Foreign Policy

Mass exodus at the State Department

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Maybe if they tweeted this like our Twitter-Troll-in-Chief does, this story would get wider media coverage. This is a big effin’ deal.

Josh Rogin at the Washington Post reports, The State Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.

Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career Foreign Service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

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Russia scandal: from ‘kompromat’ to cover up?

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Could this be the real reason for President Trump’s visit to the CIA on Saturday? Trump, in CIA visit, attacks media for coverage of his inaugural crowds.

McClatchy News service reported last week that FBI, 5 other agencies probe possible covert Kremlin aid to Trump:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

Investigators are examining how money may have moved from the Kremlin to covertly help Trump win, the two sources said. One of the allegations involves whether a system for routinely paying thousands of Russian-American pensioners may have been used to pay some email hackers in the United States or to supply money to intermediaries who would then pay the hackers, the two sources said.

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Donald Trump’s rhetoric embraces ‘Putin’s Real Long Game’

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James Bruno, a former U.S. diplomat, writes at the Political Animal blog, Tinker. Tailor. Mogul. Spy?

Putin-Trump-KissThe United States has just endured a carefully planned, well-orchestrated assault against its democratic form of government in the form of a grand cyber-theft of information and targeted release of that information. After a thorough scrub of available intelligence, seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies concluded unanimously that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.

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But if Russia’s role in the 2016 election is basically undisputed, we’re still left with a separate, more troubling question for which there isn’t yet a clear answer: Could Donald Trump actually be a Russian intel asset?

The U.S. intelligence chiefs steered clear of this hot potato conjecture. Supporting the case in favor is Trump’s bizarre screeds against the U.S. intelligence community and his equally head-scratching and consistent praise of Vladimir Putin even as his nominees to head the CIA and Defense Department describe Moscow as a threat. “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” former acting CIA Director Michael Morell wrote in the New York Times. An “unwitting agent” or “asset” in spy parlance is an individual who serves the interests of a foreign government without fully realizing it, or, what Lenin liked to call, a “useful idiot.” A “witting” asset is one who knows fully what he is doing.

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Donald Trump’s Russian Mob Money Connections

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I picked a bad week to get sick again. Lots of crazy stuff coming out of Washington this week.

I don’t have time to get into the unconfirmed “Donald Trump dossier” and his allegedly being compromised by the Russians which blew up his press conference earlier this week. How Russian ‘kompromat’ destroys political opponents, no facts required:

Putin-Trump-KissShort for “compromising material” in Russian, kompromat is all about the intersection of news and blackmail. It’s the ability to sully the reputations of political opponents through hints, images, videos, promises of disclosures, perhaps even some high-quality faked documentation. Sex or pornography often figures prominently. The beauty of kompromat is that it has to create only a sense of doubt, not prove its case conclusively. This sounds a bit like “fake news,” but in a classic kompromat operation, real Russian state media organizations work in tandem with the Kremlin to find appealing and effective ways to discredit the target. Often, that means in the most visceral and personal ways possible.

Now kompromat may have come to the United States.

Arizona’s angry old man, Senator John McCain, managed to get himself entangled in this “Donald Trump dossier” scandal as well, so bonus! John McCain intrigue grows in Donald Trump dossier affair:

McCain this week confirmed he received the “sensitive information,” which originally was compiled as anti-Trump opposition research during the 2016 GOP primaries and general election, and gave the explosive file to the FBI.

“I did what any citizen should do: I received sensitive information, and then I handed it over to the proper agency of government and had nothing else to do with the issue,” McCain told reporters Wednesday.

The FBI apparently was already aware of the memos, or at least most of them. The memos became news this week when CNN reported that intelligence officials had given Trump a summary of the allegations. The website BuzzFeed subsequently published the memos.

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‘Dear Leader’ Donald Trump’s big reveal on Russian hacking – Julian Assange?

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So THIS is supposed to be “Dear Leader” Donald Trump’s big reveal about Russian hacking?

Trump fluffer Sean Hannity interviewed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange last night on “Hannity.” Assange insisted the Russian government was not his source for the hacked emails he released from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Sean Hannity Declared Reports That The US Has 17 Intelligence Agencies “Fake News”. “We don’t have 17 intelligence agencies, so now we’ve got ‘fake news’ stories to bolster the claim of the president and the Democrats losing the election.” Right-Wing Media Are Using The Term “Fake News” To Attack Credible News Sources.

“Has WikiLeaks become a laundering machine for compromising material gathered by Russian spies? And more broadly, what precisely is the relationship between Mr. Assange and Mr. Putin’s Kremlin?” How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West’s Secrets. “[A] New York Times examination of WikiLeaks’ activities during Mr. Assange’s years in exile found a pattern: Whether by conviction, convenience or coincidence, WikiLeaks’ document releases, along with many of Mr. Assange’s statements, have often benefited Russia, at the expense of the West.”

And here we have Sean Hannity advancing a Russian disinformation campaign in the post-truth fact-free world of FAUX News.

GOP_BubbleThis is how the mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing propaganda machine works, creating Epistemic closure and the ‘conservative misinformation feedback loop’ media bubble.

Trump Quotes Assange, Says WikiLeaks Did Not Get Emails From Russia:

Mr. Assange appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night with Sean Hannity, one of Mr. Trump’s biggest media boosters, to declare once again that the Russians were not the source of the purloined emails that WikiLeaks released from the Democratic National Committee and the personal account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Mr. Trump followed that appearance with a series of Twitter posts on Wednesday that appear to be preparing his followers for battle once more information on intelligence findings is released, likely by Thursday.

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