Putin Makes A Point

Russia's President Vladimir Putin offered to provide a transcript of his Foreign Minister's visit to the White House in order to settle the recent fake news controversy regarding the release of classified intelligence by President Trump.

SOCHI, Russia, May 17 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump had not passed any secrets onto Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in Washington last week and that he could prove it.

Speaking at a news conference alongside Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Putin quipped that Lavrov had not passed what he said were the non-existent secrets onto him either.

Putin said Russia was ready to hand a transcript of Trump's meeting with Lavrov over to U.S. lawmakers if that would help reassure them.

Two U.S. officials said on Monday that Trump had disclosed highly classified information to Lavrov about a planned Islamic State operation, plunging the White House into another controversy just months into Trump's short tenure in office.

Putin later remarked that the two American officials were "full of shitsky" and that, in Mother Russia, "Leakers" could only be a mispronunciation of a California basketball team.

Source

UPDATE

Zero Hedge quotes Putin as saying:

"We are seeing in the US a developing political schizophrenia," Putin said quoted by RT. "There is no other way I can explain the accusations against the acting US president that he gave away some secrets to Lavrov" and added that "it's hard to imagine what else can these people who generate such nonsense and rubbish can dream up next," said Putin.

"What surprises me is that they are shaking up the domestic political situation using anti-Russian slogans. Either they don't understand the damage they're doing to their own country, in which case they are simply stupid, or they understand everything, in which case they are dangerous and corrupt."

"Anyway, this is a US matter, and we don't want and don't plan to interfere," the Russian president said.

Bingo

Spy vs Spy

In my wasted youth I loved Mad Magazine. One of my favorite cartoons were the Spy vs. Spy series. Although the way these two characters plotted against each other is funny in a comic strip, it definitely is not humorous in practice.

It is imperative that our intelligence operatives do not pick sides. They're all supposed to be on our side.

The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect.

What I am talking about is the continuing “Wiretapgate” debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world — a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad — the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order.

The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a “trust gap” that can take years to bridge and resolve.

More here.

Well Played Mr. President. Well Played.

The Conservative Treehouse:

[...] White House Deputy Chief-of-Staff Katie Walsh was fired today immediately following a New York Times report which outed two National Security Council members as the source for Devin Nunes “tip” to review a specific batch of President Obama’s executive intelligence. The transparent sequence of events reveals that Walsh was the source of NYT reporter Maggie Haberman’s article; (Walsh and Haberman are “friends”).

And with the White House Leaker now identified and fired, the White House challenges the congressional intelligence committee leaders, four members of the oversight ‘gang-of-eight,’ to come and review the Obama intelligence report. That review request paints Intel Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff, and Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chair Senator Mark Warner into a corner.

It's Spring. Let the indictments bloom. I wanna smell the indictments.
Gateway Pundit has this to say:

“The president and his allies have been deliberately feeding her fake information in order to find her network,” says a source close to the president’s family. “It’s been going well.”

Walsh was a #NeverTrump Republican during the campaign. Neither Walsh nor her family were supporters during the campaign, says a source from Walsh’s hometown of St. Louis.

It's like digging ticks out of a hound.

Dim Bulbs

The Dems are screaming that Congressman David Nunes could face an ethics investigation for spilling classified intel beans.

... it appears that the chairman may have opened himself up to an ethics investigation by apparently disclosing the existence of a foreign surveillance warrant during a press conference last Tuesday.

Of course it's all a diversion from the real scandal, that Obama's deep state was peeking up Donald Trump's skirts.

According to the Conservative Treehouse, a former Obama administration official, Evelyn Farkas who was Deputy Asst. Secretary of Defense, appeared on MSNBC and admitted to Mika Brzezinski that she possessed first hand knowledge that the Obama administration spied on  Donald Trump’s transition team to gather 'intelligence' for political use.

Once sweet Evelyn opened that can of classified beans, she couldn't stop herself from boasting:

I was urging my former colleagues, and, and frankly speaking the people on the Hill [Democrat politicians], it was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can – get as much intelligence as you can – before President Obama leaves the administration.

Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left; so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy, um, that the Trump folks – if they found out HOW we knew what we knew about their, the Trump staff, dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods; meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.

This is what happens when you put a forty watt bulb into a light fixture that clearly requires 100 watts.

Apparently Ms. Farkas was one of the sources for this New York Times article that revealed more classified intel bean spilling:

“More than a half-dozen current and former officials described various aspects of the effort to preserve and distribute the intelligence, and some said they were speaking to draw attention to the material and ensure proper investigation by Congress. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified information, nearly all of which remains secret.” 

Sure, I seem to make light of intel beans, but this is deadly serious stuff. People go to prison for decades for these kind of offenses. Apparently these Obama administration light weights didn't have the sense to realize the position they were placing themselves in and relied on political protection from any legal/criminal consequences. We'll see about that.

More here.

Possibly The Worst Penetration Of American Intelligence

And it was perfectly preventable. It's not like the dubious associations of these Pakistanis were unknown, but as the major media have for the most part ignored this story, most Americans have no idea they've been kicked square in the cojones.

The media has been attacking Trump for a compromised mission in Yemen where a Special Forces soldier was killed, but there is  good chance that IT personnel working for dozens of Democratic Congressmen did the foul deed.

On February 2, 2017, three Pakistani brothers with top access to the computer systems inside the U.S. House of Representatives containing some of the nation’s most sensitive information were removed from their positions by U.S. Capitol Police.

The three brothers who are the target of a criminal probe, deliberately understated as a “procurement scam” include Imran Awan, Abid Awan and Jamal Moiz Awan, each who were the “shared employees” of at least 31 Democratic Congressional Representatives. But the case itself and potential damage is much, much worse than is being reported, if it’s being reported at all.

No nation can long withstand an assault on vital institutions by its own traitorous citizens. And that's what the democrats are all about.  Story here.

McAfee: The Russians Didn't Do It

According to anti-malware industry expert John McAfee, the DNC was not hacked by the Russians.

The CIA Is An Embarrassment

The CIA has taken the position that the Russian government has interfered in a US Presidential election by hacking into the emails of prominent Democrats and spilling the beans to various sources. They are doing this despite possessing no evidence that this has happened.

Rather, CIA officials cite circumstances that lead them to believe this. One circumstance is that the Republicans were not likewise afflicted by the likes of WikiLeaks, QED, those pesky Rooskies are at it again and wanted Trump to triumph.

Problem is, other highly regarded intelligence sources cite decades of analytical/intelligence experience and think the CIA is full of shit.

[...]We are being misled to believe that there is irrefutable evidence that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and the basis for this conclusion, we now learn, is that some unnamed analysts THINK that Russia is behind it because the only emails released came from the Democrats and excluded the Republicans.

The stupidity of this is stunning. When I was an analyst my bosses did not care what my opinion about anything was. I was to report the intelligence and comment on what we knew.

But it gets worse. The CIA analysts predicated their goofy analysis on a false premise– they “THINK” Russia breached the RNC. Think? There was a time that the bosses at CIA required evidence or sources. Speculation was unacceptable. But this goes beyond speculation. The CIA is ignoring the proven fact that the RNC Chair Reince Preibus and the RNC Deputy Sean Spicer say there was no breach whatsoever. In fact, they said the FBI came into the RNC, examined the computer systems and then confirmed that they had not been hacked nor breached. The failure to consider all facts is the cardinal sin of an intelligence analyst. On this point the CIA is guilty.

It is the considered opinion of one intelligence expert of note that:

This is more than an embarrassment; it is an indictment of how corrupt and inept the CIA has become over the last 20 years. It has become so thoroughly politicized that it is no more reliable then your mediocre Washington think tank. In my view the CIA should be dismantled. We need to start over. This is not an isolated error. The failures of the CIA over the years are significant. But those did not include meddling in a U.S. Presidential election. This is the ultimate irony. The CIA is accusing Russia of interfering in the Presidential election when in fact it is the CIA itself that is now crossing that line.

Story here, more here on how it appears that this was leaked information from an inside source, not hacked remotely by a foreign agent.

And right on the heels of the above comes this - a disgusted democrat gave up the goodies.

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia. 

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September. 

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'