Saturday 27th of April 2024
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the russians did (not do) it...

dolls Speaking to Radio Sputnik about his explosive, detailed and documented but broadly overlooked investigation into how US intelligence agencies, not Russia, were the ones trying to meddle in the 2016 US presidential race, retired CIA officer-turned political activist Ray McGovern outlined why changing Americans' minds on the matter is so difficult.


 

McGovern's report, which came out last week, provided new, documented proof on some of the ways US intelligence officers attempted to interfere in the 2016 election, and on how pro-Clinton FBI staffers now involved in the alleged Trump-Russia collusion investigation worked to try to immunize former Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton from crimes including lying to the FBI and endangering state secrets.

Sputnik: Tell us a little about this report, and how you came about creating it.

Ray McGovern: Well, it was not very difficult. The fact that our report is unique is a symptom of the blanket coverage saying that Russia interfered in our election. Even most of my progressive colleagues believe that and so this is a counter-narrative, and it's really hard to change your mind around into believing something very different, even if, as in this case, it's based on documentary evidence.

So, just let me note at the outset that this is the first request, after several days of this article being up on the web in various places, for an interview, on this shocking news that it might not be Russia that intervened into our election, but rather the FBI in cooperation with the CIA and others who we call the deep state.

 

The story is simply this: the exchange of emails that was released by the Department of Justice inspector general shows that very top level FBI officials, including the head of counterintelligence, were plotting to make sure #1: that Trump did not win and #2: that if he did win, they would be able to push a narrative saying 'Aha, he didn't win fairly, and it was the Russians that helped him win.'

That is the narrative that prevails in our media right now; it's a really, really shameful thing because even my progressive friends believe it. Even the progressive website that used to automatically print my materials, like CommonDreams for example, or Amy Goodman on Democracy Now. I am shunned, like those dissidents in Russia way back when the Soviet Union existed.

Sputnik: Why would the FBI and the CIA try to promote this Russian-hacking narrative, when implying that they could allow such a thing to happen makes them look incompetent?

Ray McGovern: If it were true, it would make them incompetent. You're quite right; they're pushing a narrative that should be embarrassing, but the American people are not aware of what's really going on, because the media presents a one-sided view here.

The intelligence agencies were first and foremost determined [to ensure] that Trump could not win. You have not only this business coming out of the FBI – mainly documentary evidencein the form of text messages, but the…[forensically disproven] notion that Russia hacked into the DNC emails and gave them to WikiLeaks. When I say that's disproven, it all hinges on the forensic studies we have supervised, made and reported on, which show that this Guciffer 2.0 is a fraud…He's an entity that was invented, we think, by Bill Binney from the NSA, earlier. And I think that it was probably our own security services who invented Guciffer 2.0 and used this entity as a way of showing 'Oh, here are Russian templates on these messages!' and 'Oh, here's a little bit of Cyrillic!' They superimposed this 'evidence' on these messages to show that the Russians hacked. That is disproven by forensics now.

 

It's very important that people know this, but just as other things that show the faults of the narrative that prevails, it does not appear in the media, not even in the so-called progressive media.

Sputnik: Donald Trump is known for his difficult relationship with the security agencies. What do you make of that?

Ray McGovern: Well let me just give you one example. Right before he became president, that is on the 6th of January [2017]…the FBI, the CIA and the NSA gave him a scurrilous document that indicated that he had been guilty of all manner of profane and other activities captured by the [Russian FSB] when he visited Moscow many years ago. Why did they do that? They did it as an annex to another report that had no proof in real evidence, that is, that the Russians, under the direction of President Putin, interfered in our elections.

What happened was, three of them presented it, and one stayed behind, and that was James Comey of the FBI…[who] gave [Trump] what was called the dossier, the dossier about all of these terrible things. Now none of them are true. It's disproven and really conjured up. Why did they do it? It's an old tactic that the FBI uses. They say to an incoming president, 'we have this information on you, so just be aware.'…If I were Mr. Trump, I would react very, very negatively to that, because this is the old implicit trick of blackmail; that the security services have this information on a new president, and they can use it at any time if he does not do the bidding of the security services.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201801151060773365-ray-mcgovern-intervi...

the no trump FBI...

Special Report: In the Watergate era, liberals warned about U.S. intelligence agencies manipulating U.S. politics, but now Trump-hatred has blinded many of them to this danger becoming real, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes.



By Ray McGovern


Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Ten illustrative texts from their exchange appear at the end of this article.)

Despite his former job as chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence section, Strzok had the naive notion that texting on FBI phones could not be traced. Strzok must have slept through “Security 101.” Or perhaps he was busy texting during that class. Girlfriend Page cannot be happy at being misled by his assurance that using office phones would be a secure way to conduct their affair(s).

It would have been unfortunate enough for Strzok and Page to have their adolescent-sounding texts merely exposed, revealing the reckless abandon of star-crossed lovers hiding (they thought) secrets from cuckolded spouses, office colleagues, and the rest of us. However, for the never-Trump plotters in the FBI, the official release of just a fraction (375) of almost 10,000 messages does incalculably more damage than that.

We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process. And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State.

More of the Strzok-Page texting dialogue is expected to be released. And the Department of Justice Inspector General reportedly has additional damaging texts from others on the team that Special Counsel Robert Mueller selected to help him investigate Russia-gate.

Besides forcing the removal of Strzok and Page, the text exposures also sounded the death knell for the career of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, in whose office some of the plotting took place and who has already announced his plans to retire soon.

But the main casualty is the FBI’s 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama administration’s Russia-gate intelligence “assessment,” electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets.

Ironically, the Strzok-Page texts provide something that the Russia-gate investigation has been sorely lacking: first-hand evidence of both corrupt intent and action. After months of breathless searching for “evidence” of Russian-Trump collusion designed to put Trump in the White House, what now exists is actual evidence that senior officials of the Obama administration colluded to keep Trump out of the White House – proof of what old-time gumshoes used to call “means, motive and opportunity.”

Even more unfortunately for Russia-gate enthusiasts, the FBI lovers’ correspondence provides factual evidence exposing much of the made-up “Resistance” narrative – the contrived storyline that The New York Times and much of the rest of the U.S. mainstream media deemed fit to print with little skepticism and few if any caveats, a scenario about brilliantly devious Russians that not only lacks actual evidence – relying on unverified hearsay and rumor – but doesn’t make sense on its face.

The Russia-gate narrative always hinged on the preposterous notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin foresaw years ago what no American political analyst considered even possible, the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. According to the narrative, the fortune-telling Putin then risked creating even worse tensions with a nuclear-armed America that would – by all odds – have been led by a vengeful President Hillary Clinton.

Read more:

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/01/11/the-fbi-hand-behind-russia-gate/

I know how wrong I was...

from Chris Floyd...

 

I'm ashamed, but I'll go ahead and admit it: For years, I thought Rupert Murdoch was the single worst poisoner of our political system. I thought the Civil Rights movement was a remarkable manifestation of the human spirit. But now, thanks to our sensible Democratic centrists, I know how wrong I was.

Over the course of the past year, I've finally seen the light. Now I know that Vladimir Putin is behind every malign element in today's political scene. What's more, I've finally realized that Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks and all those other malcontents who moaned about social and economic and racial "injustice" in America were just dupes – or agents! – of the Russians, sowing dissent and disruption in our exceptional land.

With the Russians stirring up all that bother in the Fifties and Sixties, we forgot that we are great because we are good. Any "protest" about US society could only be caused by dezinformatsiya spread by wicked foreigners and their unwitting (or oh-so-witting!) tools. But now, praise God, I'm a good centrist again! If anyone challenges incremental, corporate-funded, hyper-militaristic neoliberalism in any way, I know what to do: Denounce them! And denounce their master, Putin.

I don't have to worry anymore about Murdoch or Mercers or Kochs, about religious cranks or Randian kooks. I don't have to worry anymore about centuries of endemic, deliberately fomented white supremacy used to divide working people from each other so the wealthy few can gorge their fill! I don't have to do the most painful thing of all: look at our actual history and see how Democratic support – and advancement – of a rapacious economic system and all-devouring war machine has been absolutely crucial to the decay and disintegration of US society, and the destabilization and impoverishment of the world at large.

No, I'm here to tell you that I have laid that burden down. Now I know that all our troubles, yesterday, today and tomorrow, are due to the eternal machinations of the Russians. 

read more:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/articles/a-liberal-s-confession-16012018...

 

increasingly desperate...

With Congress increasingly desperate to turn up something that they can pin on Russia interference-wise, there is growing pressure on major technology companies to dig through their logs and try to find something conceivably Russia-related.

Facebook has appeared to be the most eager to come up with something, having claimed that 129 “events” were created by people they suspect of being in league with the Russians, though later conceding that they had no information if any of those events ever actually took place.

Facebook did, however, claim an “insignificant” overlap between the putative Russian and the Trump campaign. That’s somewhat surprising, as oftentimes attempts to label someone a secret Russian hinge heavily on them being perceived as pro-Trump in such after the fact investigations.

 

Read more:

https://news.antiwar.com/2018/01/26/tech-companies-see-no-evidence-of-russian-influence-in-us-elections/

steele — the clinton's man of rust...

The heavily redacted memorandum represents the declassified version of the criminal referral against Steele, which was filed by the senators, saying that Steele was receiving information from "a foreign sub-source" who was in touch with "a friend of the Clintons."

The document unveils the coordination between Clinton's circle and the Obama administration, as part of an effort to source damaging information about then-candidate Trump.

"It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele's work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility," the senators wrote to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia probe, and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Controvercial anti-Trump Dossier

The dossier about alleged collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia was first published by BuzzFeed a few days before his inauguration in January, 2017.

 

The document was written by former British spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by research firm Fusion GPS, which later turned out to have received funding from the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Folowing the publication, in October 2016, The Washington Post reported that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had helped fund Fusion GPS' research on Trump's alleged ties with Russia.

The Fusion GPS company was originally hired to do research during the 2016 Republican primary campaign for a still unknown Republican donor who wanted to defeat Trump.

The document claimed that the Russian government had compromising information on Trump, which has been denied both by the US president and by Moscow. Almost a year after its publication, the vast majority of the salacious claims contained within remain unverified.

 

All these publications triggered two separate investigations - dubbed a "witch hunt" by the US president - are currently being conducted by the US Senate and Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign's supposed "collusion" with Moscow, a claim that has been called "groundless" by the Kremlin.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201802051061377840-clinton-trump-dossier/

unconfirmed visit...

The Director of the Russian Federal Security Service (Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации, FSB), General Alexander Bortnikov, and that of the Foreign Intelligence Service (Служба внешней разведки, SVR), Sergey Naryshkin, paid a secret visit to the United States at end of January 2018. They were received by Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA, and Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence.

A high-profile political figure, Sergey Naryshkin (photo) has been a member of President Putin’s security detail since the 1990s at the Saint Petersburg City Hall where Putin entered politics. He was director of Russia’s first television channel, served as president of the Duma and deputy prime minister.

Since Crimea joined the Russian Federation, he has been targeted with sanctions by the United States ... including a ban to enter US territory issued by President Obama in March 2014.

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article199603.html

 

This news, unconfirmed, would have a great chance of being accurate.