The Donald Trump Thread

Heck - I want the President to 'collude' with President Putin to make the world a bit more safe!

David

Well this claim might make your day then:

Russian Infiltration of the US Federal Government

Guys, what is really going on?

Putin has vast experience blackmailing billionaires as leverage to pry apart self-destructing superpowers from his KGB days. And what’s happening in the USA of 2017 fits that modus operandi to a tee.

After reading through the Steele paper, and seeing that the only real criticism of it has been that it seems too good to be true, I’m definitely inclined to believe that the CIA and FBI aren’t just pretending to be concerned in the name of party politics (especially since they very rarely see eye-to-eye on anything).

Don’t you find it suspicious that Trump hasn’t made any move to stop sucking up to Russia despite the fact that his entire intelligence network is telling him that the FSB played him like a fiddle, and was directly responsible for sabotaging the American election? Instead, he’s just flipped into indignant denial mode and still aggressively pursues a close economic relationship with a nation who is directly opposed to the USA in every geopolitical way imaginable.

Though this might make you a bit sad:

Putin’s Chekist Cover Has Been Blown

ISIS Doesn't Stand A Chance, Unless America 'Engages' Russia

Instead of contrition or apology, Putin embraces that legacy. He is the Darwinian product of 450 years since the founding of the first secret police, the Oprechnina. “Superior negotiating skills” will not reverse that DNA spiral. Russia thus has a huge asset that ISIS does not. Our visceral reaction against ISIS is absolute. But Putin’s worship of Stalin and adoption of his tactics triggers no comparable reaction in the West. To better understand the point, consider a former Gestapo officer presiding over a Germany that never admits or repents, but instead glorifies Hitler and its Nazi past, and invades Denmark and Holland as “threats” to its security.

Second, the proposal requires that we engage Russia to assist (how, exactly?) countering a secondary danger whose (i) very creation Russia enabled, aided and abetted, that (ii) it continues to promote, and (iii) of which it continues to be the beneficiary of. ISIS’ genome was engineered by Moscow as “Arab Nationalism” in the 1970s and 1980s, training and directing the terrorist assault on the West. The 1972 Munich Olympics. The bomb attack in Brussels on General Alexander Haig, commander of NATO. The bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. The attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba Friendship University seconded foreigners to embed Moscow’s agenda in their own countries. Yassar Arafat was one, the KGB’s makeover receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomenei was another. There were thousands. Home-grown, non-Arab terrorists were even better: Venezuelan Carlos the Jackal, Germans Ulrike Meinhoff, French terrorist Regis Debray and former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. All were either direct KGB agents or KGB-financed.

Moscow never renounced its imperatives in birthing and sustaining Islamic terrorism, Putin declaring at the 2003 conference of the Islamic Conference Organization that Russia was Islam’s historical defender. Alexander Litvinenko was the ex-KGB officer who defected and who in 2005 was assassinated by Moscow in London using Polonium 210—nuclear warfare in Magna Carta’s front yard. He had revealed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, had been trained by the KGB in Dagestan, a region currently controlled by Russia and that was tied to the two Boston Marathon bombers. We know that Al-Zawahiri planned 9/11 with Osama bin Laden. More recently, the KGB has supplied recruits for ISIS from its North Caucasus and Central Asia regions.
 
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Some slightly older articles from the "Russia is chipping at the West" side - meaning John Schindler in this case - on how "conservative" as well "liberal"'s - including/especially Obama - weakness helped lead the way to our current problems and why they will likely continue.

Is this a "neo-conservative" lean against Obama/Snowden/Trump/etc? Fear mongering to placate people who don't want the CIA/FBI/etc to have so much power over us?

Possible, as always it pays to check multiple sources. Admittedly I'm way more "conservative" about Snowden than, say, Glenn Greenwald but I respect Greenwald as a journalist so I still try to give Snowden some benefit of the doubt.

Still, it's riveting reading at the least ->

How Trump Is Beating the Russia Rap


It must be said that President Trump is greatly helped by his adversaries on this issue. Strategists know that having a cooperative enemy is just about the best gift anyone can hope for, in politics as in war, and Trump has just about the most cooperative enemies imaginable here. After decades of low-balling the Russian threat, when not mockingly denying it outright, liberals suddenly see the Kremlin bear lurking menacingly around every corner. Leftists who castigated American intelligence as the enemies of civil liberties, openly hailing defectors to Moscow like Edward Snowden as heroes, now regard our spies as the saviors of our democracy.

This kind of naked partisanship isn’t fooling anybody in the Intelligence Community, which is skeptical of all partisan politics. Worse, the Left has embraced many White House critics whose sole credential is vehement loathing of Republicans in general and Trump supporters in particular. Many of the talking heads cited whenever the issue of Trump and Russia comes up are self-proclaimed experts, while others are outright frauds (MSNBC is particularly egregious in this regard).

Yet this case, given its importance and complexity, demands real expertise—and it can’t be denied that expertise in general is under attack in our society, as elaborated in an excellent new book, The Death of Expertise. Simply put, you need to know a lot of things to grasp the full scope of Russian spy-games against America and how they impact our politics right now.

You need a deep understanding of Russian spycraft, what Moscow calls konspiratsiya(yes, “conspiracy”), which goes back a century and more. The good news is that Kremlin spy-games have remained remarkably consistent over time; the bad news is they’re very intricate and long-term. Russian intelligence agencies are far more aggressive and risk-taking than Western counterparts and they are much more patient. In Moscow, successful espionage operations are measured in decades, not years.

You also need a deep understanding of how the Russians conduct offensive counterintelligence operations, particularly the recruitment of moles inside the enemy’s spy services. The Trump presidency is one piece of a complex Putinist puzzle which includes the long-term, far-reaching penetration of American intelligence agencies by Russian spies. Here the Snowden Operation forms a portion of a much bigger espionage story which must be unraveled to understand how 2016 happened.

Last, you need a deep understanding of how Russian intelligence disseminates propaganda, what the Kremlin calls Active Measures, against their foes. Particularly important is the use of disinformation, which the KGB and its successors have perfected over decades, and they now can disseminate it quickly and easily online. Above all, what’s required to get to the bottom of the Trump mystery is a well-honed ability to unravel the full scope of interlocking Russian spy-games in their strategic—not just tactical—complexity.

The good news for the White House is that the number of people in the West who can grasp all that is rather small. Even in our Intelligence Community, this specialization is rare and customarily considered somewhat odd. You need to understand the Russian mindset, which means you should speak their language and comprehend how they think. You need extensive knowledge of Kremlin spy-cum-propaganda operations going back many decades. That expertise is hardly ever achieved by scholars, so we’re talking about people with a lot of education but also practical experience in high-level counterespionage against the Russians.

To say nothing of the fact that the Russians routinely use provocateurs and fake opposition to muddy the waters whenever questions arise about nefarious Kremlin activities. Vociferous haters of Moscow and all its works have an odd habit of turning out to be secretly on the payroll of Russian spy services, while the Kremlin has employed provocation on an industrial scale for more than a century to confuse the West in its efforts to understand what the Russians are really up to. Chekists like Vladimir Putin take enormous pride in their seasoned ability to run rings around confused foreigners until they get lost in the vaunted “wilderness of mirrors.”

To sum up, the knowledge required here can’t be obtained by reading a few books and consulting Wikipedia. Neither does partisan hackery help in getting to the bottom of Trump’s murky Russia ties. However, dull amateurism matched with naked partisanship constitutes most of what passes for media analysis of this critical issue, and as long as that continues to be the case the president will skirt the serious inquiry the country needs to unravel Donald Trump’s strange relationship with the Kremlin.

Understanding Russia’s SpyWar Against Our Election


However, some salient facts about this secret Kremlin operation need to be understood. In the first place, there wasn’t much “hacking” going on here. Instead, most of the purloining of emails from top Democrats fell under normal 21st century signals intelligence operations of the kind done by Russia, the United States, and pretty much every technically advanced country on earth. Everybody spies—among adults this isn’t a controversial statement.

What set this year’s election games apart, however, was how the Kremlin weaponized what its spies in the ether had systematically purloined, disseminating it through its Wikileaks front to harm the Democrats. Russians intelligence has countless emails from American politicians of every stripe—if you’re a Washington macher of any variety who uses email, it’s a safe bet Moscow reads them—but this year it only wanted to expose the ones from Democrats.

Russians call this kind of nasty covert action scheme Active Measures, and Moscow’s spies have been doing it a long time. The only novelty here is that the Internet makes it devilishly easy to disseminate such disinformation, to use the proper term, quickly and anonymously. As the Internet has sped up our news cycle dramatically, it’s made spreading disinformation faster and easier, too.

Viewed in this manner, several important spy stories in recent years come into focus and can be understood for what they really are. American counterintelligence, which has never been a high priority in Washington, suffered complete collapseduring President Obama’s two terms. In matters of basic security, Obama’s inattention and escapism amount to presidential dereliction of duty. Pretty much all our Federal agencies have been hacked by Russia and/or China, including the White House itself, while the pillaging of the Office of Personnel Management ranks as a security debacle without parallel in espionage history.

Then there’s the case of Edward Snowden, who, contrary to vast media myth-making, did enormous damage to Western intelligence by stealing and leaking 1.5 million classified documents, many of them relating to enormously sensitive intelligence programs. Snowden has been working for the Kremlin since he landed in Moscow in late June 2013—and perhaps before. It’s no coincidence that he was shipped to Moscow by Wikileaks, since that vaunted “privacy organization” has been doing Putin’s bidding for years, long before Julian Assange went on a crusade to take out Hillary Clinton.

Our biggest problem, however, resides in the Russian moles in Washington who haven’t been caught. There was one clear counterintelligence success on Obama’s watch, the roll-up of 10 deep-cover Russians spies in the United States in the summer of 2010. That operation, called Ghost Stories by U.S. counterintelligence, was a genuine coup, although it had been in the works for years, long before Obama moved into the White House. Putin was furious at our unmasking of his network of “Illegals” (to use the Chekist term) in America and he wanted revenge—which he got in 2016.

The most important aspect to Ghost Stories, however, was the dog that didn’t bark. In the course of the extended IC investigation of Russia’s Illegals network, it became obvious that Moscow had several moles in Washington, including inside our intelligence agencies—with one or more burrowed into the National Security Agency, our most important spy service—and Snowden wasn’t one of them. The evidence for their existence going back at least to 2007—and perhaps even earlier—is overwhelming to anyone who understands Russian spy tradecraft, what the Kremlin calls konspiratsiya (yes, conspiracy). Since no Russian moles in our nation’s capital have been unmasked over the last six years, it’s safe to assume they’re still active.
 
Sci,

You really have to realise how bogus all this Russia thing is - I mean do you think for one moment that the US isn't doing this back to them? Now think of the Ukraine and let's say the Ukraine is to Russia as Canada is to the US. Would the US have stayed out of Canada if other countries had destabilised it and started a civil war?

The MSM discussion of Russia is so naive it beggars belief!

David
 
Sci,

You really have to realise how bogus all this Russia thing is - I mean do you think for one moment that the US isn't doing this back to them? Now think of the Ukraine and let's say the Ukraine is to Russia as Canada is to the US. Would the US have stayed out of Canada if other countries had destabilised it and started a civil war?

The MSM discussion of Russia is so naive it beggars belief!

David

Is this really the best response you've got?

I would suggest actually reading the articles - they also criticize the "MSM discussion of Russia". John Schindler is a conservative former intelligence agent who actually writes for the Observer, which Jared Kushner's father owns.

If there's claims in there that you can dispute with counter-evidence I'd be interested in reading. Blanket dismissals where you just know it's all "bogus" aren't very convincing.
 
Sorry I am not American, and that means nothing to me.

David

I'll translate. Busey is/was a total whackjob 'celebrity' and Bundy was a infamous serial killer.

Bonus... Busey was also contestant on a certain other whackjob celebrity's con artist's show, 'celebrity apprentice'. lol
 
Is this really the best response you've got?

I would suggest actually reading the articles - they also criticize the "MSM discussion of Russia". John Schindler is a conservative former intelligence agent who actually writes for the Observer, which Jared Kushner's father owns.

If there's claims in there that you can dispute with counter-evidence I'd be interested in reading. Blanket dismissals where you just know it's all "bogus" aren't very convincing.

To follow up here's what Schindler wrote post-election:

Liberals Are Suddenly Experts in Russian Espionage

"Evidence-free left-wing claims that the Kremlin elected Trump are politically toxic and threaten to undermine our system"

What he's talking about is inline with but not completely parallel to what bitter Hillary supporters want to be true. And he notes, multiple times, that in his opinion Obama is to blame for Putin's extended reach into influencing Western elections. Admittedly simply being a "liminal" writer who is not toeing the party line doesn't make him magically right - another "liminal" writer, Glenn Greenwald (major left-wing Hillary critic during the campaign), is extremely skeptical of a Trump-Russia criminal connection.

But reading both perspectives seems worth a person's time, since it's entirely plausible based on a study of history that Putin is pushing both far-right parties in the West and Islamic fundamentalists.

High stakes to say the least...
 
The (lightly) edited transcript of the Time interview leads me to conclude Trump is incoherent, insecure and delusional. I truly thought it was satire until realising it was not.

I laugh a lot when I watch his speeches.

I loved Trump's inauguration speech when he was standing in front of past presidents, the current president, and members of congress and in the true spirit of bipartisanship, he called all of them a bunch of crooks. That was coherent, a sign of self confidence, and maybe the truest thing ever said in Washington D.C.


For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left. And the factories closed.
...
The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

...
an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge
...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States
The Loudoun County, Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. is the highest-income county by median household income. Another Washington suburb, Arlington County, Virginia, ranks as the highest-income county by median family income.[2]

Many of the top counties in the following lists are found in the Northeast Megalopolis, particularly in the Washington metropolitan area and the New York metropolitan area.​
 
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@Hurm,
what is your view on Rex Tillerson
161206082614-rex-tillerson-exxon-vladimir-putin-780x439.jpg

Swamp creature?
Friend of Russia?
Right man for the job?
 
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The (lightly) edited transcript of the Time interview leads me to conclude Trump is incoherent, insecure and delusional. I truly thought it was satire until realising it was not.

I'm kinda amazed he still says Cruz's father maybe helped kill JFK, but Cruz doesn't seem to mind anymore...

It seems this penchant for story telling may be spreading to others associated with Trump:

Intel chair Devin Nunes unsure if Trump associates were directly surveilled
.

Nunes also can't seem to bring himself to deny that his "source" was the White House.

@Hurm,
what is your view on Rex Tillerson

Swamp creature?
Friend of Russia?
Right man for the job?

Exxon ‘lost’ emails from Rex Tillerson’s alias account
 
@Hurm,
what is your view on Rex Tillerson
161206082614-rex-tillerson-exxon-vladimir-putin-780x439.jpg

Swamp creature?
Friend of Russia?
Right man for the job?

He's certainly got an unusual talent for looking villainous in photographs I've seen of him, but I haven't investigated him enough yet to have an opinion. Once I acquire an opinion I'll try to get back here and report.
 
What president pussygrabber said and tweeted throughout his campaign, an now during his presidency, is so unhinged, so contradictory, so demonstrably untrue, it beggars belief.

That is not news, but what struck me over the last days, is the way his devotees defend his ramblings.
To me it is beginning to look a lot as what believers do with their holy books. They decide what was metaphorical, what was literal, what is not to be taken serious. They decide what is better ignored, they apply meaning after the fact , and so on... It is becoming very cultish if watched from a bit of a distance .

It might even be compared with the way Nostradamus and his nonsense quatrains are explained.
 
But reading both perspectives seems worth a person's time, since it's entirely plausible based on a study of history that Putin is pushing both far-right parties in the West and Islamic fundamentalists.

High stakes to say the least...

Continuing with this, at minimum, entertaining conspiracy theory:

A former NSA analyst says the Russia investigations could end Donald Trump's presidency

"There is very damning evidence, but it's top secret evidence. That's the whole problem, which is why the public discussion of this is sort of a shadow dance."

So why has the evidence not been leaked to the public?

"Information of the kind that we're talking about, which is intelligence information from U.S. and partner agencies about, not just Americans, but extraordinarily prominent Americans — the president's inner circle — is extraordinarily 'compartmented' as we say in the spy world."

"The number of people who actually are seeing the information is really quite small, which means the number of people who could leak it is quite small. Of course those people are not normally going to leak it."

"I will tell you that I have friends very close to the investigation and what they've told me is there is a considerable amount of signals intelligence — that is, phone intercepts, travel tracking, that sort of thing — some human intelligence about meetings that have happened between Team Trump principals and prominent Russians."

"None of this information, by itself, is, as we say, a smoking gun or a slam dunk. But collectively they create an indelible impression of collusion last year between Team Trump and the Kremlin."

Putin to turn on ‘refugee tap’ to send migrants to EU and DESTROY bloc, Brussels fears


Putin’s Support for Europe’s Far-Right Just Turned Lethal


The Real Ed Snowden Is a Patsy, a Fraud and a Kremlin-Controlled Pawn


Russian fighters are joining ISIS in record numbers
 
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Bannon confronted members of the House Freedom Caucus earlier this week during the White House's push for the American Health Care Act, Axios's Mike Allen reported Saturday in his newsletter.

"Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill,” Bannon reportedly said.

A Freedom Caucus member reportedly replied: “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn't listen to him, either."
http://thehill.com/homenews/325767-...his-is-not-a-debate-you-have-to-vote-for-bill
 
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