Category Archives: News

Intelligence chairman: Justice report shows no evidence for Trump’s claims of wiretapping during campaign

The Washington Post reports: The Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that new documents provided to Congress by the Justice Department provided no proof to support President Trump’s claim that his predecessor had ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower.

“Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No, but there never was, and the information we got on Friday continues to lead us in that direction,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added, “There was no FISA warrant that I’m aware of to tap Trump Tower” — a reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a federal law that governs the issuance of search warrants in U.S. intelligence gathering. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Allegations from the United States that British spy agency GCHQ snooped on Donald Trump during his election campaign are “arrant nonsense”, the deputy head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) said in an interview on Saturday.

President Trump has stood by unproven claims that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 White House race. On Thursday his spokesman cited a media report that Britain’s GCHQ was behind the surveillance.

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told BBC News the idea that Britain had a hand in spying on Trump was “just crazy”. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

White House installs political aides at Cabinet agencies to be Trump’s eyes and ears

The Washington Post reports: The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.

At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.

Most members of President Trump’s Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged — above all — with monitoring the secretaries’ loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the administration.

This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

An uprising among scientists

Climate Central reports: The current political climate has spurred a growing cadre of scientists to emerge from their labs, offices and fieldwork sites to contest an administration that’s openly hostile to scientific inquiry — particularly when it comes to climate change — and coined the term “alternative facts.”

“We’ve tried to let our data do the talking for us and that has failed miserably,” Kim Cobb, a coral researcher at Georgia Tech, said.

Scientists staged a thousand-strong rally in Boston during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in late February. Much bigger protests are afoot with the March for Science and its 190 satellite marches planned for April 22. Scientists are also organizing support groups and many have said they are considering running for public office.

The current wave of scientific discontent has the makings of a budding movement. But whether it moves the political dial like the Tea Party or fizzles out like Occupy Wall Street remains to be seen.

Scientists in the streets is not a new thing. They rallied around nuclear disarmament during the Cold War, but they also weren’t the main component of that movement. That makes the current groundswell of scientists leading their own charge a different proposition.

The March for Science is the most visible piece of the new movement, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, a private planning Facebook group with more than 837,000 members and more than 50,000 volunteers. The march has the potential to go down as one of the largest mass mobilizations by scientists in history. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Germany rejects Trump’s claim it owes NATO and U.S. ‘vast sums’ for defense

The New York Times reports: President Trump criticized Germany on Saturday for paying too little to both NATO and the United States for security support, a day after he held a chilly meeting at the White House with Chancellor Angela Merkel that showcased the two leaders’ disagreements.

“Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Twitter as he began his weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

“Nevertheless, Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” he continued.

The message was misleading because no nation actually “owes” money to NATO; its direct funding is calculated through a formula and paid by each of the 28 nations that are members.

Mr. Trump may have been referring to the fact that Germany, like most NATO countries, falls short of the alliance’s guideline that each member should allocate 2 percent of its gross domestic product to military spending, but that money is not intended to be paid to NATO or to the United States. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday rejected U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that Germany owes NATO and the United States “vast sums” of money for defense.

“There is no debt account at NATO,” von der Leyen said in a statement, adding that it was wrong to link the alliance’s target for members to spend 2 percent of their economic output on defense by 2024 solely to NATO.

“Defense spending also goes into UN peacekeeping missions, into our European missions and into our contribution to the fight against IS terrorism,” von der Leyen said.

She said everyone wanted the burden to be shared fairly and for that to happen it was necessary to have a “modern security concept” that included a modern NATO but also a European defense union and investment in the United Nations. [Continue reading…]

The way Trump talks about NATO suggests he has the wrong model in his mind. He seems to view the international organization as an American-run club who members pay fees in order to enjoy services provided by the U.S., but it doesn’t work like that.

Perhaps Trump’s suspicions about getting “ripped off” are further reinforced by the fact that this club (for which the U.S. in reality only pays 22% of the organizational operating costs) is based in Brussels and led by a Norwegian.

For more details on NATO funding, it’s worth reading NATO’s own explanation. If Trump had the slightest interest in educating himself — he clearly doesn’t — he could learn a lot simply by reallocating 30 minutes of his time away from Fox News to Nato.int. On funding, the site even includes a Trump-friendly summary of “highlights” reduced to six bullet points.

(Just in case Trump and the other conspiracy theorists in the White House are perplexed by NATO’s logo which shows “NATO” and beneath that those letters in reverse, OTAN is not a secret code — it stands for Organisation du Traité de l’Atlantique Nord (NATO in French).)

Facebooktwittermail

Senators ask Trump adviser, Roger Stone, to preserve any Russia-related documents

The New York Times reports: Roger J. Stone Jr., an informal adviser to President Trump, has been asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to preserve any records he may have in connection to a broader inquiry into Russian attempts to interfere with United States elections.

The letter sent to Mr. Stone, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, represents the first public indication of the scope of the committee’s inquiry, and possible connections to Mr. Trump’s campaign.

The Senate committee asked Mr. Stone, who is also under scrutiny from other federal investigators, to “preserve and retain all hard copies and electronically stored information as specified below in furtherance of the committee’s ongoing investigation into Russian actions targeting the 2016 U.S. elections and democratic processes globally.”

Mr. Stone confirmed the existence of the letter, which was dated Feb. 17. However, he said he had received it only on Friday, by email. Mr. Stone has acknowledged trading messages over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that officials believe was actually Russian intelligence officers.

The letter to Mr. Stone was signed by the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and its ranking Democrat, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. Press officers for Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner declined to comment on the letter.

Democrats and some investigators, as well as some Republicans, have been watching Mr. Stone, a Richard M. Nixon acolyte and self-described “dirty trickster,” more closely since he posted on Twitter in August 2016 about John D. Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, whose private emails were hacked and provided to WikiLeaks. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why Trump’s plan to slash UN funding could lead to global calamity

Amy B Wang writes: For 16 days, Stephen O’Brien, the United Nation’s undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, traveled from one afflicted country to another, talking to people who were traumatized. Starving. Desperate for peace.

Many had been displaced, the victims of airstrikes and constant fighting, of drought and imminent famine.

By the time O’Brien returned to the United Nations, the humanitarian chief had committed several statistics to heart, each one illustrating a deep gash the agency needed to address in its efforts around the world.

In Yemen, he said, more than 7 million people are hungry and do not know when they will eat again. That represented a staggering increase of more than 3 million people since January.

In South Sudan, more than 7.5 million needed assistance, including 1 million malnourished children.

In Somalia, 6.2 million were in need of aid.

And in northern Kenya, the number of people who were “food insecure” was likely to reach 4 million by April.

In all, more than 20 million people in those four countries faced starvation and famine, O’Brien said in a lengthy address to the U.N. Security Council on Friday.

O’Brien’s grim report came as President Trump proposed slashing U.S. spending on the United Nations by more than half, as reported by Foreign Policy.

“We’re absolutely reducing funding to the U.N. and to various foreign aid programs,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said during a news conference Thursday, according to Fox News. When asked by how much, he replied simply: “A lot.”

The United Nations warned against the proposed cuts Thursday. “Abrupt funding cuts can force the adoption of ad hoc measures that will undermine the impact of longer-term reform efforts,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres’s spokesman said in a statement.

French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre said the cuts could result in instability worldwide. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

China urges U.S. to remain ‘coolheaded’ on North Korea as Tillerson warns of danger

The Washington Post reports: China urged the United States to remain “coolheaded” over North Korea and not to turn its back on dialogue, as visiting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed a “sense of urgency” to curb dangerous levels of tension on the Korean Peninsula.

On his first trip to Asia this week, Tillerson earlier declared that diplomacy has failed to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear program and that a new approach was needed. On Friday in Seoul, he warned ominously that all options were on the table to counter the threat from Pyongyang.

President Trump weighed in Friday by goading China over Twitter for not doing enough to help prevent its ally from “behaving very badly.”

But in a joint news conference Saturday with his Chinese counterpart, Tillerson struck a more diplomatic note, choosing to play down differences with Beijing and affirm that both countries share the goal of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Most American young adults see Trump presidency as illegitimate

The Associated Press reports: A majority of young adults – 57% – see Donald Trump’s presidency as illegitimate, including about three-quarters of blacks and large majorities of Latinos and Asians, a new poll has found.

GenForward is a poll of adults age 18 to 30 conducted by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

A slim majority of young whites in the poll, 53%, consider Trump a legitimate president, but even among that group 55% disapprove of the job he’s doing, according to the survey. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian defector who documented Assad’s atrocities returning to Washington

Josh Rogin writes: The Syrian defector known as “Caesar,” who brought the world the largest trove of evidence of mass atrocities perpetrated by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, is returning to Washington this weekend. Three years after he helped expose some of the worst war crimes of our generation, the victims of those crimes are still a long way from getting justice.

From 2011 to 2013, Caesar worked as a military photographer in the Syrian army, forced to meticulously document the torture and murder of thousands of men, women and children inside Assad’s jails. When he fled Syria in 2013, he brought with him over 55,000 images that show the killing of over 11,000 civilians in custody, along with documents detailing the Syrian government’s highly organized system of mass murder.

The photos, some of which were released publicly in 2014, show bodies starved, tortured and mutilated. The Syrian government kept detailed records. Assad’s “machinery of death” was the worst since the Nazis, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for war crimes Stephen Rapp said at the time.

Caesar testified before Congress in the summer of 2014 and explained to U.S. lawmakers that the evidence he smuggled out of Syria showed only a small segment of the overall government operation and that tens of thousands of civilians were still being tortured and murdered in Assad’s prisons.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum took up Caesar’s cause and helped build an effort to raise public awareness about the Syrian government’s mass atrocities, working with elements of the Syrian opposition. Caesar’s photos were shown in the halls of Congress, the United Nations and the European Parliament. In 2015, the FBI verified the authenticity of the photos after an extensive forensic investigation.

Now, Caesar is returning to the United States with a simple question: What progress has been made? For those pushing for accountability, justice and a halt to the slaughter, the sad answer is not enough. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Leaked emails reveal Nigel Farage’s long-standing links to Julian Assange

Business Insider reports: There was much confusion Thursday [3/9] when Nigel Farage was spotted by BuzzFeed leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London — the residence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Asked why he was there, Farage replied that he couldn’t remember what he was doing in the building, adding, “I never discuss where I go or who I see.”

Emails leaked to Business Insider, however, reveal that UKIP under Farage’s leadership had long-standing links to Assange. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Doctors warn climate change threatens public health

E&E News reports: Growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, Patrice Tomcik had never heard of Lyme disease — an infectious, flu-like illness transmitted by ticks.

But in the last few years, five of her friends have caught it, she’s had to have her dog vaccinated and she regularly finds herself pulling ticks off her children. It can be disconcerting, she said, having to worry about an illness that she had never been exposed to in the past.

“It’s getting warmer, so the season for ticks is lasting longer,” said Tomcik, a field consultant with Moms Clean Air Force. “There are so many more of them, and they just don’t die off. It’s a big issue here in Pennsylvania, because we have so much wood. Our family has 29 acres of land out in the woods, and I’m picking ticks off my dog and my kids like I’ve never seen before.”

Lyme disease isn’t the only contagious illness that is venturing into new territories under a shifting climate. Across the country, physicians are noticing an influx of patients whose illnesses, they say, are directly or indirectly related to climate change. Now, 11 medical associations — representing around half the doctors and physicians in the country — are creating a group that intends to address the links between climate change and health risks. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump’s source: A greedy former judge citing an intel conspiracy theorist

The New York Times reports: Andrew Napolitano was a Superior Court judge in New Jersey until, frustrated by the constraints of his salary, he left the bench for more lucrative pastures: talk radio, a syndicated small-claims court TV series (“Power of Attorney”) and, eventually, Fox News, where he rose to become the network’s senior legal analyst.

It was in that basic-cable capacity this week that Mr. Napolitano managed to set off a cascading scandal, which by Friday had sparked a trans-Atlantic tiff between Britain and the United States while plunging President Trump’s close relationship with Fox News into new, murkier territory.

It was new ground for Mr. Napolitano, 66, who prefers being addressed as “The Judge” and once insisted that Fox News install bookshelves and wood-paneling in his newsroom office, the better to resemble a judge’s chambers.

But Mr. Napolitano’s unlikely leap into global politics can be explained by his friendship with Mr. Trump, whom he met with this year to discuss potential Supreme Court nominees. Mr. Napolitano also has a taste for conspiracy theories, which led him to Larry C. Johnson, a former intelligence officer best known for spreading a hoax about Michelle Obama. [Continue reading…]

Today, Johnson writes:

I spoke three months ago with a source that, if the source’s name was revealed, would be known and recognized as a reliable source of information. Based on that contact I reached out to friends in the intel community and asked them about the possibility that a back channel was used to get the Brits to collect on Trump associates. My sources said, “absolutely.”

There’s a mighty chasm between saying something’s possible and asserting that it happened. The very same source, if asked whether he had any evidence that such a back channel had indeed reached out to GCHQ, would have most likely followed his “absolutely,” with, “none whatsoever.”

Facebooktwittermail

Among British intelligence officials, growing concern about security threat posed by Trump

Financial Times reports: Shaken by the leaks of Edward Snowden, beset with strategic threats from Islamist militants and Russian aggression, the US-UK intelligence alliance is now facing a more unexpected although no less serious challenge — from the most powerful man within it.

Serving and former British intelligence officials worry that the US president has the power — if not necessarily the inclination — to weaken intelligence ties. After all, the White House has in the past tried to choke off sharing information with the UK and political disagreements have also sometimes led to selective disclosures on both sides.

They also fret that Mr Trump’s fast-and-loose style could lead to the disclosure of highly sensitive information provided by Britain. Most sensitive of all, some British intelligence officials wonder how carefully Mr Trump might treat their “product” — particularly over Russia — if it was deemed damaging to his own political interests. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Russian elite invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings

Reuters reports: During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump downplayed his business ties with Russia. And since taking office as president, he has been even more emphatic.

“I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia,” President Trump said at a news conference last month. “I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”

But in the United States, members of the Russian elite have invested in Trump buildings. A Reuters review has found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, according to public documents, interviews and corporate records.

The buyers include politically connected businessmen, such as a former executive in a Moscow-based state-run construction firm that works on military and intelligence facilities, the founder of a St. Petersburg investment bank and the co-founder of a conglomerate with interests in banking, property and electronics.

People from the second and third tiers of Russian power have invested in the Trump buildings as well. One recently posted a photo of himself with the leader of a Russian motorcycle gang that was sanctioned by the United States for its alleged role in Moscow’s seizure of Crimea. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump’s foolish effort to blame GCHQ and Fox News for a diplomatic mess of his own making

Former NSA analyst and counterintelligence officer, John Schindler, writes: Napolitano has zero background in intelligence and has no idea what he’s talking about. His accusation against Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, London’s NSA equivalent, was patently absurd, as well as malicious, demonstrating that neither Napolitano nor Fox News have the slightest notion how intelligence works in the real world.

Yet here the White House was publicly endorsing this crackpot theory—and blaming perhaps our closest ally for breaking American laws at the behest of Barack Obama. Our domestic crisis thereby became an international one, for no reason other than the administration has gone global in its efforts to deflect blame from its own stupidity and dishonesty.

This is no small matter. NSA and GCHQ enjoy the most special of special relationships, serving since the Second World War as the cornerstone of the Anglosphere Five Eyes signals intelligence alliance (the others are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) which defeated Hitler and won the Cold War. This constitutes the most successful espionage alliance in history, and just how close NSA and GCHQ are would be difficult to overstate.

Affectionately calling each other “the cousins,” they interchange personnel and, in the event of disaster—for instance a crippling terrorist attack on agency headquarters—NSA would hand most of its functions over to GCHQ, so that Five Eyes would keep running. It’s long been a source of consternation at Langley that NSA appears to get along better with GCHQ than with CIA. I once witnessed this issue come up in a top-secret meeting with senior officials, in which a CIA boss took an NSA counterpart to task when it became apparent that a piece of highly sensitive intelligence had been shared with “the cousins” before Langley was informed. The NSA senior official’s terse reply silenced the room: “That’s because we trust them.”

Publicly attacking the NSA-GCHQ relationship was therefore a consummately bad idea, particularly by a White House that has already gone so far out of its way to anger and alienate our own spies, and the British reply was one for the record books. Late yesterday, GCHQ issued a remarkable statement:

Recent allegations made by media commentator judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.

American spy services are famously tight-lipped in their public utterances, falling back on “we can neither confirm nor deny” with a regularity that frustrates journalists. And our spooks are positively loquacious compared to British partners, who seldom say anything on the record to the media. Calling out Fox News and the White House in this manner has no precedent, and indicates just how angry British officials are with the Trump administration. For Prime Minister Teresa May, whose efforts to build bridges with the new president have been deeply unpopular at home, this had to be galling. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘Deep State’ myth won’t fix wiretapping mess

Tim Naftali writes: It’s worth noting that the vast majority of intelligence abuses unearthed by the Watergate and Church investigations and by investigations after 9/11 were not the product of an unelected state; they were the product of secret activities ordered by elected officials, namely our Presidents.

Even Richard Nixon, our most conspiracy-minded President before Donald Trump, understood this distinction very well. After the Senate Watergate investigation turned up evidence in May 1973 that Nixon had ordered wiretaps on 17 members of the National Security Staff and the press between 1969 and 1971 without seeking a court order, Nixon wanted “all the wiretaps of previous administrations revealed.”

“I wanted everything out on the Democrats,” he wrote, convinced that the secret records of previous domestic wiretaps would put him in the better light. On June 1, Nixon told National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger to “let your [liberal] assholes know” that the White House would soon be publishing the list of wiretaps by Democratic presidents.

Less than a week later, he reminded White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig, Jr., that he wanted the names from the FBI of all the individuals tapped between 1961 and 1964, “Give us the names — that’s all we need.” And on June 21, he discussed with White House Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt, Jr., the list provided by the FBI of all wiretaps after 1960.

In his memoirs, Nixon didn’t suggest any doubt that in 1973 he possessed a full record of wiretaps ordered by his predecessors. Such is the power of the presidency. If he wanted to know such things, all he had to do was ask. The intelligence community works for him. In other words, he is the mythic “Deep State.”

So, Donald Trump, when he heard the media speculation of Obama wiretaps, could have simply asked for a list, as Nixon once did. Trump could also have asked for all of the FISA warrants — something that did not exist in Nixon’s time — requested by the Bureau. This would tell him right away if the Obama Justice Department had ever overreached.

Perhaps Trump has already done this. After all, for over a week, some Congressional heavy hitters, like Senator John McCain and Roy Blunt, have been advising the President through the media to investigate the matter himself.

And maybe Trump hasn’t been happy with what he learned. If so, he is reliving the Nixon experience. Nixon tried his best to spin what the secret documents told him to his advantage, to no avail. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

House Intelligence panel does not reveal whether documents substantiate Trump’s wiretap claim

The Washington Post reports: The House Intelligence Committee did not reveal on Friday night the answer to the question of whether Justice Department documents substantiate President Trump’s claim that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration.

The committee had asked for copies of any warrants, applications or court orders relating to a wiretap of Trump or his surrogates and affiliates in advance of a Monday hearing at which the directors of the FBI and the National Security Agency are expected to testify about alleged connections between the Trump team and Russian authorities.

Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) avoided the big question by releasing a statement late Friday that said his panel is “satisfied” that Justice “has fully complied” with its request related to “possible surveillance” of Trump and his associates.

Nunes said the CIA and FBI had not yet provided information that was requested “that is necessary to determine whether information collected on U.S. persons was mishandled and leaked.”

He added that the NSA had “partially met our request” and pledged to fully meet it by the end of next week. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. policy of ‘strategic patience’ with North Korea over, says Tillerson, raising the specter of nuclear war

Reuters reports: A U.S. policy of strategic patience with North Korea has ended, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in South Korea on Friday, adding that military action would be “on the table” if North Korea elevated the threat level.

Tillerson began his first Asian visit as secretary of state in Japan on Wednesday and will travel to China on Saturday with a main focus on finding a “new approach” on North Korea after what he described as two decades of failed efforts to denuclearize the insular nation.

“Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended. We are exploring a new range of security and diplomatic measures. All options are on the table,” Tillerson told a news conference in Seoul.

He said any North Korean actions that threatened the South would be met with “an appropriate response”.

“If they elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action, that option is on the table,” Tillerson said when asked about military action. [Continue reading…]

Arms control expert, Jeffrey Lewis, underlines the implications of threatening military action by citing a March 9 statement published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state news agency of North Korea:

Facebooktwittermail