Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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The extent to which he still keeps sticking up for Russia despite his own intelligence services is mind boggling..

The intelligence community's focus on Russia as the source of cyberattacks on Democrats during the presidential campaign is "a political witch hunt," President-elect Donald Trump told The New York Times on Friday. Trump's interview came hours before he was due to be briefed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the intelligence community's conclusions about Russia's role in the hacks, which targeted the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Trump: Focus on Russian hacks 'a political witch hunt' - Business Insider

So Mr. Clapper has a point:

Mr. Clapper said pointedly that there was “a difference between healthy skepticism” — a phrase Vice President-elect Mike Pence used in defending Mr. Trump’s criticism of the intelligence agencies — and “disparagement.” “The intelligence community is not perfect,” Mr. Clapper added. “We are an organization of human beings and we’re prone sometimes to make errors.” But he referred to the wall of stars in the C.I.A. lobby commemorating the deaths of agency officers on duty and said the agencies’ efforts to keep the country safe were not always appreciated. Ms. McCaskill said there would be “howls from the Republican side of the aisle” if a Democrat had spoken about intelligence officials as Mr. Trump has.

Intelligence Chief Criticizes ‘Disparagement’ of Findings on Russian Hacking - The New York Times

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And yet more nonsense..

Last week, Trump said he agreed to meet with intelligence officials about Russia's involvement in the hacks, although he added it was "time to move on." He also claimed he would reveal insider information about the cyberattacks on Tuesday or Wednesday, although a member of Trump's team told CNN Trump would not be following through.

At least one lawmaker slammed Trump's Tuesday night tweet. "Really wish we saw more PEOTUS respect for our intelligence professionals," Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said on Twitter. "Proves the need for Congress to give the American people a timely bipartisan probe."

Trump claims his briefing on Russian cyberattacks was delayed, but US intelligence officer says otherwise - Business Insider

We're still waiting for that insider info.. Or maybe it was this:

Leading Republicans broke with Donald Trump on Wednesday after the president-elect appeared to put more faith in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange than in US intelligence agencies. The sharp differences on a highly charged national security issue are the latest sign that matters of intelligence and policy towards Russia reflect a deep fault line in Trump’s relationship with the Republican party establishment. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, called Assange “a sycophant for Russia” on a conservative radio show and GOP Senator Tom Cotton told MSNBC that he had “a lot more faith in our intelligence officers serving around the world … than I do in people like Julian Assange”.

Trump’s support for Assange has not led to break with all his Republican allies. Sarah Palin said on Wednesday that she now regretted her attacks on Assange in 2010 after he published leaked documents from her time as governor of Alaska. “He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban,” she said at the time. “Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?” Palin now says she has changed her mind since WikiLeaks published Democratic Party emails.

Republicans voice disdain after Trump tweets support for Julian Assange | US news | The Guardian

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Indeed, who has..

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta on Friday criticized President-elect Donald Trump's skepticism of US intelligence reports about Russia's role in election-related hacking, telling the "Today" show that Trump's open mistrust of the US intelligence community was "just unheard of and unprecedented." "I've been in public service for over 50 years — I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime," said Panetta, who served as CIA director from 2009 to 2011 and as defense secretary from 2011 to 2013.

Leon Panetta rips Trump's reaction to Russian hacks - Business Insider

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Intelligence officials concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin directed efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election, with the goal of helping President-elect Donald Trump win. In a highly anticipated report prepared by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, intelligence officials doubled-down on earlier assertions that Moscow was responsible for cyberattacks directed at the Democratic National Committee.

Intelligence Report Concludes That Vladimir Putin Intervened In U.S. Election To Help Donald Trump Win | The Huffington Post

Strobe Talbott, who was Bill Clinton’s closest adviser on Russia, told me recently that the hack of the D.N.C. and Putin’s other moves in Europe—including the annexation of Crimea, the Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine, and the financial support of nationalists like Marine Le Pen, of France—were part of a larger strategy intended to weaken the E.U. and nato. “I try to be careful about superlatives,” Talbott said, “but I cannot think, going back to the Soviet Union or since, that there’s been a Moscow-Kremlin-instigated gambit that was so spectacularly successful as what they have done with our democracy. All of those assets that they tried to use on us over the years were far less by comparison; this was like winning seventeen jackpots all at once.”

Trump, Putin, and the Big Hack - The New Yorker

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Well, perhaps it all starts to make sense, the extraordinary length to which Trump has gone to discredit US intelligence agencies and keep Putin out of the wind..

From CNN:

Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him
By Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein, CNN

Updated 2317 GMT (0717 HKT) January 10, 2017

(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."

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In the light of the revelations, which we don't know what, if anything, is true (and note how the 'liberal' press is really restraining itself and compare that to the witch hunt of the conservative press on Clinton, where every morsel was taken as truth and never questioned).

However, Trump's position on Russia in general and Putin in particular has been REALLY curious. Vox summing it up:

One of the enduring mysteries of the 2016 election is how Republican voters who have for decades venerated Ronald Reagan for defeating the Soviet Union got so strongly behind a pro-Russian candidate like Trump. 

During the campaign, Trump praised Putin’s strength as a leader, brushed aside concerns about Putin’s abysmal human rights record, hinted that he might recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and talked about leaving NATO entirely or opting to ignore America’s legal obligation to defend any NATO member that comes under Russian attack.

Trump’s pro-Russian positioning goes all the way back to the Republican convention, when his campaign softened the party platform’s language on Ukraine to remove all reference about providing weapons to Kiev so it could protect itself from Russia. A short time later, Trump hinted to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he was fine with Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.

"The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were," Trump said. One of Trump’s former campaign managers, meanwhile, had been a paid consultant for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine like its former president, Viktor Yanukovych. The campaign manager, Paul Manafort, later resigned as part of an internal campaign shake-up.

Trump himself has spent months praising Putin. "I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he's getting an 'A' and our president is not doing so well," Trump said during an NBC forum in September.

He has also effusively praised Russia’s bombing campaign in Syria: "What’s wrong with Russia bombing the hell out of ISIS and these other crazies so we don’t have to spend a million dollars a bomb?" Never mind that Russian bombs have targeted the relatively moderate opposition more than ISIS, and that the point has been to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. With Russian help, Assad’s forces just finished reconquering the rebel stronghold of Aleppo.

Trump’s rhetoric about Russia has been even more startling since November 8. He has spent weeks mocking the CIA’s conclusion that Putin tried to interfere in the election to help him win the White House by pointing to the spy agency’s faulty intelligence in the runup to the Iraq War. When US spies personally briefed Trump on their findings about Russia, he issued a remarkable statement that barely mentioned Russia. Instead, he lumped it in with China and other unnamed countries and outside groups as potential perpetrators.

Trump’s complete refusal to admit that Russia interfered in the election has baffled and infuriated many Republican lawmakers, who have called for congressional investigations into Moscow’s activities during the campaign and condemned Putin as a quasi-dictator. Just this week, five Republican senators said they’d back a Democratic bill that would make it harder for Trump to lift the punishing US sanctions on Russia.

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Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick for Attorney General, is grilled in confirmation hearings. You should read this, he still goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid saying that Russia interfered with the election. Amazing stuff..

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While that dossier is unverified, but it's difficult to say that the guy who compiled it is some sort of a clown. From Business Insider:

The author of the 'fake news' dossier on Trump's ties to Russia is looking increasingly credible

• Jake Kanter
  

LONDON — US President-elect Donald Trump on Friday declared the author of the bombshell dossier on his potential ties to Russia a "failed spy" on Friday. Christopher Steele's former colleagues and friends beg to differ. In fact, there has been an avalanche of support for Steele's credentials in the British press over the past two days, the cumulative effect of which has been to add credibility to the unproven allegations against the US president-elect.

Here are some key things we now know about Steele:

• Steele was head of MI6’s Russia desk. He worked at Britain's intelligence service for years and was a highly regarded specialist on Russia, according to The Guardian. He served in Paris and Moscow in the 1990s before retiring. He now runs the intelligence company Orbis Business Intelligence with Christopher Burrows, a former British Foreign Office counsellor.
  
• He has a network of sources in Russia. The New York Times said he was known for "his knowledge of the intricate web of Kremlin-tied companies and associates that control Russia." He called on these contacts to compile the allegations against Trump.
  
• Steele has been trusted by the FBI and others with sensitive work. Reuters reported that the intelligence expert supplied the FBI with information on corruption at football's world governing body, FIFA, in 2010. He also gathered intelligence on Russia for England's 2018 World Cup bid. Russia ultimately triumphed during the bidding process.
  
• He has friends in high places. Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow who helped alert US intelligence to the dossier, said Steele was a "very competent professional operator."
  

It hasn't all been one-way traffic, however. The dossier, which BuzzFeed published in full on Tuesday, does have its detractors. Elements of it have been proved untrue, most notably its incorrect spelling of Russian conglomerate Alfa Group as "Alpha-Group." It also said Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, travelled to Prague to meet with Russian officials. Cohen has since said he has never been to Prague.
Then there was this from another former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Tony Brenton. He told Sky News:

"I've seen quite a lot of intelligence on Russia, and there are some things in it which look pretty shaky. For example it claims that the Russians began to cultivate Donald Trump five years ago. If they did that they showed remarkable prescience because at the time he had nothing to do with American politics." (Brenton is wrong on that last point: Trump publicly flirted with running for president in 2000, 2004 and 2012, even though he did not launch a full-blown campaign.) 

Trump's view is clear: The dossier is dodgy, he has said stridently. But it may be a gamble.
"It's the biggest political bet he is ever going to make," Republican strategist Rick Wilson told the BBC. "The bet is this: He can bluster his way through this, there's nothing there. That at no point at any time in his multiple trips to Russia did he engage in any behaviour that was caught on tape. That's a big bet. If he's right, he's right. If he's not, it's going to have some significant consequences for this credibility."

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This is the right question, of course:

How do we explain the overtly pro-Russian behavior of Trump and his surrogates? If they’re not Russian puppets, why do they work so hard to defend Putin and Russia against American investigators and reporters? Why do they divert blame to other countries and victims of the hack? Why, instead of targeting the Russian intelligence agencies that infiltrated us, do they attack the American intelligence agencies that exposed the Russians?

Why does Donald Trump continue to defend Russia and attack U.S. intelligence?

Some more on the guy of the dossier, and the curious FBI inaction..

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who investigated Donald Trump’s alleged Kremlin links, was so worried by what he was discovering that at the end he was working without pay, The Independent has learned. Mr Steele also decided to pass on information to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that such material should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Mr Trump, who had hired his services, but was a matter of national security for both countries. However, say security sources, Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

It is believed that a colleague of Mr Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the end also continued with the Trump case without being paid. 

Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's frustration as FBI sat on Donald Trump Russia file for months | The Independent

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In the same month  Mr Steele produced a memo, which went to the FBI, stating that Mr Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine. Four days later Mr Trump stated that he would recognise Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. A month later officials involved in his campaign asked the Republican party’s election platform to remove a pledge for military assistance to the Ukrainian government against separatist rebels in the east of the country.

By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions.  The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.

As the election approached, FBI director James Comey made public his bombshell letter saying that Ms Clinton would face another email investigation. Two days before that Mr Giuliani, then a part of the Trump team, talked about “a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next few days. We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn things around”.

Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's frustration as FBI sat on Donald Trump Russia file for months | The Independent