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Trump Probe Began With Russian Messages Intercepted By NSA

Trump Probe Began With Russian Messages Intercepted By NSA

As Trump and his minions poured out mesmerizing disinformation last weekend about the origins of the Russia probe, a bracing slap of reality was delivered by Observer.com, a news website owned by the Kushner family (and once known as the New York Observer, a weekly newspaper where I formerly worked.)

Observer columnist John Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst and professor at the Naval War College, is a  controversial figure who worked for years in U.S. counterintelligence. He is a #NeverTrump conservative with deep ties in the intelligence community, whose devotion to official secrecy he shares.

In his latest column, Schindler not only debunks Trump’s “Spygate” charges against the FBI, but reminds us of a crucial clue about how the Russia probe began. The FBI counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign’s troubling connections to the Kremlin actually was initiated when alarms were set off by signals intelligence, or what spooks call “SIGINT” — meaning messages and conversations intercepted by the NSA and its allies in foreign intelligence agencies.

Schindler reminds us that “multiple SIGINT reports” gathered by NSA and allied agencies as early as 2015, involving interactions between Trump and his circle and “known or suspected Russian agents,” set off suspicions in U.S. intelligence agencies. Amplifying NSA’s own data collection, such reports came from agencies in Australia, Germany, Estonia, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. Some of the most incriminating information first came from NSA’s most trusted partner, the United Kingdom’s innocuously named Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

Concerning those British contributions, Schindler quotes the Guardian, which reported on the Trump-related intercepts last year. “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 U.S.”

But the Western intelligence agencies weren’t “wiretapping” Trump, as he has ludicrously claimed. They were instead listening to the Kremlin and its spies, as usual, and finding repeated conversations and connections implicating Trump.

According to Schindler, a senior NSA official recently told him that when the Republican convention ratified Trump’s nomination in July 2016, “We knew we had a Russian agent on our hands.” Classified above top secret and available only to a handful of officials, the damning reports on the Republican nominee clearly indicated that the Russians felt they controlled Trump, that they were seeking to turn the election in his favor — and that Trump and his children were well aware of these nefarious machinations.

Whether and how Robert Mueller will be able to use such highly classified data in a criminal investigation remains to be determined. But there is little doubt that if those reports exist, the former FBI director has seen them.

IMAGE: The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, pictured from the air in this image taken on January 29, 2010. Saul Loeb/AFP

Egypt, International Groups Weigh Value Of Observers For Election

Egypt, International Groups Weigh Value Of Observers For Election

By Amro Hassan and Laura King, Los Angeles Times

CAIRO — Egypt’s presidential election next week presents a quandary for both international observer groups and the military-backed interim government.

To Egyptian authorities, the presence of prestigious outside observers gives the election a stamp of legitimacy, even in the face of the government’s harsh crackdown on political dissent.

But international election monitors’ reports will probably include yet more criticism of the repressive political climate that has prevailed in the more than 10 months since the government — whose de facto head, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, is expected to be elected president — took power.

For the observer groups, the dilemma is whether to risk appearing to support what human rights groups describe as a deeply undemocratic administration by being here at all for the vote — or to stay away and perhaps let their voices go unheard.

Previous prosecutions of foreign organizations seeking to promote democracy in Egypt — including some court convictions that still stand — have kept away some authoritative groups that would normally try to assess the fairness of a major election.

Some strongly worded reservations in advance of the vote came from the U.S.-based Carter Center, which expressed concern last week about the “restrictive political and legal context” surrounding the vote.

In the past 10 months, the interim government has cracked down on Islamist opponents, and also has targeted some secular democrats. More than 1,400 supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi have been killed, and by conservative estimates, more than 16,000 have been arrested. Morsi, an Islamist, is imprisoned and on trial for various charges.

“I am gravely concerned that Egypt’s democratic transition has faltered,” former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said in a statement last week. “Egypt’s next president should take immediate steps to foster dialogue and political accommodation to ensure the full spectrum of Egyptian society can participate meaningfully in politics.”

The Carter Center chose to deploy what it called a “small expert mission” to assess conditions surrounding the election.

The European Union said Monday that its observers — after reporting initial technical problems that could have seriously hampered their work — would fully participate in assessing the fairness of the balloting, deploying across Egypt.

Mario David, a member of the European Parliament and the chief observer, said Monday that the mission would go ahead despite observers not getting into the field throughout Egypt well ahead of time as intended.

Many of the international organizations that monitored the 2012 election that brought Morsi to power are sitting out this election, as they did the January referendum on Egypt’s new constitution. Morsi was the country’s first democratically elected president, though his rule was considered profoundly authoritarian and not politically inclusive.

January’s referendum was the interim government’s first foray into a promised democratic transition. The new national charter won about 98 percent approval — a lopsided margin reminiscent of sham elections that were a hallmark of the three-decade rule of dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled in the Arab Spring uprising of 2011.

Morsi was ousted by the military in July after popular protests demanding his removal. In the interim, the government that supplanted him has alternated between harsh demands that the international community back off and appeals for understanding of the political circumstances that led to the coup.