MI6 "Steele Dossier" Trump-Russia Lawfare Retrospective Rosenberg / Grant

       14 December 2018, WASHINGTON, D.C. - Lawfare introduction verbatim fair comment full report link follows:

By Sarah Grant, Chuck Rosenberg

 Friday, December 14, 2018, 8:00 AM

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President Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin prior to the 2018 Helsinki Summit. (kremlin.ru)

" The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele remains a subject of fascination—or, depending on your perspective, scorn. Indeed, it was much discussed during former FBI Director Jim Comey’s testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 7. Published almost two years ago by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, the document received significant public attention, first for its lurid details regarding Donald Trump’s pre-presidential alleged sexual escapades in Russia and later for its role in forming part of the basis for the government’s application for a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page. 

Our interest in revisiting the compilation that has come to be called the “Steele Dossier” concerns neither of those topics, at least not directly. Rather, we returned to the document because we wondered whether information made public as a result of the Mueller investigation—and the passage of two years—has tended to buttress or diminish the crux of Steele’s original reporting. . . ."

Please see full report: https://www.lawfareblog.com/steele-dossier-retrospective

Sarah Grant is a student at Harvard Law School and previously spent five years on active duty in the Marine Corps. She holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge and a BS in International Relations from the United States Naval Academy. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, the Marine Corps, or any other agency of the United States Government.

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Chuck Rosenberg is a former U.S. attorney, senior FBI official and chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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Copyright 2018 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to Lawfare content)

Trump Is Russia's "Useful Fool" C.I.A. Former Director Charges As U.S. Spy Community Dreads Briefing Tweeting Trump On Nation's "Deepest Secrets"

       Friday, 11 November 2016, WASHINGTON, D,C. - UPDATED - While former CIA acting director Michael Morrell asserts that Russian former KGB/FSB Vladimir Putin "has cleverly recruited" President-elect Donald Trump as an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation" it appears that Putin's actions and words vis-a-vis the "post-truth" Trump are more predictably opportunistic than "clever" better described as consistent with Putin's routine modus operandi of thinly veiled but tenuously deniable essentially obvious "covert" attempts to leverage Russia's increasingly limited resources by intruding on including by often brutal disruption of world affairs.
     Such attempts including with disinformation, propaganda and "fake news" regularly are sought to be obscured consistent with decades-known former Soviet practices with which previously KGB/FSB Putin is well indoctrinated as he deploys them going to any length to again make Russia appear to be a meaningful player including even so far as to committing atrocities on a global scale as deemed necessary in this pursuit. Meanwhile Putin in order to survive can only succeed personally by continuing to distract the Russian people with cheap propaganda from the unfolding domestic economic and social disaster he has overseen and ignores at home even as Putin himself has operated his faux "democracy" in actuality a kleptocracy by means of which Putin has stolen and enriched himself at the expense of the Russian people robbing them of former State industry assets in an amount reportedly estimated to be at least $252 billion. These may turn out to be a rather unmanageable amount of stolen funds to hide indefinitely from western intelligence agencies assessing "retaliatory measures" including repatriating the funds or at least exposing their existence to the Russian people from whom they have been stolen.
       Putin's "clever" bromance with Trump has been called out by many ranging from late-night television host comic monologues to an unusually stark unambiguous public calling out of Putin cyber-meddling hacks made by U.S. intelligence agencies. These include the Department of Homeland Security ("intelligence" notably no longer applying to self-righteous FBI Director James Comey (who Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) calls a "Republican operative" who cost Hillary Clinton the presidential election) and his rogue FBI "Trumpland") and further including even the rare public definitive statement of Russian malfeasance by James R. Clapper Jr. Director of National Intelligence who oversees them all. Trump nevertheless ignored and in fact rejected the warning of the Nation's most knowledgeable intelligence officials. Trump relied instead on his "gut" completely uninformed by any meaningful knowledge of foreign affairs and blissfully unencumbered by any context one might assume informed the usual United States president gained from, e.g., reading something more than the "Breaking News" at the bottom of the FOX-TV screen.
       Trump certainly has not hidden his admiration and astoundingly naive belief that his "soul mate" Putin regardless of his growing portfolio of atrocities and  increasingly vast human rights abuses probably is a great guy with whom Trump and his staff of cronies actually may have more, perhaps a lot more, in common than the American people might even suspect. Russian diplomats already certainly have wasted no time even as early as yesterday trying to broadcast that information, misinformation and/or disinformation. Who knows or even really cares at this point given Trump's own profoundly troubling campaign statements including publicly encouraging Russia to spy on the United States in order for Trump to gain some perceived political advantage over his rival on the basis of stolen information. (Call to mind any past criminal Republican U.S. president?)
       Moreover former NSA (1999-2005) and CIA (2006-2009) director Michael V. Hayden goes so far as to identify Trump as what the Soviets called a "polezni durak" which means the "useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited".  Hayden admits that that is a "pretty harsh term" but concludes that it is the "most benign interpretation of all this that I can come up with right now". President-elect Donald Trump reportedly this week has commenced briefings by United States intelligence analysts with a "read-through" of the President's Daily Brief providing Trump with the same "sensitive compartmentalized information" (SCI) being the United States most highly classified information of real-time top level intelligence and national security developments including operations and capabilities which are reported by U.S. intelligence analysts to President Barack Obama each day.                
       Concerned readers interested in more information as to why the United States intelligence community "dreads" providing Trump with more detailed intelligence and national security information including the Nation's "deepest secrets" can go to the Washington Post links below. The first link provides more detailed information on the scope and depth of the intelligence and national security communities' fears about Trump and the reasons therefor. The second link is to former NSA and CIA director Hayden's opinion piece in that same publication. Both links further provide additional links to more information on and related to this matter.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-trump-about-to-learn-the-nations-deepest-secrets-a-sense-of-dread-in-the-intelligence-community/2016/11/09/e4206810-a676-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop_b

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-cia-chief-trump-is-russias-useful-fool/2016/11/03/cda42ffe-a1d5-11e6-8d63-3e0a660f1f04_story.html?tid=a_inl

Copyright 2016 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved

Leaked Voter Internet Database 191 Million Voter Names, Emails, Birth Dates, Addresses, Party Affiliations, And Phone Numbers For All 50 States And D.C.

     Tuesday, 29 December 2015, WASHINGTON, D.C. - A publicly accessible U.S. voter database consolidating 191 million U.S. voters' names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers, and email addresses from all fifty states and Washington, DC was incorrectly configured so that it was not secure with the leak first reported by CSO Online and Databreaches, Inc. Those computer and privacy news sites according to Austin, Texas computer researcher tech support specialist Chris Vickery were helping him to locate the Internet voter database's owner.
     Vickery said in a Monday telephone interview that it was he who originally had discovered the leak while seeking to expose data security public leaks on the Internet. Mr. Vickery reportedly said the database took about one day to download and did not know if it had been accessed by any others. CSO Online said the information contained codes that may have originated from campaign software provider NationBuilder.
     NationBuilder Chief Executive Officer Jim Gilliam said the database was not created by the Los Angeles-based company although some of the database information may have come from "data it freely supplies to political campaigns." Gilliam curiously then while implying NationBuilder had not necessarily "seen" all the information leaked made the definite statement that the voter information "included" in the leak "is already publicly available from each state government" and so asserted that "no new or private information was released in this database". Apparently Mr. Gilliam may have overlooked both the security danger the voter information compilation posed including because of criminal use of it in "concentrated" form as Mr. Vickery pointed out as well as the fact that different state governments do not uniformly allow the same uses of voter registration information.
     Federal agencies quickly stepped up to shift the blame to others with a representative with the U.S. Federal Elections Commission saying the FEC has no jurisdiction over protecting voter records. Mr. Vickery said he has not been able to identify who controls the database, but that he is working with U.S. agencies whom he declined to identify to determine who owns the site so that it can be removed from public view. Unsurprisingly the F.B.I. declined to comment on its role presumably yet again sleuthing slippery commie states and/or tech punks (it might later hire due to its own present gross ineptitude) in this recent huge government Internet security breach doubtless hoping yet again no one rightfully could attribute responsibility to the F.B.I. for this or any of the other rapidly growing multitudes of government Internet and database breaches extending from the White House to the Pentagon that serve to magnify the F.B.I.'s inability to enforce internet security against anyone except its own corrupt recently criminally tried agents.
     This "no FBI comment" strategy is readily understandable especially considering that FBI Director "Backdoor Man" James B. Comey like screaming NSA Director "No Backdoor Man" Admiral Michael "Mike" Rogers has been increasingly vociferously demanding a "key" or "split keys" to U.S. technology company including phone encryption contrary to all reputable world computer security expert opinions (and directly violating Comey's pledge covered verbatim in a post here earlier this year in which he assured that would take "no position" on the issue) on the grounds that Director Comey and apparently Admiral Rogers even in the wake of the continuing tidal wave onslaught of U.S. government cyberbreaches still incredibly believe their agencies can insure any cybersecurity at all much less manage not to lose or have a "key" misused by a criminal hostile state within a matter of days. Should the federal government succeed in threatening American technology companies to get a single "key" or "split keys" the Ninth Amendment respectfully suggests that President Obama please immediately demand it be turned over to the White House so that it may be secured with the First Lady to wear as a necklace.
     Readers interested in more information regarding the above first reported by Reuters can go to the New York Times link incorporating the Reuters report below.
             
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2015/12/28/us/28reuters-usa-voters-breach.html?_r=0

Copyright Martin P. 2015 All World Rights Expressly Reserved