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Dr. Spook and the Manchurian President?
Well, that’s a heck of a story to wake up to:
During a special briefing last Friday, leaders of the intelligence community gave President-elect Donald Trump a synopsis of unsubstantiated and salacious allegations that Russian operatives had obtained potentially compromising personal and financial information about the president-elect, a U.S. official confirmed Tuesday.
I gather that everyone who’s anyone in Washington has read the memo containing these allegations, but no one thought it was worth publishing (until now).
Some thoughts, in random order:
1. It looks as if the first publication to write about this was Mother Jones, on October 31. Here’s how they put it:
And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.
Let’s call the “former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” Dr. Spook, for short. Was Dr. Spook shopping this to every publication in the US? Or just to Mother Jones? Maybe Mother Jones was the only publication willing to publish it? Kurt Eichenwald at Newsweek also seems to have used the memos in his reporting. Did Dr. Spook fax his memos to every journalist in Washington?
2. The story as it’s now being presented is that this became newsworthy because Trump himself had been briefed about it. Who leaked the story that he’d been briefed about it, and why? Why now? Apparently, “multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings” told CNN about this. How many people would have direct knowledge of these briefings in the first place? Why didn’t any of these leaking briefers think to come forward with this before the election, given that everyone in Washington apparently knew about this?
3. As Lawfare blog puts it,
… it is significant that the document contains highly specific allegations, many of which are the kind of facts it should be possible to prove or disprove. This is a document about meetings that either took place or did not take place, stays in hotels that either happened or didn’t, travel that either happened or did not happen. It should be possible to know whether at least some of these allegations are true or false.
If Dr. Spook was passing these memos to every journalist and politician in Washington as early as October 31, at least a few of the key points should have been substantiated by now, wouldn’t you think?
4. John Schindler of 20Committee says that the “GOP was informed back in the spring that Trump was a 1-man FSB kompromat machine come to life. They did nothing. This is on them now.” Was this circulating as early as last spring, then? And no one has made any progress since then in substantiating or discrediting it?
5. Presumably everyone in Hillary’s camp also knew about it, too: It was an oppo research briefing, right? I wonder what kept her from bringing it up?
… the documents reached the top of the FBI by December. Senator John McCain, who was informed about the existence of the documents separately by an intermediary from a western allied state, dispatched an emissary overseas to meet the source and then decided to present the material to Comey in a one-on-one meeting on 9 December, according to a source aware of the meeting. The documents, which were first reported on last year by Mother Jones, are also in the hands of officials in the White House.
McCain is not thought to have made a judgment on the reliability of the documents but was sufficiently impressed by the source’s credentials to feel obliged to pass them to the FBI.
Who is this source? And who’s the Guardian’s source for this story, I wonder? The point of sending an emissary overseas to meet the source is to ensure that only he and the emissary knew of it. So I assume McCain authorized this leak. Why would McCain leak to the Guardian, though? Why not at least leak to a US publication?
7. The Guardian claims that as early as last summer, the FBI applied FISA warrant to monitor four members of the Trump team “suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials.” If so — what’s up with the FBI?
8. If Trump’s the victim of a disinformation campaign, who’s behind it? Is this the intel community’s response to Trump’s claim that they have “no clue?” Hillary’s revenge?
9. It doesn’t help when yet again, Trump replies using exactly the same language the Kremlin does:
10. I don’t understand how our Deep State works. Don’t we have spies of our own in Russia? Why do we need Dr. Spook to tell us this? Why is this only being reported now?
My verdict: I’ve got no idea what’s going on, but this seems fishy.
That said: That people will believe it is Trump’s fault. His behavior toward Putin has been so sycophantic and bizarre that even an extraordinarily weird story like this sounds plausible. If Obama’s refusal to use the phrase “Islamic terrorism” convinced a significant number of Americans that he was a Muslim, the same phenomenon will be at work here — even if these memos prove to be a complete fabrication and fantasy.
It’s entirely plausible to imagine that Trump enjoyed the company of ladies of poor repute when he was in Russia. No one can say, with a straight face, “That’s ridiculous. Donald Trump is an upright and responsible married man and a faithful husband. He would never consort with Slavic hookers.” Exactly no one would be surprised if he had, and exactly no one would be surprised that the Russians taped the encounter.
Trump’s eagerness to adopt the Kremlin’s line in matters of foreign policy and his general mien of moral incontinence will be enough to convince a significant number of Americans that all of these allegations are true.
It won’t be enough for Trump to Tweet indignantly and wait for the media to bore with the story. It won’t. We’ll hear of nothing but this for years to come, I reckon.
What do you make of it?
UPDATE: The Trump Dossier: Dynamite or Disinformation? makes the skeptical case better than I did, and concludes:
In the absence of any evidence, this will do nothing but widen the dangerous divide within American society.
And here’s the irony: that’s exactly what the Kremlin wants. Whether damning proof of complicity with an antagonistic foreign power, or a piece of raw anti-Trump disinformation, at present this cache of documents is probably more effective than any number of hours of programming by Russia’s RT television station – which emerged as the star of the recent and deeply flawed open source on the hacking case – in turning America against itself.
Published in General
How can we know without their birth certificates?
That does not make it right to happen. Period. The comments in questions across the board are of the “it is well deserved”. No it is not, anymore than a blow hard like Hulk Hogan deserved to have his sex tape made public.
My comments were consistent with Herberts’ not Bryan’s caricature of them, FWIW. I think it’s perfectly possible to know that slander is always wrong, while at the exact same time seeing the irony of someone who’s so frequently employed it finding himself on the receiving end of it.
That is *not* how this has been portrayed. I have seen, explicitly stated, that because this is Trump, more credence should be given to the allegations. That may not have been you, but those comments have been made, here and elsewhere.
No, because it goes to the credibility of the CNN report.
CNN said he was shown the “2 page synopsis” during his intel briefing on Friday. Their whole story on Tuesday was that Trump was briefed via a “2 page synopsis” about information that Russia had to discredit him – oh and CNN isn’t going to show the 35 page unverified memo.
According to NBC – the 2 page synopsis was to be used in the event the question came up as to the difference between ‘vetted’ intelligence and unverified disinformation and was to be used as an example of the latter. The source quoted by NBC said the example was never used.
In short form: The hook used by CNN to give greater publicity to an unverified memo was itself untrue.
It was, in the parlance of our times, “Fake News”.
Exactly, one member said earlier on this thread that he warned that stories like this would come up if Trump became president. I question whether that is so because of Trump’s personality or his policies. Continued…
Republicans get extra scrutiny because they disagree with the press politically. Trump gets extra scrutiny because not only does he disagree with the press politically, he also calls the press out on their BS. If you disagree with his politics, that’s fine, but don’t pretend like the point of contention is anything else.
I think the comments you’re referring to are better summed up as “Because this is Trump, more credence will be given to the allegations.” Not “should.” Whether you like it or not, he does have a reputation for being a bit of a sleazeball.
Sure he does. Not for this. I still see the “should” in the comments, even if the word is not said.
I swing by every week or two to see if the NeverTrump campaign has run out of gas yet. This comment shows me that there is sanity breaking out over here. My growing suspicion is that NeverTrumpers, like Wilson and maybe McCain, paid this MI6 rogue to gin up some salacious gossip to bring down Trump. It was so obviously crap that nobody had the nerve to put it out before the election. We are in banana republic territory and the the GOPe does not have clean hands.
“Should” and “ought,” as I recall from my university days, are terms from Philosophy and Ethics. Two subjects that are in lamentably short supply in Washington.
Oh, come on. Doing oppo research on a candidate you don’t like isn’t even close to banana republic territory. That’s how campaigns have worked since the advent of democracy.
Fake news, from the Fake News Network. Let’s see if we can get a meme going: not CNN, FNN.
I wonder if they tried to research Obama in 2008. Given the fact that they did nothing with the Reverend Wright info and the Bill Ayers revelations, I doubt it.
Maybe in 4 years they could have gotten BOs grades from Columbia or Harvard?
This smacks of GOPe #incompetance
No, no, no. That’s a bait and switch. I responded to your claim that others were saying “it was well deserved.” That is different than saying they might be worthy of “credence.” Let me offer a taxonomy:
It’s amazing how not actually knowing anything opens up wide new vistas for theorizing.
I think only people’s biases make this credible. There is nothing that has been publicized about Trump that gets this kinky. He seems a bit more vanilla in his tastes. Maybe a threesome.
I would believe this more of Clinton than Trump.
I am not engaged in “bait and switch” and I resent the accusation. People were not saying this was “ironic” they were saying it is just desserts. You have offered your take, but you have not answered mine. Even Jim Geraghty feels this is exactly the defense offered by Buzzfeed:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443787/worst-excuse-buzzfeed-eh-trump-had-it-coming-him
So, I am not alone in my interpretation. When someone says “This is different because its Trump” in response to questions about taking it seriously, that is not talking about it being “Ironic”.
http://ricochet.com/402551/dr-spook-manchurian-president/comment-page-3/#comment-3661206
Lewis Amsalem – a retired FSO with long experience – says this:
From the Left:
Again, gets to my observation that it matters whether people evaluate these stories on a normal-kinky axis or a fornication-nonfornication axis.
The Duke of Wellington’s timeless response to blackmail comes to mind.
Politico is now reporting that the allegations of Russian involvement that got Paul Manafort bounced from the Trump campaign were engineered by a conspiracy between the Hillary campaign and the Ukrainians.
Also that Ukraine is now scrambling to make nice to Trump.
To quote James Lileks: Nothing seems real, and everything seems plausible. The world is nuts.
More MRE’s are on their way, Ukraine. I hope you like freeze dried borscht.
The sad thing is I suspect the world has always been nuts it is just now in the days of the internet both the truth and lies get out there more.