Showing posts with label FBI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FBI. Show all posts

Blood Sports

SUBHEAD: Trump is a more troubling personality than Nixon, infantile, narcissistic, at times verging on psychotic.

By James Kunstler on 12 May 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/7571/)


Image above: Donald Trump "wax figure" at Ripley's Odditorium in Orlando, Florida. From what we can tell the wax figures hands have been slightly enlarged and the finger fattened up like Polish sausage.From (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rosie-odonnell-in-new-twitter-attack-we-have-three-weeks-to-stop-trump_us_586b2c56e4b0d9a5945c3b9c?slideshow=true#gallery/5826518ee4b0c4b63b0cc448/1).

What you’re seeing in the political miasma of “RussiaGate” is an exercise in nostalgia. Apart from the symbolic feat of getting a “black” president freely elected in 2008 (remember, Mr. Obama is also half-white), the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed a political triumph in half a century to match the Watergate extravaganza of 1972-74, which ended in the departure of Mr. Nixon, the designated Prince of Darkness of those dear dead days. Watergate had had a more satisfying finale than The Brides of Dracula.

So, in its current sad state, devoid of useful political ideas, mired in the mostly manufactured conflicts of race and gender, psychologically crippled by the election loss of a miserable candidate to the Golden Golem of Greatness, the Democratic Party is returning full steam to a gambit that worked so well years ago: beating the devil by congressional inquiry.

In President Trump (uccchhh, the concept!), they’ve got a target much juicier even than Old Nixie. It wasn’t for nothing that they called him “Tricky Dick.” He came back from political near-death twice in his career.

The first time, running as Dwight Eisenhower’s veep, he was accused of accepting the gift of a vicuna coat for his wife, Pat, and other secret cash emoluments. He overcame that with one of the first epic performances of the TV age, the “Checkers Speech” — Checkers being the family’s cocker spaniel, who Nixon invoked as a proxy for his own guileless innocence. It worked bigly.

The second near-death was his defeat in the California governor’s race of 1962, following his 1960 squeaker presidential election loss to John F. Kennedy. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore…” he told the press.

But he rose from the grave in 1968 — after fortifying his bank account in a Wall Street law practice — when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart (and wrecking the Democratic Party of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey).

It is not unrecognized that in his first term Nixon functioned as a very capable executive, presiding over social and environmental legislation that would be considered progressive today — though he remained mired in the tarbaby of Vietnam.

But then, in the reelection campaign of ’72, he got a little too cute — or, at least, his campaign show-runners did, hiring a klatch of bumbling ex-CIA errand boys to burgle the DNC offices, who were then caught red-handed at the scene, which was the basement of the Watergate apartment complex… and the rest is history.

What a fabulous inquisition Watergate was! What a colorful cast characters: the wily old “country lawyer” Senator Sam Ervin, the dashing chief staff inquisitor Professor Sam Dash, the fallen Republican knights, Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox, the lonely and heroic bean-spiller, John Dean! And many more.

The Watergate hearings on TV were more thrilling than Downtown Abby. Once Old Nixie went down the path of stonewalling and evasion — covering up an escapade he might not have even known about at the time — he was dead meat.

I remember that sweaty August day that he threw in the towel. (I was a young newspaper reporter when newspapers still mattered.) It was pretty much a national orgasm. “NIXON RESIGNS!” the headlines screamed. A moment later he was on the gangway into the helicopter for the last time.

Enter, stage right, the genial Gerald Ford….

Forgive me for getting caught up in the very nostalgia I castigate. And now here we are in the mere early months of Trumptopia about to hit the replay button on a televised inquisition.

In my humble opinion, Donald Trump is a far more troubling personality than Tricky Dick ever was, infantile, narcissistic, at times verging on psychotic, but the RussiaGate story looks pretty flimsy.

At this point, after about ten months of NSA-FBI investigation, nothing conclusive has turned up about Trump’s people “colluding” with Russia to gain unfair advantage in the election against You-Know-Who. Former NSA chief James Clapper has publicly stated twice in no uncertain terms that there’s no evidence to support the allegations (so far).

And there remains the specter of the actual content of the “collusion” — conveniently ignored by the so-called “Resistance” and its water-carriers at The New York Times — the hacked emails that evince all kinds of actual misbehavior by Secretary of State HRC and the DNC.

The General Mike Flynn episode seems especially squishy, since it is the routine duty of incoming foreign affairs officials to check in with the ambassador corps in Washington. Why do you think nations send ambassadors to other countries?

The upshot of all this will be a political circus for the rest of the year and the abandonment of any real business in government, at a moment in history when some very weighty black swans circle above the clouds waiting to crash land.

Enjoy the histrionics if you dare, and pay no attention to collapsing economy as it all plays out.

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Is Grizzly Steppe a joke?

SUBHEAD: No,Grizzley Steppe is not a locale in Yellowstone Park or a Chippandale dancer's name. It's just propaganda.

By Deirdre Fulton on 30 December 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/30/critics-still-see-holes-us-evidence-russian-election-interference)


Image above: Jeh Johnson, Director of the Department of Homeland Security under cover as male stripper "Grizzly Steppe" of Chipendale's. From Wikipedia and (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d1/64/ba/d164ba23e6e8a95d8f29ae33813c23e7.jpg). Mashup by Juan Wilson.

[IB Publisher's note: Grizzly Steppe is actually a ridiculous name made up by US intelligence agencies. On Thursday, the DHS and FBI released a report on alleged Russian election interference, dubbed GRIZZLY STEPPE]

Critics still see holes in US 'Evidence' of Russian election interference. Like the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi WMDs, the charges that Russia 'hacked' the presidential election in November have not been established beyond secret intelligence sources.

As the U.S. expels 35 Russian diplomats over hacking charges, critics say the so-called evidence released Thursday alongside President Barack Obama's sanctions is an insufficient response to calls for hard proof of the allegations.

The FBI/Department of Homeland Security Joint Analysis Report "Grizzly Steppe" (pdf), published as part of the White House's response to alleged Russian government interference in the 2016 election process, "adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the [Democratic National Committee, or DNC], the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], the email accounts of Democratic party officials, or for delivering the content of those hacks to WikiLeaks," wrote cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr on Friday.

The brief report "merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company that is suspected of being Russian-made and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists," Carr said.
He continued:
If the White House had unclassified evidence that tied officials in the Russian government to the DNC attack, they would have presented it by now. The fact that they didn't means either that the evidence doesn't exist or that it is classified.
If it's classified, an independent commission should review it because this entire assignment of blame against the Russian government is looking more and more like a domestic political operation run by the White House that relied heavily on questionable intelligence generated by a for-profit cybersecurity firm with a vested interest in selling "attribution-as-a-service."
In fact, cyber-expert Robert M. Lee, in his posted critique on Friday, noted that the FBI/DHS report "is intended to help network defenders; it is not the technical evidence of attribution."

As such, Lee argued, it is likely to "confuse readers" who are seeking such evidence.

Meanwhile, Intercept journalist Sam Biddle, who recently published a take-down of the public evidence that had been put forth as of mid-December, added his voice to calls for more in the way of hard evidence:
Sam Biddle @samfbiddle
GRIZZLY STEPPE only restates premise that APT 28/29 are Russian gov, rather than proving it. let’s hope for more in congressional testimony
And The Young Turks politics reporter Jordan Chariton also raised questions in a video posted Thursday afternoon:


Video above: Jordan Chiriton From (https://youtu.be/snJin79SbaU).

For raising these questions, Chariton and others who supported his demand were branded "Kremlin cheerleaders," continuing what journalist Glenn Greenwald described as a trend:
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
it's worse than that. If you question adequacy of the evidence or want to see more, they'll accuse you of disloyalty & being a Russian agent https://twitter.com/JustinRaimondo/status/814875448651853824 
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
Lets be clear: U aren't an American patriot & don't respect Constitution if u believe Saddam more than our President & intelligent services https://twitter.com/matthewjdowd/status/814615305729220609 
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
Words don't exist for how low it is to depict someone as a Kremlin agent or traitor for questioning adequacy of evidence for USG assertions.
Like Greenwald, author and media critic Howard Friel sees parallels between the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the current "unconfirmable claims" of Russian election interference.
"Like the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi [weapons of mass destruction], the charges that Russia 'hacked' the presidential election in November have not been established beyond secret intelligence sources, which have been treated and printed by the New York Times as impeccable," Friel wrote on Friday.     

He continued:
Just as the Times editorial page in February 2003 had no basis for concluding that Colin Powell's presentation at the UN was "the most powerful case to date" that Iraq possessed WMD, the Times today has no confirmable basis for concluding that "there should be no doubt" that Russia hacked the presidential election last month or that President Obama has any basis for "punishing Russia," which in any event is unprofessional and jingoistic journalistic usage from the leading newspaper in the United States.

Yet, it reflects the warlike tone and tenor of the liberal political and journalistic establishments, led by the New York Times, which seems determined to drive us over the cliff once again toward war.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he would not expel any U.S. diplomats in retaliation for Obama's moves—"a surprisingly calm reaction," as the Guardian described, "that appears to be designed as an overture to the incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump."

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Wikileaks got info from Democrat

SUBHEAD: Ex-British ambassador who is now a WikiLeaks operative claims Russia did NOT hack Clinton emails.

By Alan Goodman on 14 December 2016 for the Daily Mail -
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4034038/Ex-British-ambassador-WikiLeaks-operative-claims-Russia-did-NOT-provide-Clinton-emails-handed-D-C-park-intermediary-disgusted-Democratic-insiders.html)


Image above: John Posdesta in a "I guess I blew it!" moment.  From (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/russia-responsible-podesta-wikileaks-hack-230095).

[IB Publisher's note: This explanation of obtaining Wikileaks and publishing John Podesta the contents of John Podesta's emails is at least as convincing as "It was a Russian hack job!" version the Democrats are putting up. The point is "Are they the truth?" Apparently the answer is Wikileaks published the truth. The other explanation is out there too - that Podesta's staff fell for an obvious phishing effort with a staff member falling for an email saying "You must change your gmail password immediately!" In either case -the Clintons were fools who committed criminal behavior and Podesta is a fool.]

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.

Murray's claims about the origins of the Clinton campaign emails comes as U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly confident that Russian hackers infiltrated both the Democratic National Committee and the email account of top Clinton aide John Podesta.

In Podesta's case, his account appeared to have been compromised through a basic 'phishing' scheme, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly told members of Congress during classified briefings that they believe Russians passed the documents on to Wikileaks as part of an influence operation to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump.

But Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' Murray said. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

He said the leakers were motivated by 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.'

Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

His account cannot be independently verified but is in line with previous statements by Wikileaks - which was the organization that published the Podesta and DNC emails.

Wikileaks published the DNC messages in July and the Podesta messages in October. The messages revealed efforts by some DNC officials to undermine the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was running against Hillary Clinton.

Others revealed that Clinton aides were concerned about potential conflicts and mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation.

Murray declined to say where the sources worked and how they had access to the information, to shield their identities.

He suggested that Podesta's emails might be 'of legitimate interest to the security services' in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials.

Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from intelligence officials that Wikileaks was given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.

'I don't understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn't true,' he said. 'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.'

Murray was a vocal critic of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan while serving as ambassador between 2002 and 2004, a stance that pitted him against the UK Foreign Office.

He describes himself as a 'close associate' of Julian Assange and has spoken out in support of the Wikileaks founder who has faced rape allegations and is currently confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Assange has similarly disputed that charges that Wikileaks received the leaked emails from Russian sources.

'The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,' Assange told John Pilger during an interview in November.

'Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That's false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.'

The Washington Post reported last Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies had 'identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails.'

The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.

'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. 'That's the consensus view.'

The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.

'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the
Post. 'That's the consensus view.'

The Obama administration has been examining Russia's potential role in trying to influence the presidential election. Officials said Russians hacked the Republican National Committee, but did not release that information in a deliberate effort to damage Clinton and protect Donald Trump.

Several congressional committees are also looking into the suspected Russian interference.

While there is a consensus on Capitol Hill that Russia hacked U.S. political groups and officials, some Republicans say it's not clear whether the motive was to try to swing the election or just to collect intelligence.

'Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that's the subject of investigation,' said Sen. John McCain on CBS Face the Nation. 'But facts are stubborn things, they did hack into this campaign.'

President elect Donald Trump raised doubts about the reports and said this was an 'excuse' by Democrats to explain Clinton's November loss.

'It's just another excuse. I don't believe it,' said Trump on Fox News Sunday.


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Hello Russia! Are you there?

SUBHEAD: There is a war going on between US intelligent/security services involving China and Russia.

By Dmitry Orlov on 13 December 2016 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2016/12/hello-russia.html)


Image above: Today's page hits by country to cluborlov.blogspot.com. Note the unlikely possibility that Russian traffic exceeds American traffic on this English language blog. From original article.

Over the past week, Google's Blogger has been reporting an excessive number of visits to this blog coming from Russia. This data is not corroborated by other web traffic monitoring sources, including Revolver Maps or Google's own Google Analytics.

Looking at the structure of the “Russian” traffic, it looks very much like random noise. What could this possibly be? “Evidence of Russian hacking,” anyone?

Well, here it is, finally! Let's not forget, Google founder Sergei Brin is a Russian... And here we were thinking that “Russian hacking” is as real as “Iraqi WMDs”! Shame on us!

 Below is the December 13th, 2016 page hits by country to cluborlov.blogspot.com.




Dasvidaniya Rossiya!

SUBHEAD: You're not the only one Dmitry. At least my American readers outnumber the Russians.

By Juan Wilson on 14 December 2016 for Island Breath -
(islandbreath.blogspot.com/2016/12/hello-russia-are-you-there.html)


Image above: Today's page hits by country to islandbreath.blogspot.com. Note new heavy traffic from Russia as well as significant traffic from China. Both are new phenomena... and possible fake.

IslandBreath.org has been getting similar "misinformation" monitoring traffic to our website. Our website is divided into two internet service providers (isp). One isp has the oldest material on the "islandbreath.org" site from 1993 to 2009. That isp provider also has the outer frame that nests the newer material on the "islandbreath.blogspot.com"  that has been posted day to day since 2009.

The blogspot.com and blogger.com web tools were bought up by Google several years ago as blogging and blogger.com were getting very popular.

I know, that's sounds confusing but is is the way it is... and is does let me see things a bit differently then just through the viewport of Google's monitoring tools.

What I've discovered is that for some time in the recent past "Russian" views of our site have increased by at least two orders of magnitude. It is interesting that Club Orlov has more Russian than American traffic. Unlike Dmytri's site on the Island Breath sitethe Chinese traffic has increased similarly. American traffic to our website appears the Chinese traffic yesterday was almost almost tied with Russia. See chart above of our latest website traffic taken today.

But as Dmitry Orlov has discovered, other traffic statistic counters other than that provided by blogger.com have widely different results. IslandBreath uses www.statcounter.com to monitor traffic on our sites. Today it show the most recent traffic having hit from Hong Kong and no other traffic from China and no traffic from Russia.


Image above: The image above is a screen capture of recent traffic today 12/14/16 on our islandbreath.blogspot.com site provided by statcounter.com.

It looks like the anti-Trump elements (including CIA) of the American intelligent/security apparatus are trashing Russia and blaming it for the election Clinton loss. On the other hand elements of the FBI are on the other side of that fight.

Something is going on here that I suggest is disinformation that could threaten alternative news, information and opinion expressed on the most prevalent source for such information - the internet and its variations in social media.

The other aspect of this we should be aware of is the fake "Fake News" debacle. The US Congress has moved to "eliminate" sources of non approved "fake news". See below.



Disinformation & Propaganda

SUBHEAD: Senate passes billgiving the government a full mandate to punish, shut down or otherwise prosecute, any website it deems offensive and a source of foreign government propaganda.

By Tyler Durden on 12 December 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-10/senate-quietly-passes-countering-disinformation-and-propaganda-act)

While we wait to see if and when the Senate will pass (and president will sign) Bill  "H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017", which was passed by the House at the end of November with an overwhelming majority and which seeks to crack down on websites suspected of conducting Russian propaganda and calling for the US government to "counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly,” another, perhaps even more dangerous and limiting to civil rights and freedom of speech bill passed on December 8.

Recall that as we reported in early June, "a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth has been quietly introduced in Congress. As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information.

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability

Also called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016 (S. 2692), when introduced in March by Sen. Rob Portman, the legislation represents a dramatic return to Cold War-era government propaganda battles. “

These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations,” Portman explained, adding that while the U.S. spends a relatively small amount on its Voice of America, the Kremlin provides enormous funding for its news organization, RT.“Surprisingly,”

Portman continued, “there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.”

Long before the "fake news" meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on wuch mainstream fake news portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would rask the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.

Fast forward to this past Thursday, December 8, when the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" passed in the Senate, quietly inserted inside the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report.

Here is the full statement issued by the generously funded Senator Rob Portman (R- Ohio) on the passage of a bill that further chips away at press liberties in the US, and which sets the stage for future which hunts and website shutdowns, purely as a result of an accusation that any one media outlet or site is considered as a source of "disinformation and propaganda" and is shut down by the government.

Senate Passes Major Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill as Part of NDAA
Portman/Murphy Bill Promotes Coordinated Strategy to Defend America, Allies Against Propaganda and Disinformation from Russia, China & Others 

U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) today announced that their Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act – legislation designed to help American allies counter foreign government propaganda from Russia, China, and other nations – has passed the Senate as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report.

The bipartisan bill, which was introduced by Senators Portman and Murphy in March, will improve the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation by establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government.

To support these efforts, the bill also creates a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside government who are engaged in counter-propaganda related work. This will better leverage existing expertise and empower local communities to defend themselves from foreign manipulation.

“The passage of this bill in the Senate today takes us one critical step closer to effectively confronting the extensive, and destabilizing, foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us. While the propaganda and disinformation threat has grown, the U.S. government has been asleep at the wheel.

Today we are finally signaling that enough is enough; the United States will no longer sit on the sidelines. We are going to confront this threat head-on,” said Senator Portman. “With the help of this bipartisan bill, the disinformation and propaganda used against our allies and our interests will fail.”

“Congress has taken a big step in fighting back against fake news and propaganda from countries like Russia. When the president signs this bill into law, the United States will finally have a dedicated set of tools and resources to confront our adversaries’ widespread efforts to spread false narratives that undermine democratic institutions and compromise America’s foreign policy goals,” said Murphy.

 “I’m proud of what Senator Portman and I accomplished here because it’s long past time for the U.S. to get off the sidelines and confront these growing threats.”

NOTE: The bipartisan Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is organized around two main priorities to help achieve the goal of combatting the constantly evolving threat of foreign disinformation. They are as follows:
  • The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering foreign propaganda and disinformation. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China in addition to violent extremists. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.
  • Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques. This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.
In other words, the Act will i) greenlight the government to crack down with impunity against any media property it deems "propaganda", and ii) provide substantial amounts of money fund an army of "local journalist" counterpropaganda, to make sure the government's own fake news drowns that of the still free "fringes."

So while packaged politely in a veneer of "countering disinformation and propaganda", the bill, once signed by Obama, will effectively give the government a full mandate to punish, shut down or otherwise prosecute, any website it deems offensive and a source of "foreign government propaganda from Russia, China or other nations."

And since there is no formal way of proving whether or not there is indeed a foreign propaganda sponsor, all that will be sufficient to eliminate any "dissenting" website, will be the government's word against that of the website. One can be confident that the US government will almost certainly prevail in every single time.

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Assange's most incendiary interview

SUBHEAD: "Hillary Clinton is the central cog of the American Establishment".

By Tyler Durden on 6 November 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-05/julian-assanges-most-incendiary-interview-hillary-clinton-central-cog-establishment)


Image above: Mashup of Assange as on Hillary's hit list. From (http://truepundit.com/under-intense-pressure-to-silence-wikileaks-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-proposed-drone-strike-on-julian-assange/).

[IB Publisher's note: And that's why we voted for Jill Stein for President.]

In what may be his most provocative and incendiary interview ever given, Wikileaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange - who realizes that if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency his prospects turn even more bleak - spoke to Australian journalist and documentary maker John Pilger.

He summaraized what he has gleaned from the tens of thousands of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year in the following interview courtesy of RT and Dartmouth films.

John Pilger, another Australian émigré, conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Last month, Assange had his internet access cut off for alleged “interference” in the American presidential election through the work of his website.

INTERVIEW:

John Pilger: What’s the significance of the FBI's intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?


Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America's political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.  The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us. 

But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. 

We've published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she was Secretary of State.  They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 -- to herself, and we've published about half.

Then there are the Podesta emails we've been publishing.  [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations.

[These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases. 

‘Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks’


Pilger: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.

Assange: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.  Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.

WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong. 

‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’

Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of  when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.

Assange:  And twelve million dollars from Morocco …


JA: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].

Pilger:  In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East.  Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.

Assange:  There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation.

Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.

But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and  Qatar that have been funding ISIS.

Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.

Assange:  Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion.  In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.

Pilger: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.

Assange:  Yes.

Pilger: That's extraordinary. 

‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’

Assange:  I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions,  tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states.  The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network?  She's a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.

She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs.  She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citi Bank. This is quite amazing. 

Pilger: Didn’t Citibank supply a list …. ?

Assange:  Yes. 

Pilger: … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.

Assange:  Yes.

Pilger: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States?

Assange:  If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests. So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton's foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia.  The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.

‘Libya is Hillary Clinton’s war’

Pilger: Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us – told you – about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion. What do the emails tell us about that?

Assange:  Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it?  Hillary Clinton.  That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we've published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state -- something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.

So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa -- previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean.

That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi:  ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.

‘Trump won’t be permitted to win’

Pilger: You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing?  Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?’

Assange: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that?  Because he's had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies... big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

Pilger: There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’

Assange:  We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.


Pilger: Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election?  Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?

Assange:  [Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind?  He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’.  It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them.

Because he so clearly -- through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies -- represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.

‘US squeezing WikiLeaks through my refugee status’


Pilger: I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London.  Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we're doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign.  Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?

Assange:  Let’s let go back four years.  I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago.

Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds -- so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side.

So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.

WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable.

[It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.

Pilger: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.

Assange:  I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000.  So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].

Pilger: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here. 

Assange:  Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable.  They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised -- this [the embassy] is the world .. it’s visually the world [for me].

Pilger: It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it?

Assange:  It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it.

Pilger: Yes.

Assange:  So , yes, you adapt.  The one real irritant is that my young children -- they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for.

Pilger: Do you worry about them?

Assange:  Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

‘I am innocent and in arbitrary detention’

Pilger: Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’

Assange: The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K.  Who’s right?

The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.

It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here?  What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognise his asylum.’ [And here is]

Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we're not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite.

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative -- that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well.

The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners.

They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.

Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum.

Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric? 

Pilger: Yes, it’s different.

Assange:  The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.

[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.

.

Meltdown at Justice Department

SUBHEAD: "Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department", President Obama.

By Editorial on 1 November 2016 for The Wall Street Journal -
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/meltdown-at-justice-1477956287?mod=e2two)


Image above: Still from ABC-TV report on Loretta Lynch meeting Bill Clinton privately aboard her plane on tarmac in Phoenix in June before Benghazi Report. From (http://www.abc15.com/loretta-lynch-bill-clinton-meet-privately-in-phoenix).

Fewer than 3 out of 10 Americans trust government to do the right thing always or most of the time, Gallup reports, and the years since 2007 are “the longest period of low trust in government in more than 50 years.”

The details emerging about the multiple investigations into Hillary Clinton explain a lot about this ebbing public confidence in institutions such as the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Start with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. A cavalcade of former Justice heavyweights are now assailing FBI director James Comey for reopening the Clinton email file, and Justice sources are leaking that the director went rogue despite Ms. Lynch’s counsel not to alert Congress so close to an election.

But Mr. Comey works for the Attorney General. If she thinks Mr. Comey was breaking Justice rules by sending Friday’s letter to Congress, then she had every right to order him not do so. If Mr. Comey sent the letter anyway, and he didn’t resign, Ms. Lynch could then ask President Obama to fire him.

Our guess is that she didn’t order Mr. Comey not to send the letter precisely because she feared Mr. Comey would resign—and cause an even bigger political storm.

But the worst approach is to let a subordinate do something you believe is wrong and then whisper afterwards that you told him not to. The phrase for that is political cowardice.

Ms. Lynch’s abdication began when she and her prosecutors declined to empanel a grand jury. It continued in June after her supposedly coincidental rendezvous with Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

She could have told Hillary Clinton’s husband that the appointment was inappropriate, or refused to let him board her plane. She says the conversation was “social,” but she allowed the ex-President to create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” Ms. Lynch conceded at an Aspen forum in July.

The Clinton campaign compounded the problem by gossiping to the press that Mrs. Clinton would keep Ms. Lynch on as AG if she wins.

Ms. Lynch also abandoned her post when Mr. Comey staged his July media event dissecting the evidence in the Clinton email case and exonerating the Democratic nominee. The FBI’s job is to build a case, not make prosecutorial decisions.

Yet Ms. Lynch later told Congress that rather than make up her own mind on the evidence she would merely “accept the recommendation of that team” at the FBI “and there was no basis not to accept it.”

Meanwhile, the Journal’s Devlin Barrett broke the news Sunday that senior Justice officials and FBI officials disagreed over how aggressively to pursue the Clinton Foundation for financial fraud and influence peddling.

FBI field agents—in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Arkansas—wanted to pursue subpoenas and empanel a grand jury. Senior officials at Justice, likely political appointees, refused to give the FBI agents permission.

But the agents continued to investigate under their current authorities, even after Justice denied their request to read the Clinton-related emails that the national-security team had uncovered.

In August a “very pissed off” Justice official dressed down Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command who oversaw the Clinton email investigation, for looking at the Clinton Foundation in an election year.

According to the Journal story, Mr. McCabe replied, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” The official said no, but the message down the FBI chain of command was to “stand down.”

This follows Mr. Barrett’s previous scoop that Mr. McCabe’s wife received $675,000 in campaign donations from Clinton comrade Terry McAuliffe for a Virginia legislature race.

The FBI says there was no actual conflict of interest because Mr. McCabe detached himself from his wife’s campaign, but the appearance of a conflict is egregious. Mr. McCabe should have been removed from the FBI probe.

Democrats and their media allies are now in attack-and-deflect mode, assailing the FBI agents on the Clinton cases as “conservative.”

But considering that the Journal story is the first public confirmation in the heat of election season that the Clinton Foundation is under investigation, the agents were handling the matter professionally and discreetly despite Washington interference.

All of this reveals a Justice Department and FBI in turmoil, with some agents in semi-open revolt against their political leadership. This is terrible for those institutions, for confidence in government, and for Mrs. Clinton’s ability to govern if she does win next Tuesday’s election.

These events mean she could enter the Oval Office under criminal investigation, with her right-hand aide Huma Abedin suspected of concealing evidence, and Congress investigating these compromised investigations.

The Clinton penchant for deception and secrecy bears much of the blame for this mess, but then so does the President who is currently responsible for the Justice Department.

Mr. Obama sent his own bad political message when he twice suggested in interviews, in October 2015 and April 2016, that Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured email setup did not endanger national security and that she had no ill intent.

The norm is for the chief U.S. law-enforcement officer not to comment on ongoing investigations, and Mr. Obama’s prejudgment of the legal questions may have seeped down to the rank and file.

In Mr. Obama’s April 2016 absolution of Mrs. Clinton, the President said repeatedly that “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case.”

He added that “Guaranteed. Full stop. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department, because nobody is above the law.”

If Donald Trump wins next Tuesday, one major reason will be that the meltdown at Justice has shown how manifestly false Mr. Obama’s statements were.

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Hillary irreparably damaged

SUBHEAD: Renewed email probe ensures that Clinton faces never-ending investigations by Republicans.

By Darrell Delamaide on 1 November 2016 for Market Watch -
(http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hillary-clinton-is-irreparably-damaged-even-if-she-wins-2016-11-01)


Image above: Hillary Clinton with confidant and aide Huma Abedin. Photo by Justin Sullivan. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: This presidential race may favor Trump or Clinton, but it is not the voter's only choices in this election. Both the Green Party's Jill Stein, and Libertarian party's Gary Johnson are on enough ballots to win the Electoral College decision. If you are dreading both the Republican or Democratic regime vote for Jill or Gary. Send a real message!]

We don’t know whether the reopening of the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails will cost her the election.

It may be that she will still emerge the winner after next Tuesday’s vote, or that Donald Trump’s momentum from the Wikileaks emails, Obamacare’s failures, and Clinton’s flawed candidacy were going to carry him to victory in any case.

What we do know is that whoever wins, we are in for a fiasco in politics that will make even this fiasco of a campaign pale by comparison.


–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
There is hardly any scenario that is too far-fetched. Even if the polls are right and Clinton’s lead translates into an electoral victory, she will be so damaged going into office that her chances of getting anything done will be virtually nil.

In this sense alone, Trump’s claim that this scandal is “worse than Watergate” could prove to be true. As an incumbent, Richard Nixon at least had an administration in place when he won re-election in 1972, though it took nearly another two years before he was forced to resign under threat of impeachment.

Clinton is likely to be stymied from the start, especially if the ongoing investigations into her email practices and the Clinton Foundation lead to further damaging disclosures.

For one thing, we now have the precedence of Watergate, and Republicans, who are sure to retain the House and now probably the Senate, will not let go.

There is hardly a chance that it will all end well for Clinton and that she will be exonerated because what is already known has many Republicans convinced that she is guilty at the very least of mishandling classified documents and perhaps obstruction of justice.

While the immediate attention in the wake of last week’s disclosure about reopening the email investigation has focused on FBI Director James Comey, the real conundrum in all this concerns his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Lynch fatally compromised her position by meeting with former President Bill Clinton just days before the original investigation was closed without a grand jury ever considering the evidence.

And now her failure to block Comey’s disclosure — while leaking that she wanted to — is another ethical lapse. Other reports indicate that she attempted to quash the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

It is hard to see how she can remain in office even if Clinton wins and wants to keep her. Her resignation — or even impeachment — seems inevitable with Republicans out for blood.

The damage done to the whole Clinton entourage through the machinations exposed in the Wikileaks emails means that many of them — Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, John Podesta, Neera Tanden — will be virtually untenable in any position of responsibility in a new Clinton administration.

And this is the best-case scenario for Clinton. We all know what the worst-case scenario is.

Financial markets, Beltway pundits, mainstream media and the world at large now have just a week to get their heads around the idea that Trump might actually win the election.

This does not mean that the sky will fall, or even, as MIT economist Simon Johnson would have it, that the stock market will crash.

In fact, if markets have not already priced in some chance of a Trump victory, then they are hardly as efficient as we would like to believe.

Contrary to all the scaremongering that has accompanied Trump’s candidacy from the beginning, the strong institutional checks and balances built into our system of government will certainly be able to block any descent into authoritarianism in this country — even if that were what Trump is all about.

This was the thrust of David Gelernter’s raging commentary in the Wall Street Journal last month when he said that as reprehensible as Trump is, Clinton is worse, making a vote for Trump imperative. (For the record, Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, does not fall into the media’s facile categorization of Trump supporters as, essentially, uneducated deplorables.)

Don’t worry about Trump doing outrageous things, he says. “Ordinary politics says that Mr. Trump will not do crazy things or go off half-cocked,” Gelernter wrote, “because Republicans in Congress will be eager to impeach him and put Mike Pence in charge.”

And what will happen if Trump gets his mandate to drain the swamp? Will lame-duck President Obama have the guts to pardon Clinton prospectively and see the remains of his tattered legacy dissolve into history?

Will House Speaker Paul Ryan, facing a return to the back benches, wonder if he should have run for president this year after all?

And when Trump takes office, will he keep to his ambitious 100-day agenda of yanking trade agreements, canceling executive orders, starting deportations of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes, and restricting immigration from terror-prone countries — or will he temporize?

It will be a fiasco of epic proportions.
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Halloween Nation

SUBHEAD: Soon we will learn what kind of tensions are roiling between the FBI and the DOJ, and internally within each of these agencies.

By James Kunstler on 31 October 2016 for Kunstler.com  -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/halloween-nation/)


Image above: In July Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress on their investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. From (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-07-06/james-comey-loretta-lynch-to-appear-before-congress-over-clinton-emails).

What was with James Comey’s Friday letter to congress? It looks to me like the FBI Director had to go nuclear against his parent agency, the Department of Justice, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, his boss, in particular.

Why? Because the Attorney General refused to pursue the Clinton email case when more evidence turned up in the underage sexting case against Anthony Weiner, husband of Hillary’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin.

Over the weekend, the astounding news story broke that the FBI had not obtained a warrant to examine the emails on Weiner’s computer and other devices after three weeks of getting stonewalled by DOJ attorneys.

What does it mean when the Director of the FBI can’t get a warrant in a New York minute? It must mean that the DOJ is at war with the FBI. Watergate is looking like thin gruel compared to this fantastic Bouillabaisse of a presidential campaign fiasco.

One way you can tell is that The New York Times is playing down the story Monday morning. Columnist Paul Krugman calls the Comey letter “cryptic.” Krugman’s personal cryptograph insinuates that Comey is trying to squash an investigation of “Russian meddling in American elections.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid chimed in with a statement that “it has become clear that you [Comey] possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government.”

How’s that for stupid and ugly? It’s the Russian’s fault that Hillary finds herself in trouble again?

Earlier this week, lawyers at the DOJ attempted to quash a parallel investigation of the Clinton Foundation. They must be out of their minds to think that story will go away.

Isn’t it about time that a House or Senate committee subpoenaed Bill Clinton to testify under oath about his June airport meeting with Loretta Lynch. He doesn’t enjoy any special immunity in this case.

Speaking of immunity, when will we learn what kind of immunity Huma Abedin may have been granted in previous cycles of the email investigation?

Plenty of other Clinton campaign associates got immunity from prosecution earlier this year, rendering bales of evidence on their own laptops inadmissible in the email server case.

Things as yet unknown: Where is US Attorney (for the Southern District of New York) Preet Bharara in this case?

He works for the DOJ, but he is known to be an independent operator, and he must be already involved at least in the underage sexting case against Weiner, meaning he’s had access to an awful lot of collateral evidence from Weiner’s laptop, and must have obtained some kind of warrants of his own.

What appears to be unraveling is the AG Loretta Lynch’s effort to protect Hillary Clinton and now, in this Alfred Hitchcock movie of a presidential election, she’s trying to make it look like James Comey is stabbing Hillary in the shower.

(Film buffs note: in Hitchcock’s Psycho the character played by Janet Leigh made off with a bundle of money from her place of employment before Norman Bates worked his hoodoo on her at the motel.)

Trump, of course, is playing the escapade up in his usual idiotic way. It would be unfortunate if it ended up getting him elected — but how would it not be unfortunate for Hillary to wind up in the White House under a cloud of possible indictment?

She will be doing Chinese fire drills with a special prosecutor the whole time she is in office, tempted at every moment to start a war with the Russians to divert attention from her legal problems.

Soon we will learn what kind of tensions are roiling between the FBI and the DOJ, and internally within each of these agencies.

There are too many pissed off people there to prevent leakage, and probably plenty of email memoranda among the officials that would nicely lay out a trail of incrimination leading into the Attorney General’s office itself.

What a fine mess. And anybody who thinks that any of it might be resolved before November 8 will be disappointed. This story has so many legs, it looks like a Amazonian centipede compared to the lumbering cockroach that was Watergate.

The awful proceedings will grind on and on while the US economy and its vampire squid matrix of financial rackets implode in 2017 along with the European Union and global trade.

How do you like The Long Emergency now?

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Is Deep State tanking Hillary?

SUBHEAD: These blast points on Clinton's campaign could only be done by the Deep State.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 31 October 2016 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct16/Hillary-blast-points10-16.html)


Image above: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with her entourage when the Deep State still embraced her. From (http://www.modicanews.com/hillary-clinton-is-bringing-an-armed-forces-entourage-to-nbcs-military-forum/).

The Deep State's most prescient elements must derail Hillary's campaign to clear a path to Trump's executive team.

Back in August, I asked Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? I think we now have a definitive answer: "These blast points on Hillary's campaign... too accurate for the Mainstream Media. Only the forces of the Imperial Deep State are so precise."

The Mainstream Media is presenting the FBI investigation as a "lose-lose" situation for embattled FBI Director Comey. If Comey remained quiet until after the election, he would be accused of colluding with the Clinton campaign and its allies in the Department of Justice (sic).

But in going public, he stands accused by Democrats of "intervening in an election," i.e. raising doubts about Hillary's judgement and veracity days before Americans go to the polls.

Another narrative has Comey's hand forced by the threat of disgusted FBI agents leaking information that would show the FBI caved into political pressure from the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to keep relevant material out of the public eye until after the election.

I submit another much more powerful dynamic is in play: the upper ranks of the Deep State now view Hillary as an unacceptable liability. The word came down to Comey to act whether he wanted to or not, i.e. take one for the good of the nation/Deep State/Imperial Project.

As a refresher: the Deep State is the unelected government (also called the invisible or shadow government) that is not as monolithic as generally assumed.

The neo-conservative globalists who want Hillary to continue pushing their agenda are the more visible camp, but another less visible but highly motivated camp realizes Hillary and her neo-con agenda would severely damage the nation's security and its global influence. It is this camp that is arranging for Hillary to lose.

The consensus view seems to be that the Establishment and the Deep State see Trump as a loose cannon who might upset the neo-con apple cart by refusing to toe the neo-con line.

This view overlooks the reality that significant segments of the Deep State view the neo-con strategy as an irredeemable failure.

To these elements of the Deep State, Hillary is a threat precisely because she embraces the failed neo-con strategy and those who cling to it. From this point of view, Hillary as president would be an unmitigated disaster for the Deep State and the nation/Imperial Project it governs.

Whatever else emerges from the emails being leaked or officially released, one conclusion is inescapable: Hillary's judgement is hopelessly flawed.

Combine her lack of judgement with her 24 years of accumulated baggage and her potential to push the neo-con agenda to the point of global disaster, and you get a potent need for the Deep State's most prescient elements to derail her campaign and clear a path to Trump's executive team.

Once this path is clear, the management of Trump's executive team can begin in earnest, a management process aimed at disengaging the nation and its global Empire from neo-con overreach.

If you think this scenario is "impossible," let's see how the election plays out before deciding what's "impossible" and what's inevitable.



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Throw Huma under the bus

SUBHEAD: The thumbscrews put on Huma this morning by the campaign must be hurting.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 29 October 2016 for Island Breath -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/10/throw-huma-under-the-bus/)


Image above: Huma and Anthony on their wedding day in Huntington, Long Island on 10 July 2010. From (http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens-rep-anthony-weiner-marries-huma-abedin-president-bill-clinton-presiding-article-1.466359).

There is so much in innuendo and guesses and biased opinion floating around on this ‘morning after’ the Comey bombshell that the only option we have is to read and watch a ton of stuff and see what sticks. One thing that definitely should stick was published late last night by Paul Sperry for the New York Post.

He scores a solid and massive point that looks as damning for the FBI itself (or at least the superiors), as it does for Hillary Clinton. It is, in that regard, perhaps telling that one of the alleged reasons whispered for FBI director Jim Comey to come forward on Friday is that he feared details of the probe would otherwise be leaked to the press.

Sperry’s point: the emails that are at the center of Friday’s announcement that Hillary Clinton ‘s entire email server investigation will be re-opened -whether formally or not is moot-, were obtained by seizing devices from Anthony Weiner in relation him sexting to a 15-year old girl.
And seizing devices was exactly what was never done in Hillary’s case, though “agents assigned to that case knew Abedin hoarded classified emails on her electronic devices.” They were seized neither from Hillary nor from her closest aide Huma Abedin, who now probably- and probably rightly- fears that she may be thrown under the bus at the first convenient moment.

Hillary doesn’t appear to know what exactly is on the Weiner/Abedin device, but her staff is undoubtedly preparing a defense based on Hillary denying she knew anything about what emails Huma kept and/or sent. Such a defense may well be useless, depending on the contents of the mails. But by now it’s full blown panic danger control in the campaign.

While at the FBI the mood may now be that a second consecutive investigation that would end in a second consecutive ‘dismissal’ would be unacceptable to -a lot of- agents. Something Comey is undoubtedly painfully aware of. His ‘own people’ may have given him an ultimatum: either you do it right this time, or we will.

A few bits from Paul Sperry’s piece:
On page 3 of their 11-page report, the agents detail how they showed Abedin a classified paper on Pakistan sent from a State Department source which she, in turn, inexplicably forwarded to her personal Yahoo email account — an obviously unclassified, unencrypted, unsecured and unauthorized system. The breach of security was not an isolated event but a common practice with Abedin.
This is one of those things that Hillary will likely try to plead innocence on. Not that that should be good enough: the server, illegal as it may have been, was still her responsibility. That either she herself or Abedin would play fast and loose with the confidentiality and classification of the material involved, on top of using a server whose very existence played fast and loose with the law, is the kind of thing that disqualifies her from public office, let alone the presidency.

Hillary’s ‘defense’ has been ‘I made a mistake’, and that was enough for her, for Comey, and for the entire American media. It’s still hard to believe. And it certainly doesn’t look like it will be enough a second time. Just imagine what some FBI agents must have thought when they found out, and when Comey subsequently decided to hush the case.
“She routinely forwarded emails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account,” the agents wrote. Why? “So she could print them” at home and not at her State Department office. Abedin contended that she “would typically print the documents without reading them” and “was unaware of the classification.” Uh-huh.
The FBI also pointed out that “the only person at DoS (Department of State) to receive an email account on the (clintonemail.com) domain was Abedin.” “Multiple State employees” told the FBI that they considered emailing Abedin “the equivalent of e-mailing Clinton.” Another close Clinton aide told the FBI that “Abedin may have kept emails that Clinton did not.”
The phrase “the equivalent of e-mailing Clinton” says a lot about how closely the two worked together. And that in turn says something about the odds that Huma acted alone, without Hillary knowing.
In her April interview with the FBI, Abedin incredulously maintained that she “did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago, when it became public knowledge.” [..] .. another witness told agents that he and another Clinton aide with computer skills built the new server system “at the recommendation of Huma Abedin,” who first broached the idea of an off-the-grid email server as early as the “fall (of) 2008.”
So if you believe Abedin, she didn’t know the private clintonemail.com server that hosted her huma@clintonemail.com account even existed until she heard about it in the news. Comey was a believer; he didn’t even bother to call her back for further questioning. Case closed.
Yes, Huma knew the server existed, long before she admitted knowing it. That’s a bold faced lie. But wait, didn’t she get immunity? Apparently perhaps not officially (?!), but FBI agents seriously suspect she did:
During research, FBI assets and federal law enforcement sources concluded the only way Abedin could have walked away from the probe without criminal charges was because her legal team struck a secret immunity deal with Justice. “She has a deal in place or (FBI Director James) Comey and (Attorney General Loretta) Lynch let her just walk out the door,” a FBI source said.
Wait a minute! Anybody seen Loretta Lynch lately? Did she know Comey would make his announcement Friday? She’s his boss…

If Huma knew the server existed when she said she did not know, it’s 99% sure Anthony Weiner knew it, too. Which is important in more than one way. They shared at least one device, which means he had access to classified material. That in itself is highly illegal. And in the -year long- first stage of the probe, FBI agents knew this, or could have suspected it, and asked Huma for details. Apparently, that didn’t happen.

Perhaps even more important, Weiner is a huge and obvious risk as a blackmail target. For all we know, he may have already provided classified files to parties threatening to go public with photos he sent exposing his weiner to underage girls.

Was the clinton email server hacked? So far the word is there’s no proof of that, but… Did Huma delete and/or bleach-bit information on her devices the same way Hillary did? We can’t know, because despite Huma’s obvious untruths, these devices were not seized for the earlier investigation.

Why? We can only guess. But to quote Hillary from last night (albeit on a slightly different topic): “your guess is as good as mine, and that’s not good enough”.

What we do know is that, obviously, there is still enough material left for the FBI to re-open the case. They may have found as many as tens of thousands of mails belonging to Huma (well, actually, to the US government) on Weiner’s laptop.
[..] Abedin’s role in this caper begs for fresh scrutiny. Making false statements to a federal agent is a felony. So is mishandling classified information. By forwarding classified emails to her personal email account and printing them out at home, Abedin appears to have violated a Classified Information NonDisclosure Agreement she signed at the State Department on Jan. 30, 2009, in which she agreed to keep all classified material under the control of the US government.
Classified emails sent to an unprotected server and printed out at home. How dumb exactly is Huma Abedin? And how dumb does all this make Hillary?
Let’s see if Comey puts the screws to Abedin and leverages her for information on her boss. If he agrees to cut another immunity deal, we’ll know the fix is still in.
Will the media propaganda caravan now turn on Hillary to save its face? I would predict perhaps not immediately, since they bet a lot on their horse. But give it a few days and they may conclude it’s high time to cut their losses. And so may a lot of other parties involved.

The thumbscrews put on Huma this morning by the campaign must be hurting. Can she cut another immunity deal or will she end up under the bus?
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