January 11, 2017

The Deep State Versus Donald Trump - New Smears And The Ukrainian Connection

UPDATED (3x) (at end of original)

As remarked on January 6:

When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump. The ultimate aim of the cabal is to kick him out of office and have a reliable replacement, like the Vice-President elect Pence, take over. Should that not be possible it is hoped that the delegitimization will make it impossible for Trump to change major policy trajectories especially in foreign policy. A main issue here is the reorientation of the U.S. military complex and its NATO proxies from the war of terror towards a direct confrontation with main powers like Russia and China.

The deep state campaign against Trump opened new grounds today with the publication of completely fake and thereby unverifiable anonymous assertions which include the smear that Trump had some fun in a Moscow hotel and that Russian secret services is using that to manipulate him.

Like many smears against Trump via proxies of the Clinton presidential campaign these new ones seem to origin from Ukraine related sources and Ukrainian "nationalist" (aka fascist) putsch supporters.

The new assertions about Trump come in 35 pages of "reports" by an anonymous (claimed) former British intelligence operator working for a private U.S. company with dates ranging from June 20 2016 to December 13 2016. They say that Russia has some tapes of Trump watching sex games in 2013, they claim that Trump campaign officials coordinated the Clinton campaign leaks with Russia and that the Russian President Putin was highly involved in all of this.

Here is how the claimed former intelligence operator typically describes his sources in these "reports":

Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting U.S. Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least five years. Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN.

The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous asserted compatriot what two anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claim to have heard somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin.

They assert that Trump was supported and directed by Putin himself five years ago while even a year ago no one would have bet a penny on Trump gaining any political significant position or even the presidency.

There is a lot more of such nonsense in these new Hitler diaries. It is bonkers from a to z.

Neocon senator John McCain, friend of Ukrainian fascists and Trump enemy, passed (<-details) the "report" to the FBI and thereby made it into an official document.

Even as they are obvious fake the FBI tried to use these "reports" to get a wide warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (FISA) court to listen in on Trump campaign officials. The court thankfully denied or at least narrowed down the request.

The first "reports" were created as part of the opposition research paid by a Republican candidate running in the primaries against Trump. They were later produced for and paid by the Democratic campaign. They have been shopped around in Washington for several month. The NYT, the WSJ, CNN and the FBI all investigated the assertions in them. Despite those considerable combined capacities they could verify none of them. All publications refrained from publishing the claims during the campaign because there was no evidence at all that supported them. Buzzfeed now pushed these out despite also saying that they have found nothing verifiable in them.

Even worse, the Director of National Intelligence Clapper (who once claimed Saddam's non-existing WMDs were shipped to Syria) presented these to Congress and the president elect Trump as "annex" to his baseless U.S. Intelligence report of "Russian hacking".

A murky preview of the assertions had been given by David Corn in a Mother Jones piece in October. He talked with the said-to-be author of the "reports":

"It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."

The current publication of this full barrel of bullshit comes a day after members of the Trump cabinet have been successfully confirmed by Congress and hours before his long expected press conference. It is thereby destined to overshadow a successful start of the Trump presidency.

There are signs that the "reports" were written with some Ukrainian nationalist and anti-semitic background. Just consider this passage from the July 26 "report":

In terms of the FSB's recruitment of capable cyber operatives to carry out its, ideally deniable, offensive cyber operations, a Russian IT specialist with direct knowledge reported in June 2016 that this was often done using coercion and blackmail. In terms of 'foreign' agents, the FSB was approaching U.S. citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin on business trips in Russia.

Such tropes are typical of the anti-semitic Ukrainian "nationalist" (aka Nazi) narrative. ("All Soviet/Communist ideologues/functionaries are Jews.") Russian services would, unlike Mossad, not recruit IT hackers conditioned on "Jewish" ethnic relations or believe. They would hire anyone competent who they think they could trust.

We have seen more Ukrainian "nationalists" involved in the "Russian hacks" propaganda claims. A July 2016 Yahoo piece by (Clinton campaign mouthpiece) Michael Isikoff wrote:

Just weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa got an alarming message when she logged into her personal Yahoo email account.

...

Chalupa — who had been drafting memos and writing emails about Manafort’s connection to pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine — quickly alerted top DNC officials.

...

“I was freaked out,” Chalupa, who serves as director of “ethnic engagement” for the DNC, told Yahoo News in an interview, noting that she had been in close touch with sources in Kiev, Ukraine, including a number of investigative journalists, who had been providing her with information about Manafort’s political and business dealings in that country and Russia.

Chalupa is also somewhat involved with the ProPornOT list, promoted by the Washington Post, of alleged pro-Russian propaganda websites. This website, Moon of Alabama, is also on that list :-) (see at end of piece). (Unfortunately though we have never received a penny, or anything else, from Russian sources, are critical of Putin's neoliberal economic policies and have been plagiarized by the Russian government financed Russia Today without any compensation.) The ProPornOT Twitter account says it is “Ukrainian-American” and it used the Ukrainian fascist salute of the OUN-Bandera killer gangs "Heroiam Slava!" to hail Ukrainian hackers attacking Russia. The ProPornOT list is designed after a Ukrainian model used to smear Ukrainian anti-fascist media and journalists.

Chalupa is a main promoter of the "Russia hacked the Democratic campaign" allegations based on thin if any evidence. She was named by the same Isikoff of Yahoo as one of 16 people who shaped the 2016 election.

Chalupa is also:

founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

Moreover Chalupa coordinated her anti-Trump/anti-Russian campaign with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. A Ukrainian-American operative[, Alexandra Chalupa,] who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

One must thereby categorize Chalupa as a Ukrainian agent or at least as naive manipulated by the Ukrainian government and read her accordingly.

The foreign influence on the presidential race through the Ukrainian (fascist) connection to the Clinton campaign is thereby much more grounded in reality than the alleged but completely unproven Russian connections to the Trump campaign.

We have a Ukrainian-American nationalist Democratic campaign operator promoting anti-Russian and anti-Trump claims in cooperation with the Ukrainian government, a Ukrainian-American ProPornOT blacklist for smearing random website of being "Russian propaganda" and Ukrainian fascist tropes used in fact-less "reports" intended to smear Trump as a Russian puppet. Above all of this we have a U.S intelligence community that is feverishly fighting against a Trump presidency which is likely to cut back its many excrescences and excesses.

The CIA, the MI-6 and the German BND (a CIA controlled service) have pampered and promoted the again very active anti-Russian Ukrainian fascist circles since (at least) the late 1940s. A U.S. National Archive book about Hitler's Shadows - Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War (PDF) notes:

British operations through Bandera expanded. An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations and although the intelligence dividend was low it was considered worthwhile to proceed....”

...

In June 1985 the General Accounting Office mentioned Lebed’s name in a public report on Nazis and collaborators who settled in the United States with help from U.S. intelligence agencies. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice began investigating Lebed that year. The CIA worried that public scrutiny of Lebed would compromise QRPLUMB and that failure to protect Lebed would trigger outrage in the Ukrainian émigré community. It thus shielded Lebed by denying any connection between Lebed and the Nazis and by arguing that he was a Ukrainian freedom fighter. The truth, of course, was more complicated. As late as 1991 the CIA tried to dissuade OSI from approaching the German, Polish, and Soviet governments for war-related records related to the OUN. OSI eventually gave up the case, unable to procure definitive documents on Lebed. Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

There is no open evidence yet of a direct connection between the three anti-Russian/anti-Trump items above, the Ukrainian-fascist movement and John Brennan's deep-state CIA. There are consistencies in tone and message, some common history including the 2014 putsch in Ukraine and a connecting Ukrainian-American person in bowels of the Clinton campaign.

But even that is more than the baseless assertions of "Russian hacking" in the DNI intelligence reports and the now published MI-6 smears. Seen from a distance the "Intelligence Community" is more compromised by these "leaks" than the President elect Trump.

It is not predictable who will win this fight, the "deep state" cabal that wants to keep the U.S. on an anti-Russian course or the somewhat outsider isolationist Trump. My bet is on the bullshit artist Trump.

In the bigger international picture the fight itself, and the publicity it gets, lets the U.S. look like the Banana republic it is destined to become.

UPDATE:

The BBC Washington reporter Paul Wood on BBC radio today:

has seen the "report" in October

was told in August by U.S. intelligence that East-European(!) intelligence head claimed Russia had kompromat on Trump

there are allegedly audio and video tapes made in Moscow and Petersberg which nobody has seen

We are left to guess what "east-European intelligence" service he was talking about ...

2nd UPDATE:

There are claims that the Trump sex story involved in the 35 pages originates from alt-right or 4chan circles.

That does not fit the timeline.

The "reports" have circulated since August. The sex claim is an July part of the report. The 4chan story originated in November (as far as I can tell) and was pushed from 4chan to one political actor aligned with the Democratic party. But that was old news by then and everyone relevant was already aware of the story. It is very likely that the 4chan story was just a rehash of the already known "report" story and has no additional validity.

3rd UPDATE:

BBC's Paul Wood has more on the issue: Trump 'compromising' claims: How and why did we get here?

Nothing in the 35 pages has been shown to be true

There are additional claims of Russian (bank) payments to someone (not Trump directly but probably related) in the U.S.

of Russian (bank) payments to someone (not Trump directly but probably related) in the U.S. The payment claims were used to get FISA warrants which were twice rejected(!) but in October signed by a new judge

The payment claims come from the secret service of "a Baltic State"

Other news services seem to mix up these payment claims with those in the 35 pages. But they are different issues.

Yesterday evening DNI Clapper had a talk with Trump - it is unclear from Clapper's statement what issues exactly were talked about. He seems to allude to the payment claims, not the 35 pages.

Posted by b on January 11, 2017 at 12:39 UTC | Permalink

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