hard to say Putin is a killer. Putin hasn’t technically killed anyone himself. He didn’t personally fire bullets into journalist Anna Politkovskaya and he didn’t personally drop bombs on children in Aleppo. He just issues general orders that make these things so. When it comes to eliminating domestic opposition, Putin comes from a long tradition, maintained by his native KGB and its forebears, of ensuring that political dissent remains a mortally dangerous proposition. Yet despite these roots, he is not a very bloody ruler, at least not by Russian standards. He has not sent millions to the Gulag or, like Stalin, signed in red pencil kill lists thousands of names long.

Rather, he has created an atmosphere in which his minions—like Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov or young nationalist punks or even uniformed officers of the state—can kill with impunity. Even when tens of thousands of people protested against him in the winter of 2011-2012, he didn’t respond with mass arrests and purges. He sent a few dozen people to jail, not for 25 years, but for two or three. The government picked sample protestors from each social group—an anarchist, a pensioner, a young liberal—because the point was not so much to punish specific individuals but to send a clear, targeted message about the costs of going against him. By American standards, Putin may be a killer, but by Russian standards, he is downright moderate in how he dispatches with his enemies.

[Admin]

Nothing going on right? Perhaps, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, here an excellent summing up, from Vox:

33 questions about Donald Trump and Russia

There’s an awful lot of loose ends here.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com  Feb 20, 2017, 8:00am EST

Michael Flynn’s resignation — under fire — as national security adviser has the larger question of Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia back in the news. It’s a story that centers on three big, but fundamentally unproven, allegations: that Trump is on the take from Russia, that he is somehow exposed to Russian blackmail material, that his campaign actively collaborated with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign, or some combination of the above.

The evidence for those explosive charges is thin.

What we have instead are a lot of small, unanswered questions. Questions about Flynn’s behavior and the circumstances of his firing. Questions about the behavior of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the circumstances of hisfiring. Questions about enigmatic remarks made by longtime Trump associate and veteran political operative Roger Stone. Questions about an obscure American businessman named Carter Page who maybe — or maybe not — worked for some time with the Trump campaign.

But there are also longstanding questions about the opaque financing of the Trump Organization, and about why its founder and owner has been so reluctant to engage in normal levels of financial disclosure. And most of all, there are questions about Trump’s highly unorthodox attitudes toward Russia, its government, and its leader, Vladimir Putin.

Here, in convenient list form, are the 30 small questions and three big ones about Donald Trump and Russia.

Five questions about Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn was a well-regarded, if somewhat unorthodox, Army officer who was promoted to head the Defense Intelligence Agency. There, he clashed with colleagues over disparate visions for the structure of the overall intelligence community and with the Obama White House over Iran policy. He was fired and sent to the fringes of the policy community, from whence he returned with out-of-the-mainstream opinions on Islam and Russia policy, a close association with the Russian television network RT, and an affiliation with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
A top aide to the president, he was recently fired as part of the fallout of a telephone call with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during which they discussed the Obama administration’s imposition of sanctions to punish Russia for interfering in the American election. Trump says Flynn was fired due to a loss of trust between the two men, but that Flynn’s underlying conduct in making the call was fine. But:

• What exactly did Flynn say or do that caused the president to lose trust in him?
  
• Why did Flynn tell the public (and Mike Pence and even the FBI) that he didn’t discuss sanctions with Kislyak when he did discuss them?
  
• Who, if anyone, authorized or directed Flynn to call Kislyak and discuss sanctions with him?
  
• What, if anything, did Flynn promise Kislyak in exchange for Russia forgoing retaliation to sanctions?
  
• Why did White House officials continue to say that Flynn hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak for days after the White House counsel was told that he had?
  

Three questions about Carter Page
Carter Page was an American businessman of no particular renown who worked in the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch before striking out on his own with a consulting company. Nobody in Washington — and few people in Moscow — seems to have heard of him when Trump started naming him as a member of his then-threadbare national security team. The résumé boost seems to have been a boon to Page’s stature in Russia, where he portrayed himself as a big shot in ways that ended up being a liability to Trump.
His association with the Trump team ended rapidly, and Trump has ever since been at pains to minimize the degree of contact he ever had with Page.

• Why, then, did Trump name the decidedly obscure “Carter Page, PhD” as one of only five national security advisers in a March 2016 interview with the Washington Post editorial board?
  
• Who did Page meet in his mysterious summer 2016 trip to Moscow where he billed himself (perhaps inaccurately) as a key conduit to Trump?
  
• Why did Page step down from the Trump team in September 2016 just as stories of the summer trip began to surface?
  

Five questions about Roger Stone
Roger Stone is a veteran Republican Party political operative dating back to the Nixon administration, when he was a leading perpetrator of “dirty tricks” politics. By the 21st century, he was a marginal figure in national GOP politics but continued to be a player in New York via his connections to former New York state Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno (who was later convicted on multiple corruption charges that were eventually overturned). He’s also a longtime friend of Trump’s, and a bridge between pre-campaign Trumpworld and the world of politics.
His exact role in the evolving Trump campaign is unclear, but he has at various times appeared to be strikingly in the know about the goings-on of WikiLeaks, and anonymously sourced news articles have suggested his ties to Russian government figures are the subject of ongoing investigation.

• Why exactly was Roger Stone fired from the Trump campaign back in 2015?
  
• Why did Stone purport to have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks releases of John Podesta’s stolen emails in the fall of 2016?
  
• How did Stone know in August 2016 that “it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel [sic]”?
  
• How did Stone get back into Trump’s good graces sufficiently to merit a Trump Tower meeting during the transition?
  
• Do US intelligence agencies have evidence that Stone was wittingly or unwittingly in touch with Russian intelligence operatives during the campaign?
  

Five questions about Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort, like Stone, is an old-line Republican Party operative who’d somewhat fallen out of the national party mainstream. But while Stone became a colorful domestic figure, Manafort sought his fortunes abroad — offering consulting and lobbying services to an array of unsavory foreign governments, and eventually finding work for Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, Moscow’s main vehicle for influence in Ukraine during the 21st-century tug of war for dominance over that country.

• Why, exactly, was Paul Manafort fired as campaign manager?
  
• Given the firing, why was Manafort back in Trump’s good graces by December, journeying to Trump Tower and offering advice on appointments?
  
• Did Manafort receive more than $12 million in cash payments from the pro-Russian Ukrainian political party he worked for prior to joining the Trump campaign?
  
• Why did Manafort make several trips to Kiev between the end of his consulting work there in 2014 and late 2015?
  
• Did Manafort have contact during the campaign with representatives of the Russian government?
  

Seven questions about the Trump Organization
Donald Trump’s financial disclosure forms reveal essentially nothing about his underlying finances, because all they show is that he is the full or partial owner of a sprawling array of limited liability companies that together comprise the Trump Organization. These are privately held “pass-through” entities, whose profits and losses show up on the individual income taxes of their owners — Trump and his partners.

Because Trump has not disclosed his tax returns, this means we have no real idea how his businesses operate or where they get their money. Trump loudly proclaims he has no deals in Russia, but the physical location of deals is not the issue. And Trump has not amassed the kind of sterling record of honesty that should make anyone inclined to simply take his word for it.

• How much revenue and investment has the Trump Organization received over the years from Russian nationals and entities in other post-Soviet republics still in Moscow’s sphere of influence?
  
• Does Trump, as he has said publicly, have “ZERO investments in Russia” — and if so, why won’t he release the relevant financial records that prove it?
  
• Who was really behind the New York property development company Bayrock, of which Trump served as a public face, that’s enmeshed in money-laundering allegations and about which Trump said in a 2011 deposition: “I never really understood who owned Bayrock.”
  
• Why did Trump, upon returning from a 2013 trip to Moscow, claim to have made high-level contacts with the Russian business and political elite, claiming “almost all of the oligarchs were in the room” to meet with him?
  
• Was Russian money behind Trump’s business partners in Toronto, Talon International?
  
• What exactly did Donald Trump Jr. mean when he said several years ago, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia”? (Whose money? To what?)
  
• Are any of Trump’s hundreds of millions of dollars in gross debts held by entities close to the Russian government?
  

Five questions about Trump’s policy toward Russia
Before Trump arrived on the scene, the overwhelming consensus in Republican Party politics was that the Obama administration had been too soft on Russia. Republicans believed the New START Treaty made too many concessions to Moscow, that Obama had not intervened forcefully enough against Russia’s allies in the Syrian government, that he had not done enough to back the Ukrainian government, and that he had committed insufficient military resources to the defense of Central Europe.

Trump reversed all that. And while seeming very flexible on most policy matters, he has remained quite rigid in his insistence on replacing the GOP’s old “more hawkish on Russia than Obama” stance with a new “more friendly to Russia than Obama” stance.

• Who intervened to change the GOP platform in 2016 and prevent it from calling for military assistance to Ukraine, and why?
  
• Why is Trump unwilling to criticize Vladimir Putin’s record on human rights and repression of domestic political opposition?
  
• Why did Trump call for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails at a press conference, and then stop holding press conferences?
  
• Why was Trump so reluctant to accept the conclusion of the intelligence community that the Russian government was behind the hacks of the DNC and John Podesta?
  
• Why was Trump so reluctant to speak about aggressive Russian activity since his inauguration, whether in Ukraine, the Black Sea, or even right off the coast of the United States, until directly asked at a press conference?
  

The three big questions about Trump and Russia
A lot of these details are essentially trivia, but they add up to a few big, explosive questions about why the president of the United States keeps needing to distance himself from his own associates, won’t reveal what’s going on with his money, and insists on advancing an unusual foreign policy doctrine.

• Did the Trump campaign, directly or indirectly, actively collaborate with the Russian government over the course of the 2016 campaign?
  
• Is the Trump Organization benefiting from ongoing or recent financial flows from the Russian government or people close to it?
  
• Does the Russian government have dirt on Trump, relating to past shady financing or to some of the more salacious blackmail material alleged in the infamous “Steele dossier,” that’s influencing American policy?
  

The small questions ensure the big questions won’t end
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is a good dictum for forestry management but doesn’t really apply to politics.
Politicians try to avoid embarrassment, and a simple desire to own up to something embarrassing — rather than anything illegal or genuinely nefarious — often lies behind mysterious behavior. It’s entirely possible that Page ended up on the roster of Trump advisers simply because a disorganized campaign was taken in by a grifter. Trump’s refusal to engage in standard financial disclosure certainly seems to be about covering up something, but that something could have nothing to do with Russia.

The shifting and inconsistent stories about the Flynn timeline could be nothing more than a disorganized and distrustful White House staff bungling something and then compounding the bungling by not wanting to admit they were bungling.
Trump’s boast about meeting with oligarchs could just be a habitually dishonest person lying for no particular reason.

But especially in light of Trump’s unorthodox policy views on Russia, the sheer quantity of outstanding questions and loose threads is remarkable. That’s doubly so because the Trump team has repeatedly tried to have it both ways on a number of these fronts — with Stone, Manafort, Page, and Flynn all distanced from Trump once their Russia connections came to light, even as Trump denies there was any underlying wrongdoing and appears not to have fully severed ties.

Trump has repeatedly, and increasingly angrily, suggested that the answer to the three big questions is uniformly no. But his inability to provide satisfactory answers to the myriad other questions means it’s hard to take him at his word.

[Admin]

Not directly related to Trump, but nevertheless a reminder of what Putin stands for..

A Montenegrin prosecutor has said that “Russian state bodies” were involved in a coup attempt during October’s election, with the aim of stopping the Balkan country from joining Nato. Montenegrin police arrested a group of Serbian nationals on the eve of the 16 October vote and two Russian suspects are wanted over the alleged plot to seize parliament and assassinate former president and prime minister Milo Đukanović.

'Russian state bodies' involved in alleged Montenegro coup plot, says prosecutor | World news | The Guardian

[Admin]

My interviewee is Glenn Carle, a 23-year veteran of the CIA and a former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council. Here, I ask him if we’ve truly entered uncharted territory, and if he believes Trump’s ties to Russia have compromised our national security. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing The president of the United States just tweeted that “Information is being illegally given” to the New York Times and the Washington Post “by the intelligence community.” Are we witnessing a shadow war between President Trump and the intelligence community?

Glenn Carle Well, I think the talk of a "shadow war" diverts from the real issue because it focuses attention on some coherent, organized bureaucratic or institutional campaign to oppose the president. But none of that's the case. The issue is that Trump and his entourage, for a long period of time, have been associating with, meeting with, involved with, or working somehow with Russian intelligence. Now, I've been aware of this for about a year. I've been jumping up and down, and I'm not the only one. And if I can figure it out as a professional intelligence officer who's no longer in service, then obviously active intelligence officers can figure it out too.

“We should not — and cannot — trust this man." A CIA vet on Trump's feud with US spies. - Vox

"I cannot in good faith serve this administration as an intelligence professional," Price said in a column published by The Washington Post on Monday. In his column, Price expressed his disbelief with the manner in which Trump — both as a candidate and as president-elect — criticized the US intelligence community over its findings about Russia's attempts to influence the US election.

CIA analyst resigns, calls Trump's actions in office 'disturbing' - Business Insider

[Admin]

Applying pressure to the FBI?

The FBI reportedly rejected a White House request to debunk stories about alleged communications between Russian operatives and people within President Donald Trump's inner circle, CNN reported on Thursday evening. Trump administration officials wanted the FBI to disavow the reports and say that there was no contact between people associated with Trump and Russia, the network said, citing multiple US officials familiar with the discussions.

FBI rejects White House request to debunk Russia stories - Business Insider