John Miltimore and Carey Wedler
Activist Post
Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they’re prone to
viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to
instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.
These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been
able to overlook the many abuses—constitutional, legal, and moral—of US
intelligence agencies.
Unlike some more seasoned media, conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants, classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption, campaign moles, and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means.
These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public
and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history
of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of
control long before the 2016 presidential election.
1. That Time the CIA Considered Bombing Miami and Blaming It on Castro
It’s no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans.
The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort
that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense,
and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to
topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One
of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by
General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine “pretexts” the CIA and US government could employ to justify military intervention in Cuba. One
of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a
terror campaign (“real or simulated”) and blaming it on Cuban refugees.
“We could develop
a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida
cities and even in Washington,” the Operation Mongoose document says.
Read more
Zero Hedge
Andrew Weissmann, perhaps the ‘angriest‘
Democrat on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, is leaving the
investigation and will return to the private sector, according to NPR, citing two sources.
Considered the “architect” of the case against former Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort – who was sentenced to a combined 7.5 years in
prison for financial crimes related to his private business dealings,
Weissmann will now study and teach at New York University. He will also
embark on several public service projects, such as how to prevent
wrongful convictions by improving forensic science standards.
As NPR notes, “The departure is the strongest sign yet that Mueller and his team have all but concluded their work.”
Weissmann – who wasn’t able to link Manafort to collusion between the
Trump campaign and Russia, has come under fire from conservatives for
his extreme liberalism. He attended Hillary Clinton’s election night
party in 2016, and was one of several officials told by then-DOJ #4 Bruce Ohr prior to the DOJ obtaining a FISA surveillance warrant that the ‘Steele Dossier’ was opposition research connected to Clinton and might be biased. Weissmann was the head of the DOJ’s fraud section at the time.
Read more
DCWhispers
The Obama era Intelligence community was determined to punish Donald Trump and his supporters for challenging the political status quo. They didn't actually think Trump would win though. So what was initially a punishment operation turned into a search and destroy operation that pitted the Deep State and its media cohorts against a duly elected President of the United States? That attempt is now being uncovered in real time which in turn has led to a flurry of cover-up activity from such powerful players as the New York Times. And not only are they desperate to save their own skins but even more importantly protect the man at the very top of this political conspiracy food chain - Barack Obama himself.
"John Brennan should get a good lawyer." That's the advice from former U.S. attorney Joe diGenova who laid out the stunning extent of the Deep State operation against Donald Trump:
"We know that Hillary Clinton was illegally exonerated. We knew that a year ago," the former prosecutor said.
"We know that there was a substantial effort to frame the current president of the United States with crimes by infiltrating his campaign and then his administration with spies that the FBI had set upon them."
"We have learned that the crimes were committed by the FBI, senior members of the Department of Justice, John Brennan, Mr. [James] Clapper, Mr. [James] Comey and others associated with the Democratic Party," he continued. "And Donald Trump and his associates committed no crimes."
"Categorically and unequivocally, it has been proved that the FBI, in violation of all guidelines, all legislation - and I believe they committed crimes in doing so - purposely sent people into the Trump campaign to plant false information, then force that information to be forwarded back to CIA, and then funneled to the FBI, to be used as false information in FISA applications," he said.
"Everybody involved in that process, who knowingly participated, committed a crime," DiGenova concluded.
Read more
The NSA has tripled its surveillance of Americans’ phone chatter, collecting over 534mn phone call records and text messages last year, despite pressure for more restrictions and transparency, a new official report has revealed.
Over the course of 2017, the National Security Agency (NSA) collected some 534,396,285 call detail records (CDRs), representing a dramatic increase over the previous year when, the agency gathered details of 151,230,968 calls, according to the report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
A call detail record contains various attributes of the call, such as the source number, destination number, and the call duration, but does not include the “content of any communication, the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer, or cell site location or global positioning system information,” the report states. The data is collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The report also noted that the NSA collected records from some 129,080 'non-US persons' which is a rather minor increase from 106,469 records collected the year before, under FISA Section 702. The highly controversial Section 702 does not require that an individual surveilled be a suspected terrorist, spy or foreign agent, nor does it demand judicial approval to target someone. Information gleaned by such data collection can be kept for years and may be used for purposes that do not have to be related to national security.
Read more
Elan Martin
Sott.net
These are very tenuous times in Washington. As we've been noting for
more than a year, the accusations made against Trump for "colluding with
Russia" to win the Presidency against Hillary Clinton has been nothing
short of a political witch-hunt to delegitimize him in the eyes of
Americans, the world, and to prevent the US government from working with
Russia in any kind of reasonable way. Globally, the attempt to connect
Trump to an "evil plan" hatched by Russia "to subvert US democracy" by
tinkering with the Presidential elections has also served the purpose of
vilifying the Russian government - and painting Russian President
Vladimir Putin as some kind of imperial Machiavelli who must be
contended with in the most prejudicial of ways.
The entrenched political and intelligence interests connected to
perpetuating this ridiculous shitshow must have thought they were
killing two birds with one stone; the first, to destroy Trump
politically so that he had no chances of showing that the US and Russia
could work together constructively, and the second, to further the Big
Lie that Russia seeks to harm the US (and the world) in pursuit of its
interests. But, alas, the real lies, connivances and crimes
connected to perpetuating the false 'Russiagate' narrative are now,
finally, being exposed and reaching greater public recognition. And the
laws that were broken in order to hunt Trump down may be the cause of
all hell breaking loose in Washington. Or so it should.
Last Thursday, a four-page House Intelligence Committee memo laying out pervasive FISA court abuse was shown to members of the US House of Representatives. The "disturbing and explosive" information it supposedly contains points directly to the illegal surveillance
of Trump and his campaign by employees of the FBI and the Department of
Justice, under the direction of the Obama administration. The memo
remains 'classified', but Republican members of Congress have over the
past week been publicly hinting at what it contains, and urging its
release.
Though downplayed in the mainstream media - which is casting the memo as
a partisan effort by the GOP to undermine Robert Mueller's Special
Counsel investigation - such is the hype in DC at the moment that
publication of the document would apparently not only end the careers of
senior FBI and DoJ officials and open a door to their criminal
prosecution, but put an end to Robert Mueller's completely spurious
investigation, the main driver of 'Russiagate'.
Read more
The Register
Dec. 24 2013
Governments, judges, cops and politicians are continuing to lobby
Google to tear down online material critical of their operations, we’re
told.
Today, the advertising giant said that, in the first six months of 2013,
it received 3,846 demands from public officials to remove 24,737
personal blog posts, YouTube videos and other pieces of content it
hosts. That’s up 68 per cent on the second half of 2012.
And according to the web giant, which has just published its latest
transparency report, 93 requests focused on content that was critical of
people in public office. Defamation and copyright infringement were
often cited, but less than one third of the highlighted material was
removed in the first half of 2013.
"Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent:
governments continue to ask us to remove political content," wrote
Google legal director Susan Infantino, who called out Turkey and Russia
for ramping up the number of complaints.
"Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them,
police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a
light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t
want people to be able to find information about their decision-making
processes," she added.
In the US, Google said that it saw requests for content removal up 70
per cent over last year. Notable cases include the removal of 76 apps
from the Google Play store over alleged infringements of government
copyrights and the denied takedown request from a local official who
sought to remove pages outlining his record as a police officer.
In the UK, Google said it shot down a request from a local government
council to take down a critical website, and upheld a request to pull a
preview from a book that alleged illegal activity by an unnamed member
of Parliament.
The report is the latest in a transparency program that Google is soon
hoping to expand. The company has petitioned the US government to allow
it to post information and notifications relating to FISA takedown
requests. Thus far the requests have not been granted.
Verizon is also preparing to launch its own transparency report on law
enforcement data requests, a particularly interesting development given
the mobile carrier’s recent interactions with the NSA and the
revelations of federal officials collecting mass archives of user
activity.
"All companies are required to provide information to government
agencies in certain circumstances, however, and this new report is
intended to provide more transparency about law enforcement requests,"
said Verizon general counsel and executive vice president of public
policy Randall Milch.
