Month: October 2017

Almost anything can happen, but it looks like Manafort is the one.

My money is on him.

Unless he decides to get chatty this weekend.

I am definitely not an expert on the politics of Utah, but I suspect that if Sen. Orrin Hatch retires, as is now being predicted, and Mitt Romney runs to replace him, we’ll have a Senator Mitt Romney to contend with. I’m sure that Steve Bannon will have something to say about it, but I doubt Romney can be defeated in either the state Republican convention (that’s how the Utah GOP picks its candidates) or in a general election.

For my part, Mitt Romney is the least honest politician I have ever encountered, as was ably documented by Steve Benen both here at Political Animal and at MSNBC during the 2012 election.

On the other hand, he delivered one of the most impassioned anti-Trump speeches of 2016 before he reversed course after the election and sat down with Trump over a course of frogs legs to apply for a cabinet position in the president-elect’s administration.

I wouldn’t expect Romney to be a positive addition to Congress, but he wouldn’t be a rubber-stamp for Trump, either. He’d probably be somewhere between the principled and outraged man who railed against Trump in a March 2016 speech and the complete suck-up who dined with Trump late last November.

I think that would place him as slightly above average for a Republican senator, and that’s about how I’d currently rate Orrin Hatch.

Back on June 14th, I made a brief post that said only, “Suffice to say, if Jon Ossoff loses the election in Georgia, we’ll have plenty of reason to doubt the result.” That was my coercive way of trying to force you to follow the link to a Politico Magazine article called: “Will the Georgia Special Election Get Hacked?”

The short summary of that article is that Georgia’s election system was sitting insecure on the internet for months and was easily accessible by hackers. The problem was discovered ahead of time and the state was taken to court in an effort to prevent them from using the unprotected system for the special election between Karen Handel and Jon Ossoff.  But the election was held anyway and now we’ll never know if the results were legitimate.

One reason I spent the small amount of time it took to write that brief post before the election is that I wanted to be able to point to it later on in case someone accused me of advancing some conspiracy theory I couldn’t prove when I questioned the validity of an Ossoff loss.

Because the whole point is that no one can prove it. And that’s especially true now that the evidence has been destroyed. Although, to be fair, hackers wouldn’t have much difficulty erasing their own tracks without this kind of ham-handed assistance:

A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case that was later obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe…

…Wiping the server “forestalls any forensic investigation at all,” said Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer scientist following the case. “People who have nothing to hide don’t behave this way.”

…The server data could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by hackers. The plaintiffs contend results of both last November’s election and a special June 20 congressional runoff— won by Kemp’s predecessor, Karen Handel — cannot be trusted…

…Kemp and his GOP allies insist Georgia’s elections system is secure. But Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff, believes server data was erased precisely because the system isn’t secure.

“I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious,” she said.

Actually, data was removed from at least two backup servers as well. The FBI might have some data from back in March, but that wouldn’t be of much help to an investigation about a possible hack in June.

The FBI is known to have made an exact data image of the server in March when it investigated the security hole. The Oct. 18 email disclosing the server wipe said the state attorney general’s office was “reaching out to the FBI to determine whether they still have the image” and also disclosed that two backup servers were wiped clean Aug. 9, just as the lawsuit moved to federal court.

I want to be extra clear and reiterate that the concern was that a well-designed hack would not be detectable even if all this information had been preserved and turned over for forensic analysis. The fact that all the evidence was deliberately destroyed right before it was going to be requested by a federal court is more of an acknowledgment of guilt than a necessary step in this kind of conspiracy.

And here is the excuse:

After declining comment for more than 24 hours, Kennesaw State’s media office issued a statement late Thursday attributing the server wiping to “standard operating procedure.” It did not respond to the AP’s question on who ordered the action.

The defendant in the case is Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who is candidate for governor in 2018. He says he didn’t order the wiping of the servers and “had neither involvement nor advanced warning of the decision.”

I have little reason to believe him. I look forward to hearing what the judge thinks.

People spent millions of dollars and tons of energy on the special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, and we can have no confidence in the results. It wasn’t just predictable. I did predict it.

What we’ve known for over a year is finally making its way into the pages of the WaPo.  Fusion GPS was paid by the DNC and the Clinton Campaign.  The WaPo acknowledged:

    https:/www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-l
ed-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html

    Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

    After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But, for those who read it, the Steele Dossier is really trash intelligence, little more than outtakes from some old NSA surveillance mixed with Moscow hotel employee gossip from years ago.  None of it is admissable in a court of law.   How much of it is simply fabrication, and how much hear-say ,and how much is actually wiretaps of efforts to set up Trump & Associates is really unknowable at this point.  But, we do know that CIA Director Brennan, Susan Rice and some friends in the NSC and State Dept seized the opportunity after the election to use classified intercepts as a means to gather and illegally release opposition research on the Trump campaign.

The Dossier is part of that politicization of intelligence.   This and the leaks that followed the election  are political payback by the spooks, plain and simple, but that may end up with as high a cost to the Democrats as it will to Trump.

Fusion GPS and Steele were minor characters who had a relatively brief role and actually came in near the end of this saga.  They served as cut-outs to introduce classified intelligence debris into the election.  What became the Steele “Pee Pee Dossier” was handed to Harry Reid in July who scattered it around Washington during the months leading up to the election.   In the end, that failed to have the desired effect of discrediting Trump and getting Hillary elected.

By feeding into the spreading sick feeling that Washington — both parties, the FBI, the intelligence services, all of it — is utterly corrupt, the Dossier may have actually helped Trump get elected.

Indeed, all the above had a hand in creating and spreading the PeePee Papers.  From the same WaPo article:

    Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

    The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

The back-story behind the dossier* is just as sordid.  It’s pages are largely based on wiretaps of Carter Page, an agent provocateur who has been wearing an FBI wire since 2014, who was inserted into the Trump campaign to lure Paul Manafort into various schemes to compromise him in absurd plots.  These succeeded in painting him as a Russian stooge.  Manafort is the real target of Agency ire after he mucked up CIA and State Dept. regime change operations in Ukraine, a “Color Revolution” project that did not succeed as intended,  resulting in a bloody civil war and stalemate in that now divided country.   The operation was not a triumph on any U.S. Intelligence Officer’s resume.

Beyond Manafort, the dossier may have had only limited further damage to its intended targets.  None of the material gathered through wiretaps of Page is remotely admissible or even credible.  The Russian SVR intelligence service knew exactly what Page was doing after he managed to slip bugs into materials he fed several SVR operatives working at the UN.   Page was the easily identifiable “Male-1” witness in the 2015 trial of one of the SVR agents, an incident that served as a pretext to shut down and expel most of the Russian intelligence presence at the UN.   Russian intelligence knew who Page was, what he was doing, and the SVR subsequently fed him the materials during his visits to Russia and in Trump Tower nothing more than what they wanted the CIA to hear.

But, to the SVR, the “Russia, Russia, Russia” saga has been tremendous success at little cost to itself.  The episode has disrupted American politics and paralyzed the governing process in America for more than a year.   It is a classic PsyOp**, a disinformation program and political spoiling  operation,  resulting in destabilization that has worked only because of the predictable political opportunism of the DNC Democrats and its allies in the American intelligence community and a scandal-obsessed corporate media.

Meanwhile, Former FBI Director Mueller, no stranger to stage managing the damage of politically charged intelligence scandals (he was Deputy U.S. Attorney during the Iran-Contra prosecutions), has used this as an opportunity for a fishing expedition that rivals anything written by Herman Melville.   As a CNN print article, which can contain occasional semi-precious gems, observed in August about where a year of investigation has taken us and is going:  http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/03/politics/mueller-investigation-russia-trump-one-year-financial-ties/in
dex.html

    The possible financial ties between Trump and Russia were part of the concerns for US intelligence and law enforcement officials from the beginning, according to one current law enforcement official and one former US intelligence official.

    Over the decades, the Trump real estate business and its financial dealings have come under scrutiny by the FBI and the Justice Department multiple times.

    In some cases, the FBI was pursuing others who did business with the Trump organization, including alleged mobsters who controlled key contractors used by many real estate developers in New York during the 1980s. The flow of Russian money in real estate — and concerns that some buyers were making the purchases to illegally launder money — had also drawn some attention by US authorities to the Trump business.

This operation may well end up destroying public confidence in both American political parties as well as the Trump Administration, exposing the utter corruption of the mobbed-up New York mercantile class as it has already taken down the credibility of U.S. intelligence, the FBI, and the Justice system in the process.   Altogether, an utter triumph for the SVR.

________________

*This earlier article goes into the details about Carter Page’s history of wearing a wire for the FBI and court testimony against the SVR.  It will become clear why the Russians were fully aware that he’s an agent provocateur and that the SVR was feeding him disinformation that ended up in the Steele Memo.

Carter Page Backstory – JPR 6.22.17

https:jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/heres-the-backstory-behind-russiagate-the-msm-wont-tell-yo
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**Also, please see this update that details how and why Russia!, Russia!, Russia! effectively operates as an SVR Psyop, probably the most effective in history – JPR 7.16.17: https:/jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/russiagate-psyop-progress-report-far-exceeds-expectations

 

https://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp#

That is all.

‘Tis the season for something a bit more Halloween themed.

If time permits, I’ll see if I can find a few more photos. I love bats. I don’t often see them hanging around buildings in my city. Obviously, I took quick advantage of the opportunity.
Please note that this is a reboot of a series that went to seed a few years ago. I know that there are some photo hobbyists like me who post here already. Hoping to incite a bit more “community behavior” in our community blog. AndiF and BobX used to curate the old foto flog. Others contributed quite regularly, and I suspect I’d miss way too many people if I tried to name them all.

I don’t use anything especially fancy. Right now my Samsung Galaxy 6 keeps humming along, and it continues to serve me well for most general photography purposes. Unless that phone goes bad, I plan on keeping it for at least the next couple years. Some of our regulars have actual professional equipment, and before Photobucket turned into such a drag, we were graced by some absolutely stunning landscape shots, close-ups of flowers and insects, and some abstract photography.

I’ll have a new one up in a few weeks. I am planning to do this a bit earlier in November, so expect to see me back at it once more. Remember, a foto flog is not just for Fridays. Or perhaps I should say it’s Friday somewhere.

What Mohammad Bin Zayed said to Trump at White House | Gulf News |

Shaikh Mohammad briefed the US President on the Libyan issue and the move taken by concerned parties during their latest meeting in Abu Dhabi.

The talk also touched on the efforts by the international community to combat violence, extremism and terrorist groups, among other issues of common interest.

Shaikh Mohammad stressed that the UAE and the US have strategic partnership and are allies for a long time as their relations are based on a long history of deeply-rooted ties in political, economic, military and security domains and are based on mutual respect and common interests and values.

“The UAE is always keen to develop its strategic relations with the US and taking them forward to greater heights, especially in view of their identical views over regional and international issues, foremost of which is the GCC security, Middle Eastern crises, fight against terrorism and threats posed to the security and stability on the global scale,” Shaikh Mohammad said.

Shaikh Mohammad, who is in Washington for a two-day visit to the US, is accompanied by a high-level delegation that includes Shaikh Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, National Security Adviser, Shaikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and Ali Hammad Al Shamsi, Deputy Secretary General of the Supreme National Security Council.

The delegation also includes Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority, Yousef Al Otaiba, UAE Ambassador to the US, Mohammad Mubarak Al Mazroui, Undersecretary of the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince’s Court, and Lieutenant General Eisa Saif Ablan Al Mazroui, Deputy Chief of Staff of the UAE Armed Forces.

Mohamed bin Zayed arrives at The White House, greeted by @POTUS, Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/NT00gjPFe8

— محمد بن زايد (@MohamedBinZayed) 15 mei 2017

 

Rex Tillerson reaffirms US commitment to Syrian peace, rules out Assad in future government

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has reaffirmed a commitment to reviving the Geneva peace process. He added that Washington sees no future for President Bashar Assad in Syria’s government.

Tillerson told reporters on Thursday that the reign of the Assad family was “coming to an end” after what he called a “fruitful” discussion with UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, who later addressed the UN Security Council by videoconference.

“The US wants a whole and unified Syria with no role for Bashar Assad in the government,” Tillerson said. “The only issue is how that should be brought about.”

But Assad’s exit was not a “prerequisite” for the talks to start, Tillerson said.

No triumph for Tehran

Tillerson also said the Syrian government’s advances did not amount to a “triumph” for Iran, a key backer of Assad.

“I see Iran as a hanger-on,” Tillerson said. “Iran has not been successful; the Russian government has been more successful. We have had success. I don’t think that Iran should be given credit for the defeat of IS in Syria.”

○ Are Hashd Al Shaabi the “Iranian militias” Tillerson asked to leave Iraq?
○ Iraq rebuffs Tillerson call to disband Iran-backed militias
○ Switzerland to be diplomatic channel for Saudi Arabia and Iran | DW |
○ Tillerson-Ghani meeting speaks volumes of American failures in Afghanistan: Asif | Dawn |

More below the fold …

EU under mounting pressure to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia | The Guardian |

The European Union is under mounting pressure from MEPs to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia in response to the Gulf state’s bombing campaign in Yemen.

The leaders of four political groups in the European parliament have urged the EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, to propose an EU arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, because of the devastating war in Yemen that has left nearly 20 million people in need of humanitarian aid.

In a letter to Mogherini, seen by the Guardian, the MEP leaders accuse the EU of flouting its own rules, by selling weapons to Saudi Arabia in defiance of a 2008 common code on military exports. Mogherini has the right to propose an arms embargo, but would need to win the backing of EU member states, including the UK, one of the biggest arms exporters to the Gulf kingdom.

The latest call for a ban would run into immediate opposition from the British defence secretary, Michael Fallon, who urged MPs on Wednesday not to criticise Saudi Arabia in the interests of a fighter jet deal.

…
The UN has described Yemen as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis: in September it agreed to send war crimes investigators to the devastated country to examine alleged human-rights violations committed by both sides during the two-and-a-half year civil war.

After Saudi Arabia launched a bombing campaign against the Houthi rebels in March 2015, at least 10,000 people were killed in the first 22 months of the conflict, the UN humanitarian office said, almost double other estimates. At least 2,100 people have died from cholera, while thousands more are being infected with the disease every week following the collapse of water supplies and sanitation.

○ Yemen’s Cholera Epidemic Hits 600,000, Confounding Expectations | Reuters |

I don’t know what relationships Juliette Kayyem retains in the intelligence community, but I imagine she still has some extensive connections. She has served as Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as Undersecretary for Homeland Security in her home state of Massachusetts. She was an adviser to Janet Reno when Reno was serving as President Clinton’s Attorney General. She also acted as Rep. Richard Gephardt’s appointee to the National Commission on Terrorism in 1999 and 2000. It’s unlikely that she doesn’t have some sources with at least some kind of insight into what’s going on inside Robert Mueller’s shop at the Justice Department.

Or, maybe, she’s just guessing like the rest of us. But it’s her opinion that the reason we’re seeing the Republicans ramp up their attacks on the FBI and the Steele Dossier is because they know something is coming down soon and it’s not going to be good.

National security expert Juliette Kayyem is predicting news from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation will be announced within the next month.

“I think it is safe to say that before Thanksgiving … something’s going to drop with Mueller,” she said on Boston Public Radio today. “The pace is too much right now. Every 12 hours we’re now dealing with a piece of this story at a pace we haven’t seen.”

Kayyem was prompted to make her prediction by the buzz surrounding a story about how Hillary Clinton’s campaign funded what would eventually become the famous “Trump-Russia Dossier” that surfaced in January…

…Kayyem speculated that the pace of stories critical of Hillary Clinton represents “a recognition by the White House team” that Mueller is getting close to something substantive as a result of his investigation.

Kayyem pointed out that Mueller has interviewed former Press Secretary Sean Spicer and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

“This is so close to the Oval Office now, if not in the Oval Office, that all of this [dossier news] to me is just background noise to what Mueller is going to deliver,” she said. “This is more than an obstruction charge. There is something big underlying the obstruction.”

It’s true that we’re seeing a pivot now. For a long time, Trump was seemingly acting out of a compulsion to comment on and dismiss the Russia investigation. But then he got new lawyers and went quiet. His attorney Ty Cobb seemed to be pursuing a strategy of conspicuous cooperation, where the story was that they had nothing to hide.

This seemed to work in tamping down the attention the media paid to the story and perhaps it earned some good will from Mueller’s shop, too, for whatever that might be worth. But something has changed this week, and it could be nothing more than the timing of the disclosure that the Clinton campaign indirectly funded the investigation that led to the Steele Dossier. But it could also signal that the Trump administration knows that something is coming down on them soon and that they need to change over from cooperating and legitimizing the investigation to undermining the independence of its conclusions.

I feel pretty confident that Mueller is preparing on his end, as well, which is why I think we learned that they’re looking into John Podesta’s brother and his lobbying firm’s compliance issues. It wouldn’t do to indict Manafort for offenses that Tony Podesta also committed. If Mueller wants to avoid the appearance that he’s acting in a partisan manner, he’ll want to take a piece out of the Democrats’ hide, too. When I saw that Tony Podesta was under scrutiny, I took that as a sign that something is coming soon and that it will hit the Trump folks like a ton of bricks.

But I also expect the first salvos to be at Manafort and Flynn, rather than at Trump. Unless they’re helping Mueller build a massive case against the president, I can’t see how they can escape criminal charges or why they wouldn’t be first in line. In a way, the longer they go without being indicted, the worse news it is for the administration.

In any case, I think we’ll see something before Thanksgiving. Whether she has inside information or not, I suspect that Juliette Kayyem is right about that.

Steve Bannon lost his job in the White House on August 18th, but he lost a lot of his influence long before that. In April, President Trump’s National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster removed Bannon from the National Security Council. At the time, Jim Lobe noted on his blog that this was good news for the neoconservatives.

The apparent and surprisingly abrupt demise in Steve Bannon’s influence offers a major potential opening for neoconservatives, many of whom opposed Trump’s election precisely because of his association with Bannon and the “America Firsters,” to return to power after so many years of being relegated to the sidelines. Bannon’s decline suggests that he no longer wields the kind of veto power that prevented the nomination of Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state.

I can only imagine how Bannon feels about seeing neoconservative stalwart Lindsey Graham positioning himself to have the ear of the president:

Three times in a single day last week, Senator Lindsey Graham’s cellphone rang. The first time, President Trump called about the health care fight in Congress. The second time, the president thanked the senator for defending his honor on television. Then Mr. Trump rang seeking more intelligence on health care.

Mr. Graham — Republican of South Carolina and a one-time target of the president’s barbs on Twitter — has transformed himself into the Senate’s Trump whisperer, shrugging off the White House chaos, personal insults and deep ideological differences in exchange for Mr. Trump’s ear.

It’s well known that Sen. Graham’s best friend in the Senate is John McCain, and that they share a fire-breathing militaristic neoconservative view of U.S. foreign policy. They have nothing in common with the Bannonites, and this is one reason among many that McCain has been increasingly critical of Trump. I have no doubt that Bannon would like nothing better than to banish Graham from the Senate and see him replaced with an America Firster.

Graham recently injected himself into the health care debate, which is an area where he has previously shown little interest and less expertise. And it’s true that these recent calls pertained to health care and not foreign policy. But Graham is establishing trust and a working relationship which he will attempt to use in foreign policy going forward.

It’s a sign of how badly things have deteriorated that this might not be such a bad thing. For all the flaws with neoconservatism, its insistence on global engagement puts it above the kind of Know-Nothing paleoconservatism of folks like Pat Buchanan and Steve Bannon. For example, the neoconservatives may not see the State Department as a natural ally, but they don’t want to abandon diplomacy or support for international organizations and alliances. I imagine that Graham will give some very bad and dangerous foreign policy advice to President Trump, but he also might talk some sense into him.

Either way, this appears to be one of the neoconservatives’ only tethers to power right now. A man who once called the president “the world’s biggest jackass” now has his ear.

And he certainly isn’t following his colleague Jeff Flake’s advice to take a stand against Trump.

“I’m going to try to stay in a position where I can have input to the president,” Mr. Graham, 62, said in a lengthy interview. “I can help him where I can, and he will call me up and pick my brain. Now, if you’re a United States senator, that’s a good place to find yourself.”

“He’s very popular in my state,” Mr. Graham continued. “When I help him, it helps me back home. And I think it probably helps him to be able to do business with an old rival who’s seen as a deal maker.”

I see what Graham is doing. I think he’s being admirably transparent about it. He’s protecting his right flank in South Carolina and getting the neoconservative viewpoint heard. Bannon must be furious.

America is waiting: