Backbearings

Who's the Russian mole?  Could it be the head of one of Obama's intelligence agencies?

Still it may be profitable in real-life Washington to go back a few years, as Dana Priest in the New Yorker does, to unravel a problem similar to that which baffled Sherlock: why did the dog not bark in the night? Or as Priest puts it,why couldn't the Obama era intelligence community detect Russian meddling.

There are too many coincidences for it to be just bad luck. Some journalists are belatedly realizing they are living through the aftermath of the Big Bang. A huge strike happened without them even being aware of it and the scale of it is boggling. The Obama administration failed to detect the rise of the Islamic state, was surprised by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Putin's intervention in Syria, did not see the rapid development of Kim's nuclear arsenal and, publicly at least, ascribed the assault on the Benghazi consulate to a video -- and as the New Yorker points out, were even blindsided by Russian election interference openly happening on Facebook.

And then, of course we have the famous Romney - Obama debate in which Obama chides Romney “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because you know, the Cold War has been over for 20 years."

Read the whole thing.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Pakistani IT Scammers

There’s more than bank fraud going on here.

This is not about bank fraud. The Awan family swindles are plentiful, but they are just window-dressing. This appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.

At the time of his arrest, the 37-year-old Imran Awan had been working for Democrats as an information technologist for 13 years. He started out with Representative Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.) in 2004. The next year, he landed on the staff of Wasserman Schultz, who had just been elected to the House.

Congressional-staff salaries are modest, in the $40,000 range. For some reason, Awan was paid about four times as much. He also managed to get his wife, Alvi, on the House payroll . . . then his brother, Abid Awan . . . then Abid’s wife, Natalia Sova. The youngest of the clan, Awan’s brother Jamal, came on board in 2014 — the then-20-year-old commanding an annual salary of $160,000.

A few of these arrangements appear to have been sinecures: While some Awans were rarely seen around the office, we now know they were engaged in extensive financial shenanigans away from the Capitol. Nevertheless, the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak, who has been all over this story, reports that, for their IT “work,” the Pakistani family has reeled in $4 million from U.S. taxpayers since 2009.

That’s just the “legit” dough. The family business evidently dabbles in procurement fraud, too. The Capitol Police and FBI are exploring widespread double-billing for computers, other communication devices, and related equipment.

Why were they paid so much for doing so little? Intriguing as it is, that’s a side issue. A more pressing question is: Why were they given access to highly sensitive government information? Ordinarily, that requires a security clearance, awarded only after a background check that peruses ties to foreign countries, associations with unsavory characters, and vulnerability to blackmail.

These characters could not possibly have qualified. Never mind access; it’s hard to fathom how they retained their jobs. The Daily Caller has also discovered that the family, which controlled several properties, was involved in various suspicious mortgage transfers. Abid Awan, while working “full-time” in Congress, ran a curious auto-retail business called “Cars International A” (yes, CIA), through which he was accused of stealing money and merchandise. In 2012, he discharged debts in bankruptcy (while scheming to keep his real-estate holdings). Congressional Democrats hired Abid despite his drunk-driving conviction a month before he started at the House, and they retained him despite his public-drunkenness arrest a month after. Beyond that, he and Imran both committed sundry vehicular offenses. In civil lawsuits, they are accused of life-insurance fraud.

Read the whole thing.

Sealing and transfer of Susan Rice records angers House committee investigating ‘unmasking’

House intelligence committee sources say career officials at the National Security Council are slow-walking the delivery of subpoenaed records on former National Security Adviser Susan E. Rice’s handling of classified information and the “unmasking” of Trump campaign workers — material from the Russian hacking probe that middle-level NSC managers claim was transferred to President Obama’s library and could “remain closed to the public for five years.”

One source, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, called the transfer curious and appeared to reflect an effort by former administration officials to obscure evidence on whether Ms. Rice and other top officials in the Obama White House illegally tried to identify which Trump campaign and transition aides had been caught up in the U.S. intelligence intercepts of Russian interference in the presidential race.

...

Democrats want the probes to stay tightly focused on possible obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump and collusion between his associates and the Kremlin. The U.S. intelligence community has unanimously concluded that the Kremlin was behind an organized cyberattack campaign to interfere in the U.S. election and undermine the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton last year.

But since the Russia probes launched earlier this year, Mr. Trump and his aides have argued that the real scandal lies elsewhere. They contend that senior Obama administration officials, including Ms. Rice, inappropriately unmasked and perhaps illegally leaked to the media the names of Trump campaign officials swept up in the hacking probe, and failed to take sufficient steps to stop the hacking once it was uncovered.

Judicial Watch sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the NSC in April seeking records concerning Ms. Rice’s communications on a range of subjects.

NSC Access Management Director John Powers responded on May 23 — roughly a week before the House intelligence committee began seeking the records.

“Documents from the Obama administration have been transferred to the Barack Obama Presidential Library,” Mr. Powers wrote. “You may send your request to the Obama Library. However, you should be aware that under the Presidential Records Act, presidential records remain closed to the public for five years after an administration has left office.”

SHARYL ATTKISSON: Obama-era Surveillance Timeline

You can find many timelines that follow allegations of Russia tampering in the U.S. election and alleged involvement of Trump officials. But I couldn’t find any comprehensive timelines cross-referencing Obama-era surveillance of whistleblowers, journalists and other U.S. citizens with Russia surveillance allegations. So I built one.

Read the whole thing.

If you want to know how badly Obama and his henchmen (and henchwomen) spied on Americans in violation of the law, Attkinson creates a list. It's only a partial list that will lengthen and involve more criminals as more information comes to light.

At what point will the people who commit really big crimes against the people be brought to answer and held accountable?  Because right now the American people realize that government officials seem to be exempt from laws that send the ordinary citizen to jail.  This systematic differentiation between he ruling class and the peasant class is corrosive of democracy.  It destroys faith in the fairness of laws.  In many respects an ordered society depends on the voluntary acceptance of rules that govern all of us.  When it becomes apparent that there is an political aristocracy that does not have to obey the rules; that literally gets away with murder, the glue that holds a free society together dissolves.  If you can't trust the authorities, you have to trust the people around you who look like you and think like you.  You join a gang for self-protection.  That's the point at which tribal warfare breaks out.  

I suggest we start to think about a tribunal like the Nuremberg Trials that exposed the war crimes of the Nazis in World War 2. That may the the only way that the American people will regain their trust in the integrity of the American government.

Andy McCarthy raises the point that If the Government Cannot Be Trusted, Can It Protect the Nation? 

...foremost in our minds will be how readily the government’s awesome intelligence capabilities can be abused. That is the real significance of the controversy over Obama-administration spying on the Trump campaign and transition.

The scandal that CNN is hell-bent on ignoring brings into sharp relief the very abuses the media, echoing civil-liberties activists, have warned against for years: pretextual uses of intelligence-collection powers to spy on political opponents and dissenters. As a national-security conservative with no illusions about government, I’ve acknowledged these concerns. I’ve countered, though, that the powers are, yes, essential to national security. The abuse of power is thus a reason to get rid of the abuser, not the power.

In our modern political dysfunction, that seems impossible. Washington protects its own. No one gets fired anymore, let alone impeached. So just as we make war on “terror” because we don’t want to identify the enemy, we condemn “power” because we can’t bring ourselves to hold the rogue officials accountable.

Did the Obama administration have compelling foreign-intelligence reasons to monitor its political opponents? Or was Russian espionage mainly a cover for political spying?

As I’ve said before, there is enough risk on both sides that I doubt we will get definitive answers to these questions. There is little doubt, however, that Republicans and Democrats will mutually find intelligence-collection power to be a convenient scapegoat. That’s where this is heading: the showdown over FISA reauthorization.

So can we trust the government with this power? It is worth remembering that, before someone decided that the perilous complexities of the modern world left us with no choice but to trust the government, we built a governing system on the premise that it can’t be trusted.

The American experiment in democracy has always meant that a new administration did not use it's police powers to jail members of the previous administration as a means of stifling dissent.  We are not supposed to jail our political opponents.  That's what "banana republics" do and we're supposed to be better than that.  The Civil War was an exception, and it was the losers of the election that started the conflict.  

But at some point the issues become so egregious that things have to be done.  What's interesting is that it's the Democrats, who - like their counterparts in 1860 - dispute the validity of the election.  They do it under the pretext that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired to steal 2016 election.  They insist that interference with an election is so serious that it's an act of war.  

But if interference in an election - working to steal an election - is a form of warfare, should we not take their word for it that it's serious enough to put the people responsible in jail?  Even if the people responsible are officials of the previous government?  And even if they did not actually succeed in stealing an election but are using information collected by spying to undermine a legitimately elected administration?  

If Donald Trump really wanted to shake Washington up and "Drain the Swamp" that would be one way he could do it. Send a few of the top criminals to jail and there would be fewer government officials who would commit these crimes.  

Trump is not part of the government power elite.  He's an outsider who does not owe allegiance to the government ruling class of either party.  He has set himself up in opposition to them.   There is a large and steadfast core of people in the country who agree with his position.  They are beginning to emerge across the country, even in places like Berkeley, demonstrating that after being subjected to physical attacks in the past they will not be silenced nor intimidated by America's Red Guards.   They will fight back, eagerly.  

If we do not want to see this issue settled by bloody clashes in the streets, I suggest that settling it in court may be better for the country and for the safety of the country.  Trump would be doing the country a favor by breaking the understanding that the ruling class has and actually sending some of them to jail.

How John Brennan and Some Brits Tried to Tip the Election to Hillary

They investigated candidate Trump and then planted smears in the English press about it.

It makes sense once you find out that Obama's CIA Director John Brennan once supported the Communist Party.

Hillary Clinton's team met with Russian ambassador, says Kremlin spokesman, as he warns against 'hysteria'

Why do I have to learn this from a British news source?

Hillary Clinton’s team members met with the Russian ambassador during the election as well as Donald Trump’s, the Kremlin spokesman has alleged, as he set out to dismiss the “hysteria” surrounding Mr Trump’s links to Russia.

The house intelligence committee will hold its first session on Russia on March 20, with the heads of the FBI, national security agency and CIA expected to appear, plus previous intelligence chiefs.

But Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Vladimir Putin, said on Sunday that America was “self-humiliating” in insisting that Russia hacked its election.

Impossible to impeach her, she lost. Lock her up?

When you elect an administration that doesn't really like the country that much, this is what you get.

More of the politicization of the bureaucracy that is Obama’s toxic legacy.

Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell said on Saturday that the WikiLeaks' dump of documents it claims are from the top-secret CIA hacking program is "absolutely" an "inside job."

Speaking with "CBS This Morning," Morell said the spy agency should be asking itself whether the leaker was a staff employee or a contractor, and whether there were any "red flags" that were missed....

"This data is not shared outside CIA. It's only inside CIA," Morell said. "It's on CIA's top secret network, which is not connected to any other network. So, this has to be an inside job."

"The American public should be deeply troubled by any WikiLeaks disclosure designed to damage the intelligence community's ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries," a CIA spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday. "Such disclosures not only jeopardize US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information that do us harm."

How's the fundamentally transformed country working out for you?

Kim Philby, British double agent, reveals all in secret video

A previously unseen video of one of Britain's most infamous spies describing his career as a Soviet agent has been uncovered by the BBC.

The tape is of Kim Philby giving a secret lecture to the Stasi, the East German Intelligence Service, in 1981.
It is the first time the ex-MI6 officer can be seen talking about his life as a spy from his recruitment to his escape.
He describes his career rising up the ranks of MI6 whilst providing its secrets to the Soviet Union's KGB.
He ends with advice to the East German spies.

"Dear Comrades."
With those two words spoken in an impeccable upper-class English accent, one of Britain's most famous spies and its greatest traitor begins a masterclass in betrayal to a select audience of East German spies.

Philby's hour-long address was preserved on video tape and never seen in public until now.

The BBC unearthed it in the official archives of the Stasi in Berlin.

It was never made for public consumption (and the grainy video and poorly synchronised sound shows the limits of technology at the time), but that means the former MI6 officer is open about his career in a way never heard before.
'Enemy camp'

After an introduction from East German spymaster Markus Wolf, who was so elusive to western spy agencies that he was known for many years as "the man without a face", Philby makes his way to the lectern to a hero's welcome.
"I must warn you that I am no public speaker," Philby says.

"I've spent most of my life trying to avoid publicity of any kind."

That much is true. Previously the best known video of Philby was him giving a 1955 press conference in his mother's London flat.
On that occasion he said very little, only denying he was a communist.