Thursday, May 31, 2018

The Zarif Mask Falls
Whitewash fades.

Sohrab Ahmari Commentary  May 30, 2018

javad-zarif.jpg
Anadolu Agency/Pool via AP

Javad Zarif was recently caught on video chanting “Death to America!” and “Death to Britain!” and “Death to Israel!” at a rally in Tehran. That should come as no surprise to Americans who understand the nature of the Iranian regime, its history, and the anti-Western animus that pulsates at its heart. Yet numerous American political and media figures have spent years promoting Zarif as something other than what he is: a pure product of Khomeini’s hateful revolution.
Here’s the footage in question. Watch it—and re-watch it—as you join me on a guided tour of Zarif hagiography, courtesy of the American prestige press.

Fareed Zakaria, speaking at the Council of Foreign Relations, Sept. 23, 2016:
My guest needs no introduction. He has a favorability rating in Iran which has declined now to 75 percent. (Laughter.) I don’t think it’s quite that high in the United States. (Laughter.) But Mohammed Javad Zarif is the foreign minister of Iran. He was ambassador to the U.N. He’s a career diplomat. He is also an academic with a Ph.D. I think fair to say that he is the most distinguished diplomat Iran has had for many decades, and we have all seen him as he spearheaded Iran’s negotiations for the nuclear deal.

Robin Wright, writing in Time magazine, Oct. 28, 2016:
Zarif has . . . built a following in Washington. ‘He doesn’t play games,’ says Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chair Dianne Feinstein. . . . [H]e has also been lauded by the likes of Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Chuck Hagel when they were in the Senate. And he earned a University of Denver doctorate under the same professors who taught Condoleezza Rice.

Carol Morello, writing in the Washington Post, July 3, 2015:
Despite their differences in style and world outlook, John [Kerry] and Javad—as they call each other—have managed to form a working relationship based on respect over the course of the Iran nuclear talks—a striking outcome for two men representing countries with decades of deep and sometimes bloody enmity, at odds on almost every world issue.

Suzanne Maloney, writing at the website of the Brookings Institution, Sept. 5, 2013:
Zarif’s spot at the helm of the nuclear negotiating team is sure to draw the same sort of cheers that greeted his nomination as Foreign Minister last month. During his tenure as Iran’s representative to the United Nations in New York, Zarif established a reputation as a thoughtful and reasoned spokesman. . . . Zarif is an extraordinarily talented diplomat. . . . Zarif became well-known to many in Washington during his five-year stint in New York. He regularly organized small dinners for academic experts and Washington analysts, including some of the most senior officials in the Obama Administration.


I could go on and on. Will this latest footage finally shatter the liberal foreign-policy establishment’s illusion of Javad Zarif the moderate? Don’t count on it.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

John Kerry and his pursuit of Bashar al-Assad & Javad Zarif … 
flawed judgment, or deceit, or? 

 Kerry  has spent a half-decade courting  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

 In December 2006, when he was still a US senator, in spite of the objections of Pres. George W. Bush and the US State Department,** Kerry traveled to Damascus to meet with  Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad..  Kerry  portrayed  Assad as a reformer who could be peeled away from his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, and lured towards the West. Kerry also publicly held out the possibility of   Assad negotiating a peace treaty with  Israel over the Golan Heights.

By 2011, after that initial meeting, Kerry was reported to have met with Assad a total of six times, including a visit in February 2009 when he and Assad dined along with their wives at an upscale Damascus restaurant. After the dinner, Kerry reportedly asserted that “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.”

In addition to his visits to Damascus, Kerry was actively advocating for Assad in the US. Jay Solomon[The Iran Wars] describes Kerry as having emerged, by 2009, as the “Syrian dictator’s man in Washington.”  Kerry was very public in his  lobbying efforts in behalf of Assad. In a March 2011 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kerry claimed that the Syrian dictator “very generous” and said, “Syria will move … Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West.”

Kerry’s words of support for Assad at Carnegie were given during the very week in March 2011 that the initial peaceful protests in Syria began. Assad responded to the protesters’ pleas for reform with brutal crackdowns that led to a bloody civil war and the genocide of Syria’s Sunni population.Thus far, the Syrian  war has killed half a million Syrians, displaced more than ten million from their homes, and wrought havoc across the region and beyond. By the time Kerry began his diplomatic outreach, Assad already had a well-established record of mischief in the region.

When Kerry made his first trip to Syria at the end of 2006 — while the terrorist insurgency in neighboring Iraq was in full swing — Assad had been facilitating the movement of Al Qaeda fighters and suicide bombers from Syria into Iraq. Assad had also established the Damascus International Airport as the jihadi gateway for Sunni militants traveling from around the Middle East and North Africa looking to attack American forces inside Iraq. The Assad regime even arranged for buses to ferry fighters directly to the front lines.

**As early as January 2004, the Bush administration was increasing its pressure on the Assad regime to halt the jihadi traffic into Iraq and Syria's support of the  terrorist insurgency in which American soldiers were targeted and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

Kerry regularly advocated for Javid Zarif as a moderating force in Tehran’s revolutionary regime

During early May 2018 , former Secretary of State John Kerry  met with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad  Zarif twice   to  organize a  concerted effort to  undercut US administration’s efforts to modify and strengthen the Iran nuclear deal that Zarif and  Kerry had   previously negotiated. Their focus  was  to get the European Union to counter and bypass US efforts to reimpose sanctions  and other controls on Iran.

 Last week Zarif made headlines when he was caughtthe on tape with a crowd in Tehran actively participating in a chant calling for the destruction of the United States and its allies. The crowd can be heard chanting “Death to America,” “Death to Britain,” and “Death to Israel,” and  Zarif is  clearly seen smiling and mouthing along.

Over the years John Kerry had grown quite close to the foreign minister of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.Kerry regularly advocated for Zarif as a moderating force in Tehran’s revolutionary regime. During his efforts to sell the Iran nuclear deal to Congress and the American people in 2015, Kerry pushed the idea that the deal would empower Zarif and other supposed reformers, thus tempering the Islamic republic’s hostility to the US and its allies. American TV frequently featured Kerry and Zarif w backslapping throughout the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.


Kerry’s words of assurance have , of course, proven to be false — as Iran’s aggression in the region and hostility towards the West have only increased since the deal was implemented. 

John Kerry and his pursuit of Bashar al-Assad & Javad Zarif … 
flawed judgment, or deceit, or? 

 Kerry  has spent a half-decade courting  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

 In December 2006, when he was still a US senator, in spite of the objections of Pres. George W. Bush and the US State Department,** Kerry traveled to Damascus to meet with  Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad..  Kerry  portrayed  Assad as a reformer who could be peeled away from his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, and lured towards the West. Kerry also publicly held out the possibility of   Assad negotiating a peace treaty with  Israel over the Golan Heights.

By 2011, after that initial meeting, Kerry was reported to have met with Assad a total of six times, including a visit in February 2009 when he and Assad dined along with their wives at an upscale Damascus restaurant. After the dinner, Kerry reportedly asserted that “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.”

In addition to his visits to Damascus, Kerry was actively advocating for Assad in the US. Jay Solomon[The Iran Wars] describes Kerry as having emerged, by 2009, as the “Syrian dictator’s man in Washington.”  Kerry was very public in his  lobbying efforts in behalf of Assad. In a March 2011 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kerry claimed that the Syrian dictator “very generous” and said, “Syria will move … Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West.”

Kerry’s words of support for Assad at Carnegie were given during the very week in March 2011 that the initial peaceful protests in Syria began. Assad responded to the protesters’ pleas for reform with brutal crackdowns that led to a bloody civil war and the genocide of Syria’s Sunni population.Thus far, the Syrian  war has killed half a million Syrians, displaced more than ten million from their homes, and wrought havoc across the region and beyond. By the time Kerry began his diplomatic outreach, Assad already had a well-established record of mischief in the region.

When Kerry made his first trip to Syria at the end of 2006 — while the terrorist insurgency in neighboring Iraq was in full swing — Assad had been facilitating the movement of Al Qaeda fighters and suicide bombers from Syria into Iraq. Assad had also established the Damascus International Airport as the jihadi gateway for Sunni militants traveling from around the Middle East and North Africa looking to attack American forces inside Iraq. The Assad regime even arranged for buses to ferry fighters directly to the front lines.

**As early as January 2004, the Bush administration was increasing its pressure on the Assad regime to halt the jihadi traffic into Iraq and Syria's support of the  terrorist insurgency in which American soldiers were targeted and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

Kerry regularly advocated for Javid Zarif as a moderating force in Tehran’s revolutionary regime

During early May 2018 , former Secretary of State John Kerry  met with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad  Zarif twice   to  organize a  concerted effort to  undercut US administration’s efforts to modify and strengthen the Iran nuclear deal that Zarif and  Kerry had   previously negotiated. Their focus  was  to get the European Union to counter and bypass US efforts to reimpose sanctions  and other controls on Iran.

 Last week Zarif made headlines when he was caughtthe on tape with a crowd in Tehran actively participating in a chant calling for the destruction of the United States and its allies. The crowd can be heard chanting “Death to America,” “Death to Britain,” and “Death to Israel,” and  Zarif is  clearly seen smiling and mouthing along.

Over the years John Kerry had grown quite close to the foreign minister of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.Kerry regularly advocated for Zarif as a moderating force in Tehran’s revolutionary regime. During his efforts to sell the Iran nuclear deal to Congress and the American people in 2015, Kerry pushed the idea that the deal would empower Zarif and other supposed reformers, thus tempering the Islamic republic’s hostility to the US and its allies. American TV frequently featured Kerry and Zarif w backslapping throughout the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.


Kerry’s words of assurance have , of course, proven to be false — as Iran’s aggression in the region and hostility towards the West have only increased since the deal was implemented. 

Monday, May 28, 2018

Tinker, Tailor, Clapper, Carter, Downer, Halper, Spy[background for the initiation of the "Russian investigation" by what appear to be  rogue elements the US intelligence community.]


by Mark Steyn  Steyn on America   May 22, 2018

Below are background materials on the Office of Net Assessment and an article by Mark Steyn that accurately sums up the background for the initiation of the "Russian investigation" by what appear to be  rogue elements the US intelligence community.

Other materials  highlight the extensive British involvement in the collection and transmission of the precursor “information” which is widely cited as the “reasons” for the beginning of the surveillance activities .

It is a matter of public record that Stefan Halper actually received  for his “services” to the US intelligence community for his activities relating to the Trump campaign, an  enormous amount of money. [While the exact amount is not known, preliminary reports state that ONA paid him at least $250,000 ]

 Questions include:

  A.If Stefan Halper actually earned this money – what did he do to merit this amount of reimbursement? If he actually earned it, someone in the intelligence community should go to jail for using intelligence resources to spy  on a US political campaign. 

B.   If Stefan Halper did not merit this amount of money, someone in the US intelligence community should go to jail for transferring US resources under a boondoggle for services that were not actually rendered to the US government.

First,  some background information: 

The Department of Defense (DoD) is the executive branch department of the federal government of the United States charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government concerned directly with national security and the United States Armed Forces.

The  Office of Net Assessment (ONA) was created in 1973 to serve as the Pentagon's "internal think tank.” 

The Director of Net Assessment is the principal staff assistant and advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense on net assessment.[ According to Defense Directive 5111.11, the Director shall develop and coordinate net assessments of the standing, trends, and future prospects of U.S. military capabilities and military potential in comparison with those of other countries or groups of countries 
in order to identify emerging or future threats or opportunities for the United States.]

Andrew Marshall was named its first director, a position he held  under succeeding administrations. Marshall  retired in January 2015. He was replaced by Jim Baker in May 2015.

Marshall joined the RAND Corporation, the original "think tank” in 1949. Marshall was part of "a cadre of strategic thinkers" that coalesced at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s, a group that also included Charles J. Hitch, Herman Kahn and  James Schlesinger . 

Schlesinger would later become the U.S. Secretary of Defense and personally oversaw the creation of the Office of Net Assessment. The original main task of the office was to provide strategic evaluations on nuclear war issues. James Roche, Secretary of the Air Force in the administration of George W. Bush, worked for Marshall during the 1970s.

Andrew Marshall actively participated in 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), created by then-Defense Department staffers I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad; all of the aforementioned would ascend to influential roles in the administration of George W. Bush.

In an interview in 2012 the main author of four of the Chinese defence white papers General Chen Zhou stated that Marshall was one of the most important and influential figures in changing Chinese defence thinking in the 1990s and 2000s.

We studied RMA exhaustively. Our great hero was Andy Marshall in the Pentagon. We translated every word he wrote.
- General Chen Zhou, PLA

 “A slew of Marshall's former staffers have gone on to industry, academia and military think tanks. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, among others, have been cited as Marshall ‘star protégés.’” In 2012 Foreign Policy named Marshall one of its  Top 100 Global Thinkers. 

Second, significant article by Mark Steyn [whose content, we fully endorse]

Tinker, Tailor, Clapper, Carter, Downer, Halper, Spy

by Mark Steyn  Steyn on America   May 22, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8667/tinker-tailor-clapper-carter-downer-halper-spy


As I think most persons paying attention now realize, the investigation into foreign interference with the 2016 election was created as a cover for domestic interference with the 2016 election.

It was run at the highest (or deepest) Deep State levels by the likes of James Clapper and John Brennan, whose frantic and hysterical Tweets are like no utterances of any CIA director in history. That also explains one of the puzzling aspects of the last year that I've occasionally mentioned here and on TV and radio: If you were truly interested in an "independent" Special Counsel, why would you appoint Robert Mueller? He's a lifetime insider and the most connected man in Washington - a longtime FBI Director, and Assistant Attorney-General and acting Deputy Attorney-General at the Department of Justice.

Exactly. His most obvious defect as an "independent" counsel is, in fact, his principal value to the likes of Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein: He knows, personally, almost every one in the tight little coterie of discredited upper-echelon officials, and he has a deep institutional loyalty to bodies whose contemporary character he helped create. In other words, he's the perfect guy to protect those institutions. As for the nominal subject of his investigation, well, he's indicted a bunch of no-name Russian internet trolls who'll never set foot in a US courthouse. That's not even worth the cost of printing the complaint. Rush Limbaugh has been kind enough to quote, several times, my line that "there are no Russians in the Russia investigation". Which is true. Yet that doesn't mean there aren't foreigners. And an inordinate number of them are British subjects - or, to use today's preferred term, "Commonwealth citizens". All the action in this case takes place not in Moscow but in southern England.

Let's start at Cambridge University with a two-day conference called "2016's Race to Change the World", held on July 11th and 12th 2016 - or three weeks before the FBI supposedly began its "counterintelligence" operation against Trump, codenamed "Crossfire Hurricane". That's from the first line of the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash". The song and its key signature figure in the plot of a ho-hum Cold War thriller of the same name, about a British spy trying to get info from the Russians to an heroic American woman.

Yes, really. Jonathan Pryce played "Jumpin' Jack Flash" , and I asked him about it when I moderated a panel on acting at St Catherine's College, Oxford with him and Patti Lupone a few years later.

If you think that's a weird event for an Oxbridge college to host, it's as nothing to this "Race to Change the World" beano. I do my share of international junketing, but the bill of fare for this curious symposium is so bland as to be almost generic - panels titled "Europe and America", "2016 and the World", "Global Challenges Facing the Next President". Compared to the laser-like focus of a typical Cambridge confab ("A Westphalia for the Middle East?"), it's almost as if someone were trying to create an event so anodyne and torpid no one would notice it. All that distinguished these colorless presentations was the undoubted eminence of the speakers: former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former UK Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind; and Sir Richard Dearlove, former C (that's M, for 007 fans) at MI6. The conference appears to have been put together at a couple of weeks' notice by Steven Schrage, former "Co-Chair of the G8's Anti-Crime and Terrorism Group" and a well-connected man on the counterterrorism cocktail circuit: Here he is introducing Mitt Romney to the director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, and here he is spending election night in the UK at a party with Scotland Yard elite counterterrorist types. Make of that what you will - it's a somewhat odd background for the convenor of an insipid, vanilla, cookie-cutter foreign-policy seminar - but among the small number of strangely prestigious attendees at Mr Schrage's conference were:

~Carter Page, a petroleum-industry executive and Trump campaign volunteer;

~Christopher Steele, the former head of the Russia house at MI6;

~Stefan Halper, a University of Cambridge professor with dual UK/US citizenship.

Today, Mr Page is better known as the endlessly surveilled "person of interest" whose eternally renewable FISA warrant was the FBI's gateway into the Trump campaign; Mr Steele is a sometime FBI asset who, a week before the Cambridge conference, had approached the G-men with the now famous "dossier" that provided the pretext for the FISA application; and Professor Halper turns out to be not some tweedy academic but a man with deep connections to MI6 and the CIA, on the payroll of something at the Pentagon called the "Office of Net Assessment", and (one of) the supposed FBI informant(s) inside the Trump circle.

Carter Page says that in the course of this two-day conference he met Professor Halper for the first time. But I was struck by this aside Mr Page made to Sara Carter:

Madeliene Albright was always trying to get me to go into public debates. I told her I was there just as a listener, just as an attendee.

Hmm. If you'll forgive another Patti Lupone-type digression, many years ago our mutual pal Ned Sherrin decided to launch, just for a laugh, a rumor that me and Carol Thatcher (Mrs T's daughter) were having an affair. Ned told somebody, and somebody told somebody else, and about eight months later it turned up as an item in Nigel Dempster's highly authoritative Daily Mail gossip column, along with a rather goofy picture of me and Carol at a David Frost shindig at the Grosvenor House in Park Lane. And Ned was stunned - because he assumed the Daily Mail story was true. Because, by the time it circled back to him, he'd clean forgotten he'd started the whole business.

Oddly enough, that's exactly how James Comey and Andrew McCabe and John Brennan work. At the FISA court, the FBI, to bolster their reliance on the Steele dossier, pointed to newspaper stories appearing to corroborate aspects of it - even though, as he subsequently testified under oath at the Old Bailey, those stories were in fact fed to those reporters by Steele himself. Nevertheless, it works like a charm on gullible FISA judges. You take one thing and you make it two things. Or even better, you take nothing and you make it a thing: Here, from yesterday's letter by Senator Ron Johnson, are McCabe, Sally Yates and other FBI/DOJ honchos arranging for Comey to brief Trump on the Steele dossier for the sole purpose of giving CNN a news peg for leaking details about what's in it.

It's almost as if that's what Madeleine Albright is doing here, isn't it? It's one thing to invite Carter Page to show up at some tedious yakfest at Cambridge with Halper sitting in front of him and Chris Steele sitting behind. But what if you could get Page to stand up and say something? Then you could find a friendly journo to report it and, instead of just a nobody on the fringes of the campaign, you'd have a "senior Trump advisor" sharing his thoughts on the global scene with Madam Albright and Sir Richard and Sir Malcolm and all the other bigshots, and then you could use that story three weeks later at the FISA court, to demonstrate how deep into the heart of the campaign the Russkies had penetrated.

Instead, Professor Halper has to make do with chit-chatting to Mr Page over the tea and biscuits, and planting the seeds for a friendly relationship.

Herewith a note on the academic circuit: emeritus professors and visiting fellows are popular covers with espionage agencies because there's minimal work and extensive foreign travel, to international talking shops like the one above. If you make the mistake of being a multinational businessman and go to foreign countries to meet with other businessmen, you'll be investigated up the wazoo. But, if you're a professor and you go to foreign countries to meet with other professors, the world is your oyster. You also get to meet young people, who are the easiest to recruit.

Here's another professor, and from another Commonwealth country: Malta. Joseph Mifsud is (was) a professorial fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland, but is (was) based in London as a principal of the "London Centre of International Law Practice" and a director of the "London Academy of Diplomacy", both of which sound fancy-schmancy but are essentially hollow entities operating from the same premises - 8, Lincoln's Inn Fields, a tony address (next to the London School of Economics and the Royal College of Surgeons) but the "London Centre/Academy"'s fifth in three years and at which they and a handful of other endeavors are holed up in a minimally furnished back room filled by four interns round a trestle table on fifty quid a week.

Professor Mifsud also has (had) similarly undemanding academic sinecures at the "Euro-Mediterranean University" in Slovenia and "Link Campus University" in Italy. At the beginning of March 2016, a young man called George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign. On March 14th, traveling through Italy, he met with Professor Mifsud. They got together again in Britain, and at some point Papadopoulos became head of the "London Centre of International Law Practice"'s soi-disant "Centre for International Energy and Natural Resources Law & Security", a post for which he had no obvious qualifications. Happily, like most other jobs at the "London Centre", it didn't require work, or showing up at the "London Centre" or even being in London.

Mifsud is said to have ties to high-ranking figures in Moscow, but there seems to be more prima facie evidence of ties to high-ranking figures in London. That's Professor Mifsud above with my old friend Boris Johnson, Britain's Foreign Secretary, at some Brexit event last October 19th. On October 31st Joseph Mifsud disappeared and has not been seen since. I know how he feels: The same thing happened to me twelve days after I lunched with Boris at The Spectator in early 2006. Is (was) Mifsud an FSB asset? An MI6 asset? Both? Neither? Well, there's more circumstantial evidence of Mifsud's ties to British intelligence, including multiple meetings with, inter alia, Claire Smith of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee.

At any rate, back in London on April 26th 2016, Professor Mifsud told young Papadopoulos that the Russians have all this "dirt" on Hillary, "thousands of emails". A couple of days later, a friend of George's at the Israeli Embassy, Christian Cantor, introduced him to Erika Thompson, who worked for Alexander Downer, Canberra's High Commissioner in the UK, at Australia House. On May 4th, Papadopoulos was quoted in The Times of London denouncing David Cameron for calling Trump "divisive, stupid and wrong". On May 6th, Ms Thompson called Papadopoulos to say that Mr Downer wanted to meet him. On May 10th they met for drinks at the Kensington Wine Rooms. Young George claims that the High Commissioner told him to "leave David Cameron alone". Which doesn't sound quite right to me.

As longtime readers may recall, I have drunk with Alexander Downer and that is not something to be undertaken lightly. Somewhere in the course of the evening a pretty squiffy Papadopoulos lifted his head up from the bowl of cocktail olives and started blabbing about Russian "dirt" on Hillary.

Another digression: Mr Downer was Australia's longest serving foreign minister and, as I used to say in those days, "my favorite foreign minister". Since then, he has spent many years on the "advisory board" of Hakluyt, a curiously named body set up by former MI6 chaps. I'm not saying he spends his nights rappelling down the walls of presidential palaces (although I would be tickled to be proved wrong), but I don't think I'm betraying any confidences when I say that, after tea with Alexander in Adelaide a couple of years back, whence he had just returned from some meeting with some group or other in Lisbon, I remember musing about that select circle of people who can jet around the world in the expectation that doors will open for them and some useful tidbit will drop into their laps. As for Hakluyt, its website is here: I do believe it's the coolest thing I've seen since (another long me'n'Carol-type story) I was given Marlon Brando's business card, which had the words "Marlon" and "Brando" on it and nothing else.

At any rate Mr Downer relayed the information about young George to Aussie Intelligence back home. Canberra sat on the info for two months and then passed it along to the Yanks in late July, just in time for that FISA application.

And so, as July turned to August, Peter Strzok bade farewell to his "paramour" Lisa Page and flew to London for a sit-down with the High Commissioner at Australia House. When Strzok reported back to Washington, the FBI sicced the omnipresent "professor" Stefan Halper on George Papadopoulos. So the Trump aide woke up one August morning to an email from a Cambridge academic he'd never heard of, inviting him on an all-expenses-paid trip back to Britain to give a speech for $3,000. Once in London, Halper casually inquired of his new friend, "George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?"

Right. As Rush put it, the day before I guest-hosted last week:

He was a nothing. He was a nobody, which made him a perfect mark. He was a young guy who wanted to go places... He actually put on his résumé that he had participated in Model UN in high school.

Just so: Papadopoulos was the perfect mark. And the easiest way to reel him in is to get him off his home turf. In your own neighborhood, you have your routine - your usual bars, favorite restaurants; you notice if something's off. But, flown to London, you have no routine, no old haunts. You go where you're invited, you're introduced to important people - like "High Commissioners", woshever the hell thash ish, hic - and you want them to think you're important, too, so you reveal that you know all about the Russian "dirt" on Hillary.

So you got that from the Russians, right? Er, no. I got it from a Maltese guy in Italy who's a Scottish professor and plugged in to MI6, and then I told it to an Australian bloke in London who's also plugged in to MI6 and told me to lay off David Cameron, and then an American guy in Cambridge who's plugged in to MI6 reminded me about it to see if I'd deny all knowledge of it, which would be suspicious, wouldn't it..?

As I said, and as Rush likes to quote, there are no Russians in the Russia investigation. But, like that rumor about me and Carol Thatcher, you just put these things out there and a few months later they come back to you, via Canberra and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing program and suddenly it's "independently" "corroborated" "evidence" from a respected ally and you can take it to a FISA judge.

There were two investigations into presidential candidates during the 2016 election. But, as Andrew McCarthy reminds us, these two investigations were not the same. The Clinton "matter" was a criminal investigation - because there was credible evidence that Hillary had committed criminal acts. The FBI had no such clear-cut goods on Trump. So they had to find something else:

The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation. With the blessing of the Obama White House, they took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans — Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries.

And the advantage of a "counterintelligence investigation", unlike a criminal investigation, is that everything in it is "classified". So that even an obvious set-up at a Cambridge confab or Kensington wine bar is "intelligence" that has to be "protected" for "national security" reasons. It's a brazen, audacious scheme, and unlikely to have been loosed without the approval, however discreetly stated, of the then President. Occam's Razor suggests that the man running the operation was the CIA's John Brennan through the "inter-agency taskforce" that met at Langley. But Brennan isn't that reckless: Go back to Madeleine Albright urging Carter Page to speak up at a Cambridge conference; Christopher Steele leaking parts of his dossier to the newspapers; a staffer at Australia House inviting George Papadopoulos for a drink... The best way to turn nothing into something is to plant it somewhere far away and wait for it to work its way back to you:

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.

Golly, you don't say! I wonder who "told" The Guardian that. A conference here, a speech there, a cocktail round the corner, and pretty soon you have the simulacrum of "counterintelligence" concerns from America's closest allies:

According to one account, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, passed material in summer 2016 to the CIA chief, John Brennan. The matter was deemed so sensitive it was handled at "director level". After an initially slow start, Brennan used GCHQ information and intelligence from other partners to launch a major inter-agency investigation.

Er, wait a minute. If it's "so sensitive" it's being handled "director-to-director", why isn't the head of GCHQ meeting with his opposite number at NSA? Why's he meeting with Brennan?

Hey, don't get hung up on details. It all went brilliantly - except for one tiny detail: Hillary managed to do the impossible and lose. On January 23rd 2017, three days after Trump's inauguration, GCHQ at Cheltenham Tweeted the sad fate of Mr So Sensitive:

We're sorry to announce that Robert Hannigan, our Director since 2014, has decided to step down as head of GCHQ.

Oh, dear. Well, enjoy your sudden retirement, old boy. Unfortunately, for Brennan and Comey and McCabe and Strzok and the others on this side of the Atlantic in the third week of January, it wasn't quite that simple. Because, instead of protecting Hillary, they were now protecting themselves - so it was necessary to dig in and double-down on the "Russia investigation".

Which sounds super-credible except for one small point: there was never a Russia investigation. As Andrew McCarthy sums it up:

Opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.

Which is what they did - Brennan and Clapper and Comey and McCabe. They took tools designed to combat America's foreign enemies and used them against their own citizens and their political opposition. It was an intentional subversion of the electoral process conducted at the highest level by agencies with almost unlimited power. And, if they get away with it, they will do it again, and again and again. That's what Brennan's telling us on Twitter, and Clapper on "The View":

Yeah? So what? Whatcha gonna do about it?

Good question.



Sunday, May 27, 2018

Spies like us (or do they?)[Documented  FBI actions within the Trump campaign]
By Jim Wagner RenewAmerica   May 25, 2018


http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/jwagner/180525

As the lead singer for the punk rock band "Dead Kennedys" once put it, "if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street..., we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half." Today's FBI seems to have taken that counsel very much to heart, at least in so far as its relationship to the Trump presidency is concerned. But have our national spooks really been spying on this president since the earliest days of his campaign? Or were they merely sending agents to "inform" on Trump and his associates?

According to the New York Times Adam Goldman et. al. (May 18, 2018), there is a crucial distinction to be made over this point. According to Goldman, "President Trump accused the FBI...without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign 'for political purposes.'" But in reality, the article assures us, FBI agents "merely sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers...." Which reminds me of that time we sent airplanes to deliver those two packages to Japan. (But let's not quibble about semantics!)

Days later, on May 24, Politifact went to some pains to clarify what may seem to some a distinction without a difference. Quoting Robert Litt, who served as general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence under Obama, Politifact explained, "There's clearly a difference between planting a person inside a campaign to observe and report back, and simply asking someone to meet with people and report back...." To punctuate that nuance, Politifact then quoted law professor Emily Berman to explain that while spying vs. informing may be a "judgment call," it was all intended to help Trump by "disrupting Russian efforts to influence the campaign, rather than catch Trump associates in unlawful activity."

Trump must have been greatly reassured to learn that the Obama Justice Department was so concerned about the health of his campaign. But which was it? Did the FBI actually send spies into the Trump campaign to gather information? Or did they merely send informants into the campaign to spy on Trump and his associates? This is an important fine point, you see, because the integrity of our national intelligence apparatus dangles in the balance. So with your permission I will spare you the suspense. Those agents who contacted George Papadopoulos and Carter Page and Sam Clovis – all members of the Trump campaign – were strictly speaking neither informants nor spies. They were involved in a plot far more sinister, something altogether different from and far more insidious than mere spying. They were engaged in a notorious and highly problematic historical specialty of the FBI. But before elaborating on that I should probably provide some background.

For the sake of brevity, let us deal solely with the espionage activities directed against one fringe associate of the Trump campaign, the hapless George Papadopoulos. You may remember George as that ambitious dupe whose drunken ramblings to an Australian diplomat ostensibly provoked the Trump "collusion" investigation. But long before that investigation is acknowledged to have commenced, Papadopoulos had already been contacted by at least three different individuals representing the FBI. And those three had one thing conspicuously in common. They all, in one way or another, informed George or emphasized to him that "the Russians" had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton which, they implied, could be of value to the Trump campaign.

The first such contact was made by the FBI in the person of one Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor and global gadabout with wide-ranging connections. Margot Cleveland at The Federalist provides the full details of Mifsud's shady background and his curious contacts with Papadopoulos here. http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/15/maltese-professor-may-hold-key-fbi-really-began-surveiling-trump/. But briefly, during the week following Papadopoulos' first contact with the Trump campaign, during that period before he had actually joined the campaign, he was contacted by Mifsud, who intimated that he had extensive Russian connections. At that point Mifsud seems to have been so impressed with George that he also offered him a job at the London Center of International Law Practice. Soon after that first contact Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a woman claiming to be Vladimir Putin's niece, and then to an ostensible associate of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The thrust of these contacts and Mifsud's other ongoing outreaches to Papadopoulos was that Mifsud was in a position to help the Trump campaign should it decide to pursue better relations with Russia, something Trump had openly promised to do.

But then Mifsud's emphasis suddenly took a new direction. According to Papadopoulos' confession statement (he plead guilty to a single count of lying to the FBI about the timing of this contact), Mifsud told George that he "had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian governmental officials." On that trip, according to Papadopoulos, Mifsud said that he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. To wit, Mifsud related that "the Russians had emails of Clinton." "Thousands of emails," he insisted! Shortly after that Joseph Mifsud disappeared, and he has not been seen since.

Was this a chance meeting? Joseph Mifsud was a close friend and business partner of Gianni Pittella, president of Italy's Socialists and Progressive Democrats. In 2016 Pitella flew to Philadelphia, as Time Magazine reported, to "take the unprecedented step of endorsing and campaigning for Hillary Clinton because the risk of Donald Trump is too high." Admittedly, this does not prove that Joseph Mifsud had a political interest in undermining the Trump campaign. But I'll let the reader decide what it suggests.

The second FBI agent to contact George Papadopoulos during the 2016 presidential campaign was a Cambridge professor by the name of Stefan Halper. (You can read a full description of Professor Halper, his various connections, his attitude toward Trump, and his odd and deliberate outreach to George Papadopoulos at https://www.americanthin ker.com/blog/2018/05/stefan_halper_and_the_origins_of_the_fbi_counterintelligence_investigation_of_the_trump_campaign.html. Stefan Halper had strong ties to the CIA and a long record of working with both US and British intelligence. But his history went deeper than that. He was a professional dirty-tricks artist with more than 30 years' experience. For instance it has been widely reported and long believed that Dr. Halper was the mole who collected dirt on Jimmy Carter's foreign policy during the 1990 presidential campaign. And while Halper contacted several Trump campaign staffers ostensibly to assist them, his public position was decidedly pro-Clinton. "I believe Clinton would be the best for US-UK relations," he is quoted as saying, "(because) she is... predictable (and) will be less disruptive over time."

Stefan Halper first contacted George Papadopoulos in September of 2016, several months after Joseph Mifsud had planted in him the seeds of Russian dirt. He sent George an email, asserting as bona fides an alleged connection with campaign staffer Sam Clovis, and offered George $3000 plus expenses to write a policy paper on the Leviathan natural gas field in the Middle East. George accepted the offer, whereupon Halper intensified his recruitment, meeting with him repeatedly.

But then, like Mifsud before him, Halper suddenly turned the conversation to a new direction. "George," he asked earnestly and quite out of the blue, "you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Evidently George had forgotten about the bomb Joseph Mifsud had strapped on his back some months before, because he told Halper he knew nothing whatever about Hillary emails or Russian hacking. According to the Daily Caller, "Halper "grew agitated and pressed Papadopoulos on the topic. Papadopoulos believes that Halper was recording him during some of their interactions...." Halper at this point apparently abandoned the effort to cement the thought of Russian hacking into George's fragile memory, despite receiving payments totaling nearly $400,000 from the Defense Department for this work and apparently even more than that from other government sources. But that was not the end of it.

The third FBI agent to contact George Papadopoulos in the months leading up to the 2016 election was Stefan Halper's "personal assistant" Azra Turk. (See at http://dailycaller.com/2018/05/21/fbi-informant-george-papadopoulos/. ) According to Papadopoulos' statement, which was taken at a time before he could possibly have realized the broader significance of this, the winsome Ms. Turk "flirted with him during their meetings" and "later tried to meet with him in his home town of Chicago." She also followed up on that flirtation by email. But more to the point, like Halper and Mifsud before her she asked George about those damning Hillary emails allegedly hacked by "the Russians."

Enter Alexander Downer, Australia's High Commissioner to the UK and coincidentally the man who had earlier arranged a $25 million donation from Australia to the Clinton Foundation. As luck would have it, Commissioner Downer just happened to bump into George Papadopoulos at a Kensington Wine Room in London, where he extracted from the drunken Trump campaign staffer some mumbled ramblings in reference to the story of Hillary's emails and Russian hacking that had been planted by Mifsud, Halper and Turk. (Details at The American Spectator here: https://spectator.org/the-papadopoulos-affair-such-a-downer/. ) Downer then dutifully contacted the FBI, and according to the official story, that is how the Trump-Russia collusion investigation began.

But how did a highly placed Australian official like Alexander Downer find himself slumming in London with a drunken low level campaign staffer the likes of George Papadopoulos in the first place? The answer is simpler than you might imagine. According to the Gateway Pundit, Alexander Downer and Stefan Halper go way back. They have known each other at least since October 18th of 2010, when they shared the podium at a seminar on "The War Economy" at Emmanuel College. http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/05/breaking-fbi-spy-stefan-halper-and-aussie-diplomat-downer-go-way-back/ . It was a set up. That is what the FBI does. Mifsud and Halper and Turk and Downer were what they call in the trade agents provocateurs. Rather than attempt to explain what is meant by that fancy French, I will quote directly from Wikipedia.

"An agent provocateur (inciting agent) is a person who commits, or who acts to entice another person to commit an illegal or rash act or falsely implicate them in partaking in an illegal act." Further, "An agent provocateur may be a police officer or a secret agent of police who encourages suspects to carry out a crime under conditions where evidence can be obtained.... A political organization or government may use agents provocateurs against political opponents. The provocateurs try to incite the opponent to do counterproductive or ineffective acts to foster public disdain or to provide a pretext for aggression against the opponent." This might include acts, one would imagine, like seeking to obtain Hillary's purloined emails from a supposed Russian agent.

The Oxford Dictionary of Law defines agent provocateur more succinctly as "one who purposefully lures or persuades someone into breaking the law when that person may not have done so alone, and then turns them over to the police." Poor Papadopoulos! They couldn't pay him to break the law, so they indicted him for incorrectly remembering a date – the date upon which he first spoke with their own agent, the slippery Mifsud.

And this takes us back to the main point. Why would I suggest that our very own FBI might employ agents provocateurs to entice low level Trump campaign staffers into repeating the claim that the Russians had hacked Hillary Clinton's emails? Simple! Under its COINTEL Program the FBI has done exactly that sort of thing many times in the past. And in this case it would provide the pretext for a full scale investigation of Trump and his associates including myriad forms of electronic surveillance, warranted and even warrantless searches, subpoenas, grand juries, informants (not spies – heaven forbid) and many other methods otherwise foreclosed by law.

Returning to Wikipedia, "COINTELPRO... was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations. FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted organizers, activists of civil rights movements.... The FBI has used covert operations against domestic political groups since its inception.... COINTELPRO tactics are still used to this day, and have been alleged to include discrediting targets through psychological warfare, smearing individuals and groups using forged documents and by planting false reports in the media (here I am thinking of the salacious and unverified Steel Dossier); harassment; wrongful imprisonment" etc.

In 1976 the Church Committee under Senator Frank Church investigated the FBI's COINTEL Program. The Committee found that "the domestic activities of the intelligence community at times violated specific statutory prohibitions and infringed the Constitutional rights of American citizens. The legal questions involved in intelligence programs were often not considered. On other occasions, they were intentionally disregarded in the belief that because the programs served the 'national security' the law did not apply.... (The) most serious breaches of duty were those of senior officials, who were responsible for controlling intelligence activities and generally failed to assure compliance with the law. Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that.... The Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation...on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups...would protect the national security...."

Broadly speaking, according to the Church Report, the methods of COINTELPRO included variants of the following:
Infiltration "...to undermine trust and scare off supporters (and to) smear genuine activists as agents."

Psychological warfare including "dirty tricks" to undermine movements, "false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondences, sent anonymous letters (and) spread misinformation about meetings and events (and) set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents...."

Harassment via the legal system. "They...abused the legal system to harass.., gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretense for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment... (and) used grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate...and silence...."

Illegal force including break ins, vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations.

Undermine public opinion. "One of the primary ways the FBI targeted organizations was by challenging their reputations in the community and denying them a platform to gain legitimacy."
J. Edgar Hoover himself provided the original operational doctrine for these sorts of FBI activities. "The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt..., and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." The final report of the Church Committee concluded: "The Government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power. The government, operating primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other techniques such as wiretaps (and) microphone 'bugs'...has swept in vast amounts of information about...American citizens. Investigations of groups deemed potentially dangerous – and even of groups suspected of associating with potentially dangerous organizations – have continued for decades despite the fact that those groups did not engage in unlawful activity."


Do not buy the lie that the Comey FBI was simply using "informants" to "obtain information" about Russian attempts to hack our elections. The FBI investigation of Trump, and the Mueller investigation it spawned, have from the start been COINTELPRO operations, or if you prefer the Church Committee's characterization, vigilante actions conducted by anti-Trump agents provocateurs with strong financial and emotional ties to the Hillary camp. In other words, we have been witnessing a witch hunt. And it is still going on.