Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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You won't read this on Breitbart, or hear it on Fox..

Nunes himself admitted on Friday morning that, despite arguably making it seem like the information he shared with Trump somewhat vindicated the president’s claim to have been wiretapped by President Barack Obama, in fact “there was no wiretapping of Trump Tower. That didn’t happen.”

“All of us are in the dark”: Top Intelligence Committee Democrat blasts Devin Nunes for wild allegations - Salon.com

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The investigation subsequently appeared to stall, with Nunes calling off a critical hearing scheduled for Tuesday 28 March, at a time when his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Adam Schiff, said he had seen more than circumstantial evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia.

At an extraordinary committee hearing last Monday, the FBI director, James Comey, confirmed for the first time that the bureau was investigating Trump associates for possible collusion with Moscow.

At the hearing, Comey refused to name any of the campaign aides under FBI scrutiny. Schiff, the ranking Democrat, said he and Nunes had been given a classified briefing that involved evidence of collusion that “isn’t purely circumstantial”.

Schiff said he had persuaded Nunes to put in a joint request to Comey to share that evidence with the rest of the committee but said he did not know how the FBI director would respond.

Nunes, who served on Donald Trump’s transition team, subsequently put off the second hearing, which would have heard from former intelligence chiefs and a former deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump.

Nunes said he wanted to postpone the hearing to give the committee more time to confer with Comey and the National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers. Schiff, however, claimed the hearing had been cancelled to to “choke off public information” and avoid any more embarrassment to the White House.

Nunes has been under scrutiny over the past week for other reasons. He is reported to have gone missing on Tuesday night, under mysterious circumstances. The Daily Beast reported that Nunes received a message on his phone while travelling in a Uber car with a senior committee staffer in Washington, and then left the car abruptly without telling the staffer where he was going.

The next day he called a press conference, without telling his senior staff what he was going to say, and announced that he had seen “dozens” of intelligence reports that showed US intelligence agencies had “incidentally collected” material on members of the Trump transition team.

Such incidental collection happens when court-approved surveillance of an intelligence target picks up communications involving US persons who are not the formal target of the surveillance.


Nunes did not share the intelligence material he claimed to have seen with Democratic members of his committee, and instead outraged them further by briefing Trump. He said later: “I had a duty and obligation to tell him because, as you know, he’s taking a lot of heat in the news media.”


The president later said he felt “somewhat” vindicated in his repeated claims to have been the target of an Obama administration wiretap, even though those claims have been repudiated by Comey, intelligence chiefs and senior Republicans who said there was no evidence for them.



Trump and Russia: top Democrat casts doubts over independence of investigation


Schiff lambasted Nunes for failing to share the documents he said the committee chairman had gone to see in “this extraordinary and peculiar midnight run”.



“You don’t take information to the White House instead of your own committee if it purports to shed light on one of things we’re investigating,” Schiff told the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that the whole incident was designed to provide political cover for Trump’s tweeted claims.


“It’s hard to have confidence if the chairman is going to be involved in that sort of conduct,” he said. Nunes would not say who had shown him the documents – only that they were “legally brought to me by sources who thought that we should know it”.


Nunes’ Tuesday night foray to see possibly critical documents, his failure to share those documents with the committee, his decision to brief the president instead, and his abrupt cancellation of Tuesday’s hearing have all raised questions over whether the intelligence committee under his chairmanship can continue its inquiry into reported Russian intervention in the 2016 election with any credibility.

Lawmaker's 'peculiar midnight run' endangers Trump-Russia inquiry | US news | The Guardian

Let's see:

• Nunes, the Republican chair of the Commission investigating the Russia ties was also a member of the Trump transition team after the election.
  
• He took possibly classified info directly to the White House, without telling the rest of the Commission
  
• That info superficially seem to suggest that the Obama govt. might, after all, have been surveilling Trump Tower simply as a byproduct of the surveillance of others (Russians, etc. as these are speaking to other people). 
  
• But actually even that isn't sure at all
  
• Nunes didn't say where he got the info from
  
• Now he reschedules the another hearing and keeps it private instead of public.
  

[Admin]

Nice try, Donald..

USA Today tied Trump’s tweets back to Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cashand an April 2015 New York Times article — both of which Trump was known to turn to during the campaign:

The Times reported the Russians directed $2.35 million — which the Clintons failed to disclose — to the Clinton Foundation at a time when the Russian atomic energy agency was seeking approval for a deal to buy a company that controlled one-fifth of America's uranium production capacity. During this same period, a Russian investment bank tied to the Kremlin paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech in Moscow.

However, as Politifact reported, the accusations against Clinton have been deemed “mostly false,” as Clinton “didn’t have the power to approve or reject the deal” and led one of nine agencies that signed off on the deal.

Donald Trump is trying to make his Russia scandal about Hillary and Bill Clinton - Vox

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And yet another one..

On Monday, the New York Times broke news about a previously undisclosed December meeting between Jared Kushner and Sergey Gorkov, head of Vnesheconombank, a state-owned Russian bank that is still under American sanctions placed on it by the Obama administration in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The meeting occurred as Kushner, who was still head of Kushner Companies at the time, was looking for investors to redevelop the Manhattan office building he paid $1.8 billion to purchase in 2007. But White House spokesperson Hope Hicks told the Times that Kushner, who now serves as President Trump’s senior adviser, met with Gorkov to talk diplomacy — not to try and strike a business deal.

“Members of presidential transition teams routinely meet with foreign officials,” the Times reported, paraphrasing an interview with Hicks. “Part of Mr. Kushner’s role during the campaign and the transition was to serve as a chief conduit to foreign governments and officials, and Ms. Hicks said he met with dozens of officials from a wide range of countries.”

That line was echoed by Press Secretary Sean Spicer during his Monday news conference. “Throughout the campaign and the transition, Jared served as the official primary point of contact with foreign governments and officials,” Spicer said. “You’re acting as though there’s something nefarious about doing what he was actually tasked to do.”

Jared Kushner met with head of state-controlled Russian bank linked to espionage
He didn’t disclose the meeting, even to other White House staff.thinkprogress.org[/url]

But Vnesheconombank tells a different story. In a statement emailed to Reuters and other outlets, the espionage-linked bank says that Gorkov, who was appointed to his position as chair of the bank by Russian President Vladimir Putin, met “with a number of representatives of the largest banks and business establishments of the United States, including Jared Kushner, the head of Kushner Companies.”

Shortly after his meeting with Kushner, Gorkov —who graduated from Russia’s Federal Security Service security agency, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB — went on a Russian state-owned television station and said he was hopeful the financial constraints placed on Russian banks like his by the American sanctions “would change for the better,” the Times reports.

According to the Times, the meeting between Kushner and Gorkov was arranged by Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who had previously met in Trump Tower with Kushner and Michael Flynn.

White House’s explanation for Kushner’s secret meeting with a Russian banker unravels

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• Monday night, Nunes dismissed calls for him to recuse himself, saying, “I'm sure that the Democrats do want me to quit, because they know that I'm quite effective at getting to the bottom of things.” Which is an odd thing to say when the thing he’s supposed to be getting to the bottom of isn’t about Democrats. [Washington Post / Aaron Blake]
  
• It’s also an odd thing to say when he keeps canceling hearings that are supposed to be “getting to the bottom of” the Trump/Russia investigation. Like the one that was supposed to happen Tuesday but was canceled last week — at which former acting Attorney General Sally Yates was supposed to testify. (Trump fired Yates in February for refusing to enforce the White House’s original travel ban, but she’d also been involved in conversations about former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s ties to the Russian government.)
  
• On Tuesday, the Post reported something that might have caused the postponement: The White House tried to block Yates from testifying, arguing she’d be publicly discussing things that were protected by executive privilege. [Washington Post / Devlin Barrett, Adam Entous]
  
• To many, it’s yet another sign that the White House is trying to impede the investigation — and that Nunes is trying to help them do it. [The New Yorker / Ryan Lizza]
  
• The result so far, at least, is that it’s not just Nunes who looks terrible. He makes the Republican establishment, which has for the most part continued to support him, look incapable of impartiality too. [Washington Post / Amber Phillips]
  

Vox Sentences: Repeal and replace ... revived? - Vox

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The criticism stems from Nunes’s disclosures that he met with an unnamed source at the White House complex who gave him classified information purportedly validating some of Trump’s claims. (To be clear: It doesn’t.)

It’s all a bit confusing, but here’s why Nunes’s White House meeting really matters. Nunes has steadily refused to detail the information or identify his source. The fact that he met that unnamed person at the White House complex raises the real possibility that the source was a member of the administration. In other words, Nunes may have used information he received from the Trump White House itself to publicly try to deflect blame from Trump. 

“If the chairman of an investigative committee met with one of the targets of the investigation, that would be a very serious matter,” Rep. Jim Himes, a Democratic member of the House intelligence panel, told me. “The chairman says it was an innocent meeting. If that’s true, why isn’t he telling us any of the details?”

Devin Nunes's botched effort to scuttle the Trump/Russia investigation, explained - Vox

The above is really a must read story detailing all the suspect moves of the House Committee Chair, Nunes:

• He argued that info, which supposedly at least partly vindicates Trump's claim that Obama had surveillance on candidate Trump while the info does nothing of the sort (and he has been forced to walk it back).
  
• Instead of sharing that info with with the rest of the committee, he went straight to the White House, which is actually the subject of the investigation.
  
• He still hasn't shared the info with his committee, nor revealed its source.
  
• It's likely he received the info from the White House itself, but we don't know for sure as they are not revealing the visitors log which would enable the public to see who let him in (under Obama these visitor logs were in the public domain).
  
• He has postponed or canceled or changed from public to private some hearings, likely in an effort to stall and in one case likely to prevent former Attorney General Sally Yates from testifying.
  
• Ducking and weaving, stalling to such an extent that even some Republicans have lost faith in him.
  
• You might also want to realize that Nunes was part of the Trump transition team before Trump took office.
  
• And he's now argued he's not going anywhere with or without the Democrats (who have lost faith in Nunes).
  

[Admin]

Amazing stuff

On Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee chair and former Trump transition official Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) made the extraordinary claim that Democrats are actually the ones obstructing his committee’s investigation into connections between President Trump and Russian officials. Nunes — who abruptly cancelled all scheduled committee hearings last week, including one that was to feature testimony from Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who alerted the White House to Michael Flynn’s deceptions about his communications with Russian officials and was fired for refusing to enforce President Trump’s Muslim ban — told NBC News that “it appears the Democrats aren’t really serious about this investigation.”

House Republicans cancel all hearings on Russian investigation, blame Democrats

First, it's not true (as the story reveals), second, why on earth would the Democrats not want to proceed?

And of course, Nunes still owes a host of explanations:

On Wednesday, CBS reporter Major Garrett grilled Spicer about the still-unexplained fact that Nunes was on the White House grounds the night before his press conference. Nunes “hasn’t told his own committee members what he knows, how he learned about it, and what the substantive importance of that is,” Garrett said. “So we are also curious about that. And among the things that might shed light on that is how he got [to the White House], who he met with, and what he learned.”

Nunes’ handling of national security information may have opened him up to an ethics probe, and at least two House Republicans have already called for him to recuse himself. But if his conduct is really meant to distract from the underlying Trump-Russia scandal, it appears to be working.

According to a new CBS poll, 74 percent of Republicans now believe Donald Trump’s offices “were wiretapped, or under government surveillance during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

House Republicans cancel all hearings on Russian investigation, blame Democrats

Yea, the most depressing thing is that 74% of Republicans belief in something that's manifestly not true. Surprise surprise..

[Admin]

Very depressing, this:

A CBS poll out today finds that 47 percent of Americans — and a full 74 percent of Republicans surveyed — believe it’s “likely” or “somewhat likely” that President Donald Trump’s offices were wiretapped during the 2016 presidential campaign.

There is of course no credible evidence that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. As Vox has outlined, both “the heads of the FBI and NSA categorically denied President Donald Trump’s tweets claiming that President Barack Obama ordered the US intelligence community to wiretap Trump Tower.”

But these latest poll findings are a reminder of an uncomfortable truth about people: They generally don’t base their opinions on a careful analysis of evidence. And it’s not because they are “stupid” or willfully ignorant. It’s because our brains aren’t great at rationally analyzing facts, especially in fractured, ideologically polarized times.

This frustrating trend of people thinking in terms of what supports their party, rather than facts, keeps showing up. Trump voters were more likely to say Trump had a larger turnout at his inauguration than Obama, despite obvious differences in the photos that demonstrated otherwise.

One of the key reasons is an idea called “politically motivated reasoning” — it’s the idea that our brains have something of an immune system for uncomfortable thoughts. We use our intelligence to protect the groups we belong to first, and reason objectively second. (Read more about politically motivated reasoning here.)

But that’s not all.

A new poll on Trump’s “wiretapping” shows how easily he can spread misinformation - Vox

The article then discusses the psychology behind this, giving three reasons why this is the case:

• Plausibility, or at least the perception of it.
  
• Suggestions and innuendo can be as powerful as assertions
  
• The more we engage with a lie, the more we misremember.
  

[Admin]

Nunes story simply doesn't add up..

Nunes' spokesman said later that the chairman was there to view the documents in a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the White House in order to "safeguard the proper chain of custody and classification of these documents." Nunes has insisted that no one from the Trump administration knew he was on White House grounds being briefed on the documents. 

But National security experts, Republican and Democratic congressmen, and White House reporters have argued that it is highly unlikely Nunes could have obtained access to the White House grounds unnoticed. "This is insane," Juliette Kayyem, a CNN national security analyst and former official at the Department of Homeland Security, told Business Insider on Monday. "You only go to the White House to get briefed by the White House. It’s not a meeting point, like a McDonald’s off the Turnpike." Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed Kayyem's assessment on Tuesday morning: The White House "is not an internet café," Swalwell told MSNBC. "You can’t just walk in and receive classified information." Swalwell also wondered why Nunes couldn't have viewed the documents inside an SCIF at the Capitol after consulting with his fellow committee members.

House intelligence chair's explanation for why he was at the White House doesn't add up - Business Insider

Moreover, it would be logistically impossible, sources say, for Nunes to get onto the White House grounds ― much less get into a room used for viewing classified information ― without being escorted by someone with an official badge.

“You have to be allowed onto the White House compound by a White House staffer. You have to be allowed into a SCIF by a White House staffer. You have to be provided computer credentials by a White House staffer. There is no other way to be authorized access to the White House other than via a White House staffer,” said Ned Price, who ran communications for Obama’s National Security Council. “Did he just show up and say ‘Let me in’? It defies credulity.”

Under the Obama administration, at least some information about Nunes’ mysterious White House visit would have eventually been made public in White House visitor logs. Those logs used to be accessible online and were usually updated every three to four months. But the website hosting the visitor logs has been down since Trump took office.

Devin Nunes' Story About His White House Grounds Visit Simply Isn't Credible | The Huffington Post

Think about the events of the past week alone. In the immediate aftermath of Nunes’s disclosures, Trump said the comments left him feeling “somewhat” vindicated, while the Republican Congressional Committee sent a list-building email with the subject line “Confirmed: Obama spied on Trump.”

Devin Nunes's botched effort to scuttle the Trump/Russia investigation, explained - Vox

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And then there is this..

Representative Devin Nunes obviously fancies himself Jason Bourne. To sneak onto the White House grounds for that rendezvous with an unnamed source last week, he switched cars and ditched aides, vanishing into the night. But Senator Lindsey Graham looks at him and sees a different character. Graham said on the “Today” show on Tuesday that Nunes was bumbling his way though something of an “Inspector Clouseau investigation,” a reference to the fantastically inept protagonist of the “Pink Panther” comedies. I salute Graham’s movie vocabulary. I quibble with his metaphor. While Clouseau was a benign fool, there’s nothing benign about Nunes’s foolishness.

Devin Nunes Is Dangerous - The New York Times

Considerable effort to disguise that he went to the White House. Now why would that be, one wonders...