- France
Attack overshadows last campaign day in first round
- France Terrorism
Champs-Elysées shooter was arrested and released in February
- France Terrorism
Trial of 20 suspected members of French terror cell opens
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First round too close to call in French presidential election
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Epilepsy drug behind thousands of 'severe birth defects' in France
- Israel
Israeli conscientious objector Tamar Zeevi finally freed
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Amazones d'Afrique, West Africa's female powerhouse
- Nigeria Boko Haram US
US government overlooking human rights concerns with Nigeria…
- Internet Cameroon Web
Cameroon internet shutdown inspires punitive proposal targeting African governments
- Colombia
Colombia: Cauca locals fear spread of violence in the region - part 1
- Strike Israel Palestine
Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners launch hunger strike in Israel
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Senegal: The benefits of baobab fruit
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High turnout likely in Turkey's constitutional referendum
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Chibok anniversary shows Boko Haram still strong
- Gambia Adama Barrow
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Turkey referendum: No vote is Yes to peace, says pro-Kurd party
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· · · · · · ·
Karim Cheurfi - Abu Yousef al-Belgiki- identified as shooter in Paris ...
Washington Times-13 hours ago
Forensic experts investigate the crime scene after a fatal shooting in which a police officer was killed along with an attacker on the Champs ...
Champs-Elysées gunman had 'long-standing grudge' against ...
Local Source-The Local France-2 hours ago
Local Source-The Local France-2 hours ago
Paris Shooting Suspect Karim Cheurfi Was ISIS Terrorist: Previously ...
The Inquisitr-13 hours ago
He has been identified as ISIS fighter Karim Cheurfi, also known as “Abu Yusuf al-Beljiki,” which translates to “Abu Yousuf the Belgian,” ...
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· · · ·
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Ms. Le Pen focused her demands on Friday on the roughly 10,000 people that law enforcement officers have flagged as possible Islamist radicals, saying that those on the so-called S-files who are foreigners should be deported; that those who are dual citizens should be stripped of their French nationality; and that those who are French should be prosecuted.
Legal experts have noted, however, that the threshold for being designated for the S-files is very low compared with the evidence needed to secure a criminal conviction.
The conservative candidate François Fillon said from his campaign headquarters in Paris that France needed to prepare for a long struggle.
“We are in a war that will be long,” he said. “The opponent is powerful; its networks are numerous; its accomplices live among us and beside us.”
Mr. Fillon said that if elected, he would “take the diplomatic initiative” to reach consensus between Washington and Moscow on destroying the Islamic State, which he promised to do “with an iron hand.” He added that “France’s Muslims overwhelmingly want to live their faith in peace,” and appealed for their help in combating fundamentalism.
Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve responded to Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Fillon with a point-by-point rebuttal. “She has pretended to ignore that it was this government that restored border controls,” he said of Ms. Le Pen, noting that more than 2,300 officers had been mobilized every day along France’s frontiers since the attacks in and around Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. He also noted that 117 people had been expelled from France over terrorist activities, and that Ms. Le Pen’s party had voted against laws that strengthened the government’s intelligence-gathering powers.
“For all of our citizens, for our entire country, this attack is a tragedy,” he said. “Ms. Le Pen seeks to make it an opportunity.”
He said it was hard to believe Mr. Fillon’s promise of 10,000 new police jobs, saying that Mr. Fillon, when he was prime minister from 2007 to 2012, had overseen spending reductions that resulted in the loss of 54,000 military jobs and 13,000 internal security jobs. During that period, France, like many countries, was tightening its belt in response to the financial crisis.
The presidential election will be held in two stages.
Round 1
Voters will choose from 11 candidates on April 23.Round 2
If, as is widely expected, no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates will compete in a runoff on May 7.Read more
Why does this vote matter? We offer a guide to the French vote.
The centrist independent candidate Emmanuel Macron urged France not to succumb to the fear that extremists seek to spread.
“They want France to be afraid; they want to disrupt the democratic process; they want the French to yield to unreasonableness and division,” he said. “Our challenge is to protect the French, not to give up who we are, to stay unified and build a future.”
The gunman who killed the officer on Thursday evening on the Champs-Élysées had been detained in February for threatening the police, but he was released because there was not enough evidence to charge him, according to French news agencies and a law enforcement official.
The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility within hours of the attack, which also wounded two police officers and a bystander and briefly shut down the city’s most famous boulevard. The gunman was shot dead by the police as he tried to flee.
Several news outlets identified the gunman as Karim Cheurfi, who was born in 1967 and lived in Chelles, an eastern suburb of Paris. In an interview on Friday, a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing confirmed that Mr. Cheurfi was the gunman, and that he had been convicted around 2003 of attempted murder, after he shot two police officers.
Mr. Cheurfi was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but the sentence was reduced to 15 years and he served less than that, the official said.
On Friday, the office of the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, said that the authorities searching the gunman’s car had found a pump-action shotgun, two large kitchen knives, a pair of pruning shears and a Quran.
Three people linked to the suspect have been taken into custody for questioning.
The prosecutor’s office also said that the assailant’s car had contained a piece of paper with the addresses of the French domestic intelligence agency and of a police station in Lagny-sur-Marne, a town about 13 miles east of Paris.
Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told Europe 1 Radio on Friday that the police officers who killed the gunman had averted a “blood bath, a carnage on the Champs-Élysées.”
“This was an individual who was known by the judiciary, who was known to police services, who was a dangerous individual,” he said.
Asked about news reports that the assailant had been briefly arrested in February after he expressed his intention to kill police officers, but that he had been released for lack of evidence, Mr. Brandet declined to comment.
On Thursday, Belgian authorities issued a warrant for what they believed was a dangerous man who intended to travel to France. Some news reports suggested Thursday evening that the man might be connected to the shooting on the Champs-Élysées, but Mr. Brandet said the man turned himself in at a police station in Antwerp, Belgium, on Friday morning and did not appear to be related to the Paris case.
Mr. Molins was expected to hold a news conference later on Friday.
Continue reading the main story
Read the whole story
· · · ·
By Warren Fiske
Special to the Richmond Free Press
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia is in a high-profile position this spring as the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The committee began hearings in January and, after a short break, plans to resume them after the Senate’s spring recess ends Saturday.
Although most of the hearings have been behind closed doors, the panel has publicly interviewed six national security experts and academics and is expected to interview several key current and former aides to President Trump.
The Richmond Free Press posed questions to Sen. Warner about the importance of the probe, its progress and whether the national attention he is drawing might encourage him to make a White House bid of his own in 2020.
Here are Sen. Warner’s answers:
Q: You’ve called the Russian investigation “the most important thing I’ve ever done.” Why do you feel that way?
A: This investigation is ultimately about preserving the integrity of American democracy. We now hold indisputable evidence that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election. Both political parties were hacked by Russian agents and information was released with the intent to influence American voters. The Senate Intelligence Committee is working, in a bipartisan way, to provide the American people with the truth.
Q: What conclusions have you drawn so far about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election? What has surprised you the most? Disappointed you the most?
A: Information was selectively leaked — in effect, weaponized — to the detriment of one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the benefit of one candidate, Donald Trump.
Russia set out to undermine the trust in American media by effectively paying close to 1,000 internet trolls to manufacture fake news and create an environment of suspicion and disinformation. Russia interfered in the American democratic process. And they are currently attempting to do the same thing in both the French and German elections.
Q: Are you convinced President Trump and/or members of his campaign knew about Russia’s efforts?
A: We can acknowledge that there is certainly a web of connections between Trump aides and Russia. What I am interested in is discovering the implications of those connections. We have to find out the truth so that we can either remove the cloud currently hanging over this administration or provide the American public with conclusive evidence of complicity.
Q: Is there evidence that President Trump’s campaign coordinated events with Russia?
A: There are a series of people very closely affiliated with the Trump campaign who have extensive ties with Russia. This investigation aims to discover whether or not there was any active coordination.
Q: What is the goal of the Intelligence Committee’s investigation and when do you think it will be complete?
A: The goal of this investigation is to discover, in a bipartisan fashion, the extent of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election and provide solutions that will protect our democratic process from foreign influence in the future.
Q: When you talk to voters around the state, are Russia’s actions on the top of their minds? How does this affect people? Why should people care about this?
A: The fact that the Russian government paid internet trolls to manufacture fake news should be a concern for everyone. In this climate of disinformation, it is extremely important for Americans to practice good “cyberhygiene.” What I mean by that is people need to be aware of both the benefits and the harms of social media.
Q: There is lots of speculation that your key role in the investigation could put you into contention for the White House in 2020. Are you eyeing a presidential run?
A: Right now, my attention is focused on this investigation. I think a lot of politicians make the mistake of looking too far ahead. I have a job to do, here and now, and I intend to do it well.
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· · ·
By Tristan Lejeune - 04/21/17 06:47 AM EDT
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By Tristan Lejeune - 04/21/17 06:47 AM EDT
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Russia's shadow-war in a wary Europe
Raw Story-1 hour ago
The French elections are the latest front in what is likely to be a conflict for years ... of the French Institute of International Relations, a think tank in Paris. .... A policeman stands guard in front of TV5 Monde headquarters in Paris ...
Cyberspace Becomes Second Front in Russia's Clash With NATO
Bloomberg-Oct 14, 2015
A policeman stands guard outside of the TV5Monde building after the cyber-attack in Paris, on April 9, 2015. ... an upgrade of computer systems in government offices, the financial sector and hospitals, said one of the people.
Hackers claiming ISIS ties seize control of French network TV5 ...
New York Daily News-Apr 9, 2015
The Paris prosecutor's office said Thursday it has opened an ... TV5 Monde, which was founded by the French government in 1984 and calls ...
China rights website founder arrested for leaking state secrets, says ...
South China Morning Post-Dec 22, 2016
... Borders (RSF)-TV5 Monde Press Freedom Prize in early November. ... police in his hometown of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, ...
Read the whole story
· ·
US President Donald Trump on Friday said a deadly attack in Paris claimed by the Islamic State group “will have a big effect” on France’s upcoming presidential vote.
“Another terrorist attack in Paris. The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!”
Trump tweeted hours after a gunman shot dead a policeman and wounded two others on the world-famous Champs-Elysees boulevard.
The attack, claimed by the Islamic State, rocked France’s presidential race Friday with just days to go before one of the closest elections in recent memory.
Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Friday accused far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of seeking to use the attack for political gain.
Cazeneuve, a Socialist, said Le Pen’s National Front (FN) “after each attack, seeks to exploit it and use it for purely political means.”
French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve speaks next to Interior Minister Matthias Fekl (L) and Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas after a meeting of the Defense Council on April 21, 2017 at the Elysee Palace in Paris, after a gunman opened fire on police on the Champs-Elysees. (Thomas Samson/AFP)
Bloodshed had long been feared ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting after a string of jihadist atrocities since 2015, and shooting on the world-renowned boulevard forced security to the top of the agenda in the campaign.
Three of the four frontrunners called off campaign events planned for Friday in the wake of the attack.
France is in a state of emergency and at its highest possible level of alert since a string of terror attacks that began in 2015, which have killed over 230 people.
The swift claim by IS indicated the group may have been trying to capitalize on the widespread attention from a high-profile attack at a time when Islamic extremism and security are at the center of France’s presidential campaign.
French presidential election candidate for the right-wing Les Republicains (LR) party, Francois Fillon delivers a statement to the press at his campaign headquarters in Paris on April 21, 2017. (Patrick Kovarki/AFP)
Meanwhile French conservative candidate Francois Fillon has pledged to keep the country under a state of emergency following the Paris attack.
In a statement at his campaign headquarters, Fillon said “the fight for the French people’s freedom and security will be mine. This must be the priority” of the next president.
Fillon promised to boost police and military forces.
He also said that, if elected, he would launch a “diplomatic initiative” aiming to create an international collaboration against Islamic extremists that would include all major actors, including the United States, the European Union, Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Gulf countries.
Fillon hopes his experience as prime minister from 2007 to 2012 and hardline views on security issues will give his campaign a boost, just two days before the first round of the vote.
The two top contenders Sunday will advance to the runoff on May 7.
Read the whole story
· · · ·
April 20 (Reuters) - Highlights for U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on Thursday: TRADE AND IMF The Trump administration delivers a simple but stark message to world financial leaders who gathered in Washington amid worries about rising U.S. protectionism: fair trade means tit-for-tat tariffs.
NORTH KOREA Trump praises Chinese efforts to rein in "the menace of North Korea" after North Korean state media warns the United States of a "super-mighty preemptive strike." U.S. STEEL Trump moves against China and other exporters of cheap steel into the U.S. market, starting a federal investigation to determine whether foreign-made steel threatens U.S. steelmakers and national security.
IRAN Iran and the United States trade barbs over the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Trump accusing Tehran of not living up to the spirit of the accord and Iran's top diplomat urging Washington to fulfill its own commitments.
RUSSIA Russia dismisses as false a Reuters report saying a government think tank controlled by President Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Trump.
U.S. ECONOMY American economic growth will not achieve the administration's 3 percent goal this year or next, even if some fiscal stimulus and changes to tax laws are implemented, according to economists in a Reuters poll.
TRADE WITH JAPAN Japan has less room to compromise with the United States under a bilateral trade deal than under a multilateral agreement like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, its deputy prime minister says, taking a swipe at U.S. attempts to pressure Tokyo into opening heavily protected markets like agriculture.
TAXES AND REGULATION Trump will sign on Friday an executive order on finding and reducing tax burdens and two memoranda ordering reviews of financial corporate regulations, a White House official says.
Top Trump advisers say his tax reform plan will rely largely on future revenue gains from faster economic growth to justify major tax cuts.
WHITE-COLLAR CRIME A senior Justice Department official says the Trump administration will be persistent in prosecuting white-collar crimes despite giving a higher profile to tackling violent crime.
DAIRY TRADE Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brushes off an attack by Trump on Canada's system of dairy protections, saying every country defends its agricultural industries.
EGYPT Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says he is optimistic about improving military ties with Egypt after talks in Cairo with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, following a period of strain under the Obama administration.
(Compiled by Jonathan Oatis and Bill Trott; Editing by Richard Chang and Lisa Shumaker)
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A legal advocacy group led by conservative radio host Mark Levin, the Landmark Legal Foundation, has filed a request with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting a "full investigation" of multiple leaks on surveillance activity conducted at the behest of the court.
Many former associates of President Trump were then identified in news reports, likely as a result of those requests. Landmark argues that this is an illegal abuse of the FISA process.
The amicus curiae filed Thursday cites a "flurry of recent published reports" that disclose classified information, citing multiple anonymous sources. "The nature, timing and volume of classified information released indicated a systematic effort to exploit the orders of this Court for political purposes," the filing reads.
The filing refers to a number of articles from the Washington Post, New York Times, the BBC and others which contain information related to the FISA Court, which was established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and oversees requests for surveillance warrants against foreign intelligence operations.
The articles cited concern former Trump associates: former campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump confidant Roger Stone and former campaign adviser Carter Page — all of whom are U.S. citizens who were "subject to a FISA warrant."
Page, for example, was hit with allegations he either worked as an agent of a foreign government or colluded with one amid reporting claiming the FBI had successfully obtained a secret court order for a FISA warrant to monitor communications in 2016. Manafort is being probed as part of congressional and FBI investigations into the Trump camp's ties to Russia.
The filing also refers to former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who got caught up in the surveillance of the Russian ambassador and whose identity was "unmasked" and "unlawfully" leaked to the media. Flynn resigned earlier this year after it was revealed he lied to the White House about his communications with the Russian ambassador.
"Each leak is potentially criminal and certainly unethical," the filing reads. "They also undermine the public's faith in the credibility of the FISA process."
"Landmark respectfully suggests that the Court, sitting en banc, should direct the government to complete its investigation and report its findings to the Court within 90 days," Levin read on his radio program Thursday.
"The Court should also consider whether it is appropriate to issue an order to all relevant federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to show cause as to why they should not be held in contempt for failing to protect the secrecy of classified information obtained pursuant to orders of this Court."
He added: "Landmark respectfully encourages this Court to use the full arsenal of legal powers available to it to resolve this matter."
Read the whole story
· ·
Hande Fırat - ANKARA
Turkey will launch a foreign policy move through presidential visits to critical countries in May in an attempt to reshape the country’s relationships with the international community after months of domestic political tension fractured Turkey’s bonds with its traditional allies.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s itinerary in May includes a visit to Washington D.C. for his first in-person meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump after the latter’s election and to Sochi for talks with
Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
Erdoğan will also visit Beijing, Brussels and New Delhi.
Turkey is going on the foreign drive in a bid to repair relationships with a number of key countries, such as the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, which have soured in recent months, while
Ankara
also wishes to discuss developments in Syria and the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Erdoğan will seek to establish “a new framework” for the Turkish-American relationship in Washington in the wake of his contested win in the April 16 referendum, while also planning to meet with the European Union’s two top institutional leaders, Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, in Brussels to discuss Ankara-Brussels ties in detail.
First stop India
Erdoğan’s first stop on his tour will be
India
on April 30, when he will be accompanied by ministers responsible for economy and trade. Erdoğan will participate in Turkey-India Business Forum and will hold political talks with Indian leaders, particularly President Pranab Mukherjee. The agenda during the meeting is expected to be dominated by an improvement of bilateral economic and trade ties.
Putin-Erdoğan meet on May 3
Erdoğan’s second visit will be to Sochi on May 3 where he will meet President Vladimir Putin, although the two leaders recently met in Moscow in March. Erdoğan, who will discuss developments in Syria with Putin, will deliver the message that “the conflict in Syria can be resolved if
Russia
adopts a constructive position and a political transition process can begin.”
The Erdoğan-Putin meeting will be important also for bilateral economic and energy ties. Despite the fact that the two countries launched a normalization process in ties,
Russia
continues to impose serious restrictions on the import of Turkish agricultural products. Turkey recently deployed a high-level delegation to
Russia
to resolve the trade dispute that has affected $450 million in agricultural trade from Turkey. The two leaders are also expected to discuss the potential that Moscow will ease visa conditions for Turkish business leaders.
First meeting with Trump
The meeting between Trump and Erdoğan, deemed as historic by
Ankara
with regards to Turkish-American ties, is expected to take place in the second half of May. The oral invitation to Erdoğan was extended by Trump in a phone conversation on April 18, in which Trump reportedly told Erdoğan: “Let’s meet face to face. Turkey is very important for us; we want to work with you.”
Following consultations through diplomatic channels, the two sides agreed to hold a meeting in the second half of May. The issues to be discussed at the White House include the extradition of Fethullah Gülen and restrictions on his followers in the U.S., developments in Syria, Turkey’s sensitivities over the prospective role for the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), in the upcoming Raqqa operation, as well as the countries’ bilateral economic relationship.
Turkey has already begun working on the dossiers ahead of the visit, while the main theme in Washington will be to create a new framework for bilateral ties.
Key talks with EU
A
NATO
summit in Brussels on May 25 will also provide a good opportunity for Erdoğan to hold bilateral meetings with some key European leaders. Furthermore, talks are underway to arrange bilateral or trilateral meetings between Erdoğan and European Commission head Juncker and European Council President Tusk.
Erdoğan’s message to
Europe
is expected to center on unopened accession chapters, visa liberalization, the outlawed
Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK) and the Gülenist movement’s activities in Europe, according to presidential sources.
Turkish sources noted that
Ankara
had reacted positively to
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s call for dialogue following the referendum, while stressing that further contacts with
Europe
would follow in this process.
Agreement in China
The president will also visit
China
in May to attend the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation on May 14 and 15 along with Putin and other regional leaders. Erdoğan will hold talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as well as other participants, and is expected to sign a cooperation agreement on the revival of the ancient Silk Road through new railways and roads.
April/21/2017
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· · ·
After hearing about an alleged Russian plot to throw the election to Donald Trump for eight months, amid leaks by “former government and intelligence officials,” this media narrative being pushed relentlessly by Rachel Maddow and the fake journalists over at CNN has come to naught. I’ve pinned a tweet to the top of my Twitter profile that’s my answer to this sort of nonsense:
None of the official reports issued by our intelligence agencies and made public contains a lick of real evidence that the Kremlin guided and encouraged Trump’s rise to power: they consist of simple assertions, and exclamations of “high confidence,” without giving anyone a reason to feel the least amount of confidence in their conclusions. They hide behind the old “sources and methods” excuse in their failure to provide what could even loosely be defined as proof of their allegations. Yet some of these “sources and methods” have come to light anyway, as the leakers desperately try to salvage their failing narrative.
The latest focus of the conspiracy theorists is that Carter Page, an economic consultant specializing in Russian energy resources, who served as an unpaid and informal advisor to the Trump campaign, is the key link between the Russians and the Trump campaign. A report in the Washington Post alleges that the FBI obtained an order from the FISA court allowing it to spy on Page, and CNN followed up with a story telling us that the factual basis of the surveillance request was the infamous “dirty dossier” compiled by “ex”-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, which contains sensationalistic allegations about Trump’s sexual activities while in Russia. The dossier also alleges that Carter was bribed with offers of a deal with the Russian energy company Rosneft in exchange for somehow effecting a 180-degree turnabout in US policy in Ukraine.
The dossier is dodgy is more ways than one: aside from the fact that it contains a number of factual errors, Steele was paid by a mysterious group of anti-Trump Republicans, initially, and later by an opposition research firm linked to the Democrats. Furthermore, Steele paid his sources – an incentive to make stuff up, or at least blow marginal “intelligence” out of proportion. In a letter to FBI director James Comey requesting documents relating to this arrangement, Sen. Charles “Chuck” Grassley” (R-Iowa), writes:
“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for President in the run-up to the election raises further questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends.”
The media and the Clintonian dead-enders – or do I repeat myself? – are unconcerned about the implications of such an arrangement. That the FBI and who knows what other “intelligence” agencies were paying Steele to spy on the opposition party in the run up to and in the aftermath of a presidential election is just routine, as far as these people are concerned. It doesn’t matter to them that a bought-and-paid-for dossier consisting of unconfirmed speculation was the basis for the FISA court’s approval of a request to spy on the Trump campaign. Evidence? Facts? Don’t be so old-fashioned! The Surveillance State is a lawless entity, and there’s no use trying to tie it to traditional standards of legality, never mind propriety.
The New York Times reports that the FBI’s interest in Page was sparked when he went to Russia and made a speech criticizing US foreign policy:
“[W]hen [Page] became a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign last year and gave a Russia-friendly speech at a prestigious Moscow institute, it soon caught the bureau’s attention. That trip last July was a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign, according to current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials.”
It doesn’t take much to attract the FBI’s attention. All you have to do is dissent from the foreign policy “consensus.” As Mollie Hemingway notes over at The Federalist:
“If this is true that this was the catalyst, it is concerning. The Times article explains at great length how little a role Page had in the campaign and how far from central he was, to put it mildly. It notes that he worked in Russia and was critical of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia. At no point is anything illegal alleged. To be clear, since many in the media are not clear on this point, it is still legal in this country to be critical of US foreign policy toward another country.”
It may still be legal to be critical of US foreign policy, but it’s also legal to spy on you if you get too noisy about it. When you have a secret “court” that has only denied permission to spy on Americans a mere 12 times out of some 34,000, as Hemingway notes, then the standard of “legality” is formally met, but in reality what you have is a police state apparatus in place.
The FISA court and it’s “legal” underpinning have been around since 1978, and in all that time we never heard a peep out of anyone but a few marginalized libertarians pointing out its potential for political repression. Now, suddenly, conservatives are waking up the fact that our “intelligence” agencies are policing the political discourse – because it’s their ox being gored.
Well, better late than never.
It’s not like the FBI has been politically neutral all these years: remember Cointelpro? Remember how they spied on Martin Luther King? And lest you think it’s just the left they’ve gone after, here’s a little bit of largely hidden history for you: Franklin Roosevelt sicced the feds on the America First Committeeand other opponents of going to war in Europe in the run up to World War II. He had his Attorney General charge war opponents with “sedition,” and the media – far from rising up against this abuse of power – cheered the President on. Indeed, a Washington Post reporter, Dillard Stokes, collaborated with the FBI in setting up the defendants for the phony charge of encouraging mutiny in the armed forces.
I don’t recall anyone at The Federalist rushing to the defense of <a href="http://Antiwar.com" rel="nofollow">Antiwar.com</a> when it was revealed that the FBI was spying on us due to our foreign policy position. Not a single conservative voice was raised in protest at their designation of myself and our webmaster, Eric Garris, as possible “agents of a foreign power” – a conclusion based on absolutely nothing substantial.
First they came for the right, and liberals said nothing but “good job!” Then they came for the left, and conservatives said “But communism!” Then they came for <a href="http://Antiwar.com" rel="nofollow">Antiwar.com</a>, and nobody said a word. Now that they’re coming for Trump, the left is once again cheering while the right is aghast – and the Trump administration, far from dismantling the apparatus of repression, wants to give “law enforcement” a blank check to spy on the American people.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
Read more by Justin Raimondo
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Although Russians may have aspired to influence the November election, the real election meddlers were Democrats in the Obama administration who conspired with foreign intelligence agencies against Donald Trump’s campaign, new media reports suggest.
The key player, we are learning, is the already infamous John O. Brennan but FBI Director James Comey also played a role. From January 2009 to March 2013, Brennan was Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and then Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from March 2013 until Obama’s last day as president.
George Neumayr explains at the American Spectator how pro-Islam, pro-Communist Brennan appears to have masterminded the operation.
Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to [then-National Security Advisor] Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.
Drawing from a news article in the Guardian (UK), Neumayr adds:
Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC’s Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign.
Estonians were indeed tense after Trump’s seeming ambivalence about NATO on the campaign trail and the prospect that as president he might leave that former Soviet province at the mercy of Russian President Vladimir Putin. British spy agencies, too, were rife with Trump-haters.
The Guardian reports that Robert Hannigan, then-head of the British foreign surveillance service, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), “passed material” to Brennan in summer 2016.
The claim about GCHQ involvement surfaced a month ago.
On March 16, Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano accused GCHQ of working with the Obama administration to spy on Donald Trump, citing unnamed sources. The United States and United Kingdom are in fact parties to a multilateral intelligence cooperation pact. This five-way intelligence alliance among the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is called Five Eyes (FVEY). It obligates the countries to work together in the area of signals intelligence (SIGINT). SIGINT is the gathering of intelligence related to communications between individuals (COMINT) and or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (ELINT).
When Brennan took over the CIA, he brought along fellow-travelers.
He dragged along “a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump,” Neumayr writes. He also “bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as ‘non-partisan.’”
An official in the intelligence community told Neumayr that “Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with ‘Hillary for president cups’ and other campaign paraphernalia.”
Neumayr cuts through the obsequious flattery the Guardian article bestows on its intelligence community sources, writing that things were so bad that Brennan’s CIA “operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump.”
“To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out,” Neumayr writes of the dubious pro-Trump plot by the Kremlin, “Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the ‘Gang of Eight’ about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.”
This was part of Brennan’s audition for the Hillary White House. Eager to retain his CIA post, the perennial excuse-maker for the Muslim Brotherhood also hated Trump for his alleged “Muslim ban,” which offended Brennan’s raging case of Islamophilia. In college Brennan spent a year in Cairo studying Arabic and taking Middle Eastern studies courses. He later was awarded a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies.
Brennan and crew also helped to torpedo Mike Flynn, President Trump’s first short-lived National Security Advisor, because he “planned to rip up the Obama-era ‘reset’ with Muslim countries.” After reading the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador, “[t]hey caught him in a lie to [Vice President] Mike Pence and made sure the press knew about it.”
Not surprisingly, Brennan is one of the key reasons the Obama administration did so little to combat jihadists domestically. After Muslim lobbies supposedly put pressure on him, in 2011 Brennan purged all mentions of Islam and jihad from law enforcement counter-terror training materials. He assured those groups that the Obama administration’s worse-than-useless “Countering Violent Extremism” program had been ideologically purified and pretended the miniscule white-supremacist movement was just as big a threat as head-cutting Muslim savages.
Throughout his service in the Obama administration, Brennan regurgitated the regime’s dangerously idiotic talking points about Islam. It’s not like he needed convincing.
Brennan has spoken of "the goodness and beauty of Islam," which he calls "a faith of peace and tolerance." "The tremendous warmth of Islamic cultures and societies," he said, typically makes visitors from non-Muslim lands feel very "welcomed."
Brennan was the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina,” he said. “I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.”
Former Marine John Guandolo, who worked in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, identified Brennan as an enemy operative who converted to Islam.
Brennan admitted he supported the Kremlin-funded Communist Party USA at the height of the Cold War, even voting for CPUSA presidential candidate Gus Hall in 1976. That fact alone should have instantly and permanently disqualified Brennan from all national security-related government posts.
FBI Director Comey’s hands are also not clean.
CNN reports that the FBI relied on the discredited “piss-gate” dossier to win approval from a secret court for permission to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a member of the Trump campaign. That Comey would act based on a dossier that is so ridiculous on its face that, among other things, it accused Trump of paying prostitutes to urinate on a hotel room bed in Moscow, suggests a strong desire on Comey’s part to hurt the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, the Never Trumpers in the intelligence community can’t stop lying. Now they’ve fed more seeming nonsense to the media in order to keep the fake, faltering Trump-is-a-puppet-of-Putin story alive.
Citing unidentified American sources, Reuters is reporting that an official Russian think tank, the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, drew up plans “to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system.”
Three current and four former U.S. officials reportedly “described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election.” Of course, it is not at all clear that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded any such thing because no evidence, apart from the same anonymous statements recycled endlessly on CNN, has been made public.
The first document was “a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.” It urged the Kremlin to conduct “a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” all seven of these mysterious spooks reportedly said.
That Russia could even fantasize about having a bigger Russia-lover in the Oval Office than Barack Obama, the most pro-Russian U.S. president of all time, is difficult to fathom.
Obama advanced Russia’s interests in so many ways, according to Robert G. Kaufman. In 2009 he killed President Bush’s missile defense program for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Then he renegotiated the New START nuclear arms agreement, which curbed the U.S. missile defense arsenal while letting the Russians add to theirs. In March 2012 Obama was caught on an open microphone telling then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to wait until after the upcoming election when he would be able to make even more concessions on missile defense. As Russia engaged in what one expert called the largest military buildup since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Obama flipped off Mitt Romney during a presidential debate. After Romney on the campaign trail referred to Russia as “without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Obama mocked him, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” And Obama did virtually nothing but talk when Putin invaded Ukraine.
“Thanks to Obama's reset, Putin believes more than ever that he can achieve his consummate objective of reversing the outcome of the Cold War,” Kaufman adds. “No wonder Putin thought he could wage a cyber campaign to delegitimize the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
A second document from the institute that was drawn up in October counseled that Hillary Clinton was probably going to prevail in the election. That paper urged Russia to halt its pro-Trump propaganda campaign consisting of efforts by “state-backed media outlets, including international platforms Russia Today and Sputnik news agency, to start producing positive reports on Trump’s quest for the U.S. presidency, the officials said.”
Given that Russia Today and Sputnik are virtually unknown among American news consumers, it is hard to imagine anything they might broadcast or publish having much of an impact on an American election.
But it is becoming increasingly obvious that Russia didn’t do much, if anything, to influence the election.
John Brennan and others in the Obama administration used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in espionage against an opposition presidential campaign, an incoming administration, and that administration’s transition team.
The whole campaign aimed at convincing Americans that President Trump was a tool of Russia was created by Democrats for their illicit purposes.
Almost every day new evidence emerges proving that point.
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Q24N (<a href="http://Insightcrime.org" rel="nofollow">Insightcrime.org</a>) US President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions launched a rhetorical campaign this week against the MS13, one of the most violent gangs in Central America. But the verbal offensive by the president and the attorney general, as well as their statements on the origins and evolution of the gang, are for the most part false or misleading.
The broadside included tweets by President Trump and comments made by the attorney general to law enforcement officials, as well as statements to the press, which compare the gang with other, much more sophisticated and developed criminal groups, such as Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
On April 18, Trump tweeted that the “weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama administration” allowed the MS13 to develop in several US cities. The current president also said that his administration has been expelling gang members at rates never seen before.
In addition, speaking to Fox News, the president stated that the gangs are made up of “illegal immigrants that were here that caused tremendous crime. That have murdered people, raped people — horrible things have happened. They’re getting the hell out or they’re going to prison.”
On the same day that Trump made these comments, Sessions expressed similar thoughts in a separate TV interview and in a speech he gave to an elite group of federal officials, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF).
Like Trump, Attorney General Sessions also blamed so-called “sanctuary cities,” which forbid local police forces from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, for facilitating the MS13’s expansion.
As he had promised during his presidential campaign, upon assuming office Trump began threatening to cut federal funds to these cities if they refused to cooperate with ICE. Only a few of the more than 100 sanctuary cities have given up their sanctuary status. Others that are home to large migrant communities, such as San Francisco; Hyattsville, Maryland; Houston; and Los Angeles have defied Trump.
In addition, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly spoke about the MS13 at a public event held by George Washington University, in Washington, DC.
“They are utterly without laws, conscience, or respect for human life. They take the form of drug cartels, or international gangs like MS13, who share their business dealings and violent practices. Their sophisticated networks move anything and everything across our borders, including human beings,” Kelly said.
Each of these comments comes with its flaws, and at the very least distorts the reality and obscurs the strategies that should be followed to tackle the MS13 threat. In an effort to shed more light on this complex issue, InSight Crime has listed seven aspects of these statements in which the Trump administration is plainly mistaken.
A captured gang member makes the Mara Salvatrucha’s signs in a police station.AP Photo/Luis Romero
1. Barack Obama’s immigration policies allowed the MS13 to expand across the United States
Trump blames former President Obama, but he may have been more correct if he had pointed the finger at Ronald Reagan. The MS13 and Barrio 18 street gangs were established in the 1980s in Los Angeles. At the beginning, they were made up of young undocumented migrants that came to California escaping the civil war in El Salvador. They were tuned in to rock music and took part in small-scale drug dealing. Some of them had received military or guerrilla-style training.
As Salvadoran news outlet El Faro wrote about the origins of the MS13, very soon the gang began to articulate a violent ideology based by and large on opposition to rival gangs, most notably the Barrio 18.
The gangs migrated to the US East Coast towards the end of the 1990s, as part of the migration waves that saw Latino communities looking for jobs elsewhere in the country. By the beginning of the 2000s, the MS13 began to catch the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Even the fact sheet the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released on April 18 to support Sessions’s statements clearly says that the MS13 was born and began to expand before 2009; “The MS13 has been functioning since at least the 1980s,” the report states.
In 2004, under the George W. Bush administration, the FBI created a special unit targeting the MS13, after members of the gang committed some atrocious homicides.
In 2006, Brian Tuchon, then-head of the FBI’s special unit, told Salvadoran news outlet La Prensa Gráfica that the gang had settled in 42 US states, and had begun to participate in drug trafficking, chiefly as local distributors. Since that time, the FBI and the US State Department have maintained that gangs like the MS13 do not play an important role in the international drug trafficking chain.
The MS13’s expansion is directly related to the evolution and migration of Central American communities into the United States, and also with the large-scale deportation campaigns that began towards the end of the Bill Clinton administration and intensified during George W. Bush’s two terms in office.
2. US law enforcement has done nothing against the MS13
“It is a serious problem and we never did anything about it, and now we’re doing something about it,” President Trump told Fox News during the April 18 interview.
This is false. In addition to several FBI operations, local police forces and attorneys from counties across the states of Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and California carried out several law enforcement actions against MS13 members during the previous decade.
To give a few examples, federal cases brought by attorneys under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) law in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Arlington, Virginia led to blows that decimated the MS13 cells on the US East Coast for a decade.
In 2007, Greenbelt’s federal court sentenced some 20 members of gangs based in Maryland, DC and Virginia to several years in prison as part of an organized crime case that included charges of homicide, drug possession, illegal use of weapons and rape, among others. Among the defendants was Saúl Hernández Turcios, alias “El Trece,” one of the MS13 leaders in El Salvador.
Again, the DOJ report on the MS13 appears to contradict the president’s words. The fact sheet states: “Through the combined efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement, great progress was made diminishing or severely disrupted the gang within certain targeted areas of the US by 2009 and 2010.” That is, during the Obama administration.
3. More gang members are being deported from the United States than ever before
In his tweet, Trump said that “we are removing [gang members] fast.” Yet there is no data to support this claim. The ICE deportation figures available to the public do not show data from the first three months of 2017, when Trump has been in office. Up until the end of 2016, the percentage of gang members compared to the total deported population was minimal: 0.8 percent, that is, 2,057 individuals “with confirmed or suspected connections to gangs” out of a total of 240,255 deported people that year.
Ever since 2011, when the Obama administration announced that it would prioritize deportations for undocumented migrants with criminal records or ties to illegal groups, Washington has been juggling two distinct figures: the number of people accused or convicted of a crime, and the number of people whose only crime has been violating migration laws by illegally entering the United States. This, according to many pro-immigrant organizations, has only further criminalized migrant communities.
There is no data showing that deportations carried out during the Trump administration have targeted more gang members, and Central American police sources have told InSight Crime that this is not the case.
4. The MS13 is recruiting more in the United States in an attempt to revive defunct ‘clicas,’ and to commit more violent acts
Sessions told OCDETF that “Because of an open border and years of lax immigration enforcement, MS13 has been sending both recruiters and members to regenerate gangs that previously had been decimated, and smuggling members across the border as unaccompanied minors.”
This is, in part, correct. As InSight Crime recently reported, between 2014 and 2016 the FBI and local authorities detected an increase in homicides attributable to the MS13 in Virginia; Boston; and Long Island, New York.
Testimony from a RICO case opened in Boston in 2015 against various MS13 “clicas,” or cells, indicates that orders from the gang’s jailed leadership in El Salvador may have been behind some of these homicides. The court documents also mention a meeting between clica leaders in Richmond, Virginia, in which a spokesperson known as “Ricky” relayed the order to expand the MS13’s East Coast program.
Federal investigations revealed that some of the Boston homicides could be linked to this order. It is also true that the recent homicides were brutally executed, which is characteristic of the MS13 in Central America.
But Sessions’ statement also distorts the truth. Once again, there is no information that allows the attorney general or Trump’s administration to affirm that these murders are attributable to the arrival of undocumented minors, who began coming to the United States in larger numbers in 2014. In fact, there is no study by federal agencies or academic institutions that proves that there is a significant number of gang members among these minors. On the contrary, a large portion of these undocumented youths who come seeking asylum claim that they are fleeing gangs in the Northern Triangle.
Moreover, there is no evidence that the migratory patterns of gang members are different than those of any other group of migrants, or that they are moving in accordance with a grand plan forged by the MS13’s Salvadoran leadership to revitalize the organization.
It is nonetheless true that in 2007 the MS13 started to resume recruitment activities and indiscriminate use of violence in some US cities, according to FBI officials who have studied the gang for at least two decades. But these efforts are not directly related to Obama’s migration policies. David LeValley, who until last November was chief of the FBI’s criminal investigations unit in Washington, explains that there have been attempts by the MS13 to regain strength following the RICO prosecutions between 2006 and 2010. This has been occurring “since 2007, after real successes and after the leadership had been decimated,” the FBI agent told InSight Crime in an interview last year.
In more recent years, the MS13 has largely been following the organization’s dynamics in Central America. This includes the gang truce between the MS13, Barrio 18 and the Salvadoran government during the presidency of Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), and the subsequent declaration of war by current President Salvador Sánchez Cerén.
5. Sanctuary cities are more hospitable to the MS13, and the gang can operate freely in them
Sessions told OCDETF that sanctuary cities “dangerously undermine [the process of fighting gangs]. Harboring criminal aliens only helps violent gangs like MS13. Sanctuary cities are aiding these cartels to refill their ranks and putting innocent life — including the lives of countless law-abiding immigrants — in danger.”
This is false. There is no evidence that the “sanctuary” status of certain cities — those that refuse to allow local police to assist ICE in locating and deporting undocumented migrants — has any effect on their crime rates. Evidence indicates that, as in much of the United States, crime rates in sanctuary cities have been decreasing for years. In fact, some studies suggest that crime indicators are actually lower in migrant communities.
Furthermore, some successful models for combating gangs have been carried out in cities with a strong migrant presence, where the police established ties with such communities in order to counteract the influence of the MS13 or Barrio 18. This has been at the root of anti-gang operations in, for example, Fairfax, Virginia; Montgomery, Maryland; and Washington, DC, where InSight Crime has carried out investigations over the past two years. Between 2009 and 2014, gang-related homicides in Fairfax and Montgomery fell to nearly zero.
6. The MS13 represents a threat comparable to Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, and the Italian mafia
Attorney General Sessions compared the MS13 to Colombian cartels and the Italian “mafia.” Yet years of investigations into the MS13 and the Barrio 18 have shown that the participation of both gangs in the regional drug trade is minimal. In some cases, their activity is limited to controlling local markets.
Even the US State Department has recognized on multiple occasions that Central American gangs are not “important actors” in international drug trafficking. In contrast to the old Colombian cartels, their modern Mexican counterparts or intermediary criminal organizations, neither the MS13 nor Barrio 18 have ever had the economic or political power to obtain the protection needed to run large-scale drug trafficking activities in Central America. Nor have they been able to establish strong networks in the United States beyond small local cells.
In general, the number of big trafficking cases associated with MS13 clicas in Central America or the United States is small. And they typically involve gang units that, due to their location or leadership, have pre-existing connections to drug traffickers.
Apart from extortion, which is tightly regulated by the gang leadership, the MS13’s remaining criminal activities depend largely on decisions made by the local clica leader.
7. A law enforcement solution alone is adequate to solve this problem
Both Trump and Sessions resorted to repeating misinformation that other officials — including Central American presidents, ministers and police chiefs — have used to justify heavy-handed anti-gang policies, which have only helped the MS13 and Barrio 18 to become more sophisticated as their members have been stuffed into prisons.
At the end of the day, the words of both officials are intended to link the recent homicides attributed to the MS13 in New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia to Trump’s narrative, which he has used to criminalize migration and the Latino community in the United States.
Article originally appeared on Insightcrime.org.
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Robert Hannigan, then-head of the British foreign surveillance service, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), “passed material” to Brennan in summer 2016
Estonians were indeed tense after Trump’s seeming ambivalence about NATO on the campaign trail and the prospect that as president he might leave that former Soviet province at the mercy of Russian President Vladimir Putin. British spy agencies, too, were rife with Trump-haters.
The Guardian reports that Robert Hannigan, then-head of the British foreign surveillance service, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), “passed material” to Brennan in summer 2016.
The claim about GCHQ involvement surfaced a month ago.
On March 16, Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano accused GCHQ of working with the Obama administration to spy on Donald Trump, citing unnamed sources. The United States and United Kingdom are in fact parties to a multilateral intelligence cooperation pact. This five-way intelligence alliance among the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada is called Five Eyes (FVEY). It obligates the countries to work together in the area of signals intelligence (SIGINT). SIGINT is the gathering of intelligence related to communications between individuals (COMINT) and or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (ELINT).
When Brennan took over the CIA, he brought along fellow-travelers.
He dragged along “a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump,” Neumayr writes. He also “bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as ‘non-partisan.’”
Continued below...
Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism
An official in the intelligence community told Neumayr that “Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with ‘Hillary for president cups’ and other campaign paraphernalia.”
Neumayr cuts through the obsequious flattery the Guardian article bestows on its intelligence community sources, writing that things were so bad that Brennan’s CIA “operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump.”
“To ensure that these flaky tips leaked out,” Neumayr writes of the dubious pro-Trump plot by the Kremlin, “Brennan disseminated them on Capitol Hill. In August and September of 2016, he gave briefings to the ‘Gang of Eight’ about them, which then turned up on the front page of the New York Times.”
This was part of Brennan’s audition for the Hillary White House. Eager to retain his CIA post, the perennial excuse-maker for the Muslim Brotherhood also hated Trump for his alleged “Muslim ban,” which offended Brennan’s raging case of Islamophilia. In college Brennan spent a year in Cairo studying Arabic and taking Middle Eastern studies courses. He later was awarded a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies.
Brennan and crew also helped to torpedo Mike Flynn, President Trump’s first short-lived National Security Advisor, because he “planned to rip up the Obama-era ‘reset’ with Muslim countries.” After reading the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador, “[t]hey caught him in a lie to [Vice President] Mike Pence and made sure the press knew about it.”
Not surprisingly, Brennan is one of the key reasons the Obama administration did so little to combat jihadists domestically. After Muslim lobbies supposedly put pressure on him, in 2011 Brennan purged all mentions of Islam and jihad from law enforcement counter-terror training materials. He assured those groups that the Obama administration’s worse-than-useless “Countering Violent Extremism” program had been ideologically purified and pretended the miniscule white-supremacist movement was just as big a threat as head-cutting Muslim savages.
Brennan regurgitated the regime’s dangerously idiotic talking points about Islam
Throughout his service in the Obama administration, Brennan regurgitated the regime’s dangerously idiotic talking points about Islam. It’s not like he needed convincing.
Brennan has spoken of “the goodness and beauty of Islam,” which he calls “a faith of peace and tolerance.” “The tremendous warmth of Islamic cultures and societies,” he said, typically makes visitors from non-Muslim lands feel very “welcomed.”
Brennan was the CIA’s station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina,” he said. “I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.”
Former Marine John Guandolo, who worked in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, identified Brennan as an enemy operative who converted to Islam.
Brennan admitted he supported the Kremlin-funded Communist Party USA
Brennan admitted he supported the Kremlin-funded Communist Party USA at the height of the Cold War, even voting for CPUSA presidential candidate Gus Hall in 1976. That fact alone should have instantly and permanently disqualified Brennan from all national security-related government posts.
FBI Director Comey’s hands are also not clean.
CNN reports that the FBI relied on the discredited “piss-gate” dossier to win approval from a secret court for permission to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a member of the Trump campaign. That Comey would act based on a dossier that is so ridiculous on its face that, among other things, it accused Trump of paying prostitutes to urinate on a hotel room bed in Moscow, suggests a strong desire on Comey’s part to hurt the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, the Never Trumpers in the intelligence community can’t stop lying. Now they’ve fed more seeming nonsense to the media in order to keep the fake, faltering Trump-is-a-puppet-of-Putin story alive.
Citing unidentified American sources, Reuters is reporting that an official Russian think tank, the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, drew up plans “to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system.”
Three current and four former U.S. officials reportedly “described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election.” Of course, it is not at all clear that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded any such thing because no evidence, apart from the same anonymous statements recycled endlessly on CNN, has been made public.
The first document was “a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.” It urged the Kremlin to conduct “a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” all seven of these mysterious spooks reportedly said.
That Russia could even fantasize about having a bigger Russia-lover in the Oval Office than Barack Obama, the most pro-Russian U.S. president of all time, is difficult to fathom.
Obama advanced Russia’s interests in so many ways, according to Robert G. Kaufman. In 2009 he killed President Bush’s missile defense program for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Then he renegotiated the New START nuclear arms agreement, which curbed the U.S. missile defense arsenal while letting the Russians add to theirs. In March 2012 Obama was caught on an open microphone telling then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to wait until after the upcoming election when he would be able to make even more concessions on missile defense. As Russia engaged in what one expert called the largest military buildup since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Obama flipped off Mitt Romney during a presidential debate. After Romney on the campaign trail referred to Russia as “without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Obama mocked him, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” And Obama did virtually nothing but talk when Putin invaded Ukraine.
“Thanks to Obama’s reset, Putin believes more than ever that he can achieve his consummate objective of reversing the outcome of the Cold War,” Kaufman adds. “No wonder Putin thought he could wage a cyber campaign to delegitimize the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
A second document from the institute that was drawn up in October counseled that Hillary Clinton was probably going to prevail in the election. That paper urged Russia to halt its pro-Trump propaganda campaign consisting of efforts by “state-backed media outlets, including international platforms Russia Today and Sputnik news agency, to start producing positive reports on Trump’s quest for the U.S. presidency, the officials said.”
Given that Russia Today and Sputnik are virtually unknown among American news consumers, it is hard to imagine anything they might broadcast or publish having much of an impact on an American election.
John Brennan and others in the Obama administration used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in espionage
But it is becoming increasingly obvious that Russia didn’t do much, if anything, to influence the election.
John Brennan and others in the Obama administration used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in espionage against an opposition presidential campaign, an incoming administration, and that administration’s transition team.
The whole campaign aimed at convincing Americans that President Trump was a tool of Russia was created by Democrats for their illicit purposes.
Almost every day new evidence emerges proving that point.
Read the whole story
· · · · · · ·
The official heading the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia acting Attorney General Mary B. McCord is leaving her post next month, leaving a major vacancy at a time when other significant positions in the department remain empty, the AP reports.
President Trump may miss a Thursday deadline to release a full report of Russian interference in the US election he set himself in January, the Hill’s Joe Uchill concludes after emails to the N.S.C. and the Department of Justice were not returned yesterday.
A spokesperson for the N.S.C. denied any involvement in a new report, and a spokesperson for Rudy Giuliani – who is advising the President on private sector cybersecurity issues – told POLITICO’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, Eric Geller and Matthew Nussbaum that he was not involved in any such report.
A more complex reason why Russian President Putin may have interfered in the US presidential election would be that Trump’s professed foreign policy vision was much closer to the Russian leader’s own than Hillary Clinton’s: economic and security interests trump liberal ideals when setting the US agenda, suggests Simon Waxman at the Washington Post.
Before the start of business, Just Security provides a curated summary of up-to-the-minute developments at home and abroad. Here’s today’s news.
The KOREAN PENINSULA
The UN Security Council strongly condemned North Korea’s latest missile test, demanding that North Korea “conduct no further nuclear tests” and, in a hardening of the Council’s stance, threatening to “take further significant measures including sanctions” in a unanimous statement yesterday, AFP reports.
China’s efforts to rein in “the menace of North Korea” were praised by President Trump yesterday, Steve Holland and Phil Stewart report at Reuters.
China has put its military forces on “high alert” over North Korea’s increasing threats to strike pre-emptively, a US defense official told CNN’s Ryan Browne and Elise Labott.
South Korea is also on high alert as North Korea prepares to mark the 85th anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army on Tuesday amid concerns that Pyongyang will use the occasion to launch another nuclear test, Ju-min Park and Ben Blanchard report at Reuters.
Reports that Russia is moving troops to its border with North Korea were denied by Russian authorities, the AP reports.
State lawmakers in Hawaii have formally requested that the Department of Defense assist with the state’s nuclear disaster preparedness as tensions between the US and North Korea escalate, Adrienne Lafrance reports at The Atlantic.
“Why the panic now?” While North Korea has had nuclear weapons for over a decade, it’s currently heading for a nuclear breakout – and it’s not bluffing. Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post explains why deterrence is futile, and prevention’s best hope is that the Chinese exercise their influence, something they may be willing to do now for a variety of reasons.
A pre-emptive strike by the US on North Korea would be “reckless beyond belief” and even creating the impression that he might strike is a dangerous move by President Trump that may prompt North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to order his own pre-emptive nuclear attack. The Economist argues that Trump should cool his rhetoric immediately.
“Bellicose rhetoric, hollow threats, contradictory voice and little coordination with allies.” The Trump administration is testing its worrying foreign policy approach on “the most difficult foreign policy problem of all,” North Korea, writes Fareed Zakaria at the Washington Post.
Even the US military’s most seasoned commanders can fail to consider the wider political or strategic implications of operational decisions, with episodes such as the ordering of the USS Carl Vinson to “sail north” from Singapore this month, given without any awareness of the larger – and incorrect – impression that a naval strike force was being rushed to confront North Korea potentially set to multiply with Trump’s decision to release the military from Obama administration constraints and intensify the fight against terrorism, write Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper at the New York Times.
IRAN
Iran is “not living up to the spirit” of the nuclear deal, President Trump said yesterday during a joint press conference with his Italian counterpart Paolo Gentiloni, adding that “we’re analyzing [the deal] very, very carefully and we’ll have something to say about it in the not-too-distant future.” Felicia Schwartz and Rebecca Ballhaus report at the Wall Street Journal.
Iran and its ally Hezbollah are working together to destabilize the Middle East, the US ambassador to the UN and current Security Council president Nikki Haley said yesterday, a charge Iran’s UN envoy “categorically” denied. Edith M. Lederer reports at the AP.
Iran’s presidential race next month will mainly serve as a referendum on the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, writes the AP, taking a look at the final list of candidates.
Rhetoric and reality are once again at odds with each other in the Trump administration’s stance(s) on the Iran nuclear deal, but the “heady days of the campaign are over, and the President needs a policy review on Iran that contends with the reality that foreign policy is complicated, writes Jonathan Marcus at the BBC.
LIBYA
The US military will not play a direct role in helping stabilize Libya, President Trump announced yesterday following a meeting in Washington with Italian Prime Minister Gentiloni despite Gentolini’s pleas for the US to increase its “critical” involvement in the war-torn country, though he did not rule out US involvement in ousting Islamic militants from Libya and neighboring countries. Glenn Thrush reports at the New York Times.
TRUMP-RUSSIA INVESTIGATION
The official heading the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia acting Attorney General Mary B. McCord is leaving her post next month, leaving a major vacancy at a time when other significant positions in the department remain empty, the AP reports.
President Trump may miss a Thursday deadline to release a full report of Russian interference in the US election he set himself in January, the Hill’s Joe Uchill concludes after emails to the N.S.C. and the Department of Justice were not returned yesterday.
A spokesperson for the N.S.C. denied any involvement in a new report, and a spokesperson for Rudy Giuliani – who is advising the President on private sector cybersecurity issues – told POLITICO’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, Eric Geller and Matthew Nussbaum that he was not involved in any such report.
A more complex reason why Russian President Putin may have interfered in the US presidential election would be that Trump’s professed foreign policy vision was much closer to the Russian leader’s own than Hillary Clinton’s: economic and security interests trump liberal ideals when setting the US agenda, suggests Simon Waxman at the Washington Post.
CHAMPS ELYSEES ATTACK
A gunman who shot dead one police officer and wounded two others in an attack on Paris’ Champs Élysées last night before he was killed was known to police having been arrested February on suspicion of planning to murder officers, FRANCE24 reports.
A terrorism investigation was opened by French prosecutors, President François Hollande saying he was “convinced” a “terrorism” investigation is the correct approach, Al Jazeera reports.
The Islamic State subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack, Lori Hinnant and Sylvie Corbet report at the AP.
“It looks like another terrorist attack,” President Trump said yesterday when the news broke, Jonathan Easley reporting at the Hill.
SYRIA
The Assad regime still has chemical weapons and dispersed its aircraft after the US attacked its airbase earlier this month, Defense Secretary James Mattis said today. Thomas Gibbons-Neff reports at the Washington Post.
The evacuation of civilians from four besieged Syrian towns resumed today after a bomb attack on an evacuation convoy left dozens of people dead and caused a 48-hour delay in the program, Reuters reports.
Evidence is emerging that North Korea has helped to develop Syria’s chemical weapons and ballistic missile programs, enriching Pyongyang and prolonging Assad’s rule, something which North Korea denies, reports Steve Mollman at QUARTZ.
IRAQ
Iraqi forces have taken two more neighborhoods in western Mosul as fighting in the city intensifies, military commanders there said, Al Jazeera reporting.
US-led airstrikes continue. US and coalition forces carried out 17 airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria on Apr. 19. Separately, partner forces conducted nine strikes against targets in Iraq. [Central Command]
TURKEY
Turkey’s president will visit foreign leaders including President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in May in an effort to repair and reshape Turkey’s relationships with the international community after months of domestic political tension, Hande Firat reports at Hürriyet Daily News.
What will Erdoğan’s referendum victory mean for Turkey’s foreign policy? Metin Gurcan explores this question at Al Jazeera.
Erdoğan has not always been an authoritarian. Steven A. Cook at the Washington Post explains how the interaction of Turkey’s domestic political struggles, the choices Europeans have made, those the US did not make, and Erdoğan’s own worldview have prompted Turkey’s return to one-man rule.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FOREIGN POLICY
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has no plans to disclose damage estimates from last week’s use of the “mother of all bombs” on an Islamic State target in Afghanistan, he said yesterday, Robert Burns reporting at the AP.
President Trump met privately with two former Colombian presidents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week, the McClatchy D.C. Bureau’s Franco Ordoñez and Anita Kumar report, the White House insisting that the meeting was nothing more than a “quick hello” as the President walked past the Colombians, while former president Andrés Pastrana took to Twitter afterwards to thank Trump for the “cordial and very frank conversation.”
The Trump administration is being pressed to keep normalizing relations with Cuba for the sake of US national security interests by 16 retired military officers who sent a letter to White House national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster yesterday, Ellen Mitchell reports at the Hill.
Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has been invited to visit the US by President Trump, according to Vietnam’s government, My Pham reporting at Reuters.
PENCE’S SOUTHEAST ASIA TRIP
Vice President Mike Pence’s announcement that President Trump will follow him to the region later this year from Indonesia yesterday was a sign that the administration’s disregard for Southeast Asia so far – a focus of former US presidents – beyond North Korea and the US-China trade imbalance is about to change, write Matthew Pennington and Ken Thomas at the AP.
Pence will attempt to smooth over US-Australia relations tomorrow when he meets Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as part of his 10-day Asia trip and more than two months after President Trump’s contentious phone call with his Australian counterpart and before that Trump’s decision to pull out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Kristen Gelineau and Ken Thomas anticipate the meeting at the AP.
HOMELAND SECURITY
The US-Mexican border is “ground zero,” the “front lines,” and “where we take our stand,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said yesterday, joining Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in tough talk on immigration enforcement and border security, Rafael Bernal reports at the Hill.
Funding for President Trump’s US-Mexico border wall must be included in the upcoming bill to fund the government, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney told the AP’s Andrew Taylor.
Threats from extremist groups and criminals do not justify Kelly’s incendiary message to his workforce explaining how he means to lead a vast bureaucracy on the front lines of immigration enforcement, cybersecurity and traveler screening, writes the New York Times editorial board.
The MUSLIM BAN
A judge from “an island in the Pacific” shouldn’t be able to ban President Trump’s revised travel ban, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, referring to federal judge Judge Derrick Watson who issued an order to block the travel ban nationwide last month, a decision the Justice Department is in the process of appealing. The Hill’s Olivia Beavers reports.
Emirates’ decision to pare back flights to the US because of harsher US security measures and the travel ban is not a permanent one, the airline’s president explained, Al Jazeera reporting.
CYBERSECURITY, PRIVACY and TECHNOLOGY
The Justice Department wants to put “some people in jail” for recent leaks of classified information it is currently investigating, Josh Gerstein reports at POLITICO.
Arresting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in the disclosures is a “priority,” Attorney General Sessions said, FRANCE24 reporting.
Senior Justice Department officials have been pressuring prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia to come up with a range of possible charges against Assange, an anonymous law enforcement official told Adam Goldman at the New York Times.
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
Egyptian-American aid worker Aya Hijazi was returned to the US from Egypt yesterday after the Trump administration successfully negotiated her release following three years in captivity, Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker report at the New York Times.
Philippine military chiefs visited a Philippine-occupied island in the contested South China Sea today to announce the imminent construction of facilities there, Bullit Marquez anticipating that the move will infuriate China at the AP.
The UK’s first jail blocks exclusively for extremist prisoners will open this summer in northern England, with two or more prisons to open similar blocks later, the BBC reports.
Romania will purchase Patriot missiles from US defense contractor Raytheon to help protect its airspace as part of the NATO member’s plan to modernize its military and will increase its military spending to the two percent NATO benchmark this year, Radu-Sorin Marinas reports at Reuters.
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AP: “Some 2,500 IS fighters are estimated to be in the provincial capital alone. Hundreds more, many of them fleeing losses in Iraq, have flowed into rural parts of the province in recent months, digging in as the U.S.-backed forces concentrate on their assault on the group’s de facto capital, Raqqa, in northern Syria. Stretching along the Euphrates River through Syria’s eastern desert to the border with Iraq, Deir el-Zour is richer and more important strategically than Raqqa, because it is the center of Syria’s oil industry and because of its links to Iraq. Heavily reliant on tribal politics, its population is closely connected to that of Iraq’s Sunni Anbar province — Deiris, as they’re called, joke they are the Iraqis of Syria or the Syrians of Iraq.” Worth the click, here.
The future of USSOF, according to one think tank. How many ways can we describe conflict that doesn’t rise to the level of a war? “Ambiguous warfare,” the “Gray Zone,” “Phase 0” and “competition short of armed conflict” are a few. U.S. special operations forces frequently deploy to these spaces. Now the folks at CNA have charted a way ahead for Washington’s use of those American special operators for the current climate of “global competition,” as CNA puts it. Check out more than three-dozen pages of analysis, here.
Break, break—time for a great photo. Take a look at four Italian frogmen as they exit the Salvatore Todaro, A Type 212 SSK submarine. “This has to be one of the coolest submarine shots of all time!” said Tyler Rogoway, editor of The War Zone, who brought it to our attention thanks to his share of the pic on Twitter.
Pursuing Assange. “U.S. authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange,” CNN reported Thursday. The U.S. had reportedly prepared charges against Assange for the help he provided former Army intelligence soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. But, CNN reports, “The U.S. view of WikiLeaks and Assange began to change after investigators found what they believe was proof that WikiLeaks played an active role in helping Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, disclose a massive cache of classified documents.” More here.
How audio sensors accelerated a quick arrest during the rampage in Fresno, Calif. “Acoustic sensors mounted on lampposts and telephone poles picked up the crack of gunfire and rapidly enabled police to zero in on where it was coming from,” the Associated Press reported Thursday. “First developed two decades ago, ShotSpotter technology has been used widely since 2011 in U.S. cities. The Fresno rampage is one of the more serious crimes in which it played a vital role.”
The culprit in this case: “Kori Ali Muhammad, a 39-year-old black man who authorities say killed three people Tuesday in a bid to wipe out as many whites as possible.”
How the system works: via “numerous sensitive microphones,” AP writes. “Computers and technicians at a California-based center distinguish the sound of gunfire from other noises and triangulate the shots, in much the same way that cell towers are used to zero in on the location of a cellphone. The system can tell police the location and time the shots were fired, how many there were, and sometimes the type of weapon, the number of shooters and whether they changed location as they fired. The information can be sent to officers on the street via their smartphones and their squad-car computer screens, as was the case in Fresno.”
Worth noting for Fresno: “Police said officers were alerted to the gunfire by ShotSpotter even before they received any word from the dispatchers who take 911 calls, and the system pinpointed the shooter’s location to within a matter of feet.”
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Trump has repeatedly said he would rebuild the military with a massive defense spending increase, but the funding planned for next year's budget is less than what the Pentagon sought, according to sources with knowledge of the deliberations.
Mattis is not publicly raising concerns about the $603 billion Pentagon budget plan, aligning himself with the White House's decision, though it's a stance that's sparking frustration from some Republican defense hawks in Congress. But the Pentagon's private assessment matches lawmakers' public criticisms of Trump's budget plan.
"Mattis continues to express to members of the Armed Services Committees that he's being thwarted getting his message out that $603 billion is insufficient to do what Trump has called for," said a Republican lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about internal deliberations.
Trump has said he wants to boost the military by adding tens of thousands more Army soldiers, grow to a 350-ship Navy and add supply the Air Force with more fighter jets.
"Our military is building and is rapidly becoming stronger than ever before. Frankly, we have no choice!" Trump tweeted Sunday. The military, in fact, is still operating under spending levels approved by Congress while President Barack Obama was in office.
In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Badger said, "We expect Congress will work with the administration to fund much of our additional (fiscal) 2017 budget request. The secretary and the service chiefs highlighted the readiness needs of the armed forces in their recent testimony. That has not changed."
While the White House has touted its $603 billion defense budget as a 10% increase of $54 billion, Republican defense hawks say the White House's math doesn't add up. They argue the defense budget is actually about 3% more than the $584 billion that the Obama administration was already planning for in 2018, and that it falls short of the $640 billion that Republicans like Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain of Arizona insist is needed for the military.
In closed-door conversations with the defense committees, Mattis has been asked if the funding was sufficient for a rebuilding on that scale. The secretary has told lawmakers a rebuild is not possible, one of the sources said, with the increase only enough to dig out of the military's readiness holes caused by budget constraints over the past several years.
Politically, it's difficult for Mattis to push for more funding in the Trump budget. The Pentagon was the only agency that received an increase in Trump's budget plan, with all other agencies getting significant cuts that have been slammed by Democrats and some Republicans.
Even as Republican lawmakers push for a higher defense budget, the Trump administration's budget plan faces major hurdles -- including lifting the 2011 budget caps for defense, which Democrats have long blocked so long as they don't receive equal increases for domestic spending.
There's also some doubts the military really faces the readiness crisis Pentagon leaders have warned of, with former Obama Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale
saying in February
to be skeptical because the military services were putting their "worst foot forward."
As the Trump administration prepared its budget outline in January and February, Mattis told the President the Pentagon needed funding at or near the levels that McCain and House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas have called for.
But the Pentagon chief was overruled by another member of Trump's team, budget chief Mick Mulvaney, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations.
Now head of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney was a fiscal hawk in the House who often clashed with his Republican colleagues over his efforts targeting defense spending.
After Mattis made his case to Trump, Mulvaney convinced the President that the budget should not add to the deficit, which was how the administration landed at the $603 billion number.
In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Badger said, "We expect Congress will work with the administration to fund much of our additional (fiscal) 2017 budget request. The secretary and the service chiefs highlighted the readiness needs of the armed forces in their recent testimony. That has not changed."
An OMB spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
The $54 billion increase the Trump administration announced for defense was coupled with an equal $54 billion cut to domestic spending, which kept federal spending under the budget caps agreed to as part of a 2011 law to raise the debt ceiling.
"The core of my first budget blueprint is the rebuilding of our nation's military without adding to our federal deficit," Trump said in a letter attached to the budget blueprint released last month.
The $54 billion increase happens to be the same figure called for by both McCain and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. But they were referring to that amount being added to Obama's 2018 budget plan, not the level under the 2011 budget caps.
In public congressional testimony, Mattis has talked about rebuilding the military as a three-year effort, looking beyond the first Trump budget and into 2019.
Mattis' comments suggest he's accepted the administration's budget plan and is now working within it. But Republicans in Congress want him to fight to change the budget before the full Trump proposal is released next month.
"It is right for a combatant commander to say, 'You tell me my funding level and I'll do the best with it I can,'" said a congressional aide. "That's not the appropriate posture for a secretary of defense."
The frustration from some Republicans in Congress is also directed at Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work -- an Obama holdover who has stayed in his job until his successor is confirmed -- whom Republicans are suspicious of.
Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan
was named
last month as Trump's pick for deputy defense secretary, but he still has to be confirmed by the Senate.
The Pentagon is also pushing for Congress to approve a $30 billion funding supplemental that would add to the military's current budget. The fate of the supplemental, which also includes funding for Trump's border wall, is still unclear as Congress works to pass a spending agreement before funding runs out on April 28.
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Совещание с постоянными членами Совета Безопасности
21 апреля 2017 года Москва, Кремль
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В ходе беседы обсуждались тенденции геополитического развития, вопросы информационной безопасности, а также роль и место России в современном мире.
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It is time to ask the question, should President Trump dump strange bedfellow, Vladimir Putin? If he does not, when Putin is up for reelection in 2018, it would quash election tampering by the Russian opposition and support Exxon Mobil’s joint ventures with Russian state oil.
The mainstream press has unleashed a salvo of calumnies to question President Trump’s favor with Russian leadership. Even during the presidential campaign, Vladimir Putin, who used his own state controlled press to approve our own representative men was vociferously accused of hacking the results of the election when iconoclast, Trump, took the GOP and then, the country. At the height of it, with more of a compliment than he has offered to any of his colleagues, Donald Trump, during the Foreign Policy Debate predicted Syria would turn in favor of the Russians.
The left and certain factions of the right and center have implored the American president that the reason this will not work is because Putin is megalomaniacal, murderous and conniving.
They have reportedly downed drones, hacked election results, and been caught flying over Alaskan airspace. They have been suspect of kompromat over Utah Republican Representative, Jason Chafetz, and his decision not to seek reelection; and Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, according to The Daily Caller.
Fox news first reported that two Russian TU-95 Bear bombers were intercepted off the Alaskan coast by two US F-22 Raptors, on Monday, the Pentagon confirmed. United States military officials passed the incident off as “nothing out of the ordinary” and “not dissimilar from what we’ve seen in the past with respect to Russian long-range aviation.” It is unknown whether the pilots were related to the Kremlin’s recent oil fracking venture in the Arctic. Putin ordered PAO Rosneft to start drilling at its northern most oil well, reported the Financial Times. If all goes successfully, the fuel will fill up to 30% of Russia’s energy demands through the year 2050. Exxon Mobil applied to the Treasury Department for a “waiver from…sanctions” to resume its joint venture with Russian state oil, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, United States jets also intercepted of Russian aircraft off the coast of California in July 2015. That incident featured cockpit-to-cockpit communication in which the Russian pilots relayed the message: “Good morning, American pilots. We are here to greet you on your Fourth of July Independence Day.” Back in February, the USS Porter was sailing in the Black Sea when it encountered Russian aircraft three times.
So why was Trump on Putin’s side to begin with? Russian military support of the Baathist Regime finds them on the side of Iran, and whatever asinine behavior which such regime is guilty of perpetrating. Nonetheless, G7 countries failed to sanction the Kremlin for its support of the Assad regime.
On the one hand, Russia is acting like a lawnmower to cut down the enemy – Islamic State in Syria, (and not to mention al-Nusra Front and the al-Qaeda, among others)—each side vying for control of Aleppo and other strongholds, like gamblers playing juggle with bayonets. But recently, President Donald Trump, rescinded his remarks about the United States’ alliance with the Putin regime in Russia. “Right now, we’re not getting along with Russia at all. Right now were at an all-time low.” he said at a press conference. But later he took to his Twitter account declaring: “Things will work out fine between the U.S.A. and Russia… At the right time everyone will come to their senses & there will be lasting peace!”
It was largely Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged early-April chemical attack on his own civilians that caused President Trump to strike a Syrian airfield with Tomahawk missiles, setting thereby a rupture of geopolitical ties with Russia in Syria and somewhat offset by the biggest move to date which was the dropping of MOABs to buttress a ground offense on NATO in Afghanistan.
But before he makes any swift action, the president must take into account what the Russian opposition hold in store for the war on ISIS and other matters. The main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has been guilty of embezzlement and interference. However, if anyone is altering election results it is him. Russian factions plan to investigate American media outlets to find out whether and how Parliamentary elections in 2016 were influenced when the Putin-backed United Russia party won. Putin will be up for re-election in 2018 and it will be up to the United States to say what side shall fill the Kremlin, is it quid pro quo between Putin and Trump or is it time for change?
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MOSCOW, April 21. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed at the meeting with permanent members of Russia’s Security Council the fight against cyber crime and also the need for international cooperation in war on terror amid the attack on police in Paris, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"A detailed discussion was held on topical issues of Russia’s social and economic development. Participants of the meeting condemned yesterday’s attack on police in Paris and expressed condolences to the French citizens. It was noted that there is no alternative to international cooperation in the fight against terrorism," Peskov said.
The sides also discussed the fight against cyber crime and international regional issues, including Syria, he said.
At least one police officer was killed in the shootout on France’s landmark Champs Elysees boulevard on Thursday, three days before the country is to choose its new president.The shootout took place at 20:50 local time (21:50 Moscow time) on Thursday, in front of the Marks & Spencer store on Champs Elysees, at the corner of Rue de Berri. According to French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet, one officer was shot dead immediately, two others were wounded. A female foreign tourist, who was passing by, was slightly injured.The incident coincided with prime-time TV presidential campaign, aired by the France-2 TV.
