Category Archives: News

FBI launches investigation on its own use of Twitter

ThinkProgress reports: The FBI has launched an internal investigation into one of its own Twitter accounts.
The account at issue, @FBIRecordsVault, had been dormant for more than a year. Then on October 30 at 4 a.m., the account released a flood of documents, including one describing Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump as a “philanthropist.”


But it wasn’t until two days later, when the account tweeted documents regarding President Clinton’s controversial pardon of Marc Rich that the account began to attract significant attention.


The account has not been active since that tweet.
ThinkProgress has learned that the FBI’s Inspection Division will undertake an investigation of the account. [Continue reading…]

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With Mosul under siege, ISIS leader anticipates collapse of the sky

The New York Times reports: After a nearly yearlong silence, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State, released a blistering audio recording imploring his forces to remain firm in the face of the American-backed Iraqi offensive in Mosul and excoriating those who might consider fleeing.

“Know that the value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” he said, adding: “This war is yours. Turn the dark night of the infidels into day, destroy their homes and make rivers of their blood.”

The last time Mr. Baghdadi addressed his followers was in a recording released Dec. 26. His silence since then has led to persistent rumors that he had been wounded or killed. He was not heard from even after one of his closest associates — the extremist organization’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who headed the group’s efforts to export terror abroad, including overseeing attacks in Paris and Brussels — was killed in an airstrike in August.

The terrorist leader’s tone in the new recording at times suggested an air of panic, as if he was trying to shore up his fighters and enjoin them to continue battle, promising them heavenly rewards: “Oh soldiers of the caliphate, if you stand in the line of fire from America’s jets and its allies, then stand firm.”

He added: “Know that if the sky collapses onto the earth, God will make room for the believers to breathe.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Western intelligence sources believe the Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is no longer in Mosul, Boris Johnson has said.

In an unusual reference to intelligence, the British foreign secretary said Baghdadi’s audio recording issued on Thursday calling for the defeat of the Iraqi forces fighting to liberate Mosul was “cruelly ironic since some of the intelligence we have suggests he had himself vacated the scene himself and is yet using internet media to encourage others to take part in violence”. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s ties to its chief benefactor, Saudi Arabia, are starting to unravel

The New York Times reports: In the tumultuous two years since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt came to power, one ally has kept the Arab world’s most populous country from economic ruin: Saudi Arabia pumped more than $25 billion into the faltering Egyptian economy, dwarfing aid from the United States.

The Saudis may have thought they were buying loyalty. But Egypt’s vote last month for a Russian United Nations resolution on Syria threatens to unravel Mr. Sisi’s relationship with Egypt’s most crucial benefactor.

Shortly after the vote, the Saudi ambassador to Egypt left Cairo for an unscheduled three-day visit to Riyadh. The state-owned Saudi oil company, Aramco, postponed a promised shipment of 700,000 tons of discounted oil in October, and the spokesman for Egypt’s oil ministry said the fate of November’s shipment remains unknown.

Then last week, the Saudi head of a major Islamic organization, who has since resigned, publicly mocked Mr. Sisi, exposing the rift in a new way.

Ahmed Moussa, a prominent Egyptian talk show host and staunch supporter of Mr. Sisi, was one of many Egyptian commentators who reacted angrily.

“They want to make Egypt kneel,” Mr. Moussa said of the Saudis, then offered his own threats. “Don’t you ever think you can pressure Egypt into backtracking,” he said. “Its decisions are sovereign. We don’t owe anyone anything. We are the ones who are owed.”

The fraying of the alliance between the two most influential Sunni nations is unfolding amid increasing sectarianism across the region. And the potential loss of Saudi support could hardly come at a worse moment for Egypt, whose economy is crashing amid a devaluing of its local currency, reduction in imports, and tourism tailspin. [Continue reading…]

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Israel advances construction of 181 homes in east Jerusalem

The Associated Press reports: Israeli planning authorities issued building permits for 181 new homes in east Jerusalem Wednesday, drawing a harsh rebuke from the United States.

Jerusalem spokeswoman Brachie Sprung said plans in the Gilo area were first approved in 2012 and that Wednesday’s approvals were for “technical details of plot distribution.”

She said more detailed building permits will be required before the units are built. But the approval nonetheless raised hackles in the U.S. State Department.

“We strongly oppose settlement activity,” spokesman John Kirby told reporters, accusing Israel of actions that “risk entrenching a one-state reality” and raise serious questions about the Jewish state’s commitment to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. [Continue reading…]

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White nationalists plot Election Day show of force

Politico reports: Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin plans to muster thousands of poll watchers across all 50 states. His partners at the alt-right website “the Right Stuff” are touting plans to set up hidden cameras at polling places in Philadelphia and hand out liquor and marijuana in the city’s “ghetto” on Election Day to induce residents to stay home. The National Socialist Movement, various factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the white nationalist American Freedom Party all are deploying members to watch polls, either “informally” or, they say, through the Trump campaign.

The Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military members that often shows up in public heavily armed, is advising members to go undercover and conduct “intelligence-gathering” at polling places, and Donald Trump ally Roger Stone is organizing his own exit polling, aiming to monitor thousands of precincts across the country.

Energized by Trump’s candidacy and alarmed by his warnings of a “rigged election,” white nationalist, alt-right and militia movement groups are planning to come out in full force on Tuesday, creating the potential for conflict at the close of an already turbulent campaign season. [Continue reading…]

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Video shows Trump with mob figure he denied knowing

Michael Isikoff reports: A newly uncovered video appears to contradict Donald Trump’s claim that he never knew a high-stakes gambler who was banned from New Jersey casinos for alleged ties to organized crime.

The reputed mob figure, Robert LiButti, can be seen standing alongside Trump in the front row of a 1988 “WrestleMania” match in Atlantic City, N.J. LiButti wasn’t there by accident, according to his daughter, Edith Creamer, who also attended the event. “We were his guests,” she told Yahoo News in a text message this week.

The video was given to Yahoo News by a confidential source who discovered it in the online archives of World Wrestling Entertainment, the sponsor of “WrestleMania.”

The video appears to lend new support to assertions Trump once had close relations with LiButti, who was banned from the state’s casinos in 1991 because of his ties to Mafia boss John Gotti, then the chief of the Gambino crime syndicate. Separately, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission that same year levied $650,000 in fines against the Trump Plaza hotel over its dealings with LiButti, who gambled huge sums at the hotel’s casino. LiButti died in 2014. [Continue reading…]

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Trump adviser reveals how Assange ally warned him about leaked Clinton emails

The Guardian reports: A key confidante of Donald Trump has provided new details about the “mutual friend” of Julian Assange who served as a back channel to give him broad tips in advance about WikiLeaks’ releases of emails to and from key allies of Hillary Clinton.

Roger Stone, a longtime unofficial adviser to the Republican presidential nominee, was briefed in general terms in advance about the sensitive and embarrassing leaked Democratic emails by an American libertarian who works in the media on the “opinion side”, he told the Guardian in an interview.

Stone claims his American source, whom he declined to identify, has met with Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, in London and is a “mutual friend” of Stone and Assange. The WikiLeaks source, Stone said, is not tied in any way to the Trump campaign but has served as a back channel for Stone, who is an outside adviser to the Republican presidential candidate, allowing the adviser to tweet and comment very broadly prior to some key WikiLeaks disclosures.

A source close to Trump Tower also told the Guardian that Stone once boasted to him of meeting with Assange himself and told the source, who is active in GOP political circles, that WikiLeaks would be “coming down like a ton of bricks” on Clinton. Stone adamantly denied meeting with Assange (“Your source is bullshitting u” he wrote in an email) or having any direct contact with Assange or anyone with WikiLeaks.

Despite Stone’s advance tweets and comments about some major WikiLeaks disclosures – including recent ones in October relating to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and the Clinton Foundation – the self-styled “rabble rouser” and onetime Watergate dirty tricks operative said the FBI had not contacted him in its investigation into the illegal computer hacking of private Democratic emails, and he was not worried. [Continue reading…]

On October 12, CBSMiami reported: “I do have a back-channel communication with Assange, because we have a good mutual friend,” Stone told CBS4 News Wednesday evening. “That friend travels back and forth from the United States to London and we talk. I had dinner with him last Monday.” [Continue reading…]

In 2008, Jeffrey Toobin wrote: [Stone] was just nineteen when he played a bit part in the Watergate scandals. He adopted the pseudonym Jason Rainier and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, who was challenging Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1972. Stone then sent a receipt to the Manchester Union Leader, to “prove” that Nixon’s adversary was a left-wing stooge. Stone hired another Republican operative, who was given the pseudonym Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. Stone’s Watergate high jinks were revealed during congressional hearings in 1973, and the news cost Stone his job on the staff of Senator Robert Dole. [Continue reading…]

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FBI email disclosure broke a pattern followed even this summer

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. and Justice Department faced a hard decision in two investigations this past summer that had the potential to rock the presidential election. The first case involved Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and secretive business dealings in Ukraine. The second focused on Hillary Clinton’s relationships with donors to her family foundation.

At the urging of the Justice Department, the F.B.I. agreed not to issue subpoenas or take other steps that would make the cases public so close to the election, according to federal law enforcement officials.

Against this backdrop, the decision of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to send a letter to Congress last week about a renewed inquiry concerning Mrs. Clinton’s emails is not just a departure from longstanding policy; it has plunged the F.B.I. and the Justice Department directly into the election, precisely what Justice officials were trying to avoid.

Mr. Comey’s letter, which he sent over the objections of the Justice Department, stirred outrage across party lines. It unleashed a torrent of news that laid bare the government’s internal deliberations and exposed the infighting and occasional mistrust between rank-and-file F.B.I. agents and senior department officials.

Since Mr. Comey’s revelation, the F.B.I. has hurried to analyze a cache of emails belonging to one of Mrs. Clinton’s aides, Huma Abedin. It is increasingly unlikely that the review will be complete by Election Day, F.B.I. officials said, although they said there was a chance they could offer updates before Nov. 8.

The mood at the F.B.I. is dark, and nobody is willing to predict what the coming days will bring, particularly if agents and analysts do not complete their review of Ms. Abedin’s emails by Election Day. Officials said it would take something extraordinary to change the conclusion that nobody should be charged. But the absence of information has allowed festering speculation that the emails must be significant. [Continue reading…]

ThinkProgress reports: Tuesday afternoon, the FBI Records Vault Twitter account abruptly shared records “from the FBI’s files related to the William J. Clinton Foundation” on Twitter. The 129 pages of heavily redacted documents appear to pertain mostly to “a 2001 FBI investigation into the pardon of Marc Rich,” which was closed in 2005 without any finding of wrongdoing.

Though some of the records portray Bill Clinton in a less than flattering light, the documents released Tuesday reportedly contain little new information. Eyebrows were raised, however, by the Bureau’s decision to share them just seven days before Election Day and at the same time controversy is swirling around FBI Director James Comey’s decision to resurrect the Hillary Clinton email case. (Though he was appointed by President Obama, Comey told Congress this summer that he has been a registered Republican “for most of his adult life.”) [Continue reading…]

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Debunking Trump’s ‘secret server’

Robert Graham (Errata Security) writes: According to this Slate article, Trump has a secret server for communicating with Russia. Even Hillary has piled onto this story.

It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016

This is nonsense. The evidence available on the Internet is that Trump neither (directly) controls the domain “trump-email.com“, nor has access to the server. Instead, the domain was setup and controlled by Cendyn, a company that does marketing/promotions for hotels, including many of Trump’s hotels. Cendyn outsources the email portions of its campaigns to a company called Listrak, which actually owns/operates the physical server in a data center in Philidelphia.

In other words, Trump’s response is (minus the political bits) likely true, supported by the evidence. It’s the conclusion I came to even before seeing the response.

When you view this “secret” server in context, surrounded by the other email servers operated by Listrak on behalf of Cendyn, it becomes more obvious what’s going on. In the same Internet address range of Trump’s servers you see a bunch of similar servers, many named [client]-email.com. In other words, trump-email.com is not intended as a normal email server you and I are familiar with, but as a server used for marketing/promotional campaigns. [Continue reading…]

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Assad in person: Confident, friendly, no regrets

Anne Barnard reports: The guns were silent atop Mount Qasioun and the lights on its slopes twinkled over Damascus as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria welcomed a group of Western visitors into his French-Ottoman palace on Monday night, presenting himself as a man firmly in control of his country.

He radiated confidence and friendliness as he ushered a group of British and American journalists and policy analysts into an elegant wood-paneled sitting room where he claimed that the social fabric of Syria was stitched together “much better than before” a chaotic civil war began more than five years ago. It was as if half his citizens had not been driven from their homes and nearly half a million had not been killed in the bloody fighting for which he rejected any personal responsibility, blaming instead the United States and Islamist militants.

“I’m just a headline — the bad president, the bad guy, who is killing the good guys,” Mr. Assad said. “You know this narrative. The real reason is toppling the government. This government doesn’t fit the criteria of the United States.”

It was a surreal meeting for me after years of writing about a devastating and intractable war that has reduced several of Syria’s grand city centers to rubble and prompted accusations of war crimes. While hundreds of thousands of Syrians are besieged and hungry, here was Mr. Assad, secure in his palace because he has outsourced much of the war to Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces whose influence has grown to a degree that makes some of his own supporters uncomfortable. [Continue reading…]

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Taliban envoy breaks silence to urge group to reshape itself and consider peace

The New York Times reports: The Taliban’s internal debate over whether and how to negotiate with the Afghan government is playing out in the open, even as there have been renewed attempts to restart talks.

Breaking with nearly 15 years of public silence, Sayed Muhammad Tayeb Agha, who until recently was the Taliban’s chief negotiator and head of their political commission, issued a letter about peace talks to the insurgency’s supreme leader over the summer and discussed reconciliation efforts in an interview with The New York Times in recent days, his first on the record with a Western publication in years.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Times and appeared in the Afghan news media, Mr. Agha supported the idea of talks, and said the insurgency should be urgently trying to position itself as an Afghan political movement independent from the influence of Pakistani intelligence officials who have sheltered, and at times manipulated, the Taliban since 2001.

Mr. Agha led efforts to open the Taliban’s political office in Qatar in 2011, and he was instrumental in negotiations that led to the release of the last known American prisoner of war held by the Taliban, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, in exchange for the release of five Taliban detainees from the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. But he became disgruntled over the internal power struggle that broke out in 2015 after the death of the movement’s founder, Mullah Muhammad Omar, for whom he was a trusted aide. He remains in exile abroad. [Continue reading…]

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Has the small Belgian town of Vilvoorde figured out how to reintegrate its Islamists?

Financial Times reports: One winter’s day in 2014 in a small Belgian town, an apparition from Syria’s war walked unannounced into Hans Bonte’s office. Only recently released from prison, the returned fighter wove his way through the corridors of Vilvoorde’s town hall in search of the mayor.

Still wearing his electronic security bracelet and arriving with no notice or permission, the 20-something man never threatened Mr Bonte. Instead, he blurted out his problem — local police and social services were making his life a misery — and his cunning solution.

“He told me ‘the day I don’t have to wear my bracelet any more I will move to Brussels’,” says Mr Bonte, the mayor of Vilvoorde, a struggling industrial town just outside of the Belgian capital. “He said, ‘You are controlling me too much, and I have all these problems here.’”

His plan remains on hold — the man ended up back in prison for other offences — but for Mr Bonte, the possibility that the former jihadi in Syria could go to Brussels and fall off the radar was real. “The lack of control and organisation in the Brussels area remains an enormous problem, also for the security of the whole country,” the Vilvoorde mayor says.

Not long ago, the Flemish town’s biggest problem was factory closures. But since taking office three years ago, Mr Bonte’s top priority has become counter-radicalisation. About 30 people from this community of 40,000 left to fight in Syria and Iraq; some of them even used to play football with Mr Bonte’s son.

His strategy for stemming the flow has shown clear signs of success and has won praise as a creative model of how to effectively marshal the mayor’s powers, which include oversight of local police. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump used legally dubious method to avoid paying taxes

The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s. [Continue reading…]

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Survivors recount how ISIS used torture, guns and bureaucracy to hold sway over thousands

The Wall Street Journal reports: After more than two years of enduring Islamic State’s harsh rule, desperation trumped fear for Assad Ali Hassan and other residents of Faziliya, Iraq.

A few dozen militants controlled the village near the ISIS stronghold of Mosul with torture, fear and bureaucracy, recounted some who survived the occupation. The small band were the only ones with weapons, enabling them to exert outsize power over the 7,000 villagers, said Muhammad Ayub, an English-speaking graduate of Mosul University.

“Sometimes one of them would just show up in a village around here wearing a suicide belt and blow himself up,” said Mr. Hassan, 45 years old. There might be no apparent justification for it besides ensuring people remained terrified, he said.

Survivors from villages surrounding Mosul recounted how the militants kept them impoverished and scared, crushing them with a bureaucracy that included levying frequent fines, encouraging children to inform on parents, and ensuring people depended on the caliphate for essential supplies.

Reports from Mosul, still under Islamic State control, suggest the militants there have stepped up their brutality, executing dozens suspected of aiding Iraqi security forces and herding thousands of families into positions as human shields. Iraqi forces began a new phase of their offensive on Monday, aiming to enter the city itself for the first time.

Though Faziliya and other villages in the area were primarily Sunni, locals who decided to stay and live under the new regime lost faith in their Sunni occupiers after the militants showed a brutal face and piled on the regulations.

“They would get small children like this to flog grown men in public,” Mr. Hassan said, gesturing to his young son. “They would slide a pen into your beard and if it didn’t stay, if it fell out because the beard wasn’t long enough, you would get lashings.”

Such punishments often would be meted out in a public square, the violator forced to stand on a single floor tile. If the offender wavered and stepped off, the lash count would start over, villagers said.

Women were subjected to a different, painful punishment: They were bitten. A woman, for example, was deemed to be indecent. A female ISIS militant would preside over a quick trial, then administer the punishment. Was a hand too exposed? After a summary judgment, the militant would bite it.

Risking penalty of death for using a cellphone, Mr. Hassan began making secret calls to his brother Rifad, 40, who had escaped the village after it fell to the militants in 2014. Assad reported Islamic State positions to Rifad, who then passed the information to Kurdish intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. calls for end to airstrikes in Yemen while it continues to provide Saudis with military support

The Guardian reports: The US has called for an end to airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen at a UN security council meeting, but critics pointed out that Washington continues to supply arms and provide other military support to Saudi Arabia.

The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, condemned missile attacks by Yemeni Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia and said the kingdom had a right to defend itself.

But she added: “It is also incumbent on the Saudi-led coalition and the forces of the Yemeni government to refrain from taking steps that escalate this violence and to commit to the cessation of hostilities.

“After 19 months of fighting, it should be clear that there is absolutely no military solution to this conflict. Airstrikes that hit schools, hospitals and other civilian objects have to stop. In many cases these strikes have damaged key infrastructure that is essential to delivering humanitarian aid in Yemen.”

Despite severe criticism of Saudi Arabia, the US and the UK continue to supply it with munitions and provide airborne refuelling for its warplanes. Over eight years, the Obama administration has offered a total of $115bn (£94bn) in arms sales to the kingdom.

Louis Charbonneau, the UN director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The US ambassador’s call for an end to indiscriminate airstrikes in Yemen would be more compelling if the US didn’t provide Saudi Arabia with some of the weapons that end up being used in these strikes.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s man in Beirut

Alex Rowell writes: On the morning of 13 October, 1990, the Syrian Air Force launched fighter jet strikes on the Lebanese presidential palace in Baabda, southeast of Beirut. Their target was a General Michel Aoun, an army commander appointed two years previously by an outgoing president to lead a temporary cabinet until elections could be held, who instead went rogue, moving himself into Baabda Palace and effectively declaring himself ruler of the republic — and happy to fight anyone who said otherwise.

His reign, such as it was, saw thousands killed in quixotic military campaigns against rival warlords and the Syrian army then occupying Lebanon. By October 1990, the Syrians were determined to finish him off, and the United States — of whom he had also managed to make an enemy — was willing to let them, not least as a nod of gratitude for Damascus’ assistance in the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. “I am ready to die on the battlefield of honor rather than surrender — be sure I shall die fighting,” Aoun told a crowd of supporters on the 12th, when it was clear a final Syrian push was imminent. By noon the following day, Aoun had surrendered without firing a shot and fled to the French embassy, leaving scores of his men massacred in the ground and air onslaught, and the presidential palace in ruins. Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war was over.

Today, the same Michel Aoun — now 81 years old — was elected to return as president to the same Baabda Palace, ending Lebanon’s thirty-month leadership vacuum after spending over a quarter of a century between exile in France and Lebanon, tirelessly plotting his eventual comeback with near-Shakespearean ambition. “I can add colours to the chameleon,” boasts the rapacious Richard III in Henry VI; “Change shapes with Proteus for advantages/ And set the murd’rous Machiavel to school.” Aoun’s long life has seen him morph from a Fort Hill-trained commander in a US-backed army (once even photographed in Israeli company) to an anti-American proxy of the Iraqi Baath regime to a Bush-supporting neoconservative fellow traveler (speaking at the Hudson Institute in favor of the Iraq War on a 2003 tour of Washington, during which he also testified to Congress in support of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act) to, most recently, a stalwart comrade of the Iranian-Syrian “Axis of Resistance.” His election today came after he and his Hezbollah ally boycotted all electoral sessions for more than two years, bluntly refusing to attend unless and until his victory was guaranteed in advance. Earlier in the month, the last of his major remaining opponents — Saad al-Hariri of the Saudi Arabia-backed Future Movement — caved in, endorsing Aoun in what he called a “sacrifice […] for the nation, the state, and stability.” [Continue reading…]

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Blackmail: Russia has been cultivating Trump for at least 5 years says a former senior intelligence officer

Mother Jones reports: a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the [FBI] with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump — and that the FBI requested more information from him.

Does this mean the FBI is investigating whether Russian intelligence has attempted to develop a secret relationship with Trump or cultivate him as an asset? Was the former intelligence officer and his material deemed credible or not? An FBI spokeswoman says, “Normally, we don’t talk about whether we are investigating anything.” But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.

In June, the former Western intelligence officer — who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients — was assigned the task of researching Trump’s dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) “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.”

This was, the former spy remarks, “an extraordinary situation.” He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative — without the permission of the US company that hired him — he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was “sufficiently serious” to share with the FBI.

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer’s conversations with Russian sources, noted, “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance.” It maintained that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.” [Continue reading…]

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Sen. Harry Reid says FBI possesses ‘explosive information about close ties and coordination’ between Trump and Russian government

The Washington Post reports: In a letter to FBI Director James B. Comey on Sunday night, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) says Comey may have broken the law.

And that’s not even the most brazen claim in the letter — not by a long shot.

In the course of arguing that Comey’s disclosure that the FBI is looking into new Hillary Clinton investigation emails may have violated the Hatch Act, Reid slips in an extremely bold claim about the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.

Even for a man known for bare-knuckle politics, this is remarkable.

Reid is saying that he has been told the FBI has evidence of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. And he’s not just saying this information came from mysterious and unnamed national security officials; he’s saying Comey himself has left him with this impression. [Continue reading…]

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