US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7635

On May 25 2017 21:10 Biff The Understudy wrote:
So according to Ben Carson, poverty is a state of mind. The millions of disfranchised rust belt poor people who voted for his boss should appreciate, if the conservative media even relays them the good news.

U.K. police investigating the Manchester terror attack say they have stopped sharing information with the U.S. after a series of leaks that have so angered the British government that Prime Minister Therese May wants to discuss them with President Donald Trump during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Brussels. What can Trump tell her, though? The leaks drive him nuts, too.

Since the beginning of this century, the U.S. intelligence services and their clients have acted as if they wanted the world to know they couldn't guarantee the confidentiality of any information that falls into their hands. At this point, the culture of leaks is not just a menace to intelligence-sharing allies. It's a threat to the intelligence community's credibility.

In 2003, President George W. Bush reportedly authorized an aide to leak highly classified intelligence on Iraq to The New York Times to support his decision to go to war. It was an early indication that leaks would be used for political purposes and that U.S. political leaders would consider it par for the course.

Then, in 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. intelligence data, including an Army Counterintelligence Center report on how to stop the release of secret documents on WikiLeaks. That didn't stop Julian Assange's website from releasing secret data provided by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and, in 2013, by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden -- two of the biggest troves of secret material the public has ever seen.

In 2010, China began wrapping up the Central Intelligence Agency's asset network there. The agents disappeared or died one after another for the next several years. The CIA never quite figured out how the Chinese found out: It could have been a mole, or they could have hacked a communication channel. Five years later, Chinese hackers stole data about millions of U.S. government employees.

In 2012, CIA chief David Petraeus resigned after it came out that he'd leaked classified information to his lover and biographer, Paula Broadwell.

In 2016, the U.S. intelligence services accused the Russian government of hacking the presidential election campaign, in particular the Democratic Party's. After Trump won the election, leaks intensified to a frenzy, with unnamed former and current intelligence officials talking daily to the press about the Trump campaign's contacts with Russians. Overheard telephone conversations with the Russian ambassador proved to be the downfall of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. At the same time, NSA hacking tools were published online by a hacking group (leading to a recent WannaCry ransomware attack, which used a Windows vulnerability found in that trove), and WikiLeaks revealed a less advanced but still effective CIA hacking arsenal.

The leakorama has grown bizarre lately. Intelligence sources leaked the allegation that Trump leaked sensitive intelligence data related to Islamic State to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, without revealing what exactly Trump said. The next day, someone leaked the information leaked by Trump had come from Israel. Trump, on a trip to Israel, told reporters that he'd never "mentioned the word Israel" to the Russians, denying something no one ever accused him of doing.

On May 25 2017 23:17 Nevuk wrote:
I still remember the absolutely nuts interview Paula Broadwell did with Jon Stewart that led a lot of people to wonder if they'd had an affair. She spoke of Petraeus in terms that probably exceeded glowing straight into creepy.

On May 25 2017 23:38 Logo wrote:


What's the context for this? Do you see some parallel between that interview and something going on today?

Months after the FBI began examining Paul Manafort as part of a probe into ties between President Donald Trump’s team and Russia, Manafort called Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus to push back against the mounting controversy, according to four people familiar with the call.

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on the alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties between Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

Manafort had been forced to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman five months earlier amid scrutiny of his work for Kremlin-aligned politicians and businessmen in Eastern Europe. But he had continued talking to various members of Trump’s team, and had even had at least two conversations with Trump, according to people close to Manafort or Trump.

While the people say the conversations were mostly of a political or, in some cases, personal nature, the conversation with Priebus, described by four people familiar with it, was related to the scandal now subsuming Manafort and the Trump presidency.

It suggests that Manafort recognized months ago the potentially serious problems posed by the investigation, even as Trump himself continues to publicly dismiss it as a politically motivated witch hunt, while predicting it won’t find anything compromising.

The discussion also could provide fodder for an expanding line of inquiry for both the FBI and congressional investigators. They’ve increasingly focused on the Trump team’s handling of the investigations, including evolving explanations from the White House, and the president’s unsuccessful efforts to get the FBI to drop part of the investigation, followed by his firing of FBI director James Comey. All that has led to claims that the president and his team may have opened themselves to obstruction of justice charges.

According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research, and had briefed both Trump and then-President Obama on the dossier.

Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whom he alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative.

Manafort discussed with other Trump allies the possibility of launching a countervailing investigation into efforts by Ukrainian government officials, who allegedly worked in conjunction with allies of Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to damage Trump’s campaign, according to the operative. The operative added that Manafort saw such an investigation as a way to distract attention from the parallel FBI and congressional Russia probes.

Priebus and the White House press office declined to comment, as did the Ukrainian presidential administration, though it previously challenged the notion it meddled in the U.S. presidential election.

Priebus did, however, alert Trump to the conversation with Manafort, according to the operative familiar with the conversation and a person close to Trump.

But someone else familiar with the call described it as “a very vague topline discussion” that lasted two or three minutes and was short on details. “The only thing discussed was that the dossier was incorrect, full of lies, and was a joke. They never discussed ways to push back on it,” the person said. “Manafort said if you want any additional details, give me a call, and Reince never called him back.”

There’s no evidence that Trump’s team considered an investigation into Ukrainian meddling, or acted on Manafort’s recommendations, though Trump did blast the dossier as “fake news” gathered by “a group of opponents that got together — sick people — and they put that crap together.”

A Manafort spokesman declined to comment for this story.

On May 25 2017 23:43 KwarK wrote:
It's bizarre to think that the Trump administration would have caught way less flak if they had listened to all the warnings the outgoing Obama administration were giving them. Obama tried to save the Trump administration from itself.

On May 25 2017 23:48 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Hence why Priebus was worried about a potential Buzzfeed leak, apparently?



Source

Screen time

Top White House officials tell me the key to forcing a more disciplined President Trump like the one onstage overseas is limiting his screen time. In Trump's case, it's curtailing his time watching TV and banging out tweets on his iPhone.
Trump himself has been pushing staff to give him more free time. But staff does everything it can to load up his schedule to keep him from getting worked up watching cable coverage, which often precipitates his tweets. It has worked well overseas so far.
Fun thing: POTUS' current device is an iPhone with ONE app: his tweeter.

I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody that has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there,” said Carson. “And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”

On May 26 2017 00:07 brian wrote:
can anyone explain why that would ever be construed as an unreasonable little speech? seems like the most sensible few words he's strung together. but i don't know any nuances that may be involved wrt NATO

On May 26 2017 00:01 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Donald Trump the man behind the idea of the EU Armed Forces...

https://twitter.com/JamilSmith/status/867755396806492160

On May 26 2017 00:14 KwarK wrote:

There isn't a 2% contribution rule, there certainly is no suggestion that anyone might owe another country money for it, there is no mechanism for Trump to collect on a debt nor any mechanism by which that debt would even exist, there is no reason to use total US defence spending as a comparison to NATO (NATO covers the North Atlantic, the US has other alliances like SEATO, for every dollar the US spends in any region on any project they seem to want to go to each alliance and say "that dollar benefited you somehow, match me" and that's fucking retarded). If US completely pulled out of the North Atlantic their military spending would still be high enough for them to insist that they're carrying too much of the burden. The subtext of this speech is "we spent all our money fucking up the Middle East and causing the refugee crisis and you didn't spend any money doing that so here's a bill so you can share the cost, you're welcome".

Not only does he have no idea how NATO works, he's actually got together a group of leaders of American allies so he can collectively make a total idiot of himself in front of them because the desired audience of his speech isn't them, it's the American public, most of whom know even less than he does. Literally nothing will come of this speech other than some minor civil servant in each of the NATO governments drafting a letter to the Trump administration explaining how NATO works.

On May 26 2017 00:34 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Heads up, Paul Ryan speaking.