How Russia hacked Obama’s legacy

Hayes Brown reports: No one from the Obama administration seems to remember when they figured out they were falling victim to one of the greatest intelligence operations in history.

“This was the kind of realization that came incrementally,” a former senior State Department official told BuzzFeed News. “There wasn’t a moment where you realized that Pearl Harbor had been hit by kamikaze or that the World Trade Center has been hit.”

Now, as two congressional committees and the FBI investigate Russia’s role in the election, former Obama officials find themselves grappling with a new legacy, one that formed at the 11th hour of their time in power. As they looked toward a world where pariahs like Iran and Cuba were won over with diplomacy, they fell victim to a sneak attack by an old adversary. And they let it happen, offering up stern warnings and finger-wagging instead of adequately punishing Russia for achieving something that even the Soviet Union at the height of its power couldn’t manage: meddling in the US election and rattling Americans’ trust in their democracy.

Initially, news that Russia-backed hackers had infiltrated the email systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) split the Obama administration. White House staffers struggled to wrap their heads around the scale of what occurred and found themselves unsure of how to respond without appearing to give Hillary Clinton a boost. The State Department’s staff were torn over how far to press the matter with Russia, given other priorities like struggling to find an endgame for the Syrian civil war. Across the Potomac, the Defense Department was pushing for a strong response against Russia. “The White House was more in listening mode,” a former Defense Department official told BuzzFeed News.

The official described what ensued as “endless discussion after endless discussion.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s base turns on him

Politico reports: Donald Trump’s true believers are losing the faith.

As Trump struggles to keep his campaign promises and flirts with political moderation, his most steadfast supporters — from veteran advisers to anti-immigration activists to the volunteers who dropped their jobs to help elect him — are increasingly dismayed by the direction of his presidency.

Their complaints range from Trump’s embrace of an interventionist foreign policy to his less hawkish tone on China to, most recently, his marginalization of his nationalist chief strategist, Steve Bannon. But the crux of their disillusionment, interviews with nearly two dozen Trump loyalists reveal, is a belief that Trump the candidate bears little resemblance to Trump the president. He’s failing, in their view, to deliver on his promise of a transformative “America First” agenda driven by hard-edged populism.

“Donald Trump dropped an emotional anchor. He captured how Americans feel,” said Tania Vojvodic, a fervent Trump supporter who founded one of his first campaign volunteer networks. “We expect him to keep his word, and right now he’s not keeping his word.”

Earlier this week, Vojvodic launched a Facebook group called, “The concerned support base of President Trump,” which quickly drew several dozen sign-ups. She also changed the banner on her Facebook page to a picture of Bannon accompanied by the declaration: “Mr. President: I stand with Steve Bannon.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. unleashes ‘Mother of All Bombs’ — and a press release

The Daily Beast reports: U.S. Special Operations Forces dropped one of the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bombs on ISIS fighters in eastern Afghanistan on April 13, defense officials told The Daily Beast on Thursday.

The bombing could mark a shocking escalation of America’s war in Afghanistan—one that places more civilians in greater danger than ever before, though military officials insist they wouldn’t have acted if they had spotted civilians nearby.

American forces were trying to root out deeply entrenched ISIS fighters when a U.S. Air Force MC-130 commando transport dropped the Massive Ordinance Air Blast munition in Achin district in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan at 7:32 in the evening, local time.

ISIS has an estimated 600 to 800 fighters in Afghanistan, many of them in Achin, according to Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump. One U.S. commando died in a firefight in the district just a few days ago, on April 8.

But this was no act of retribution, the Pentagon insisted. “This operation was planned prior to the loss of a 7th Group Green Beret last week,” U.S. military spokesman Navy Capt. Bill Salvin explained from Kabul.

Stump said the massive bombing could hinder ISIS in Afghanistan. “It really restricts their freedom of movement.”

Pentagon officials say the generals have had the authority to whatever ordnance they had in theatre against ISIS since January last year, but President Donald Trump’s comfort level with delegating new decision-making on counterterrorism strikes surely played into their thinking. The general “ordered” the weapon for use in during the Obama Administration, according to Slavin, who said it was only delivered in January this year.

“Appropriate notifications were made. This is not a new authority. This does not reflect a new policy or authority,” U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. John Thomas emailed The Daily Beast. [Continue reading…]

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British spies were first to spot Trump team’s links with Russia

The Guardian reports: Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.

The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.

Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.

It is understood that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information. The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US. [Continue reading…]

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Prediction prof: Trump will be impeached

Politico reports: The professor who took hell for predicting President Donald Trump has a much longer case for predicting President Mike Pence — and it’s all in his new book, out next week.

Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University, reached meme-status last fall for predicting long before anyone else that Trump would win, using a formula based on the popularity of the party in control of the White House that accurately predicted the eight previous presidential elections. Now Lichtman wants everyone to pay attention to the rest of what came through his crystal ball — that Trump will now be impeached.

The people who paid attention only to the professor’s first prediction include the commander in chief, whom Lichtman says reached out to him during the transition.

“Taking time out of preparing to become the world’s most powerful leader, he wrote me a personal note, saying ‘Professor — Congrats — good call,’” Lichtman writes in “The Case for Impeachment,” an advance copy of which was shared with POLITICO. “What Trump overlooked, however, was my ‘next big prediction’: that, after winning the presidency, he would be impeached.” [Continue reading…]

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The Assad family — nemesis of nine U.S. presidents

Robin Wright writes: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s first meeting with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, in 1973, dragged on until almost eleven p.m. It ran so long, the Times reported, that the media began to speculate about whether America’s top diplomat had been kidnapped. Assad “negotiated tenaciously and daringly like a riverboat gambler to make sure he had exacted the last sliver of available concessions,” Kissinger recalled in his memoir, “Years of Upheaval.” The marathons were typical. In 1991, Secretary of State James Baker famously waved a white flag “in submission” after almost ten hours because he needed a bathroom break. Baker called negotiating with Assad “bladder diplomacy.”

Since the bloodless coup, in 1970, that brought the family to power, the Assad dynasty—the founding father, Hafez, and his heir and second son, Bashar—has exasperated nine American Presidents. “Time-consuming, nerve-racking, and bizarre,” Kissinger said of his sessions with Hafez al-Assad. Republican and Democratic Administrations alike have coaxed and cajoled, prodded and praised, and, most recently, confronted and condemned the Assads to induce policy changes.

Kissinger made twenty-eight trips to Damascus—fourteen in a single month—to deal with the fallout from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. He finally brokered an agreement with Assad, in 1974, to disengage Syrian and Israeli troops along the Golan Heights. Less than a month later, Richard Nixon became the first President to visit Damascus. He received a twenty-one-gun salute and rode in an open car with Assad past hundreds of American flags flapping in a strong breeze. A sign along the route proclaimed, “Revolutionary Damascus welcomes President Nixon.” But neither Nixon, who was forced to resign two months later, nor Gerald Ford was able to channel that connection during Assad’s early years in power into a broader Middle East peace.

Assad means “lion,” and he played up his role as the “Lion of Damascus.” Syria had been weak and unstable after independence from France, in 1946. It witnessed twenty coups in twenty-one years. Assad’s was the last, in 1970. It was, initially, applauded. The Times reported, “Admirers of General Assad welcome his seizure of power within the ruling Baath Party as the predictable victory of pragmatism over ideology.” But, to strengthen the Syrian state and turn it into a regional power, Assad became increasingly ruthless with opponents at home and obstinate with the outside world. [Continue reading…]

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Who are the new jihadis?

Olivier Roy writes: There is something new about the jihadi terrorist violence of the past two decades. Both terrorism and jihad have existed for many years, and forms of “globalised” terror – in which highly symbolic locations or innocent civilians are targeted, with no regard for national borders – go back at least as far as the anarchist movement of the late 19th century. What is unprecedented is the way that terrorists now deliberately pursue their own deaths.

Over the past 20 years – from Khaled Kelkal, a leader of a plot to bomb Paris trains in 1995, to the Bataclan killers of 2015 – nearly every terrorist in France blew themselves up or got themselves killed by the police. Mohamed Merah, who killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, uttered a variant of a famous statement attributed to Osama bin Laden and routinely used by other jihadis: “We love death as you love life.” Now, the terrorist’s death is no longer just a possibility or an unfortunate consequence of his actions; it is a central part of his plan. The same fascination with death is found among the jihadis who join Islamic State. Suicide attacks are perceived as the ultimate goal of their engagement.

This systematic choice of death is a recent development. The perpetrators of terrorist attacks in France in the 1970s and 1980s, whether or not they had any connection with the Middle East, carefully planned their escapes. Muslim tradition, while it recognises the merits of the martyr who dies in combat, does not prize those who strike out in pursuit of their own deaths, because doing so interferes with God’s will. So, why, for the past 20 years, have terrorists regularly chosen to die? What does it say about contemporary Islamic radicalism? And what does it say about our societies today? [Continue reading…]

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‘Journalism is becoming powerless’: Inside a nervous Turkish newsroom as the government closes in

The Washington Post reports: He was anticipating retirement, after nearly half a century as a journalist. Then Aydin Engin, 76, a columnist for the daily Cumhuriyet newspaper, received a frightening visit from the law.

Eight policemen arrived at his Istanbul house early one morning last fall and took him into custody on terrorism-related charges. Across the city, police officers swept up a dozen of Engin’s colleagues, including the newspaper’s cartoonist, its editor in chief, a staff lawyer and Kadri Gursel, another noted columnist — the beginnings of a sudden and startling assault by the authorities on one of Turkey’s oldest newspapers.

Now, five months later, 11 members of the Cumhuriyet staff remain locked up, their portraits printed each day on the newspaper’s front page and its website in a plaintive protest. Engin and another columnist were released because of their age, but last week they were formally indicted along with their imprisoned ­colleagues on charges that included publishing propaganda for ­various terrorist organizations. Some could be sentenced to decades in prison. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Chechnya’s vicious anti-gay crackdown

The Daily Beast reports: Beka Gabadadze’s cell phone rang again: another gay teenager was in big trouble. A 16-year-old from the Zugdidi region of Georgia was begging Gabadadze, an LGBT activist and human rights advocate, to rescue him.

The boy’s family members were determined to drag him to a doctor for hormone treatment against homosexuality; when he was at home his older brother severely beat him. The teenager, who we are not naming to protect his identity, escaped home and is now hiding at a friend’s house in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, terrified to return home.

Coming out of the closet is an act of heroism for LGBT people all over the Caucasus, a region dominated by deep homophobia. The LGBT population of the Caucasus suffer from increasingly horrifying hate crimes.

A particularly vicious crackdown is reportedly underway in the Republic of Chechnya, where authorities have initiated the most violent anti-gay campaign since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Daily Mail reported that Chechen authorities had set up what it called “concentration camps” near the town of Argun where gay men are “being tortured with electric shocks and beaten to death.”

While the presence or not of the “camps” has yet to be independently verified, Tatiana Lokshina, program director for Human Rights Watch in Moscow, told the Daily Beast: “Chechen authorities did not build special ‘LGBT concentration camps’–this information is misleading. But dozens of presumed gay men have been rounded up by local security officials and tortured in holding facilities, which are apparently maintained by Chechen authorities in several districts of Chechnya. People detained arbitrarily, abduction style, are generally taken there for interrogation, which practically always involves torture and cruel, degrading treatment.”

Graphic reports of persecution have been received by the Russian LGBT Network. The Network told NBC News they had received around 30 calls for help from those targeted since April 2.

According to a report published in Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, several gay men have been killed in the past few weeks and dozens have been arrested and tortured.

To all media requests for clarification and comment, Chechen authorities responded that there were no gay men in Chechnya. [Continue reading…]

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Police believe New York judge found in Hudson River committed suicide

The New York Times reports: Family tragedy surrounded Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam. About three years ago, law enforcement officials said, her brother committed suicide. Last year around this time, her mother died.

On Wednesday, after responding to an emergency call, officers with the New York Police Department’s Harbor Unit found the body of Judge Abdus-Salaam, the first black woman to serve on New York State’s highest court, in the Hudson River in Harlem with no apparent signs of trauma and no indications of foul play. The police are treating her death as a suicide, although an investigation is continuing.

According to one law enforcement official, Judge Abdus-Salaam called her Midtown Manhattan chambers on Tuesday morning to say she would not be coming in because she was not feeling well. When the judge failed to appear on Wednesday, her assistant sent a text to her husband of eight months, who called 911 to report her missing a short time later. Her body was found that afternoon, floating in the river by the shore near West 132nd Street.

The judge was wearing a gray zippered sweater, black sweatpants, a gray T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, the official said. She also had a white watch on her wrist and a MetroCard in her pocket. Investigators do not believe that she had been in the river long.

Judge Abdus-Salaam was last seen leaving her office on Monday evening, and investigators tracked her to the subway — the No. 6 line — at about 8 p.m., the official said. Investigators found the judge’s cellphone in her apartment, another official said, and the door had been locked with keys from the outside. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

“She was a lovely, genteel lady,” Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge of New York State, said. “We’re all just shocked. No one has any idea what happened.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between Syrian military and chemical experts

CNN reports: The US military and intelligence community has intercepted communications featuring Syrian military and chemical experts talking about preparations for the sarin attack in Idlib last week, a senior US official tells CNN.

The intercepts were part of an immediate review of all intelligence in the hours after the attack to confirm responsibility for the use of chemical weapons in an attack in northwestern Syria, which killed at least 70 people. US officials have said that there is “no doubt” that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the attack.

The US did not know prior to the attack it was going to happen, the official emphasized. The US scoops up such a large volume of communications intercepts in areas like Syria and Iraq, the material often is not processed unless there is a particular event that requires analysts to go back and look for supporting intelligence material.

So far there are no intelligence intercepts that have been found directly confirming that Russian military or intelligence officials communicated about the attack. The official said the likelihood is the Russians are more careful in their communications to avoid being intercepted. [Continue reading…]

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Tillerson meets with Putin amid deepening tensions over U.S. missile strikes in Syria

The Washington Post reports: The rift between the United States and Russia was laid bare Wednesday when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson held his first direct talks with Russia’s president. Their discussions failed to ease deepening tensions over Syria and Washington’s demands that Moscow abandon its main Middle East ally.

“There is a low level of trust between our countries,” Tillerson said in a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “The world’s two primary nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship.”

Wednesday’s meeting brought no indication that the relationship would improve any time soon.

After Tillerson spent three hours talking with Lavrov and almost two hours at the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Lavrov, sitting three feet from Tillerson, aired a long list of grievances with the United States, some dating back many years.

“Unfortunately, we’ve got some differences with regards to a majority of those issues,” Lavrov lamented.

The only concession that Tillerson appeared to have extracted from the Russians was that Putin offered to restore a hotline aimed at avoiding accidents in the air over Syria. Russia had suspended that effort after U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base following an April 4 chemical weapons attack on a village in rebel territory. Even this tiny success was conditional; Lavrov said the deal would apply only if the United States and its allies targeted terrorists — not Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ­forces.

Hopes may never have been high, especially after Russia sounded a defiant note before Tillerson arrived in Moscow. But if this was the chance to find common ground before the Trump administration attempts any new action on Syria, it has ended in failure.

The Russians used Tillerson’s visit as a chance to reassert Moscow’s firm stance on Syria: that it will not abide by any effort to remove Assad from power. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Steve Bannon’s struggle: From ‘shadow president’ to Trump’s marked man

The Washington Post reports: When Stephen K. Bannon reported for work Wednesday, he did not act like a man who had just been publicly humiliated by his boss.

The White House chief strategist cycled in and out of the Oval Office for meetings with President Trump and took a seat in the front row of the East Room for the afternoon visit of NATO’s secretary general, flanked by some of the very advisers with whom he has been feuding.

But for Bannon, the day’s routine obscured the reality that he is a marked man — diminished by weeks of battles with the bloc of centrists led by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law and cut down by the president himself, who belittled Bannon in an interview with the New York Post.

The president’s comments were described by White House officials as a dressing-down and warning shot, though one Bannon friend, reflecting on them Wednesday, likened Bannon to a terminally ill family member who had been moved into hospice care. [Continue reading…]

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Court approved wiretap on Trump campaign aide, Carter Page, seen as Russian agent

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department obtained a secret court-approved wiretap last summer on Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, based on evidence that he was operating as a Russian agent, a government official said Wednesday.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August. Mr. Page is one of several Trump associates under scrutiny in a federal investigation.

The Justice Department considered direct surveillance of anyone tied to a political campaign as a line it did not want to cross, the official added. But its decision to seek a wiretap once it was clear that Mr. Page had left the campaign was the latest indication that, as Mr. Trump built his insurgent run for the White House, the F.B.I. was deeply concerned about whether any of his associates were colluding with Russia.

To obtain the warrant, the government needed to show probable cause that Mr. Page was acting as an agent of Russia. Investigators must first get approval from one of three senior officials at the Justice Department. Then, prosecutors take it to a surveillance court judge.

And though the Trump administration has said Mr. Page was a bit player who had no access to the candidate, the wiretap shows the F.B.I. had strong evidence that a campaign adviser was operating on behalf of Moscow. [Continue reading…]

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The only language Putin understands on Syria

Steven L. Hall writes: Reasoning with Vladimir Putin will not make him support Bashar al-Assad’s departure. The specter of additional economic sanctions against Russia just might.

Indeed, when considering where to begin addressing the myriad problems in Syria, Russia is a good place to start. Syria, of course, is dominated by an authoritarian dictator more than willing to slaughter his own population using horrific methods, including poison gas and barrel bombs.

And Russia, which continues to claim that Assad’s government is legitimate, has shored up the brutal regime — putatively in its fight against ISIS, but largely for its own strategic advantage in the region.

The recent sarin gas attacks, launched by Assad forces from a base where a Russian military contingent was present, makes it difficult for any reasonable person to believe Russia had no idea what was going on. The White House has used the attack to underline the need for the Kremlin to take some sort of action against the Assad regime, and of course Russia is resisting.
As is clear from Wednesday’s Russian veto in the United Nations Security Council, Russia will go no further than calling for an international investigation of the incident.

It is unfortunate in the extreme that the United States and the West have to include Russia in the context of solving problems in Syria, given that rarely if ever has the Kremlin been helpful in resolving issues important to Washington. But let’s face it: we did it to ourselves by allowing Putin — an authoritarian dictator with much in common with Assad — to move into the power vacuum in Syria when Western countries chose not to do so.

To be clear, Russia’s most significant interest in Syria is not in warm water ports or military bases, but rather in using the tragic conflict to gain a seat as a great power at the international table. Russia wants to show the world it is to be taken seriously, and that it is key to resolving Middle East crises. Russia is expert at creating crisis and unrest, making sure it remains involved in the conflict, and then painting itself as a necessary part of any solution. (Take a look at any of the so-called frozen conflicts which Russia authored — Abkhazia, Transnistria, Ngorno-Karabakh, Georgia, and increasingly, eastern Ukraine.)

Given the remaining gulf between the Kremlin and Washington on Syria, the United States needs to speak in the language that Putin understands best: power and the inevitability of concrete consequences. The United States and its allies should use one of the few diplomatic tools that may still be capable of influencing the Kremlin: economic sanctions. [Continue reading…]

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Russia vetoes United Nations probe of the Syria gas attack

Bloomberg reports: Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that Bashar al-Assad’s government cooperate with an investigation into the deadly toxic gas attack in northern Syria that the U.S. and allies blame on the regime.

Ten nations on the 15-member Security Council voted Wednesday in favor of the resolution condemning the attack. Bolivia joined Russia in voting against the resolution. China, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia abstained.

France, the U.K. and the U.S. introduced the resolution in response to the suspected sarin attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, which killed more than 80 people, including women and children. U.S. President Donald Trump ordered missile strikes on a Syrian airbase in response, and administration officials have said evidence clearly shows that Assad’s forces were behind the attack. But Russia contends the chemicals belonged to terrorists.

A man collects samples from the site of a suspected toxic gas attack in Syria.Photographer: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images
The UN vote came shortly after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov on Syria and other issues dividing their countries. Russia wants an international investigation of the chemical attack, Lavrov told reporters in Moscow, but the resolution offered by the U.S. and its allies was aimed “more at legitimizing the arguments against Damascus.”

The abstention by China, which usually sides with Russia in the Security Council, was praised by Trump at a White House news conference. “I think it is wonderful they abstained,” he said.

Russia objected to a paragraph that would have required Syria to provide investigators with flight plans and information about air operations on the day the attack was launched, as well as the names of helicopter squadron commander and immediate access to airbases where it may have been launched.

While Russia says sarin was released when Syrian government forces accidentally struck a building where terrorists were hiding a cache of deadly chemicals, the U.S. says it has images proving the bomb left a crater in a road rather than hitting a building.

It was the eighth time Russia had used its veto power to block a resolution against Assad’s regime since 2011. Most recently, Russia blocked a council resolution in February condemning Syria for chemical attacks using chlorine gas. [Continue reading…]

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