Tag: national security and intelligence
The 'America First' Nominee Who Loves America's Enemies

The 'America First' Nominee Who Loves America's Enemies

Glance through any post-election voter interview and you will inevitably find someone who mentions "America first" when explaining his or her vote. They understand the term in varying ways, but the throughline is the belief that Trump is a strong leader who will steadfastly pursue America's national interests.

Sorry, but that is deluded. Even by the strongman standard, Trump is not securing America. His nominees are not just unqualified; they are anti-qualified. If he were attempting to sabotage America's interests, it's hard to see how he would do things differently.

Someone who cared about America's security would never dream of nominating a weekend TV host with no relevant experience in running large organizations to serve as secretary of defense, far less someone who has an alcohol problem, white nationalist sympathies and a history of sexual misconduct. Many Republican senators are minimizing the credible accusations against Peter Hegseth, so perhaps a primer is in order about why character matters.

It matters for all officials if you care about honest, responsible government (an antique taste perhaps). For those in sensitive national security posts though, good character is more than desirable; it's essential. If a defense secretary is drunk during a crisis, lives can be lost. And if he has a history of sexual assault, it's possible, even likely, that there may be more unreported episodes out there that could be exploited by an enemy to blackmail him.

The choice of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence is even less explicable. Her appalling judgment comes into sharp focus this week with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Before she was red-pilled, Gabbard's outstanding trait was warmth toward dictators. In 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad not once but twice. Like so many political pilgrims, Gabbard saw what she wanted to see, not the reality staring her in the face. In 2017, she had every reason to know that Assad had not only used chemical weapons against the Syrian people, but had welcomed Russian assistance in his civil war, and that Iranian-allied troops and Russian fighters had conducted operations against American interests in the region.

No one knows what Assad and Gabbard discussed in their two hours together, but soon after she emerged, Gabbard was expressing skepticism that Assad had really used poison gas, and by the time of her 2020 presidential run, she was citing full-on conspiracy sites that claimed the chemical attacks were false flag operations designed to bring the United States into the war.

Her credulousness — if that's what it is — looks particularly obscene this week, as stories are coming out about the grotesque human rights abuses committed by Assad in Sednaya prison and at other places around Syria. Within hours of Assad's departure, people swarmed the prisons in hopes of finding loved ones alive. At Sednaya, they forced open the doors of the prison morgue and found bodies in conditions reminiscent of the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide. The New York Times reported some of the grisly details:

"One woman shrieked at what she found. Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck — a rope burn, the examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes."

Some of the women prisoners were found with toddlers in their cells, doubtless the result of prison guards raping them. Rape and torture were routine in the prison Amnesty International labeled a "human slaughterhouse." Human rights groups vary in their estimates of the number of Syrians murdered by their designer-clothes-clad, Bentley-driving dictator, but the range is between 13,000 and 30,000 dead at Sednaya alone since the uprising against Assad began in 2011. The total of all Syrians killed since 2011 in the civil war is estimated to be 620,000, with 12 million refugees.

Gabbard demonstrated similar credulousness about Russia and Putin, mouthing so many Kremlin talking points that Russian TV hosts referred to her as "Russia's girlfriend." She repeated the propaganda that the United States and NATO were responsible for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, tweeting in 2022 that "This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns." She has denounced Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt, and repeated the baseless smear (originated in the Kremlin) that the United States was operating biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and was responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

There is something wrong with Gabbard. The pull of conspiracism — particularly anti-American conspiracism — seems to be her overriding mental frame. In this, she and Trump (and RFK Jr. and so many others) are united. If she were merely a member of Congress, her tropism toward murderous dictators would be disturbing, but as head of America's intelligence community, it's utterly insane. This is the furthest thing from America First.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Former Aides Say Tulsi Gabbard Was Duped By Kremlin Propaganda

Former Aides Say Tulsi Gabbard Was Duped By Kremlin Propaganda

Tulsi Gabbard, the onetime Democrat who is Donald Trump’s pick to be the country’s next director of national intelligence, was a faithful consumer of Kremlin-controlled media, three of her former congressional aides told ABC News.

According to ABC’s report, the aides said that the failed presidential candidate regularly read and shared stories from RT—a state-run media outlet formerly known as Russia Today—even after being told that it wasn’t a credible news source. Gabbard’s former staffers suggested that they didn’t buy some claims from Democrats that their former boss is a “Russian asset.” But they do believe she’s become a staunch advocate for one of the United States’ chief adversaries thanks to her routine consumption of pro-Russia propaganda.

It’s unclear just how much consuming news from these outlets shaped Gabbard’s worldview. In fact, her former aides said that Gabbard read news from a plethora of outlets, ranging from stories peddled by far left factions to articles from extreme-right sources. But Gabbard’s views on Russian aggression in Europe, specifically, have become increasingly eyebrow-raising since her days as a Democratic House member representing Hawaii.

The aides provided ABC News with an internal memo that Gabbard sent to staff in 2017, for instance, which showed her extending unwarranted sympathy to the Kremlin. Among many other damning things, the former Bernie Sanders loyalist-turned-MAGA apologist complained about the United States’ “hostility toward Putin” and bemoaned the fact that “there isn’t any guarantee to Put that we won’t try to overthrow Russia’s government.”

“In fact, I’m pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that,” she added.

These fresh allegations against Gabbard have heightened some Democrats’ fears about her securing a spot in Trump’s Cabinet. Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration, told ABC News that the thoughts outlined in Gabbard’s 2017 memo were “basically the Russian playbook.” He also expressed anxiety that she could soon be charged with overseeing America’s most sensitive intelligence assets.

Her sympathy toward the Kremlin only grew after 2017. During her unsuccessful presidential run in 2020, Gabbard criticized America’s involvement in Syria’s civil war as a “regime change war” on President Bashar Assad, a key Russian ally. And in 2022, Gabbard defended Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine and went so far as to blame the United States and NATO for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s security concerns.

And she didn’t stop there. In October, Gabbard baselessly suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris was the main instigator of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

Gabbard’s pro-Russia takes have not gone unnoticed by the senators who will determine whether she earns a spot in the Trump administration. Even before ABC News’ bombshell report, some Republicans indicated that they were nervous about Gabbard’s worrisome positions on foreign policy issues, as well as her promotion of Russian propaganda.

“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” one Republican Senate aide told The Hill. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

These latest revelations certainly aren’t good news for Trump, who has already had two of his nominees drop out (see: Matt Gaetz and Chad Chronister, his picks to head up the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration).

The good news for Gabbard, at least for now, is that another one of Trump’s potential appointees, defense secretary nominee and Fox News host Pete Hegseth, is now in the hot seat for a series of scandalous revelations and accusations about his own past. That means Gabbard’s troublesome views and actions have flown mostly under the radar.

But who knows how long that will last.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

McCarthy Blasted For Fresh Lies About FBI Russia Probe

McCarthy Blasted For Fresh Lies About FBI Russia Probe

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pushed blatantly false allegations about the FBI investigation into four associates of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign over the weekend — lies that were retweeted more than 34,000 times at the time of this writing.

He claimed that the recent Justice Department inspector general report showed that “The FBI broke into President Trump’s campaign, spied on him, then tried to cover it up.” In fact, the report demonstrated clearly that McCarthy’s claim wasn’t true.

In the Fox News video clip accompanying the tweet, McCarthy explained what he meant by saying the FBI “broke into” the campaign: “They broke into his campaign by bringing people into it. They have been trying to cover it up for the whole time.”

But this is false. As CNN’s Daniel Dale noted, Inspector General Michael Horowitz found no evidence to support this idea:

Horowitz’s report said that “all” of the witnesses his team interviewed said “that the FBI did not try to recruit members of the Trump campaign as CHSs (confidential human sources), did not send CHSs to collect information in Trump campaign headquarters or Trump campaign spaces, and did not ask CHSs to join the Trump campaign or otherwise attend campaign related events as part of the investigation.”

Horowitz added that “we found no information indicating otherwise.”

The report also clarifies that the investigation initially focused on four individuals — George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort — not the campaign itself. And there’s no support for McCarthy’s claim that the FBI spied on Trump himself. There was an incident in which a member of the FBI’s investigatory team helped brief the Trump campaign on intelligence matters — which is a typical function of the FBI — and Horowitz recommends that policymakers should consider barring this practice in the future. But Trump was still not a target of the investigation, and there’s no sense in which this FBI official “broke into” the campaign.

What’s particularly egregious about this lie is how blatant it is. McCarthy’s not only making wild accusations — he’s making accusations that are contradicted by the report that he cites for the accusation.

His comparison to Watergate is also galling because in 2016, it was the Democratic National Committee that was once again, just like in Watergate, illegally burgled, this time by Russian hackers who stole and leaked private emails. And it was Trump who, at the time, encouraged these hackers to go after Clinton personally, and they apparently listened to this command.

“These claims are false,” said CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti in response to McCarthy’s tweet. “The Inspector General did not *find* evidence of this during his investigation.”

John Harwood of CNBC said: “House GOP leader McCarthy, who three years ago said Putin was paying Trump ‘swear to God,’ now joins Trump in disseminating Russian propaganda.”

McCarthy was additionally dishonest in the video when he said of the Horowitz report that the report showed a “modern-day coup” — a completely nonsensical idea, since Trump wasn’t in office at the time of the investigation. And the evidence suggests that the FBI actually undermined Hillary Clinton’s chances in the election, not Trump’s.

McCarthy further claimed, “Now the question rises, just like Watergate, who knew, when did they know it, and how high did this go up?”

The implication here seems to be that, like Watergate, the conspiracy went up to the top — to President Barack Obama. But this isn’t really an open question. Horowitz said he found no evidence that there was improper political influence in the investigation of Trump campaign associates. And though he found significant problems, particularly in the surveillance of Carter Page, these problems were largely the result of lower-level officials within the FBI not reporting enough information up the chain to give higher-ups a better sense of the facts of the case. So the evidence for wrongdoing that exists doesn’t raise questions about how much officials at the top knew, but why they didn’t know more.

This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but it doesn’t fit Trump or McCarthy’s narrative, and their conspiracy theories and lies actually distract from the real issues in the FBI.

Watch the clip of McCarthy’s comments below:

Russians May Have Monitored Sondland Call With Trump

Russians May Have Monitored Sondland Call With Trump

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

When Ambassador William Taylor (top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine) testified during the first day of public hearings for the House impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, much of his testimony confirmed things that had already been reported. But there was one important revelation that hadn’t been previously reported: Taylor testified that one of his staffers, David Holmes, overheard a phone conversation in which Trump expressed to Gordon Sondland (U.S. ambassador to the European Union) a strong desire for an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Sondland was in a restaurant in Kyiv, Ukraine during that July 26 conversation with Trump — and according to a report by the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, it is quite possible that Russian intelligence officials infiltrated the call and were listening in.

According to Larry Pfeiffer (a former senior director of the White House Situation Room and a former chief of staff at the Central Intelligence Agency) such a call was a major breach of security.

Pfeiffer told the Post, “The security ramifications are insane: using an open cell phone to communicate with the president of the United States. In a country that is so wired with Russian intelligence, you can almost take it to the bank that the Russians were listening in on the call.”

That July 26 conversation, according to Taylor’s testimony, occurred only one day after Trump’s now-infamous phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In 2014, Nakashima points out, a phone conversation between two Obama-era diplomats was intercepted in Ukraine, recorded, and posted on YouTube. The diplomats were Victoria Nuland (who, at the time, was assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian matters) and Geoffrey Pyatt (who was serving as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine). On a recording of their conversation, Nuland was heard complaining to Pyatt about how slow-moving the European Union could be and saying, “Fuck the EU.”

Nuland later apologized to EU officials, and Nakashima notes that the leaked call “appeared to be an effort by Moscow to drive a wedge between the United States and the European Union.”

Trump has been known to use his personal cell phone for conversations with foreign leaders or officials.

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