The Washington Post reports: The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Action has been delayed, some administration officials said, because relieving Rogers of his duties is tied to another controversial recommendation: to create separate chains of command at the NSA and the military’s cyberwarfare unit, a recommendation by Clapper and Carter that has been stalled because of other issues.
The news comes as Rogers is being considered by President-elect Donald Trump to be his nominee for director of national intelligence to replace Clapper as the official who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower. That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters. [Continue reading…]
Vox reports: President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas to head the Central Intelligence Agency, putting a hawkish lawmaker who favors brutally interrogating detainees and expanding the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in charge of America’s premier spy agency.
Pompeo may be an unfamiliar name to many Americans, but he is well-known — and apparently generally well-respected — among intelligence professionals and well-liked by his colleagues on Capitol Hill.
The 52-year-old third-term Congress member serves on the House Intelligence Committee and played a prominent role the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which investigated Hillary Clinton for her role in the deaths of four Americans at the hands of Islamist terrorists in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
Pompeo was particularly harsh on Clinton during the hearings, and in a report afterward accused her of having “put politics ahead of people” and “focusing more on spin and media narrative before an election than securing American lives under attack by terrorists.”
As a member of Congress with experience working closely with — and at times strongly defending — the intelligence community, Pompeo’s nomination as CIA chief could bode well for the future relationship between the CIA and Congress, which has deteriorated in recent years over the CIA’s detainee program and feuds with its nominal overseers on Capitol Hill.
But Pompeo’s extremely hawkish views on critical national security issues, such as his support for keeping open the US prison at Guantanamo Bay; his defense of brutal CIA interrogation practices like waterboarding and “rectal feeding”; and his overwhelming focus on the dire threat of “radical Islamic terrorism” — all positions closely aligned with those of President-elect Trump and his new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — suggest he is not likely to be a particularly sobering or restraining force on the president-elect, particularly when it comes to controversial policies like torture and drone strikes.
Pompeo’s hawkish stance toward Russia, on the other hand, could be a major source of tension between him and the president-elect, who, along Flynn, seeks to develop closer ties with Russia, particularly in the fight against ISIS in Syria. [Continue reading…]
Huffington Post reports: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Tuesday said he wants Senate hearings to investigate whether Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the U.S. election, casting doubts on President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to improve relations with Russia.
“Assuming for a moment that we do believe that the Russian government was controlling outside organizations that hacked into our election, they should be punished,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill. “Putin should be punished.”
Graham, who was defeated by Trump during the primary, urged fellow Republicans to not “let allegations against a foreign government interfering in our election process go unanswered because it may have been beneficial to our cause.”
He said congressional hearings would include “Russia’s misadventure throughout the world,” including its military aggression in Eastern Europe and whether it committed war crimes in Syria.
Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to cozy up to Russia. During the campaign, he called for closer relations with Russia in fighting the Islamic State and praised Putin for being a “stronger leader” than President Barack Obama. [Continue reading…]
The Wall Street Journal reports on Rudy Giuliani’s possible nomination as Secretary of State: Beyond the Iraq war [which he supported], Mr. Giuliani is also drawing scrutiny for his regular appearances at events supporting an Iranian opposition group, called the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which the State Department designated as a terrorist organization from 1997 through 2012.
Last year, Mr. Giuliani addressed MEK leaders in Paris and called for the overthrow of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his clerical regime. “The Ayatollah must go! Gone! Out! No more!” Mr. Giuliani told a crowd of thousands. “He and Rouhani and Ahmadinejad and all of the rest of them should be put on trial for crimes against humanity.”
The MEK paid Mr. Giuliani and other former U.S. officials to speak at its events, according to group leaders and U.S. officials who investigated the matter. Speaking fees ranged from $25,000 to $40,000 per appearance.
A broad mix of senior Republicans and Democrats has appeared at MEK events, including James Jones, President Barack Obama’s former national security advisor; Howard Dean, a one-time head of the Democratic National Committee who is now seeking that post again; and Mr. Bolton.
The Treasury Department launched a probe into the legality of former officials being paid by the MEK or its affiliates while it was still on the State Department’s terror list, U.S. officials have said. Treasury officials declined to comment on the status of that probe, including whether it has been closed. [Continue reading…]
Rebecca Solnit writes: Sometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote. To defeat her it took an unholy cabal far beyond what Barack Obama faced when he was the campaign of change, swimming with the tide of disgust about the Bush administration. As the New York Times reported, “By the time all the ballots are counted, she seems likely to be ahead by more than 2m votes and more than 1.5 percentage points. She will have won by a wider percentage margin than not only Al Gore in 2000 but also Richard Nixon in 1968 and John F Kennedy in 1960.”
You can flip that and see that Trump was such a weak candidate it took decades of scheming and an extraordinary international roster of powerful players to lay the groundwork that made his election possible. Defeating Clinton in the electoral college took the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act by Republican appointees to the supreme court. It took vast Republican voter suppression laws and tactics set in place over many years. It took voter intimidation at many polling places. It took the long Republican campaign to blow up the boring bureaucratic irregularity of Clinton’s use of a private email server into a scandal that the media obediently picked up and reheated.
It took James Comey, the director of the FBI, using that faux-scandal and his power to stage a misleading smear attack on Clinton 11 days before the election in flagrant violation of the custom of avoiding such intervention for 60 days before an election. It took a compliant mainstream media running after his sabotage like a golden retriever chasing a tennis ball. It took decades of conservative attacks on the Clintons. Comey, incidentally, served as deputy GOP counsel to the Senate Whitewater committee, that fishing expedition that began with an investigation in a messy real estate deal in Arkansas before Bill Clinton’s presidency and ended with a campaign to impeach him on charges related to completely unrelated sexual activities during his second term.
It took a nearly decade-long reality TV show, The Apprentice, that deified Trump’s cruelty, sexism, racism and narcissism as essential to success and power. As the feminist media critic Jennifer Pozner points out: “Everything Trump said and did was framed in a way to flatter him, and more importantly, flatter his worldview.” The colossal infomercial fictionalized the blundering, cheating businessman as an unqualified success and gave him a kind of brand recognition no other candidate had.
It took the full support of Fox News, whose CEO, Roger Ailes, was so committed to him that after leaving the company following allegations of decades of sexual harassment of employees, he joined the Trump campaign. It took the withdrawal of too many Americans from even that calibre of journalism into the partisan unreliability of faux-news sites and confirmation-bias bubbles of social media. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: For decades, Mustafa Elaghil’s family produced snack foods popular in Yemen, chips and corn curls in bright packaging decorated with the image of Ernie from “Sesame Street.”
But over the summer, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia sent warplanes over Yemen and bombed the Elaghils’ factory. The explosion destroyed it, setting it ablaze and trapping the workers inside.
The attack killed 10 employees and wiped out a business that had employed dozens of families.
“It was everything for us,” Mr. Elaghil said.
The Saudi-led coalition has bombed Yemen for the last 19 months, trying to oust a rebel group aligned with Iran that took control of the capital, Sana, in 2014. The Saudis want to restore the country’s exiled president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who led an internationally recognized government more aligned with its interests.
But instead of defeating the rebels, the campaign has sunk into a grinding stalemate, systematically obliterating Yemen’s already bare-bones economy. The coalition has destroyed a wide variety of civilian targets that critics say have no clear link to the rebels.
It has hit hospitals and schools. It has destroyed bridges, power stations, poultry farms, a key seaport and factories that produce yogurt, tea, tissues, ceramics, Coca-Cola and potato chips. It has bombed weddings and a funeral.
The bombing campaign has exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in the Arab world’s poorest country, where cholera is spreading, millions of people are struggling to get enough food, and malnourished babies are overwhelming hospitals, according to the United Nations. Millions have been forced from their homes, and since August, the government has been unable to pay the salaries of most of the 1.2 million civil servants. [Continue reading…]
BuzzFeed reports: For the first time, federal officials have acknowledged a potential conflict of interest that faces incoming president Donald Trump over his high-profile hotel deal with the United States government. And the federal agency that’s involved wants to talk to Trump’s transition team about it before he takes the oath of office.
In 2012, the General Services Administration agreed to lease the Old Post Office Building — a landmark building just blocks from the White House — to Trump’s organization so that the mogul could turn it into a luxury hotel. In the complicated 109-page lease, Trump is required to pay the GSA $3 million a year plus a portion of his revenue, and he has to abide by a complex set of restrictions regarding what he can do and how he can build.
But once Trump becomes president, he will have authority over the GSA and will be able to fire its administrator at will, raising profound issues of a conflict.
Questioned about that conflict, a GSA spokesperson sent a statement to BuzzFeed News: “Prior to Mr. Trump taking the oath of office, GSA plans to coordinate with the President-elect’s transition team to allow a plan to be put in place to identify and address any potential conflict of interest relating to the Old Post Office building.”
Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks did not respond to emailed questions about the matter. [Continue reading…]
Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Bill Clinton and long-time confidant to Hillary Clinton, was interviewed on Friday on Nieuwsuur (News Hour) which is broadcast on Dutch public television. The introduction is in Dutch but the interview itself is in English.
Blumenthal says the decisive intervention in the election by FBI Director James Comey “was the result of a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani who was a member of Trump’s campaign and I think it’s not unfair to call it a ‘coup’.”
“Trump has positioned himself to be Vladimir Putin’s junior partner… His policy is consistently pro-Putin and I think that we will see, if his rhetoric is made into reality, that American foreign policy since the end of World War Two will be overthrown.”
The New York Times reports: Hillary Clinton on Saturday cast blame for her surprise election loss on the announcement by the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, days before the election that he had revived the inquiry into her use of a private email server.
In her most extensive remarks since she conceded the race to Donald J. Trump early Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton told donors on a 30-minute conference call that Mr. Comey’s decision to send a letter to Congress about the inquiry 11 days before Election Day had thrust the controversy back into the news and had prevented her from ending the campaign with an optimistic closing argument.
“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a donor who relayed the remarks. But, she added, “our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.” [Continue reading…]
Suppose the Clinton campaign had stayed on track and there had been no FBI intervention. It seems much more likely than not, that Clinton would have won.
That campaign would now be a subject of analysis in which pundits were describing the keys to its success, alongside the reasons Trump had failed.
In other words, it’s easy to picture two versions of the Clinton campaign that are virtually identical, the only significant difference being on whether the FBI had stepped in.
Even though it’s reasonable to point out that the FBI would never have got involved in the first place had it not been for Clinton’s ill-judged decision to set up a private email server, that mistake itself didn’t appear to be an obstacle to her election until the FBI willfully reawakened it as a campaign issue.
On October 7, the Director of National Intelligence released a Joint DHS and ODNI Election Security Statement saying:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.
President Obama has 73 days left in office and during this time he has a responsibility to act on this finding.
It may be pointless and arguably counterproductive to start formulating and enacting a strategic response to Russia’s interference in the election — especially given the likelihood that this plan would be set aside by the incoming Trump administration and given the cozy relationship that Trump and Putin are already developing.
Obama’s primary responsibility is to go to the greatest lengths possible in informing the public about what the intelligence services already know and what further information can be established and revealed in the coming weeks.
What is called for is substance to add to the assertion of confidence that has already been made.
In the absence of clear evidence, the assertions about Russia have thus far been tainted by the appearance of being politically partisan — all the more reason why Trump will easily be able to sweep away the issue. Even before the election, he had already dismissed the intelligence finding.
There is a glaring irony in this situation.
On the one hand the FBI just directly intervened in a presidential election — an intervention that was strongly criticized from many quarters and that arguably tipped the result in Trump’s favor. On the other hand, if Obama adopts the traditional caretaker role of an outgoing president, he will likely end up effectively burying evidence that the Russian government not only interfered but helped determine the outcome of a U.S. election.
As much as there might now be a common desire to heal the divisions in America, the public has a right to know and fully understand what just happened.
Russia hacked for him. The FBI director shilled for him. Wikileaks leaked for him. And he kept telling us it was rigged.
Underscoring concerns about humanitarian fallout from the battle, Iraqi troops discovered what could be a mass grave some 30 miles southeast of Mosul, according to Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abdulamir Yarallah, commander of the Nineveh liberation operation, where he said 100 decapitated bodies were found at an agriculture school in the town of Hamam al-Alil.
He provided few details but said Iraqi officials will be sending specialized teams to investigate. Mosul is located in Nineveh Province.
Michael T Flynn, the former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a 33-year career military intelligence officer and currently a close adviser to Donald Trump, tweeted this following the FBI’s notification that its review of emails has been completed and its July conclusion remains unchanged:
IMPOSSIBLE: There R 691,200 seconds in 8 days. DIR Comey has thoroughly reviewed 650,000 emails in 8 days? An email / second? IMPOSSIBLE RT
This is the level of dismay one might expect from someone who is completely ignorant about information technology.
Perhaps this is how Flynn pictures the FBI’s email review process:
Or maybe not.
Flynn followed up with an indication he is aware some highfalutin “smart machines” could have been at work, but he remains skeptical about the lightning speed of the analysis:
It took 1 year to review 60K and 8 days to review 650K? Smart machines or not, something does not jive. Thoughts?
Let’s see… If it takes one year to review 60,000 emails it should take a decade to review 650,000 — is that what you’re thinking, general?
It turns out, the FBI has a whole division devoted to Operational Technology with stacks and stacks of smart machines at its headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. The bureau acknowledges, “While OTD’s work doesn’t typically make the news, the fruits of its labor are evident in the busted child pornography ring, the exposed computer hacker, the prevented bombing, the averted terrorist plot, and the prosecuted corrupt official.”
The Washington Post drills deep into the information retrieval technicalities of the latest investigation and confirms that it did indeed involve the use of “special software.” (Lead investigator to Comey: “How can we go through 650,000 emails fast enough?!” Comey: “You’ll need to use the special software.”)
We live in an era where roughly two billion people have access to Google. The content of about 50 billion web pages is continuously being indexed by the search giant and information from that index can be retrieved in a fraction of a second. Most people haven’t the faintest idea how search technology works, but everyone knows this: it’s super fast.
So Flynn is right: something doesn’t jive.
If 650,000 emails could be reviewed in 8 days, why did the FBI dawdle for a year over its analysis of 60,000 emails?
The first sweep was much more analytical and interpretative and clearly required more eyeballs and deliberation, considering both content and intent.
Nevertheless, what has become evident over the last ten days is that the FBI is a highly politicized government agency. It appears that among its ranks there are a significant number of individuals who believe they are entitled to use their considerable power to influence the outcome of a presidential election.
For that reason, it’s fair to ask now whether the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was dragged out for as long as possible precisely so that it could yield the greatest damage to her campaign — irrespective of the investigation’s findings.
If that was the intention, it seems likely this effort will ultimately fail. Instead, the FBI has profoundly damaged its own credibility as a politically impartial institution serving the interests of the American people.
Paul Krugman writes: It’s almost over. Will we heave a sigh of relief, or shriek in horror? Nobody knows for sure, although early indications clearly lean Clinton. Whatever happens, however, let’s be clear: this was, in fact, a rigged election.
The election was rigged by state governments that did all they could to prevent nonwhite Americans from voting: The spirit of Jim Crow is very much alive — or maybe translate that to Diego Cuervo, now that Latinos have joined African-Americans as targets. Voter ID laws, rationalized by demonstrably fake concerns about election fraud, were used to disenfranchise thousands; others were discouraged by a systematic effort to make voting hard, by closing polling places in areas with large minority populations.
The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning.
The election was rigged by James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. His job is to police crime — but instead he used his position to spread innuendo and influence the election. Was he deliberately putting a thumb on the electoral scales, or was he simply bullied by Republican operatives? It doesn’t matter: He abused his office, shamefully.
The election was also rigged by people within the F.B.I. — people who clearly felt that under Mr. Comey they had a free hand to indulge their political preferences. In the final days of the campaign, pro-Trump agents have clearly been talking nonstop to Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and right-wing media, putting claims and allegations that may or may not have anything to do with reality into the air. The agency clearly needs a major housecleaning: Having an important part of our national security apparatus trying to subvert an election is deeply scary. Unfortunately, Mr. Comey is just the man not to do it. [Continue reading…]
Kurt Eichenwald writes: James Comey should not simply be fired as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He must be barred forever from any form of public service.
In the last 10 days, Comey has whipsawed the election for president of the United States. Now we know he did it for no reason. When his agents found information that suggested there were emails on a laptop that might have relevance to the investigation of Hillary Clinton and her email servers, Comey did not wait until he knew even a scintilla of information before announcing it to the world. Reasonably, lots of voters assumed there must be a there there — who could imagine a person with the power of the FBI director would turn the election on its head for no particular reason, on the basis of nothing?
Then, Sunday, Comey handed down another missive from on high: Never mind. His agents had looked through the emails and decided they were piffle. His majesty, the FBI director, has not yet deigned to officially inform his subjects — the American people — whether the emails related to the Clinton case or what they were. (However, people involved in the case tell Newsweek that almost all of them were duplicates of what the bureau already had or were personal.) He just said “nothing to see here” and waived us on our way. [Continue reading…]
Newsweek reports: The night of the disclosure [Oct 28], Newsweek reported that the emails were from as many as three accounts — one through Yahoo, one on the domain clintonemail.com, and one from an account Abedin used in support of one of Weiner’s campaigns for office. Last week, Newsweek learned that that account was through Gmail. In other words, Abedin’s personal account provided by the State Department for non-classified emails was not involved. Abedin, who did not know Clinton used a private server for her emails, told the bureau in an April interview that she used the account on the clintonemail.com domain only for issues related to the secretary’s personal affairs, such as communicating with her friends. For work-related records, Abedin primarily used the email account provided to her by the State Department.
From the information obtained that first day by Newsweek, it was already clear that, because of the accounts involved, almost all of the documents were going to be duplicates or personal emails. In other words, from the opening moments of this inquiry, there were people in government who already knew what the outcome of this new FBI effort would be, yet it took the bureau another nine days to confirm those details. [Continue reading…]
Time reports: For the last 10 days, the cloud of a renewed investigation hung over Clinton and her campaign as FBI agents scoured yet more emails looking at whether Clinton had committed a crime via BlackBerry. The FBI decided, yet again, that she had not. “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” Comey wrote.
But damage was done by Comey’s unprecedented disclosure that they were even going back to the matter in the first place. Clinton’s poll numbers in many states sank, and some of her supporters found themselves again questioning Clinton’s honesty. The October Surprise that fizzled may have had a lasting effect on the election: Voters in many states were already casting early ballots informed by little more than speculation at that point. [Continue reading…]
Politico reports: The typical Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent is white, male, and middle-aged, often with a military background — in short, drawn from the segment of the U.S. population most likely to support GOP nominee Donald Trump.
That demographic reality explains much of the heat FBI Director James Comey is taking from his own work force at the moment for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation and inquiries into the Clinton Foundation.
Days before the presidential election, FBI finds itself at the center of a political maelstrom, with Comey being sharply criticized by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and even President Barack Obama, who’ve faulted the FBI director for going public with word of new evidence in the Clinton email probe.
That furor has exposed dissension in the FBI’s ranks, prompting a flurry of leaks about alleged efforts to impede the Clinton-related inquiries and exposing lingering anger among agents about Comey’s July decision not to recommend any charges in the email probe.
Incendiary, politically charged remarks from former FBI officials — with one prominent ex-FBI leader publicly calling the Clintons a “crime family” — are also endangering the law enforcement agency’s reputation for sober, nonpartisan investigation.
Largely overlooked in the imbroglio is how the fact that the FBI doesn’t look much like America is complicating Comey’s effort to extricate himself and his agency from the political firestorm.
According to numbers from August, 67 percent of FBI agents are white men. Fewer than 20 percent are women. The number of African-American agents hovers around 4.5 percent, with Asian-Americans about the same and Latinos at about 6.5 percent.
If Trump were running for president with an electorate that looked like that, he’d win in a landslide. [Continue reading…]
NBC News reports: The U.S. government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling, American officials told NBC News.
The effort is being coordinated by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, but reaches across the government to include the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, current and former officials say.
Russia has been warned that any effort to manipulate the actual voting or vote counting would be viewed as a serious breach, intelligence officials say.
“The Russians are in an offensive mode and [the U.S. is] working on strategies to respond to that, and at the highest levels,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014.
Officials are alert for any attempts to create Election Day chaos, and say steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet.
But what is more likely, multiple U.S. officials say, is a lower-level effort by hackers from Russia or elsewhere to peddle misinformation by manipulating Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.
For example, officials fear an 11th hour release of fake documents implicating one of the candidates in an explosive scandal without time for the news media to fact check it. So far, document dumps attributed to the Russians have damaged Democrats and favored Trump. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: The FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are examining faked documents aimed at discrediting the Hillary Clinton campaign as part of a broader investigation into what U.S. officials believe has been an attempt by Russia to disrupt the presidential election, people with knowledge of the matter said.
U.S. Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has referred one of the documents to the FBI for investigation on the grounds that his name and stationery were forged to appear authentic, some of the sources who had knowledge of that discussion said.
In the letter identified as fake, Carper is quoted as writing to Clinton, “We will not let you lose this election,” a person who saw the document told Reuters.
The fake Carper letter, which was described to Reuters, is one of several documents presented to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice for review in recent weeks, the sources said.
A spokeswoman for Carper declined to comment.
As part of an investigation into suspected Russian hacking, FBI investigators have also asked Democratic Party officials to provide copies of other suspected faked documents that have been circulating along with emails and other legitimate documents taken in the hack, people involved in those conversations said.
A spokesman for the FBI confirmed the agency was “in receipt of a complaint about an alleged fake letter” related to the election but declined further comment. Others with knowledge of the matter said the FBI was also examining other fake documents that recently surfaced.
U.S. intelligence officials have warned privately that a campaign they believe is backed by the Russian government to undermine the credibility of the U.S. presidential election could move beyond the hacking of Democratic Party email systems. That could include posting fictional evidence of voter fraud or other disinformation in the run-up to voting on Nov. 8, U.S. officials have said. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.
The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
At the same time, other sources dispute the depth of support for Trump within the bureau, though they uniformly stated that Clinton is viewed highly unfavorably. [Continue reading…]
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