National Security

Putin’s fifth column of fellow travelers in the personality cult of Donald Trump

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I have castigated the craven cowards in the Congress who will not defend America against Russian asset Donald Trump’s traitorous act of betrayal of the United States at the Surrender Summit.

These craven cowards are more afraid of upsetting the sycophant supporters in the personality cult of Donald Trump than in performing their constitutional and patriotic duty to defend the national security of the United States.

Max Boot makes a critical observation at the Washington Post. The stench from Trump’s execrable performance grows ever more putrid:

Even Russian state television admits that Trump “really smells like an agent of the Kremlin.” The only question is whether he is a witting or unwitting agent. But if Trump is, at best, a “useful idiot” for the Kremlin, what does that make Trump’s useful idiots? All of the “conservatives” (I use the word loosely) who serve as the president’s enablers should understand the price of their partisanship: They are weakening U.S. security and facilitating foreign aggression.

The most useful and idiotic enablers are at Fox “News” Channel [aka Trump TV]. The propagandists (a category that excludes genuine journalists such as Chris Wallace) were in fine fettle after Helsinki. Tucker Carlson, seemingly intent on making America a safe space for xenophobes, claimed that Mexico is guilty of far worse election meddling than Russia “by packing our electorate.” Sean Hannity praised his idol for being “very strong,” thereby raising the epistemological question of whether strength in supinity is possible. Jeanine Pirro rebutted Trump’s critics by demanding: “What was he supposed to do, take a gun out and shoot Putin?” (Was that the only alternative?) And Lou Dobbs, with elementary-school eloquence, dismissed all naysaying as “stupid stuff.”

This brainwashing is as effective as it is preposterous. In a recent Economist/YouGov survey, only 40 percent of Republicans said the United States should stay in NATO and 56 percent said that Trump’s (borderline treasonous) relationship with Putin is a good thing. In the course of my lifetime, Republicans have gone from denouncing useful idiots to becoming useful idiots.

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Russian asset Trump continues his subservience to Putin

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After his disastrous press conference at the Surrender Summit, Russian asset Donald Trump was forced to “clarify” his remarks yesterday in a hostage video (press conference) reading from notes prepared by his captors, Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump’s body language and demeanor clearly indicated that he did not support his captor’s “clarification.”

“I’ll begin by stating that I have full faith and support for America’s great intelligence agencies. Always have … let me be totally clear in saying, and I’ve said this many times, I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.”

But then the hostage ad-libbed a qualification from the prepared remarks: “Could be other people also. There are a lot of people out there.” This totally negated what he just said.

I realize that there is a need for some clarification. It should’ve been obvious, I thought it was obvious, but I’d like to clarify just in case it wasn’t. In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should’ve been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ So just to repeat it, I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t’ and the sentence should’ve been, and I thought it would be maybe a little unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video. The sentence should’ve been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative. So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.

So out of all the crazy shit that Trump said at his disastrous press conference at the Surrender Summit, he would only change one word taken out of context of everything else he said? That’s not a clarification.

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Russian operative arrested for influence operation in the NRA and GOP

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Almost lost in Trump’s Surrender Summit on Monday is news that the Department of Justice announced it had arrested prominent Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina over the weekend, accusing her of setting up “back channel” lines of communication with the Kremlin in an operation that spanned from the months before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 through February 2017, the month after his inauguration. What a Russian operative’s indictment reveals about the Kremlin’s attempts to infiltrate American politics and the NRA:

In the unsealed indictment, the department accused Butina of conspiring to infiltrate U.S. political groups and advance the agenda of the Russian government through her network of high-profile American contacts in politics and media.

Read the full Complaint and attached Affidavit.

The indictment includes the most explicit and detailed accusation to date against a Russian, working with the help of an American citizen, to influence the 2016 presidential election. It also provides new details about the Russian government’s attempts to curry favor among prominent Americans.

Notably, the charges are not being made by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 election. The investigation was carried out by the FBI’s field office in Washington, and Butina is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Justice Department’s national security division.

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Trump’s Surrender Summit: A Date Which Will Live In Infamy

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For almost 240 years, General Benedict Arnold has personified the traitor in American history. He can now finally rest in peace, because he has been surpassed by a far worse traitor whom history will condemn and vilify as the personification of the traitor for the rest of time. The name Trump will forever be synonymous with traitor.

To borrow a turn of phrase from Franklin D. Roosevelt: Yesterday, July 16, 2018 – a date which will live in infamy – a president of the United States capitulated and surrendered to a Russian dictator whose government conspired to help him win the presidency. In fealty to this Russian dictator, Donald J. Trump leveled attacks against his own government and its political institutions, and blamed the American people for his own cowardly act of betrayal.

Americans will remember the day when they witnessed their president casually capitulate and surrender to a Russian dictator — without a shot ever having been fired in an armed conflict — to reveal himself as a willing puppet of the Russian government, and a traitor to the United States.

America has a national security crisis. We have a compromised commander-in-chief who must be removed from office without delay in order to safeguard the national security of the United States. The U.S. Constitution provides only one remedy for this, impeachment. Article 2, Section 4, U.S. Constitution.

The only question today is whether Republicans in Congress will rise up to the urgency of this national security crisis and do their constitutional duty to remove this national security threat from the presidency. Their failure to act is silent consent to Trump’s betrayal of his country, and Republicans will be complicit in his act of betrayal. Any Republican who fails their constitutional duty to act must also be removed from office.

This is the litmus test: Do you stand with Trump and Putin, or do you stand with America and the Constitution you have sworn an oath to defend?

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Trump fails to defend America against Russian attacks; there is a word for that (updated)

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s detailed indictment of twelve Russian intelligence officers for cyber attacks on the U.S. to interfere in the 2016 election offered new details of just how deeply Russian operatives have infiltrated state and local election agencies across the U.S. Mueller reveals depth of states’ election vulnerabilities.

House Administration Committee Democrats in a report released Thursday identified 18 states that congressional researchers say lack key voting safeguards, including paper trails for vote tallies and post-election audits. Drawing on months of input from election officials and cybersecurity experts, it called on Congress to approve $1.4 billion in new election security funding for all 50 states over the next decade. House Democrats list states with weakest election security in new report. You should note that no Republicans signed onto its conclusions.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a convention of secretaries of state Saturday that “though votes were note changed” in the 2016 election, “ANY attempt to interfere in our elections — successful or unsuccessful — is a direct attack on our democracy,” (emphasis added by her press office.) Homeland Security chief calls Russian hacking “direct attack on our democracy”. You should note that “President Trump has never condemned Russia over its election interference, and the White House press office statement on the indictments does not mention a Russian attack on our democracy.”

Also last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned of an impending, potentially devastating cyber attack on U.S. systems, saying the country’s digital infrastructure “is literally under attack” and warning that among state actors, Russia is the “worst offender.” Intel chief Dan Coats says of cyber attacks, “We are at a critical point”:

Speaking at a scheduled event at the Hudson Institute, he adopted the language of former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet who, in the months ahead of the 9/11 attacks, warned that the “system was blinking red.” Coats, citing daily attacks from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, said, “Here we are, nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say the warning lights are blinking red again.”

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