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Trumped Up Trickle Down

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News roundup logoBy Doug Porter

Oh, what a week. And it’s only Wednesday.

While the current President was bidding a dignified farewell and leaving hardly a dry eye in the audience on Tuesday, his successor was tweeting in response to accusations of water sports.

An opposition report, dog-eared from months of circulation around the national press corps, surfaced. It was, we were told, compiled by an ex-British spy with some credibility in intelligence circles, and the internet went wild over claims about Russian dealings with President-elect Donald Trump, including blackmail involving sex workers in a luxury Moscow hotel in 2013.

Claims about cooperation and coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia appear throughout the report. The President-elect’s team supposedly agreed to sideline Russian involvement in the Ukraine as a campaign issue, a charge made credible by the fact that this was the sole issue Trump’s team intervened with regard to the GOP’s convention platform.

Drip…

The first press account yesterday directly referencing the opposition report came via CNN:

Trump

Exterior view of the Ritz Carlton, Moscow

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

Drip, Drip…

The Guardian referenced the report in a story saying Senator John McCain passed along a copy to the FBI in December.

Photo by Abode of Chaos

Senator John McCain, who was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state, dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source and then decided to present the material to Comey in a one-on-one meeting on 9 December, according to a source aware of the meeting. The documents, which were first reported on last year by Mother Jones, are also in the hands of officials in the White House.

McCain is not thought to have made a judgment on the reliability of the documents but was sufficiently impressed by the source’s credentials to feel obliged to pass them to the FBI.

Buried way down in the Guardian story was another potentially damaging nugget:

The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.

Drip, Drip, Drip….BOOM.

Tuesday evening, Buzzfeed News published the entire document, warning that much of the content was unverified. Their rationale, which has met with strong disapproval from much of the legacy media, was “so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.”

BBC Washington Correspondent Paul Wood says the report was not an outlier, via Raw Story:

During a BBC 4 radio broadcast on Wednesday, Wood revealed that the former British spy was not the only source claiming to have knowledge that Russia is possession of sex tapes that could embarrass the president-elect.

“The rumors or the allegations or whatever you want to call them have been circulating for a number of months now,” Wood explained. “I saw the report, compiled by the former British intelligence officer, back in October. He is not, and this is the crucial thing, the only source for this.”

Wood said that he had been told by a member of the U.S. intelligence community that at least one East European intelligence service was aware “that the Russians had kompromat or compromising material on Mr. Trump.”

The President-elect’s reaction came, unsurprisingly, via Twitter.

Here’s the source he apparently trusts:

Bullshitting Wannabes

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical about the specifics of the opposition report published by Buzzfeed.

Andy Greenberg at Wired made the rounds of Those Who Know Things:

“…Bluntly, it looks like an ex-field officer who’s got some interesting sources, but who has no idea how to compile raw HUMINT into usable intelligence,” says Matt Tait, a former staffer of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency. (“HUMINT” stands for “human intelligence,” information obtained from human sources, as opposed to SIGINT, or “signals intelligence,” gathered from intercepted communications.) With its sources redacted and none of the “confidence markings” intelligence agencies use to distinguish which claims are most credible, the document is tough to parse, Tait says.

“The key to usable HUMINT is distinguishing the real, highly placed sources from the bullshitting wannabes who pretend they’re highly placed sources by making shit up that fits the public facts,” says Tait. “In this case, the doc gives no indication that the company has done work to rigorously separate the two…and consequently it’s really hard to tell whether any of the info is actually true, or just a very exciting and expensively produced fan-fiction novel.”

Two Things

For somebody who built his political career over the past few years peddling conspiracies, there is a certain irony in Trump’s crying the blues over fake news.Finally, what I find most amazing about the salacious parts of this story is that nobody seems to want to refute it based on Donald Trump’s moral character.

Don’t Lose Focus

It’s not Donald Trump’s peccadillos we need to worry about: it’s his policies.

I watched the President-elect’s first press conference in six months this morning.

Everybody on Trump’s team agrees the CNN/Buzzfeed reports are [pick your favorite negative word].

Donald Trump appeared, stood beside a big pile of documents, claimed all the questions about conflict of interest are resolved, and handed it off to a lawyer.

Then he returned to the podium.

Every policy question was answered with adjectives, tremendous adjectives, and fantastic campaign rhetoric.

Trump: “I said that I will be the greatest jobs producer that God ever created.”

There was a cheering section–think of it like a laugh track on a TV sitcom–to applaud at key moments.

Contrast and Compare

While I didn’t always approve of Obama’s actions and policies, his farewell speech was a class act. I watched this again to get the horrible images of the past day out of my mind.   

Activism Alert- Mayor Faulconer’s Solutions for Homelessness

Mayor Faulconer has made addressing homelessness a top priority and plans to discuss solutions at the State of the City address.

On Thursday, January 12 at 7:15, Women Occupy San Diego will gather at Horton Plaza following the Mayor’s 2017 State of the City address. There will be a discussion in response to what he proposes as “solutions” to homelessness.

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Doug Porter

Doug Porter

Doug Porter was active in the early days of the alternative press in San Diego, contributing to the OB Liberator, the print version of the OB Rag, the San Diego Door, and the San Diego Street Journal. He went on to have a 35-year career in the Hospitality business and decided to go back into raising hell when he retired. He won numerous awards for his columns from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. Doug is a cancer survivor (sans vocal chords) and lives in North Park.

Comments

  1. One question:

    We read at least once at the NYTimes prior to the election and then several times after the election that Russian Officials were in Contact with Trump Allies. Disturbing, but is it illegal? Is it treasonous? I’m not seeing any information about the apparent ability to impeach based on these facts. It seems there should be some significant consequences.

    Here’s one link (check the date already — this new Intel report is nothing new):
    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/world/europe/trump-campaign-russia.html?_r=0

    Also, some information.

    I read this book exactly a year ago and because it was written by a “Wall Street maverick” I didn’t really promote it as much as I should have. I’m sorry I didn’t as it explains in detail who Putin and his oligarchs are.

    See Bill Browder, Red Notice: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Notice-Finance-Murder-Justice/dp/1476755744

  2. I don’t think that Trump’s followers will be affected much by his peccadilloes in Russia. All his peccadilloes here in the US didn’t make much of a difference to his voters.

    Obama was totally a class act – no scandals, high approval ratings. Trump won’t be that. However, resetting the US relationship with Russia might be a good thing. I don’t think Russia is our enemy regardless of the fact that they don’t “share our values.” Some of our values are good; some of them are bad. Same with Russia. Russia and the US do have common interests like fighting terrorism. The Republican and Democratic establishments seem intent on maintaining Russia as “our enemy.” I don’t think that is necessary or wise. Our enemy is terrorism, not Russia.

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