BEYOND STUPID

The New York Times published an article slamming Trump for authorizing William Barr to declassify information.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/us/politics/trump-barr-declassify-intelligence.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

The theory is that Brennan had a mole very close to Putin who warned the CIA that Putin was going to interfere in the U.S. election to try and help Trump get elected. Brennan and the New York Times are terrified that this “source” may be outed if Trump declassifies certain documents. Actually, if the source exists at all, it was outed by the Washington Post in June of 2017:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/obama-putin-election-hacking/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cb1af99609b2

It describes an envelope so sensitive it was only shown to President Obama and three senior aids.

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.

But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

No one thought to ask the most obvious question: “are you really buying this?

If, and that is the world’s biggest IF, this story is true that the people who released this information and those who published in the Washington Post are guilty of treason. The Washington Post could have a conceivable freedom of press excuse, but the damage to national security would still be unprecedented. This is at best highly irresponsible. At worst, it is both irresponsible and frankly stupid.

The article also indicates that Obama personally warned Putin. Wow, that must have terrified him. What Obama did not do was warn Donald Trump. Instead:

Brennan convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.

Only four senior security officers were allowed to attend briefings in the White House situation room, Brennan, Clapper, Lynch and Comey. Even aides were banned. Eventually the circle expanded to John Kerry and Ashton Carter who were given envelopes that subordinates were not supposed to open.

There are points where this article says things that are at best extremely unlikely and most likely demonstrably false. For example,  it says U.S. spy agencies reached unanimous agreement that the DNC servers were hacked by Russia intelligence.  But that is far from true. Only the CIA and the DNI reached that conclusion and the NSA gave a conditional could be true statement. In reality the secrecy of this committee meant that conclusions by definition came primarily from Brennan, Clapper, Lynch and Comey.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. James Jesus Angleton was chief of counterintelligence at the CIA. He became convinced that there was a soviet mole in the CIA. He was told by a defector named Golitsyn that the KGB had a network of spies within the CIA. He went on a counter-intelligence campaign that destroyed a lot of careers. It is unclear, even today, whether there even was a mole. There were some people caught spying for the Soviet Union, but they were at much lower levels. The 2006 film the Good Shepherd is based at least partly on the real James Jesus Angleton.

The point is that the top intelligence officials in this country “believed” that they had a mole close to Putin and that Putin had the fix in for Donald Trump. In reality, that seems very unlikely. Putin has a long history of bribing the Clintons and they had helped him steal our uranium. It was Bill Clinton, not Donald Trump that Putin paid to give speeches in Moscow. It was the Hillary Campaign that was helped by the Russian Dossier, which can definitely be traced to Russian intelligence and which was absolutely designed to undermine Donald Trump. Odds are Putin was interested primarily in undermining who ever won the presidency and if he favored Trump over Hillary it was only because he was sure Hillary would win so he wanted to undermine her credibility. By the way this article admits that Russians also targeted Republican servers, they just were unsuccessful in penetrating them.

In any event if there really was a mole close to Putin, that person is almost certainly dead probably shortly after the Washington Post article was published. If that didn’t do the trick, the New York Times article published over the weekend will finish the job. Declassification of anything by Trump will have little if any impact on this person, assuming he or she even exists.

If Putin planted this seed in the minds of Brennan and Clapper, to seed distrust in the American government, he succeeded beyond all expectations. No one with an ounce of credibility pretends that Russian influence had anything to do with the 2016 presidential election results. If Hillary was beaten because of WikiLeaks, which consisted of real e-mails, she deserved to lose. Brennan and Clapper thought they had a source willing to provide access to Putin’s most secret thoughts and actions. This source told them what they wanted to hear, so they absolutely believed it. When you combine that with the failure of the NSA or the FBI to even do a forensic evaluation of the DNC servers, this theory is built on the thinnest of air.

This is about to blow sky high. This is worse than we could even imagine. A President of the United States and his top intelligence officials became convinced that Russia was trying to steal a presidential election by hacking WikiLeaks. They were so terrified that they set up a double top-secret committee to investigate. For years they have denied spying on the Trump campaign at all, now we know the opposite is true. We also know that this was not only abuse of power, it was incredibly stupid abuse of power. Abuse of power, we can understand, incompetence at this level is mind numbing.

Unfortunately, regardless of what evidence surfaces a high percentage of the usual suspects will continue to believe the impossible fueled by the ridiculous in a continued effort to find some reason to believe. Fortunately, for the country, Obama is no longer President and neither Brennan nor Clapper have any influence on our intelligence operations. More importantly, the Attorney General is William Barr, not James Comey and we will soon learn the facts as the result of criminal prosecutions.

Absolutely unbelievable. If this is an example of how the Obama administration functioned, we were lucky to survive.

TDM