REV. AL SHARPTON, SEN. KAMALA HARRIS , SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN SHOWING DISDAIN FOR JEWS By United with Israel Staff

REV. AL SHARPTON, SEN. KAMALA HARRIS , SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN 

SHOWING DISDAIN FOR JEWS

By United with Israel Staff

Two Democratic senators, both presidential candidates, have shown insensitivity to the Jewish community by praising anti-Semitic black leader Al Sharpton, who has incited violence against Jews.

The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 1000 traditional rabbinic leaders in matters of public policy, said statements of support for Rev. Al Sharpton from Senators (and presidential candidates) Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren reflected “great insensitivity” towards the Jewish community.

Following an attack on Sharpton from President Donald Trump, Harris claimed that Sharpton “has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation,” while Warren said he “has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all,” CJV said in a press release.

Sharpton played a major role in the Crown Heights riots of 1991, which led to the murder of a young rabbinic student from Australia. Despite the violence, Sharpton further inflamed anti-Semitic passion, delivering a speech which referred to the Hatzolah ambulance service, a Jewish volunteer group that serves all New Yorkers, as “an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights,” starting chants of “No Justice – No Peace” and leading a march in which protesters displayed anti-Semitic signs and burned the Israeli flag, the rabbinic group said.

Just a few years later, Sharpton led protests against a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, calling the Jewish owner a “white interloper” in the neighborhood. One of the protesters later entered with a gun, shooting several customers and murdering seven employees by fire-bombing the store.

Sharpton expressed disdain for the Jewish community by threatening to fight: “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

“In their haste to condemn the president,” said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the CJV, “two Senators, both of whom are candidates for the president’s job, described a man who instigated anti-Semitic marches and even murder as spending ‘his life’ fighting for ‘justice’ and ‘to improve our nation.’ It is hard to imagine a person with any sensitivity towards the Jewish community making such a statement.”

“The way these senators have glossed over Sharpton’s racist and anti-Semitic past would and should never happen with a white racist,” added Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, Eastern Regional Vice-President of the CJV. “The process itself and the moral double standard implied are both repugnant.”

THE FORWARD OPINION PAGE DEFENDS “PAY-TO-SLAY” CAMERA 7-30-19

THE FORWARD OPINION PAGE DEFENDS “PAY-TO-SLAY”

CAMERA  7-30-19

{Originally posted to the CAMERA website}

Last December, the Forward gaslit Jews with the claim that “‘From The River To The Sea’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means,” an opinion piece by University of Arizona professor Maha Nassar.

In January, the publication gave space to Ariel Gold, an activist with the pro-Iran, pro-Maduro group Code Pink, to advocate for housing discrimination against Jews.

This month, the publication once again defies all credible expectations, hitting yet another new low with justifications for Palestinian Authority payments to terrorists who murder Jews. (“Does The Palestinian Authority ‘Pay To Slay’ Jews? Here’s How We Palestinians See It,” July 10.)

In the second paragraph, author Muhammad Shehada claims “Pay to Slay” is a “canard” that has been debunked by the Washington Post. This is grossly dishonest.

The Post fact-check to which he refers took issue only with the claimed total amount of the payments, $350 million, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted in a speech – but the Post’s piece acknowledges, without caveat, that such payments are in fact being made: “the State Department, by law, already deducts from its Palestinian aid budget a figure that represents the amount of money the Palestinian Authority pays to people convicted of terrorism. The exact number is classified ….”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

The same Post article continues, “in the Palestinian Authority’s budget, one can find $350 million in annual payments to Palestinian prisoners, ‘martyrs’ and injured, but can one with certainty say they are all terrorists?”

Inarguably, the Palestinian Authority is paying $350 million to prisoners. It can reasonably be argued that not all of them are terrorists, and certainly not all have committed murder. But it’s also inarguable that at least some have. The Post continues:

Yet at the same time, Palestinians acknowledge making payments to the families of suicide bombers and people convicted of heinous attacks. Hakim Awad — the then-18-year-old militant mentioned by Netanyahu who murdered five family members in a West Bank settlement — receives about $14,000 a year.

Further, the Post noted,

Yet even if one accepts Palestinian complaints about due process, there is little doubt that the system allows people to be rewarded for what many Americans would call terrorism….

Malki Roth, one of the victims of the Sbarro bombing.

Payments continue to the family of the suicide bomber who killed 15 people, including four Americans, at a Sbarro cafe in Jerusalem in 2002, and to the bomb maker, other documents show.

The Post further explains that in the case of so-called “martyrs,” those who were killed, families get the payments – even if those families are not living in either the West Bank or Gaza: “Note: Payments for families in the Palestinian diaspora are about double the level for families inside.”

As a New York Times tech reporter learned the hard way, pay-to-slay is not, as Shehada would have it, a canard. In April of 2018, after an article about Facebook and “fake news” called such payments a “conspiracy theory,” the Times printed the following correction:

An article on Sunday about Campbell Brown’s role as Facebook’s head of news partnerships erroneously included a reference to Palestinian actions as an example of the sort of far-right conspiracy stories that have plagued Facebook. In fact, Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.

Shehada is certainly entitled to his own opinion, but, as the saying goes, not to his own facts. So why would the Forward allow him to make such an unfounded assertion in its pages?

Shehada’s claim that these payments are “welfare payments” has also been disproven. Sander Gerber and Yossi Kuperwasser wrote in the Washington Examiner in January of this year:

In the Palestinian Authority’s 2018 budget, funding levels for “pay-for-slay” programs and the Palestinian Authority’s social welfare programs are disclosed. Terror payment programs include salaries to prisoners set at nearly $150 million. Allocations to those killed or injured in “wars” with Israel is budgeted at over $180 million, together more than $330 million overall — consuming over 7 percent of the annual Palestinian budget. These payments go to approximately 10,500 imprisoned and released prisoners and some 37,500 families of martyrs and injured. In contrast, the entire 2018 budget for the Palestinian Authority’s social welfare system is about $214 million dollars, and supports 118,000 households: a much larger group subsisting on a much smaller budget.

That means that in 2018, prisoners received, on average, $14,285 – more than the average salary of a civil servant. Families of those killed received on average $4,800, while actual welfare recipients received only on average $1,813 per family. (While the Washington Post took issue with Kuperwasser’s 2017 figures, the Post’s own estimate for payments to prisoners in 2017 is somewhat lower and for payments to families somewhat higher than Gerber and Kuperwasser’s 2018 figures. The Post, however, does not include general welfare payments for comparison.)

In 2013, it was reported in the Guardian – hardly a hasbara mouthpiece – that:

The law of the prisoner narrowly delineates just who is entitled to receive an official salary. In a recent interview, Ministry of Prisoners spokesman Amr Nasser read aloud that definition:

A detainee is each and every person who is in an Occupation prison based on his or her participation in the resistance to Occupation.

This means crimes against Israel or Israelis. Nasser was careful to explain:

It does not include common-law thieves and burglars. They are not included and are not part of the mandate of the ministry.

Under a sliding scale, carefully articulated in the law of the prisoner, the more serious the act of terrorism, the longer the prison sentence, and consequently, the higher the salary. Incarceration for up to three years fetches a salary of almost $400 per month. Prisoners behind bars for between three and five years will be paid about $560 monthly – a compensation level already higher than that for many ordinary West Bank jobs. Sentences of ten to 15 years fetch salaries of about $1,690 per month. Still worse acts of terrorism against civilians, punished with sentences between 15 and 20 years, earn almost $2,000 per month.

These are the best salaries in the Palestinian territories.

The Washington Post further reports, “the World Bank said in a 2007 report that the martyrs fund did ‘not seem justified from a welfare or fiscal perspective,’ that the prisoners fund was ‘the most generous PA program’….”

The Post fact-check that Shehada cites also confirms that “payments increase with the length of incarceration,” in other words, with the severity of the crime. Since the Post’s article is based in part on documents provided by the PLO itself, Shehada’s claim that “neither Greenblatt nor Netanyahu have provided evidence to back their claim that the PA rewards Palestinians for ‘murdering Jews,’ with an increase in the reward concordant to the number of Jews killed,” is specious.

Despite his opening claim that pay-to-slay is a “canard,” later in the piece, Shehada grudgingly admits that it’s possible that some of these payments might be going to terrorists, but justifies them anyway by repeating the previously-debunked claim that the high conviction rates in Israeli military courts are proof that they are “kangaroo courts.” CAMERA has already addressed this issue. In both US military courts and US civilian criminal courts, the conviction rate is also above 90 percent. This is because unlike litigants in civil cases, a criminal prosecutor may only bring charges when there is substantial evidence to support a conviction.

As CAMERA wrote previously, in Israeli military courts, the prosecutor’s obligation is even more stringent than in American civilian or military courts. In the Israeli military system in the West Bank, a defendant who is acquitted is entitled to both damages and attorney’s fees. Such an award, of course, would be paid from the public purse, and would be in addition to the waste of public resources in the form of the prosecutor’s own time spent on a failed prosecution. For this reason, IDF prosecutors only bring indictments in cases in which they have a high chance of success. Colonel Maurice Hirsch, the former IDF Head of Military Prosecutions in Judea and Samaria, told CAMERA that during the time that he was in charge of the military prosecutors’ office, his instruction to his prosecutors was, “if you have any doubt, don’t bring an indictment.”

Nor does Israel imprison “Palestinian nonviolent activists,” as Shehada claims, unless you consider stone-throwing “nonviolent.” Even a child throwing a rock can kill another child.

Even as he propagates these falsehoods, however, Shehada makes some noteworthy admissions. He notes that:

Official records show that back in 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization created a “Martyrs Fund” to aid and compensate all Palestinians killed, detained, or wounded by Israel as casualties of the conflict and the struggle for independence.

Of course, Israel did not take control of the West Bank and Gaza until 1967, three years after Shehada says the fund was established. (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said the fund was started in 1965, two years before Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza.) In 1964 or 1965, what did it mean to struggle against Israel for independence? What “occupation” were these “martyrs” fighting against? Are we to infer that in Shehada’s view, the struggle includes Palestinian “independence” in all of pre-1967 Israel, as well as the West Bank and Gaza?

Moreover, he notes, “locally, Palestinian prisoners and martyrs are usually seen as either victims or heroes who paid great personal sacrifices in pursuit of their freedom and dignity.” The fact that such people are viewed as heroes is, of course, the crux of the problem.

Only a few days after writing this piece, Shehada wrote, also in the Forward and in reference to Hamas official Fathi Hammad’s call to kill diaspora Jews, that “it’s crucial for us to denounce and protest such anti-Semitic language whenever it crops up in our struggle for freedom and dignity. We must keep our struggle from getting polluted by such poisonous and dehumanizing notions.” Yet, he minimizes and justifies the morally reprehensible pay-to-slay program, which puts a bounty on the head of every Israeli. And the Forward gives him the platform to do so in a putatively Jewish publication.

WILL THE UNITED STATES AND THE IRANIANS MEET TO AVERT A MILITARY CRISIS,… PERHAPS RENEGOTIATING THE NUCLEAR DEAL?

WILL THE UNITED STATES AND THE IRANIANS MEET TO AVERT A MILITARY CRISIS,…

 PERHAPS RENEGOTIATING THE NUCLEAR DEAL?

With negotiations coming, Iran apologists are back | 

Eric R. Mandel

Negotiations are coming. There was even an unconfirmed report from i24TV a few weeks back of a meeting between Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG) and U.S. officials in Kurdistan’s northern Iraqi capital of Erbil.

Before negotiations begin, you would think that longtime defenders of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—would be on the defensive, especially after the promised moderation of the regime not only never materialized. In fact, Iran’s nefarious activities actually increased.

Iran’s complicity in the Syrian genocide, ethnic-cleansing of Sunnis, suppression of its own people, attempt to seek dual-use nuclear material in Germany and its thumbing its nose at U.N. Security Council Resolutions against missile development should have humbled the supporters of the deal.

According to a July 27 Wall Street Journal news story, “Iran has long argued … it has no interest in fielding nuclear weapons.”

JCPOA defenders’ support for the Iran nuclear agreement wasn’t diminished even after overwhelming evidence of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program was exposed when Israel surreptitiously removed tens of thousands of pieces of damning evidence from Iran, proving beyond a doubt that Iran had a nuclear-weapons program and retained the knowledge to restart it at a time of their choosing.

Yet defenders and the “experts” they quote spun it down to the point that what should have been a shocking revelation was minimized in mainstream outlets. Many interested people never fully learned about its full extent because they listened to echo chambers that quote experts without identifying their political leanings.

In 2011, NPR’s public editor published an article, “What to Think About Think Tanks?”

She wrote “Lots of things drive NPR’s audience crazy. One I totally agree with is this: NPR often does a lousy job of identifying the background of think tanks or other groups when quoting their experts. NPR also rarely explains why listeners should pay attention to the experts it chooses to quote … when quoting someone, they should go the extra distance to tell the audience why this person has been chosen and what message they are pushing.”

According to the article’s statistics, only right-of-center think tanks were identified, while left-of-center organizations, such as the Brookings Institute, whose political leanings are well-known inside the Beltway, were not mentioned to their audience. Unfortunately, National Public Radio is considered by many people to be an apolitical centrist media outlet, when in reality, like almost every other media outlet, right or left, consciously or unconsciously, it editorializes its news to fit its narrative, often by choosing whom to interview.

Understanding the news in context is vital for our democracy and an educated citizenry. As the U.S.-Iran rivalry heats up and Iran agreement supporters are back defending Iran, it should be noted that they incomprehensibly continue to ignore Iran’s human-rights abuses, its involvement in the South American drug trade with Hezbollah that is part of the American opioid crisis, and its export of terrorism throughout the world.

This month, Brookings foreign-policy expert Suzanne Maloney defended Iran’s recent aggressive military actions as simply “an attempt to negotiate.” That well may be true to increase their leverage, but what went unsaid was that Iran had all the leverage and benefits over the West until U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew last year from the JCPOA.

Where Maloney and other supporters of the JCPOA go off the rails is their projecting Western negotiating standards on a revolutionary Shi’ite Islamist regime, while ignoring the 40-year history of misleading Westerners who were outsmarted during the 2014-15 nuclear negotiations.

The Iranians will likely be forced back to the negotiating table, but it isn’t because they want to be there. To defend the Iranians actions such as shooting down a $100 million American drone, placing mines on tankers in international waters, hijacking a British tanker and spoofing false GPS coordinates in the Persian Gulf endangering international shipping, she inexplicably calls these acts just “breathless headlines.”

Her solution is based on a false analysis: “What happens next depends largely on the Trump administration.” Sorry, Ms. Maloney, what happens next is up to the Iranians.

Her remedy sounds like Iranian talking points. The Trump team must “compromise on its maximum-pressure strategy” and offer “sanctions relief as the price of admission.” In other words, unilaterally give up America’s newfound leverage that was achieved with sanctions.

In trying to make Iran seem like a legitimate international actor, she claims a recent meeting in New York between the isolationist Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has very little constituency on either side of the aisle, and the Iranian foreign minister has “now effectively normalized” contact between the two nations.

The claim that the “polished” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, whose perfect English has enamored JCPOA supporters while purposely misleading them time and again, is simply testing the waters for negotiations may be true, but he is not our friend, nor the one in control.

The ayatollahs and the IRGC call the shots, and Zarif’s charm shouldn’t fool anyone, as he represents a nation that is one of the worst human-rights abusers in the world—hanging gays routinely and imprisoning dissidents in horrific conditions.

Sounding more like publicist than journalist, Brookings’ Maloney described, “Zarif’s media appearances and private meetings … have conveyed a flexible even cordial message. He offered compliments toward Trump with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria,” another JCPOA cheerleader and Iranian defender.

Have we learned nothing from the last round of negotiations or Iran’s use of religiously sanctioned dissimulation to advance their goals?

Maloney does get it right when she says “the Islamic republic has made an art form of pairing diplomacy with force, exploiting Zarif’s unctuous charm alongside a punch in the face from the Revolutionary Guard.”

She was correct in stating that the Iran deal was the “first time that the international community managed to “slow the clerical regimes’ steady progress to nuclear weapons capability.” But the Obama administration falsely claimed that the deal will end their nuclear-weapons program, not simply slow it down for a short period of time. At that time, the center-left Washington Post editorial board had it right when it said, “When the accord lapses, the Islamic republic will instantly become a threshold nuclear state.”

Without giving credit to Trump she wrote, a “funny thing happened on the way to the breakdown: Iranian official now appear to be negotiating” similar to the secret talks the Obama administration had with Iran in Oman. That was when the administration reneged on its promise to our ally Israel and the Gulf States to keep them in the loop, knowing that Iran’s nuclear program was and is still an existential issue to them. No wonder we now see the strange bedfellows of Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and the Saudis working together on security and intelligence for shared interests.

With negotiations likely coming, citizens should know by now that today’s media, right or left, advances a particular agenda, so we must go the extra mile to get all of the information in context regarding Iran to make fully informed opinions.

Hopefully, the last negotiation taught us, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

QATAR’S NEW TACTIC IS TO CONTROL THE WORLD OF ACADEMIA BY NOAH PHILLIPS JULY 28, 2019

QATAR’S NEW TACTIC IS TO CONTROL THE WORLD OF ACADEMIA

BY NOAH PHILLIPS  JULY 28, 2019 

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Qatars-new-tactic-is-to-control-the-world-of-academia-596948

For years, Qatar’s lavish spending on foreign lobbyists – particularly in the United States, where lobbying plays an integral role in the legislative process – has constituted the bulk of the country’s attempts to wield influence in the world’s most powerful market. The small Gulf nation with not 315,000 citizens regularly doles out tens of millions on Beltway-insider lobbying firms intended to polish Qatar’s image in the eyes of lawmakers and the American populace. In 2017, Qatar spent $16.3 million on Washington lobbyists.

Qatar’s relentless US lobbying offensive has yielded favorable results. Despite its staunch opposition to America’s primary allies in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates), regular rhetorical support of Iran and monetary funding of elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda and ISIS, Qatar has nonetheless maintained its official designation as a US ally in the region even as it upholds values in stark contrast to ours.

But recently, Qatar’s lobbying stratagem has expanded from the Hill, as the country looks to cast a much wider net with much more permanent consequences for foreign relations. Qatar now allocates billions of dollars toward the protection of its image in the American classroom, sponsoring academic curricula and major academic institutions in return for favorable coverage in these settings. Since 2012, according to the Department of Education, Qatar has spent nearly $1.5 billion on infiltrating American universities and academic discourse.

From 2011 to 2016, Qatar donated over $330m. to Georgetown University, an astronomical amount to a single university. The university has strategic value to Qatar, given Georgetown’s close proximity to the nation’s capital and regular production of diplomats and legislators through its renowned School of Foreign Service. Georgetown faculty are regularly credited as experts in the media, and stifling their ability to condemn Qatar for wrongdoing is a significant gain for the Gulf state. Per the Daily Caller News Foundation, “The vast majority of funds from Qatar were contracts, the Education Department data shows, requiring Georgetown to do something in return for the money, unlike gifts.”

Qatar has also targeted the likes of Northwestern University, disbursing over $277m. to the university from 2011 to 2016. The reason likely lies with Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism’s reputation as the top place for budding journalists and members of the press to develop and hone their abilities before entering the professional world. Instilling a pro-Qatari philosophy into the minds of the future writers who would be most likely to expose Qatar for its innumerable transgressions is a strategic play by the Gulf nation.

Both Georgetown and Northwestern have established campuses in Doha, Qatar’s capital, in partnership with the Qatar Foundation, an organization solely focused on showing the West the prosperous, “humane” side of the Qatari regime. The Qatar Foundation similarly sponsored a headquarters for the Brookings Institution in Doha for the express purpose of showcasing a “bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American one,” per Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The foundation also sponsors campuses of Cornell, Virginia Commonwealth University, Texas A&M, University College London and Carnegie Mellon. More than 8,000 students study annually at Qatar’s “Education City.”

Other major recipients of Qatari wealth include the University of Michigan, Harvard, Purdue, Arizona State, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All of the aforementioned universities have forged strong professional and academic connections in Qatar.

In addition to maintaining a physical presence in Qatar, certain ideals of the regime are seeping into the forefront of discourse on college campuses more than ever. The proliferation of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to bolster the Palestinian narrative has taken off at major universities, a campaign closely in step with Qatari principles. Likewise, a tolerance for antisemitic bigotry on campus is reflective of intrinsically Qatari behavior.

The serious concerns raised by foreign donations of massive amounts of wealth are apparent, yet by and large ignored by US academic institutions. The injection of capital into the United States academic setting not only endangers the independence of private research institutions, but trickles upward as graduates reach high places, directly impacting the American stance on global issues such as terrorism and Israel.

WHAT ARE US JEWS TO DO ABOUT TRUMP? Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

WHAT ARE US JEWS TO DO ABOUT TRUMP?

Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

His opponents argue that even if US President Donald Trump is friendly to Jewish interests, Jewish values mandate he be opposed. Those assumptions must now be questioned.

Most American Jews didn’t need the latest controversy involving President Donald Trump to convince them to resist him. Already loyal Democrats, the overwhelming majority opposed the conservative policies pursued by his administration and regarded his views on illegal immigration abhorrent. But the “Send her back!” taunt Trump vehemently directed at the far-left congresswomen who comprise what has become known as “The Squad” was considered beyond the pale.

Taking their cues from The New York Times and networks like CNN, most Jews now think “racist” is not so much an epithet to be hurled at the president as an objective description. The current debate over Trump resembles the apocalyptic rhetoric that was routinely thrown about in the months before he took office, when many observers claimed the US was living through the moral equivalent of the last days of the Weimar Republic. The latest controversy has some otherwise sober liberals again asserting that Trump is an authoritarian threat to American liberties who is targeting minorities like the freshmen congresswomen for oppression.

If one accepts this characterization of the political situation, then the duty of the Jewish community is clear. A danger to any minority or oppressed group is inevitably a danger to the Jews, who always wind up being targeted by tyrants. And that’s why so many Jews view opposition to Trump as not so much a political opinion, but a religious obligation. Many in the Jewish community see Martin Niemöller’s famous poem that reads, “First they came for the Socialists …  Then they came for the Jews,” as not just an accurate analogy, but a gloomy prediction. They believe it is only a matter of time before a country where insults are aimed at women of color and where the government orders arrests of illegal immigrants will be followed by a targeting of the Jews.

Writer David Frum referenced this assumption in an article published this week in The Atlantic. Frum is part of the dwindling band of former Republicans who remain steadfast #NeverTrump advocates. But he is able to recognize that, despite the efforts by some on the left to smear Trump as an anti-Semite or an enabler of anti-Semites, this administration is, as he put it, is “not coming for the Jews this time.”

As Frum conceded, the stance of prominent members of the administration at the Justice Department’s Summit on Combating Anti-Semitism last week was one of genuine friends to the Jewish people and not allies of convenience. On any number of issues, the Trump administration has demonstrated its friendship toward the Jewish community. And that’s without taking into account the fact that it has been the most pro-Israel administration in history.

Still, in Frum’s words, this isn’t so much a reason for Jews to support Trump as it is setting up a quandary in which the community’s commitment to its values is being put to the test. Frum sees Trump as part of a new generation of authoritarians who view Jews as a protected class, even as they treat other minorities harshly and undermine everyone’s rights.

Frum seeks to frame the Jewish debate about Trump in such a way as to argue that this is a devil’s bargain in which Jews are being asked to join the oppressors.

In an odd way, he is unintentionally echoing the intersectional ideology motivating many on the left who view Jews and the State of Israel as enjoying “white privilege.” But the problem is not just that Trump is a friend to the Jews as opposed to an enemy; it’s that the basic assumption that they feel the president is destroying American liberty is mistaken.

It is true that at times, the president’s language is appalling and the opposite of what a nation in need of healing needs to hear from the leader of the free world. Many of Trump’s ardent followers are too far gone in their hero worship and their animus toward his foes to admit that he is a flawed and irresponsible messenger. That is testimony to the damage our bifurcated political culture has done to what was once a national consensus on the importance of civic virtue and civility. I FIND THIS PARAGRAPH VERY OBJECTIONABLE.  IT IS THE LEFT, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE MSM THAT ARE DIVIDING THE NATION.  AND THEY HAVE GONE TOO FAR IN THEIR HATRED OF TRUMP TO ADMIT THAT HE HAS DONE MORE FOR AMERICA AND ISRAEL THAN ANY PRESIDENT EVER.

But it is equally true that the claims this administration is destroying democracy and liberty are partisan hogwash. Trump’s opponents face no restraints or penalties for daily pillorying him and his supporters in prominent forums or in Congress. The policies Trump critics decry are not “Trumpian” tyranny, but conservative ideas that any Republican would have tried to implement. His “oppression” of immigrants that offends so many Jews is nothing more than an attempt to enforce the law, not an echo of Nazi oppression of the Jews.

Equally important, Trump is entirely correct when he describes members of the “squad,” such as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), as virulent anti-Semites who have often been given a pass by some in their party. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) – the most prominent member of the squad – is, like her two friends, a loud and dangerous opponent of Israel and a defender of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. Should Ocasio-Cortez and her friends ever gain control of their party – and we’re nowhere near that point yet – then the threat to Jews will be similar to one that a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party now poses in Britain.

Frum believes that this situation tests the ethical obligation of Jews to set aside their own parochial interests and defend others, much as the great Jewish teacher Hillel admonished us that, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” while also stating that “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

However, he and other Trump critics are wrong to view this as the moral dilemma they assume it to be. Opposing the president is what liberals, who would prefer a Democrat, should do. Trump is a conservative and someone who says inappropriate things. But he poses no more of a threat to American liberty than he does to the Jews. The same cannot be said for democratic socialists who support BDS.

SECRET FBI INFORMANT AND BILLION DOLLAR CEO, SAYS HE WAS PART OF A “SOFT COUP” AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP -,Butina’s attorney is accusing the FBI and federal prosecutors of improperly withholding the exculpatory information. JULY 27, 2019

 SECRET FBI INFORMANT AND BILLION DOLLAR CEO, SAYS HE WAS PART OF A “SOFT COUP” AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP -,Butina’s attorney is accusing the FBI and federal prosecutors of improperly withholding the exculpatory information.   JULY 27, 2019

https://gellerreport.com/2019/07/russia-hoax-bombshell-secret-fbi-informant-and-billion-dollar-ceo-says-he-was-part-of-a-soft-coup-against-president-trump.html/

The CEO of Overstock.com says he provided the FBI with exculpatory information on Maria Butina, a Russian national who pleaded guilty to conspiring to work as a Russian agent.

Butina’s attorney is accusing the FBI and federal prosecutors of improperly withholding the exculpatory information.

Patrick Byrne, the Overstock executive, told Butina’s attorney and journalist Sara Carter that the FBI encouraged him to collect information on Butina.

Byrne’s decision to come forward didn’t come lightly. However, he said it was necessary after watching what had transpired between the FBI, the intelligence community and the probe into President Trump’s campaign over the past several years.

“It was something I knew I had to do,” he told this reporter. “Those running the operation were not honest and in the end I realized I was being used in some sort of soft coup.”

Familiar with the possible backlash he will face, he made the decision to go public after speaking to his mentor and longtime friend billionaire Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet, whom Byrne describes as his ‘Rabbi,’ sent SaraACarter.com a statement Tuesday night confirming his meeting with Byrne at his home in Omaha, Nebraska several weeks ago.

Sara Carter broke the story, read the whole thing here.

Byrne’s decision to come forward didn’t come lightly. However, he said it was necessary after watching what had transpired between the FBI, the intelligence community and the probe into President Trump’s campaign over the past several years.

“It was something I knew I had to do,” he told this reporter. “Those running the operation were not honest and in the end I realized I was being used in some sort of soft coup.”

Familiar with the possible backlash he will face, he made the decision to go public after speaking to his mentor and longtime friend billionaire Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet, whom Byrne describes as his ‘Rabbi,’ sent whole thing here.

One could speculate that it was more than a soft coup against Trump. If all the reports we’ve received are correct, this resembles more of a decapitation strike aimed at taking out all resistance to the Democrat party. If the Republican President, the NRA, and other conservative groups can be alleged to have all been under the influence of a foreign power, albeit a Third World kleptocracy with an GDP smaller than New York State, then the entire opposition to the Democrats is discredited for years to come. The reason I don’t find this far fetched is that four years ago I would never have believed that the FBI and CIA would have interjected themselves into a presidential election on the side of one of the candidates and I never would have believed the UN Ambassador would be unmasking the personal communications of American citizens at the rate of one per work day.

Lawyer for accused Russian agent Maria Butina alleges prosecutorial misconduct, reveals relationship with CEO

One of the saddest episodes to emerge from the anti-Russia hysteria the Democrats and NeverTrump weenies managed to generate after the 2016 election is the case of Maria Butina. (You can chant “Russia is not our friend” under your breath to create the correct ambiance.) Butina, a member of a nascent Russian gun rights movement, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. She was never accused of being an intelligence agent. She is in prison for doing what Tony Podesta did for years and got White House invitations. Butina’s misfortune was to be Russian and to be interested in working with the NRA. Because the NRA supports Republicans, this became a convenient tool to claim the NRA was a Russian influenced organization…a charge that was actually made on this very site…and therefore illegitimate.

Yesterday, a pretty amazing thing happened. According to an exclusive report by Sara Carter (who seems to be one of the very few political journalists, liberal or conservative, not using Jake Tapper’s Twitter timeline for story ideas) the FBI aimed an informant at Butina with orders to begin a sexual relationship with her and then lied to Butina’s defense team about the informant and what the informant said about her intent because his reports undermined the government’s case.

This is the set up:

[Overstock.com CEO Patrick] Byrne was a keynote speaker on July, 8, 2015 at Freedom Fest, a yearly Libertarian gathering that hosts top speakers in Las Vegas. Shortly after his address, Butina approached him. She was flattering and repeatedly told him she was a fan of his, saying she was a graduate student that had studied the famous libertarian Militon Friedman.

He spoke to her shortly and “brushed her off.”

The young redheaded Russian graduate student then approached him again over the course of the conference and explained that she worked for the Vice Chairman of the Central Bank of Russia and sent by them to make contact with Byrne.

She also said “did you know you’re a famous man in Russia, we watch videos about you and your relationship with Milton Freeman.”

She said she was appointed to lead Russia’s gun right’s group by Lieutenant-General Mikhail Kalashnikov, who was a Russian general, most notably known for his AK-47 machine gun design. The designation by Kalashnikov is considered a huge honor and Byrne then had an “extensive conversation about Russian history and I understood her designation about Kalishnikov was significant.”

She wanted to invite Byrne to Russia to speak at the Central Bank before dignitaries. The speaking engagement would be at a major resort for three days. Butina told Byrne the event would offer him the opportunity to meet senior Russian officials and oligarchs. He didn’t accept the offer because of his security clearance. He then reported Butina and her offer to the FBI.

Byrne was a little suspicious of everything because Butina confided that she was afraid she was being monitored and thought it would be best if they disguised their meetings as a romantic relationship. He also reported it because Byrne was a part-time FBI informant.

When he contacted the FBI and then subsequently for the next few months “instead what I got was vague instructions that it would be ok to get to know her better.”

He said there was very little response from the FBI after his initial contact, until Butina asked him to come meet her in New York City. He told the FBI he didn’t want any vague instructions on whether to meet Butina or not because “I didn’t want my security clearance to get pulled.”

At that point the FBI gave him an explicit “green light” to meet with her. He rented a hotel room with two bedrooms because he was under the impression that the romantic texts were simply her way to cover for communicating with him. However, she arrived at the hotel beforehand, occupied the room before Byrne’s arrival, and when he arrived, she made clear that her flirtatious texts were not simply a disguise.

Byrne said that the FBI agents made clear they were skeptical that Butina might be of interest, dismissing her as simply a normal 26 year old Russian graduate student. Over time, Byrne and Butina developed an intimate relationship but at the same time he alleges he was continuously reporting on Butina to the FBI in an effort to convince them that it might be worthwhile to introduce her to some of his contacts at the Council on Foreign Relations. He also noted he reported to the FBI his interactions more frequently with Butina starting in December, 2015, both out of a desire not to lose the possibility of something good coming from this encounter, but also, because Butina was starting to speak more frequently of meeting with big shots in Republican circles.

Ultimately, Byrne became convinced that Butina was basically a very enthusiastic person doing exactly what she claimed to be doing: trying to build linkages between this Russian gun rights group and the NRA and conservative groups in the US and that she was not acting on behalf of the Russian government.

After her arrest, her lawyer made a demand for so-called “Brady” material and the FBI told them there was none. The FBI lying to sandbag a defense attorney…can you see my shocked face?

But this is the interesting part:

Oddly, Byrne’s name was not disclosed by prosecutors in the case or by the FBI. And despite the government’s earlier efforts to paint Butina as a Russian spy attempting to infiltrate Republican circles she was never investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which charged 25 Russian agents with interfering in the U.S. election. Further, the FBI, unlike convicted Russian bombshell spy Anna Chapman, did nothing to stop Butina from meeting with high level Republican and conservative figures. The bureau also didn’t warn those conservative figures she had made contact with,  even though they had her under surveillance and allegedly Byrne had been reporting on her during that time. As noted in a column by The Hill’s John Solomon Chapman’s actions were handled differently than Butina. When one of Chapman’s associates, who went by the name of Cynthia Murphy, made contact with Alan Patricof, a major Democratic donor close to Hillary Clinton, the FBI acted swiftly to arrest the entire cell.

[Butina attorney Robert] Driscoll said there was suspicion that the FBI did not disclose all the information it had on Butina and he stated that he believed “Patrick is not the only one” who was giving information to the FBI.

Why does this matter?

We’re seeing a pattern. When the FBI suspected that Carter Page was possibly compromised by the Russians, instead of following normal procedure and giving then-candidate Trump a defensive briefing and the opportunity to remove Page from the campaign, what did the FBI do? Nothing. We know they did that service for John McCain in 2008 and why they elected not to in 2015-16 is a question that needs to be answered. If Page had been fired from the Trump campaign in 2015 much of what happened since then would not have taken place.

Earlier this week the attorney for Joseph Mifsud intimated that his client, the guy who allegedly kicked off “Crossfire Hurricane” by telling George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, worked for western intelligence agencies. Bolstering this is the fact that Robert Mueller never claims that Mifsud was working for the Russian government and Mueller never charged Mifsud with lying to the FBI in interviews despite the fact that he did (see Jim Jordan Fillets Mueller On Joseph Mifsud Not Being Charged, Exposes Serious Credibility Issues With The Probe).

Recall that the New York Times confirmed that a woman dangled in front of Papadopoulos as a possible romantic liaison was, in fact, working for some US agency. We hope it was the FBI because if it was the CIA a boatload of laws were broken (see FBI Does Preemptive Damage Control By Confirming The Trump Campaign Was The Target Of A Spying Operation).

And so the push by John Durham to interview Joseph Mifsud and rumors that extensive exculpatory information existed on Page and Stephanopoulos that would have put their activities in a different light brings new significance.

Back to Byrne. Why did he come forward?

Byrne’s decision to come forward didn’t come lightly. However, he said it was necessary after watching what had transpired between the FBI, the intelligence community and the probe into President Trump’s campaign over the past several years.

“It was something I knew I had to do,” he told this reporter. “Those running the operation were not honest and in the end I realized I was being used in some sort of soft coup.”

One could speculate that it was more than a soft coup against Trump. If all the reports we’ve received are correct, this resembles more of a decapitation strike aimed at taking out all resistance to the Democrat party. If the Republican President, the NRA, and other conservative groups can be alleged to have all been under the influence of a foreign power, albeit a Third World kleptocracy with an GDP smaller than New York State, then the entire opposition to the Democrats is discredited for years to come. The reason I don’t find this far fetched is that four years ago I would never have believed that the FBI and CIA would have interjected themselves into a presidential election on the side of one of the candidates and I never would have believed the UN Ambassador would be unmasking the personal communications of American citizens at the rate of one per work day.

If that is the case, then a lot of very powerful people need to be sharing a cell with Tiny the White Supremacist Biker and their organizations need to be burned to the ground. If it isn’t a global conspiracy and just a series of events carried out by politically motivated law enforcement and intelligence agents, they need to do hard time and everyone associated with them reduced to penury.

@ ADAM SCHIFF….. ARE YOU THE REAL RUSSIAN AGENT OR JUST A “USEFUL IDIOT”?

 @ ADAM SCHIFF….. ARE YOU THE REAL RUSSIAN AGENT OR JUST A “USEFUL IDIOT”?

Paul Curry   townhall.com   Jul 25, 2019 

https://townhall.com/columnists/paulcurry/2019/07/25/who-are-the-real-russian-agents-n2550572?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=07/25/2019&bcid=9930c656b2212929c884960baf64bc5a&recip=26163198

On Wednesday, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller took to Capitol Hill for his much anticipated and overly hyped testimony, we witnessed the culmination of three years of Russian collusion hysteria come and go with an anti-climactic whimper. What we did not see was any evidence whatsoever of President Trump, or of his campaign, conspiring or colluding with Russia. We did not see the smoking gun Rep. Adam Schiff had consistently promised to unveil. What we did see was, hopefully, the final gasp of zealots pushing a Machiavellian-like, Russian conspiracy narrative, all the while serving unwittingly as Russian operatives.

As the Mueller Report made clear, and countless agencies confirmed, Russia, in 2016, sought to undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process. By carrying on with the false conspiracy narrative, Democrats have done, and continue to do, just that. There exists no evidence in either the Mueller Report or the public sphere that ties President Trump or his campaign to any effort to undermine faith in the electoral process, but there is substantial evidence of other parties conspiring with foreign agents and foreign nationals in order to undermine the electoral process.

For those who choose to forget, Christopher Steele, author of the infamously false Steele Dossier, was, in fact, a foreign agent. A former British intelligence officer, fired by the FBI, who conspired and colluded with numerous Russian sources to compile the “unverified” dossier was hired by the Democratic National Committee at the behest of the Clinton campaign. Through Fusion GPS, Steele sent the dossier via Fusion employee Nellie Ohr to Justice Dept. lawyer Bruce Ohr, Nellie’s husband, in the notorious “Hi honey” emails. And from there on to the FISA Court and the dubious decision to spy on Trump advisor Carter Page and other members of the Trump campaign. Who here is serving the interests of foreign actors by undermining faith in the electoral process? 

Following their inability to make any Russian collusion narrative stick to the Trump campaign, Democrats quickly moved on to one of obstruction of justice. Of course, obstruction of justice is much harder to prove than conspiracy, and thus harder to disprove. No doubt the reason for the left’s prompt change of direction once conspiracy claims disappeared like dust in the wind. President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey along with his apparent displeasure with what he believed to be a frivolous investigation have consistently been cited as evidence of obstruction. 

Yet, as Congressman Greg Steube pointed outduring the hearings, the president can fire the FBI Director whenever he so chooses, and, most importantly, Mueller himself was never fired or interfered with, and allowed to conduct his Democrat staffed investigation on to conclusion. By continuing to drive a false narrative of obstruction of justice, who here is serving the interests of foreign actors in undermining faith in democracy?

‘No one is above the law’ has become an all too familiar chant from members of the left. A seemingly never-ending talking point from Democrats crusading for justice in the face of the injustice that is the Trump administration. But to whom does this apply? Merely the president who complied with a two-year investigation or to others who have smashed cell phones, wiped servers, deleted emails and conspired with foreign agents during a presidential election? Whose interests are served by continuing on with the false and ultimately pointless narrative.

Donald Trump did not win in 2016 because of any Russian conspiracy. He won because his opponent neglected Michigan and Wisconsin. He won because his opponent proudly declaredof working class Americans, “We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” He won by beating his opponent, not cheating his opponent. The tireless calls for impeachment, to undo a fair and democratic election, do not serve the interests of, or faith in, democracy, but they might serve other foreign interests.

The consistent chants of some Russian conspiracy or obstruction of justice do not serve any legitimate American interest. They do not further discourse or enable bipartisanship. But they do serve the interests of foreign actors whose goal it was to undermine faith in our elections. Be it as Russian pawns, foreign agents or, what Stalin might have referred to as “useful idiots,” those continuously screaming collusion and obstruction while clamoring for impeachment are the ones truly serving as Russian agents.

Background materials on the charge of obstruction of justice....

 Background materials on the charge of obstruction of justice....

"California’s Ms. Harris said during a question-and-answer session that Mr. Mueller had reiterated aspects of the report. “There are outlined instances of obstruction of justice, and no matter what this current attorney general and the president of the United States try to say, the American people are smart enough to know what is and what is not truth,” she said.”

Mueller, stated under oath, when questioned that no one had obstructed his investigation. He is a witness making a statement under oath. It is not his function to make the determination…. that was already made by the Atty. Gen. and the Deputy Attorney General as they are  the ones  authorized to do.

*****

 INTELLIGENCE  Friday, April 19, 2019  http://ltgjcmilopsg3.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-mueller-report-is-prosecutors-brief.html
The Mueller report is a prosecutor’s brief presenting the maximum and most forceful position that can possibly be established.

 This is the last article presented below.  it is rather lengthily and should be scanned as an introduction and then  reviewed more thoroughly as the last item to be read.

****

INTELLIGENCE  Saturday, May 4, 2019   http://ltgjcmilopsg3.blogspot.com/2019/05/there-is-provable-case-of-obstruction.html
THERE IS A PROVABLE CASE OF “OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE”…. THE PERPETRATORS ARE ANDREW WEISMANN AND ROBERT MUELLER

The prosecutors offered Corse  a plea deal in lieu of indicting him IF he  provided a  link to connect Roger Stone and Donald Trump to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The choice they gave Corsi was to plead guilty to one count with the prosecutors’ agreement they would seek no prison term, OR  to  reject their  deal and spend possibly $2 million that he did not have to defend himself in a federal criminal case  before a hostile Washington jury that he was sure to lose that would result in a 25-year prison term. Since Corsi was 72 years old at the time,  a prison term of that length would have meant he was likely to die in federal prison.THERE IS A PROVABLE CASE OF “OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE”…. THE PERPETRATORS ARE ANDREW WEISMANN AND ROBERT MUELLER

*****

COLLUSION OR RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION?….HOW MOSCOW MANIPULATED U.S. MEDIA, LAWMAKERS AND INTELLIGENCE SERVICES INTO PROPAGATING A WILD THEORY.
David Satter   Wall Street Journal April 30, 2019 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/collusion-or-russian-disinformation-11556663662?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

Without intending to, the Mueller report has solved the mystery of the Trump-Russia affair. It shows that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia but Russian intelligence used disinformation to create the impression that he did. 
It is hard for Americans to grasp that in the eerie world of Russian intelligence, it would be normal to discredit a U.S. leader by depicting him as a friend and to support his opponent by depicting her as an enemy. But this is the reality. 

I first became acquainted with Russian disinformation while working from 1976-82 as a Moscow-based newspaper correspondent. In 1979, the Soviet authorities threatened to expel me. They accused me of traffic violations and rudeness to guides from the official travel agency, Intourist. I had wide contacts in Moscow, and these innocuous charges made me think the KGB knew little about me. In fact, they had detailed knowledge of my activities, as I learned from the way they followed me and the arrests of my contacts. But information from wiretaps and shadowing is not acknowledged openly. It is used for disinformation, conveyed by intermediaries.

One of my friends in Moscow was a gay Swedish correspondent who had a Soviet lover. Homosexuality was a crime in the Soviet Union, and my friend regularly criticized the authorities. At first officials simply objected to his articles. Then, at a USA and Canada Institute reception, a Soviet academic told the Swede he had met a “fascinating” friend of his and gave the name of his lover. The correspondent left Moscow the next day. 

The Mueller report shows that the techniques of Russian disinformation have not changed. The Trump-Russia affair began May 6, 2016, when George Papadopoulos, a Trump adviser, reportedly told Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner in London, that Moscow had compromising information on Hillary Clinton. Ten days earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told by Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who boasted of high-level Russia contacts, that the “dirt” consisted of “thousands of emails.” Mr. Mifsud had returned from an April 18 meeting in Moscow of the Valdai Discussion Club, which the Mueller report said was “close to Russia’s foreign policy establishment.”

In fact, the Valdai Club, established in 2004, is Russia’s most important center of disinformation. The club gives Western journalists and academics the opportunity to question President Vladimir Putin and other officials in a supposedly informal setting. Participants, anxious not to offend their hosts, engage in self-censorship. Circulating in the crowd are persons who claim to share confidential information and explain what the Russian leadership is thinking—as at the USA and Canada Institute in Soviet times. The Valdai Club would be a key node in any Russian effort to cause chaos in the U.S. election.

Mr. Mifsud introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, a member of the Russian International Affairs Council, who told Mr. Papadopoulos in an April 25, 2016 email that he had shared plans for a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russian government with Igor Ivanov, the council’s president and a former Russian foreign minister. 

In October 2016, Mr. Papadopoulos was fired from the campaign. But Russian intelligence had achieved its objective. The FBI had been informed of Mr. Papadopoulos’s remarks to Mr. Downer, and a counterintelligence investigation aimed at the Trump campaign was under way.

Another attempt to compromise the Trump campaign was the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and a Russian group opposing the 2012 Magnitsky Act. The meeting was arranged by London music promoter Rob Goldstone, who wrote to the young Mr. Trump that the Russian “crown prosecutor” (a nonexistent title) wanted to share incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton. 

It’s remotely possible the Russian delegation—headed by Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer with high-level Moscow connections—believed that they could gain the Trump campaign’s support. It’s likelier that the meeting was part of the effort to inflame U.S. politics by creating the impression that candidate Trump was a Russian pawn. 

Donald Trump Jr. was foolish to agree to the meeting. He did, however, have the sense to decline to discuss the Magnitsky Act. Mr. Kushner described the meeting as “a waste of time.” Yet it was a media sensation, and some of President Trump’s detractors accepted it as proof of collusion.

Then there was the dossier that purportedly contained information on Mr. Trump himself. It was prepared by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, supposedly based on information from high-level Russian intelligence sources. It said Mr. Trump had been a Russian asset for at least five years and had been monitored in Moscow engaging in “perverted sexual acts.” When the dossier was released, Mr. Steele disappeared, claiming to fear for his life. 

In fact, the dossier was transparently phony. It claimed Mr. Putin had a “desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon countries’ interests rather than the ideals-based international order established after World War Two”—echoing hackneyed attempts by Russian spokesmen to divert attention from the regime’s connections to terrorism and organized crime. Its statement that Mr. Putin “hated and feared” Mrs. Clinton reflects the standard Kremlin practice of reducing policy differences to personality. Russia had attributed tensions between the U.S. and Russia to Mr. Putin and Barack Obama’s mutual dislike. The idea that Russian intelligence agents would share genuine intelligence as opposed to disinformation was in the realm of fantasy.

The Trump-Russia affair did lasting damage to the U.S. For the first time, it became acceptable, even common, to accuse political opponents of treason. The media, Congress and the intelligence services have all undermined themselves by repeating wild and unsubstantiated charges provided for them by Russian intelligence. 

During the campaign, there was legitimate concern about the competence of Mr. Trump and those around him on the subject of Russia. Since taking office, however, he has approved the provision of defensive arms to Ukraine and coordinated diplomatic retaliation after the attempted murder in Britain of a former Russian intelligence agent, Sergei Skripal.

In any case, the disinformation attack directed at Mr. Trump had nothing to do with his policies. The ultimate target was American society. Moscow’s tactics were striking in their deviousness and the result was the greatest triumph of disinformation in the history of Soviet and Russian active measures. 

Mr. Satter is author of “Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union.

*****

THE RUSSIANS AND THE DOSSIER

Kimberley A. Strassel  Wall Street Journal  April 25, 2019 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-russians-and-the-dossier-11556232721?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h


Mueller should have investigated whether Moscow used Steele in its interference.



One of the biggest failures of the Mueller probe concerns not what was in the final report, but what was not. Close readers will search in vain for any analysis of the central document in this affair: the infamous “dossier.” It’s a stunning omission, given the possibility that the Russians used that collection of reports to feed disinformation to U.S. intelligence agencies, sparking years of political maelstrom.

The dossier—compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm working for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee—fed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media the principal allegations of the “collusion” narrative. It claimed Paul Manafort was at the center of a “well-developed” Trump-Russia “conspiracy”; that Carter Page served as his intermediary, conducting secret meetings with a Kremlin official and the head of a state energy company; that Michael Cohen held a clandestine meeting in Prague with Vladimir Putin cronies; and that the Russians had compromising material on Donald Trump, making him vulnerable to blackmail. The dossier was clearly important to the FBI probe. Its wild claims made up a significant section of the FBI’s application for a secret surveillance warrant on Mr. Page.

The Mueller report exposes the dossier claims as pure fiction. Yet in describing the actions of the Trump campaign figures the FBI accused, the report assiduously avoids any mention of the dossier or its allegations. Mr. Mueller refers to Mr. Steele and his work largely in passing, as part of the report’s description of how former FBI Director James Comey informed Mr. Trump of the dossier’s existence. The dossier is blandly described several times as “unverified allegations compiled” by Mr. Steele.

Once Mr. Mueller established that the dossier was a pack of lies, he should have investigated how it gained such currency at the highest levels of the FBI. Yet his report makes clear he had no interest in plumbing the antics of the bureau, which he led from 2001-13. Instead, he went out of his way to avoid the dossier and give cover to the FBI.

The special counsel had another, more pressing reason to look at the dossier: It fell within his core mission. Since its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017, we’ve learned enough about Mr. Steele and Fusion GPS to wonder if the Russians used the dossier for their own malign purposes.

In the first telling, Mr. Steele was described by friendly media as simply a “former Western intelligence official” with a history at Britain’s overseas intelligence service. It turns out he worked in Russia. Mr. Steele spent his first years of service under diplomatic cover in Moscow, later in Paris. And in 1999 he was among 117 British spies whose covers were publicly blown by a disgruntled ex-MI6 officer.

The former spy, known to the public and therefore to Russia, also became known for sending reports to the U.S. government. Last year former Obama State Department official Jonathan Winer explained that in 2009 he became friendly with the self-employed Mr. Steele, and starting as early as 2013 ensured that “more than 100 of Steele’s reports” on Russia topics were shared with the State Department. Given that the dossier is largely based on Russian sources, some supposedly connected to the Kremlin, did the Kremlin know about this arrangement and see an opportunity to spoon-feed the U.S. government disinformation?

We’ve also learned more about Mr. Steele’s and Fusion’s connections to Russians. Mr. Steele sent a series of emails to Justice Department employee Bruce Ohr in 2016 inquiring about the status of a visa for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch with Kremlin ties. Fusion GPS was working alongside Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016. Fusion was hired as part of a team to help Ms. Veselnitskaya undermine Bill Browder, the man behind the Magnitsky Act, a law that imposes sanctions on Russians for corruption and human-rights violations.

How did Mr. Mueller spend two years investigating every aspect of Russian interference—cyberhacking, social-media trolling, meetings with Trump officials—and not consider the possibility that the dossier was part of the Russian interference effort?

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Attorney General William Barr may answer some of the questions Mr. Mueller refused to touch. Thanks to the special counsel we know Republicans weren’t playing footsie with Russians. But thanks to BuzzFeed, we know that Democrats were. America deserves to know how far that interaction extended.

****

 INTELLIGENCE  Sunday, April 21, 2019 http://ltgjcmilopsg3.blogspot.com/2019/04/mueller-has-knowingly-engaged-in.html
MUELLER HAS KNOWINGLY ENGAGED IN A CONSPIRACY TO REVEAL CLASSIFIED AND/OR GRAND JURY AND/OR OTHER PRIVILEGE MATERIAL TO THE PUBLIC.

James Comey publicly stated that he arranged to have leaked to the New York Times James Comey's memos  concerning Comey’s meeting with Pres. Trump in the hopes (intention) of getting a special prosecutor appointed.

At that time James Comey knew or should have known that the dossier was false information. A special prosecutor was appointed. According to the standards established by members of Robert Mueller’s staff , this would be elements to establish a conspiracy to file a false complaint and thus harass the object Donald Trump ][of the complaint.

Robert Mueller wrote a report containing classified information which he knew would have to be redacted before it went to Congress. Now the report is going to Congress. Certain Democratic leaders will view both  the redacted report and the unredacted report. It is highly probable that some of the redacted  materials will be leaked to the media.

Robert Mueller when he wrote his report knew that he could anticipate this outcome… That materials unfriendly and unflattering to Donald Trump will be leaked. THIS MEANS THAT MUELLER HAS KNOWINGLY ENGAGED IN A CONSPIRACY TO REVEAL CLASSIFIED AND/OR GRAND JURY AND/OR OTHER PRIVILEGE MATERIAL TO THE PUBLIC.

I hereby charge Robert Mueller with attempting to initiate a conspiracy to reveal classified, and/or other privileged information .

Certainly, Robert Mueller's and his staff's private conversations should be subject to the same public scrutiny as the President's frustrations which should not  in any way  been a  part of this report.

****

 INTELLIGENCE  Friday, April 19, 2019  http://ltgjcmilopsg3.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-mueller-report-is-prosecutors-brief.html
The Mueller report is a prosecutor’s brief presenting the maximum and most forceful position that can possibly be established.

The Mueller report is a prosecutor’s  brief  presenting the maximum and most forceful position that can possibly be established. The specifics  of the contents were heavily influenced by Andrew Weissmann. Normally, such materials would be subject to review by a defense team and  then to a very active cross-examination of witnesses.  It is difficult not to observe  the similarity of this report and the  “Russian dossier”. The FusionGPS/ ‎Christopher Steele   materials were first briefed to the White House, then the existence of  these materials was  leaked  to the media . Then, the accusations in the dossier were presented to the public. Similar to the handling of the “Russian dossier”, the Mueller report appears intended to  serve as an accusation  reservoir from which selective leaks can be then made to the public.

Mueller’s  report discusses what Mueller found in regards to a Russian government effort to interfere with the 2016 elections and his investigations into whether the Trump campaign colluded or conspired with the Russian government in their efforts.

The Mueller report states in a summary of its findings on collusion:

“Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

US intelligence provided contrary opinions from which the Mueller investigators arbitrarily selected those viewpoints that paralleled their pre-existing biases. It is recommended that the appropriate Senate committees subpoena Andrew Weissmann to testify and that they  question him as to his selection of certain contending intelligence submissions and his rejection of other equally prominent intelligence submissions.

  Mr. Weissmann  led the task force investigating Enron more than a decade ago. Nearly all  of his "convictions" were reversed for cause and he was publicly admonished for his prosecutorial misconduct. 

Weissmann specializes in flipping witnesses and he  oversaw or took part in almost every early aspect of the special counsel’s  investigation  including Mr. Manafort’s prosecution. Thus, the negative connotations ,especially involving incidents which are presented in the report as possible obstructions of justice by Pres.  Trump  are heavily weighted by Mr. Weissmann’s  influence. For example, while both FBI agents interviewing Gen. Michael Flynn, concluded and reported that Gen. Flynn was telling the truth, their hands-on, on the scene  evaluation  was overruled by senior members of the Mueller investigation.

Below, we present just one of the documented conclusions that Putin preferred Hillary Clinton as president of the United States.  Putin and his operatives, like nearly everyone else, assumed that Clinton would win the election. Therefore the Russians shifted from a "create chaos and dissension" regime to a "mess up the frontrunner [Hillary Clinton] regime.”

*****

1.  Assertions were first floated by political operators (by Democrats in Congress, by the Democratic National Committee and by the Clinton campaign) that  Russia  (Putin) was behind the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta’s correspondence.These assertions  are  doubtful for several reasons(some of which will be presented here).
Congressional Democrats Call on FBI to Investigate Their Political Adversaries’ Kremlin Ties Glenn Greenwald  8-31-16
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/31/congressional-dems-call-on-fbi-to-investigate-their-political-adversaries-kremlin-ties/


Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has accused Russia of conducting the cyberattack operation; Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin:” the U.S. State Department’s conclusion that the  hack into Podesta’s email servers could only have been ordered by senior Russian government officials."

 Pressure grew on the administration  to publicly name Moscow.
“The Obama administration has been under fierce pressure from lawmakers — led by Senate and House Intelligence Committee ranking members Dianne Feinstein (d-calif.) and Adam Schiff (d-calif.), respectively — to publicly attribute the attacks.”

Soon after, the Obama administration accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, including  hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security issued  the following joint  statement:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” agencies. “ . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

[Obama administration publicly blames Russia for DNC hack   http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/299874-obama-administration-publicly-blames-russia-for-dnc-hack]



2.  These assertions  are  doubtful for several reasons(some of which will be presented here).

A. Russian officials have publicly denied involvement in the hackings.If any actual Russian government fingerprints are found then Putin would be subject to very public embarrassment. The attribution  by “government sources” that  there were indications of Russian involvement based on specific “fingerprints” was made by a private consulting company working for the government. These    fingerprints apply  to a major portion of the hacking’s that have occurred during 2016. Further,  review of Julian  Assange’s closed circuit conference with a group of hackers shows him clearly explaining  (to the complete satisfaction of the participants)his technique and activities in this regard.


Putin: ‘Does Anyone Seriously Imagine Russia Can Somehow Influence the American People's Choice?'By Patrick Goodenough | October 28, 2016 


http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/putin-does-anyone-seriously-imagine-russia-can-somehow-influence-us?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWmpGbE56aGhPVEptTVRFMSIsInQiOiJrWkhlRXBDRkJLVUVldnFyZXB4Yk1jeUNJMnBFcjNiQzVyeHBXa0lZSm5GcytyejZzMDZ4a0htZTd0MStSQStDQ2NjZjJzT2Mwa0FhMnNpb3Q1RldES1ZPcFc4azhaQ1RMZmVWdHpsZXJjVT0ifQ%3D%3D

B.  It appears that  Putin favors Hillary Clinton in the coming election. 

http://ltgjcmilopsg3.blogspot.com/2016/10/appears-that-favors-hillary-clinton-in.html

(1)     Putin is a cold-blooded.  realist  with an agenda to expand Russian  influence to encompass all of the areas of the previous Soviet Union and to become a major player in the Middle East.  It is Putin’s agenda that   guides his  actions.[ And,  from Putin’s point of view Hillary Clinton  is much more likely to help him  complete his agenda than  is Donald Trump.]

(2)      Most important to Putin  is the  very favorable political and  economic outcomes to Russia that would occur from Hillary Clinton’s expected actions relating to fracking.Thus, a major reason that he prefers Hillary Clinton is her position and  likely future actions concerning  Fracking.

   Hillary Clinton would  probably attempt to eliminate fracking (or if she could not eliminate it entirely  she would drastically reduce fracking within the United States). She would accomplish this through limiting the areas for  petroleum exploration; instituting rigorous regulations; requiring extensive environmental studies; moratoriums;  etc.

This elimination or reduction of US petroleum production by restrictions on  fracking would increase the world  price for petroleum.

 This increase would give Putin a vast  increase in  the value of  Russia’s  petroleum reserves  [ thus rescuing the currently faltering Russian economy ]; it would greatly increase the value of  Putin’s  petroleum exports.  This would give Putin additional hard currency  to help finance his expansionist  adventures.  It would restore Russia’s  previous  political and economic lock on  East Europe’s  energy supplies.

(3).   A second major reason that Putin probably favors Hillary Clinton in the coming election is Putin’s belief, [based on many years of   observation of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry]  that a  Hillary  Clinton administration would continue the parameters and trend lines  established by Barack Obama .[ The Obama administration has pulled back in every confrontation with Putin’s Russia.  Putin has seen this US  pattern and has resolved to remain the first mover, not expecting much American pushback except in words.] Examples:


a..Bill Clinton offered North Korea  emergency relief supplies and other concessions to obtain their agreement that they would cease their nuclear activities and dismantle their nuclear program. North Korea agreed and Bill Clinton publicly announced complete success of his negotiations with North Korea assuring the American public that North Korea will abandon the quest for nuclear weapons and completely demolish the nuclear development infrastructure. Here is Bill Clinton announcing the “resolution of the North Korean nuclear threat:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TcbU5jAavw&ab_channel=DavidGruen ]

b. During the presidential debate of 2012 Romney identified Russia  as a potential major adversary  of the United States. Obama   forcefully rebuked Romney during the debate[ (Obama to Romney:”……you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,”        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsFR8DbSRQE&ab_channel=RT

c.   During a meeting with then  Russian president Dmitry Medvedev , Obama did not know that his microphone was alive. He leaned over to whisper a confidential message that he wanted carried to Vladimir Putin …it was: “tell Vladimir “that after my election I will have much more flexibility” [this signaled that Obama was going to reverse the US  missile defense agreements with Poland and other Eastern European countries. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsFR8DbSRQE&ab_channel=RT]


d.   Hillary Clinton’s  presentation of a “reset button” [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sudCmrAsF4&ab_channel=DouglasJohnston  ]  

e.     Acceptance  of Putin’s aggressive intervention  in Ukraine; 

f.      State Department approval of sale of uranium reserves to a crony  of Putin. [Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal by JO BECKER and MIKE McINTIRE New York Times APRIL 23, 2015  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html?_r=0]

g.     Hillary Clinton initiated the  negotiations with  the Iranian hardliners which  concluded in a deal which which permits Russia to sell advanced weaponry to Iran and receive hard currency (furnished by the United States); 

h.    Strategy of  bringing Russia into the Middle East as a major player (as discussed in Obama’s Syria Policy Striptease Tony Badran The Tablet September 21, 2016 ) .

i.     Obama’s White House has cut  the military “out of the loop”in key international  and military decisions [testimony of Secretary of  Defense  Ash Carter and the Joint Chiefs of  Staff…https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-22/obama-kept-military]


C.Mr. Clapper in all of  public statements is very cautious. He will not respond to reporters leading questions but rather keeps referring them back to the written  Joint statement.Mr. Clapper said: “IT’S PROBABLY NOT REAL, REAL CLEAR WHETHER THERE’S INFLUENCE IN TERMS OF AN OUTCOME [OF THE NOVEMBER U.S. ELECTIONS] OR WHAT I WORRY ABOUT MORE—FRANKLY —IS JUST THE  SOWING THE SEEDS OF DOUBT, WHERE DOUBT IS CAST ON THE WHOLE [ELECTION] PROCESS.” 

D.  To put  these specific hacking’s into  perspective, in the year 2o16 ,there have been many hundreds of hackings, intrusions, compromises, hijackings, etc.   The following site presents a very vivid graphic  illustration of the scope and magnitude of the hacking phenomena:  http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/ 

  Here is a sample of other links:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/279740

https://www.identityforce.com/blog/

https://www.checkmarx.com/

www.darkreading.com/cloud/

www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-



E. The specific penetrations  [Clinton’s server; the Democratic National Committee; John Podesta; etc.]  were accomplished against sites that exercised very poor site protective security discipline. The specific materials that were   hacked  were not given any special  encryption and/or limited access controls. The level of skill  that is required for the successful hacking of these sites is widely distributed throughout the world.

For example, theWikiLeaks dump reveals exactly how Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, was actually hacked [ a careless response to a false request that  the site’s password be changed …which was  actually routed to a hacker’s computer in the Netherlands.] CHRIS SOMMERFELDT  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS   Updated: Friday, October 28, 2016

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/wikileaks-dump-shows-clinton-chairman-john-podesta-hacked-article-1.2849660?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Newsletter%202016-10-29&utm_term=DailyNewsletter

F.  Previous  experience demands  skepticism and thorough investigation before acceptance of any allegations of Russian responsibility.

 Intelligence analysts  have complained that their  output is being distorted by the political echelon [50 Spies Say ISIS Intelligence Was Cooked 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/09/exclusive-50-spies-say-isis-intelligence-was-cooked.html]; 

 Ben Rhodes’ Iran Deal ( “wag the dog”) echo chamber operation) which was  explicitly intended to mislead the US public in order to sell this administration’s desired  Iran agreement [ The aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign-policy guru  by David Samuels  New York Times May 5, 2016]; 

and   the false certainty of the US intelligence community that  Saddam Hussein  actually possessed nuclear weapons 

all require  that we demand  a much higher level of proof than the political echelons just asserting “we believe that” [ Eg. “U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper suggested Russia was behind a recent computer hacking operation”]and then surmising[“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,”]that if what  they believe is correct  that they then surmise  that it would require approval at the highest levels in Russia (Putin).

 Below, is an excerpt from the New York Times which reproduces in Ben Rhodes’ own words Rhodes’s  campaign to sell the Iran  
"We created an echo chamber,’ he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

From:THE ASPIRING NOVELIST WHO BECAME OBAMA’S FOREIGN-POLICY GURU  By DAVID SAMUELS MAY 5, 2016

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the administration’s foreign-policy aims and priorities converged on Iran. “We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,” he said. “We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”
In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015: “Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.” While the president’s statement was technically accurate — there had in fact been two years of formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the J.C.P.O.A. — it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making. By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.
The nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to Congress, which took place in a concentrated three-month period between July and September of last year, was located inside the White House, and is referred to by its former denizens as “the war room.”
Chad Kreikemeier, a Nebraskan who had worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, helped run the team, which included three to six people from each of several agencies, he says, which were the State Department, Treasury, the American delegation to the United Nations (i.e., Samantha Power), “at times D.O.D.” (the Department of Defense) and also the Department of Energy and the National Security Council. Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.
The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.
 “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.” For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” Somanader offered. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”
 In July 2012, Jake Sullivan, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Muscat, Oman, for the first meeting with the Iranians, taking a message from the White House. “It was, ‘We’re prepared to open a direct channel to resolve the nuclear agreement if you are prepared to do the same thing and authorize it at the highest levels and engage in a serious discussion on these issues,’ ”
The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley,  who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”
Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art of political communication; his father, Simon Malley, who was born in Cairo, edited the politics magazine Afrique Asie and proudly provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat.

 As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

 Rhodes: “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.’

G. Hillary Clinton has willingly engaged in previous public disinformation campaigns.

[Clinton Campaign, White House Coordinated Pro-Iran Deal Talking Point…Leaked emails show effort to mislead public about Iran deal by: Adam Kredo  October 10, 2016 ]

Senior Clinton campaign officials were in direct contact with the White House to coordinate pro-Iran talking points in an effort to boost last summer’s comprehensive nuclear agreement, according to leaked emails that show the Obama administration and top figures in Clinton’s campaign played a role in promulgating information about the deal that later turned out to be factually inaccurate.

The emails, released late on Friday in a massive document dump by the hacker website WikiLeaks, show coordination between Hillary Clinton’s team and the White House, which spearheaded a massive effort to create what senior officials described as a pro-Iran “echo chamber” to mislead Congress and Americans about the nature of the agreement.

An April 2, 2015, communication sent from top White House press liaison Eric Shultz to Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri includes several pages of pro-Iran talking points that were later discovered to contain misleading information.

“Love it!!” Palmieri responded to Schultz’s email. She subsequently forwarded the information to leading Clinton aides, including Cheryl Mills, Brian Fallon, and Nick Merrill, among others.

The disclosure of these emails threatens to entangle the Clinton campaign in a growing scandal surrounding secret White House efforts to mislead Congress and the public about the nuclear deal. Congress has been investigating these efforts for months and has uncovered evidence the Obama administration inked several secret side deals with Iran, including the rollback of key sanctions on Tehran and a $1.7 billion cash payment.

The White House’s pro-Iran press machine, which was helmed by Rhodes, received support from liberal billionaire George Soros and a network of non-profit organizations that funneled money to those who helped champion the deal in the public sphere. Holes and moles in U.S. intelligence


 H. One of the biggest lies is that the WikiLeaks disclosures prove that  Putin favors Trump for U.S. president   By Cliff Kincaid

I'm not naïve about Russia. I co-authored Back from the Dead: The Return of the Evil Empire, about a resurgent Russia. There are Russian links to global Islamic terrorism. They also target the U.S. for propaganda and disinformation operations

But The Washington Post has been cheerleading for Hillary Clinton for president, on the spurious grounds that she is knowledgeable about the Russian threat and Trump is not. Have we so soon forgotten the failed Russian reset and the Russian uranium deal?

There's no evidence that the Russians favor Trump over Clinton.  Clinton was duped by the Russians into orchestrating a "reset" that benefitted Russia and its ally, Iran. She played into their hands before, and they probably figured that she could be manipulated into playing into their hands again. This is especially true now that Russia and Iran have made military advances in the Middle East. Hillary Clinton continues to rely for advice on Russia from people like Brookings Institution head Strobe Talbott, a supporter of world government who had questionable dealings with the Russian intelligence service exposed in a book, Comrade J, by a Russian spymaster. In addition,  Clinton's State Department approved the Russian uranium deal, while millions flowed to the Clinton Foundation

Trump has made questionable statements about Russia, and his former campaign chairman had suspicious links to a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician. But Trump is now surrounded by realists on Russia like his vice presidential candidate, Mike Pence, and former CIA director, James Woolsey. Trump has denounced NSA defector Edward Snowden, who is living in Russia, as a traitor who deserves the death penalty. That's tougher than anything Mrs. Clinton has said about Snowden.


The evidence indicates that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks serve Russian interests. But what difference does it make if the Russians obtained the emails and turned them over to Assange for release to an American audience? Our media routinely steal and obtain documents through confidential "sources" and conduct undercover operations to secretly record their interview subjects. The term "illegal" sounds ominous, but the media have long defended getting stolen documents. Their "origin," in fact, is not the Russians but the Clinton officials who failed to protect their own communications. And, as for the "general lack of corroboration," the Clinton campaign has blamed the Russians for their release, without taking issue with the content. They suggest some portions of the documents may have been altered, but offer no hard evidence. It looks as if they are trying to divert attention from the fact that the emails are real and legitimate.

More importantly, Hillary Clinton and her associates invited this hacking by failing to protect their own emails.

Chenoweth goes on to claim that since U.S. intelligence agencies blame the Russians for the acquisition of the information, media dissemination of the emails means that this places "all of our private means of communication at risk of exposure from illegal invasion" by a foreign power and/or its intelligence agencies. So the same U.S. intelligence agencies insisting that the Russians are behind the hacking have been unable to defend the American people. That's the obvious conclusion. Again, whose fault is that? Hillary Clinton and her associates were the security risks who made all of this possible. If the American people in general are at risk, perhaps the CIA and NSA ought to do a better job of protecting us.

 The Russians are better at what they do than the American CIA and NSA. Rather than blame the Russians for embarrassing Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, why not call for an investigation of the incompetence or corruption within the U.S. intelligence community? This should be the logical outcome of witnessing an alleged "interference" in a U.S. election. Instead, Trump is blamed for citing the corruption documented in the emails, and some in the media are blamed for treating the disclosures as news. This is not only silly, but dangerous, for those who seriously want to come to grips with the holes and moles in our intelligence community.

If Putin is behind the WikiLeaks disclosures, he has provided a wake-up call regarding our vulnerability to foreign threats. But the Post is so determined to elect Hillary Clinton that it ignores her role in the debacle that now envelopes her.

Trump didn't set up her server and he didn't operate John Podesta's computer. Hillary Clinton was a security risk, and her illegal computer operations put the entire nation and its secrets at risk. We still don't know the full extent of the damage.

With a track record like that, it could be argued that Putin would prefer Hillary as president.