Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

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Hmm..

The C.I.A. told senior lawmakers in classified briefings last summer that it had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president, a finding that did not emerge publicly until after Mr. Trump’s victory months later, former government officials say.

The briefings indicate that intelligence officials had evidence of Russia’s intentions to help Mr. Trump much earlier in the presidential campaign than previously thought. The briefings also reveal a critical split last summer between the C.I.A. and counterparts at the F.B.I., where a number of senior officials continued to believe through last fall that Russia’s cyberattacks were aimed only at disrupting America’s political system, and not at getting Mr. Trump elected, according to interviews..

But as the election approached and new batches of hacked Democratic emails poured out, some F.B.I. officials began to change their view about Russia’s intentions and eventually came to believe, as the C.I.A. had months earlier, that Moscow was trying to help get Mr. Trump elected, officials said.

In January, intelligence officials publicly released a declassified version of their findings, concluding that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had “aspired to help” Mr. Trump to win the election and harm Hillary Clinton, a longtime adversary.


By then, both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. said they had “high confidence” that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump by hacking into the internal emails of the Democratic National Committee and of some Clinton aides. (The National Security Agency, also involved in the review, expressed only “moderate confidence” that the Russians were trying to help him.)

One factor in the C.I.A. analysis last summer was that American intelligence agencies learned that Russia’s cyberattacks had breached Republican targets as well as Democrats. But virtually none of the hacked Republican material came out publicly, while the Russians, working through WikiLeaks and other public outlets, dumped substantial amounts of Democratic material damaging to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

C.I.A. Had Evidence of Russian Effort to Help Trump Earlier Than Believed - The New York Times

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Rep. Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican, will take over the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, the committee's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, announced Thursday. Conaway, a member of the House Intelligence subcommittees overseeing the National Security Agency and the CIA, has expressed skepticism about the intent of Russian meddling.

Mike Conaway takes over Trump-Russia investigation - Business Insider

You don't get these FISA warrants without probable cause..

The FBI obtained a FISA warrant last summer to monitor the communications of Carter Page, who was an early foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday. The energy-consultant-turned-foreign-policy adviser was named in an unverified dossier about President Donald Trump's ties to Russia as a liaison between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. His trips to Moscow and contact with at least one Russian official last year are now reportedly under FBI investigation.

The dossier alleged that Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia's state oil company, offered Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Russia. The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow giving a speech at the Higher Economic School.

The FBI reportedly obtained a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page - Business Insider

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Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told. GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said. Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.

British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia | UK news | The Guardian

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Between 1999 and 2004, Dearlove was head of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, a tenure that included the bruising experience of the Iraq war, the drama of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. He joined the service in 1966 and in his time he ran MI6’s Washington station, the most significant posting in British intelligence and was also overall Director of Operations. So he’s seen it all before.

But the allegations that members of Trump’s staff had illegal contact with the Russian government during the election campaign are “unprecedented,” said Dearlove. As for the president’s personal position, he said, “What lingers for Trump may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the west apparently would not lend to him.”

I also asked Dearlove about Trump’s suggestion that the US National Security Agency (NSA) or British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had bugged Trump Tower on the instructions of Barack Obama. This allegation was flatly rejected by both organisations and also by James Comey, Director of the FBI, who told Congress in a March hearing that “we have no information to support” Trump’s claim. “This is simply deeply embarrassing,” said Dearlove, “for Trump and the administration, that is. The only possible explanation is that Trump started tweeting without understanding how the NSA-GCHQ relationship actually works.”

Interview: Richard Dearlove—I spy nationalism | Prospect Magazine

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Yea, this is what we've been saying for quite some time. An economy the size of Italy's, mostly existing of mining. Declining population, etc.

Dearlove then delivers another of his startlingly blunt assessments, this time of the country that was his chief adversary for most of his professional career: “It’s got a lousy economy, getting worse, it’s got terrible demographics, it’s got good strategic rocket forces and it’s got special forces and it’s able to focus its assets on issues and make its impact felt in a rather clever fashion. But that doesn’t disguise the fact that Russia’s in a mess and I don’t think we should be overawed.”

Interview: Richard Dearlove—I spy nationalism | Prospect Magazine

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The FBI used information from the explosive, unverified dossier detailing President Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia to obtain a warrant to secretly monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page.

That same dossier — a collection of memos compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — has been used in other elements of the US investigation into whether there was any inappropriate contact between Trump campaign associates and Russia..

FBI used Trump-Russia dossier to get Carter Page FISA warrant - Business Insider

[Admin]

Maybe that dossier wasn't so dodgy. After all, it was collected by a respected former long serving MI6 operative.

The FBI reportedly used the explosive, unverified dossier detailing President Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia to bolster its case for a warrant that would allow it to surveil Carter Page, an early foreign-policy adviser to Trump's campaign. It's a key signal that the FBI had enough confidence in the validity of the document to work to corroborate it and present it in court.

The FBI has been using the dossier as a "roadmap" for its investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election since last year, the BBC's Paul Wood reported last month. The document was  not central to the bureau's argument before a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that Page could have been acting as an agent of Russia, according to CNN.

But the raw intelligence contained in the 35-page collection of memos — written by the former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, who spent 20 years spying for MI6 in Moscow — apparently helped the FBI convince the court that Page could be acting as an agent of a foreign power.

The bar for obtaining a FISA order is fairly low. But evidence cited in declarations must still be corroborated through an agency's own investigations before it is submitted to the court, officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

For the application to be approved, however, as it was in Page's case, the FISC judge and the reviewing officials at the Department of Justice would have needed to be "satisfied" that the application, taken as a whole, had a "sufficient factual basis," Slick said.

Carter Page: FBI used dossier to bolster FISA warrant case - Business Insider

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A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 US presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters' faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former US officials told Reuters. They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what US intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the November 8 election.

US intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, after the election. The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign-intelligence officials appointed by Putin's office. The first document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific people. It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage US voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the US electoral system's legitimacy and damage Clinton's reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

US officials: Putin-linked think tank drew up plan to sway US election - Business Insider

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Writing for the Observer, former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler provided excellent insight into an important if abstract question: Why does Putin's Russia hate the US?

Since entering the Syrian conflict on President Bashar Assad's side a little more than a year ago, Russia has come to threaten the US in virtually every dimension imaginable.

Russia has openly taunted the US to intervene in Syria while bombing humanitarian aide convoys headed for civilians in Aleppo. It has meddled in the US presidential election by hacking the DNC. Russia has taken steps to destabilize Europe by deploying nuclear-capable missiles to Kaliningrad and, according to some, exacerbated the war in Syria to "weaponize" the refugee crisis against Europe.

Russia has pursued these extremely aggressive paths toward the West in spite of being economically and militarily weaker than the US and the West by a considerable margin. 

According to Schindler, Moscow takes this path because it simply hates the West, much like jihadists do, because of what Moscow sees as a cultural invasion of liberal and secular values into its more conservative society.

"To get a flavor of what Putinism’s worldview looks like, simply listen to what Moscow says. It’s easy to find fire-breathing clerics castigating the West and its pushing of feminism and gay rights, which they openly term Satanic."

Schindler details how Putin has formulated a potent mix of nationalism and religion to define the Russian identity and has repeatedly contrasted that to Western values.

Why Putin hates America - Business Insider

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"This just highlights how important it is that the Russia investigation be handled by an independent prosecutor," said Matt Miller, a former DOJ spokesman under the Obama administration. "Once Rod Rosenstein is confirmed, the investigation will be in the hands of someone who interacts with people in the White House on a daily basis, and that’s just not tenable. It’s even harder with the career official who has been handling it leaving the department."

Trump-Russia probe to face challenge in Justice Department - Business Insider