Good day all. As you are no doubt aware, a “Secret dossier” came out saying that President-Elect Trump was involved in some pretty nasty things while visiting Moscow. The file also had a number of other “accusations” against members, current and former, of his team. That file was promptly shown to be a load of horse manure within hours of it becoming public.
Two major news organizations, CNN and Buzzfeed, have been getting hammered over their releasing what has been shown to be false information. President-Elect Trump has been busily firebombing both groups, publicly calling them “Fake News” outlets. Another group he’s very angry with, is the Intelligence Community, primarily the CIA and the NSA. He’s not in a forgiving mood with their actions. Here’s a few details from Fox News:
President-elect Donald Trump moved to bury once and for all the suspect dossier that surfaced earlier this week claiming the Russian government had compromising information on him, declaring Friday the details were concocted by “sleazebag political operatives” – while still not letting the intelligence community off the hook over claims they leaked it.
Trump started his Friday with a characteristic blizzard of tweets, largely focusing on the dossier controversy.
“It now turns out that the phony allegations against me were put together by my political opponents and a failed spy afraid of being sued,” he tweeted.
President-Elect Trump fired off a number of tweets and you can read some of them in the Fox News story. One of them was a full salvo aimed at the person who ginned up this garbage. It turns out he’s a former member of the British intelligence community.
His “failed spy” slam refers to former British spy Christopher David Steele, who reportedly helped compile the dossier. Trump turned fire on the original sources of the material after slamming the media – namely CNN and BuzzFeed, the latter of which published the dossier itself – for reporting on the claims earlier this week.
He didn’t stop there. He’s also ripping mad at the various intelligence services.
But he also has continued to question the intelligence community’s role in the sordid allegations going public, reviving his charge Friday that they “probably” released it.
The Intelligence Community is denying this of course.
This, despite Director of National Intelligence James Clapper speaking with Trump on Wednesday about the matter, to express “profound dismay at the leaks” and claim that he does not believe they came from within the intelligence community.
In a statement, Clapper had said: “I emphasized that this document is not a U.S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC. The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions.”
A few things here. First, James Clapper is about as trustworthy as Benedict Arnold. He’s been caught lying to Congress and honestly, should have been fired for that. Second, notice how he weasel words his remarks. While the Intelligence Community didn’t generate this load of crap, their fingerprints are all over it, which is why CNN and Buzzfeed were dumb enough to run with it.
It’s also been reported that this “report” was shopped around to a number of other Progressive Media outlets, including the New York Times. These reports seem to be from “Intelligence sources”, but the information in the so called “Damning report” was so badly sourced, not to mention totally unverifiable, that other than the Clinton News Network and Buzzfeed, none of the other News organizations would touch it. President-Elect Trump noted this when beating CNN and Buzzfeed over the head with a 2 by 4.
One of the problems with the so called “Intelligence Community” is just how badly they’ve been screwing up. Granted, we rarely hear about their wins, and only hear about their incredible screw ups. However, over the last 8+ years, we have been seeing so many leaks coming from “Anonymous Intelligence Sources”, that it looks like they are putting their agencies ahead of their duties to protect the nation.
Because of these leaks, not to mention that these agencies seem to be spending their time spying on Americans instead of our enemies, it is looking like we need to do a full overhaul of all the intelligence services, starting with that monster in Langley, Virginia, the Central Intelligence Agency.
It may be time to “Decentralize” the CIA. They have come to rely far to much on technology and seem to avoid dealing with actual spying. It might be time to break them up, and possibly bring back the Office of Strategic Services to handle actual field work. (I read something that very few CIA personnel actually go overseas anymore)
A second organization would handle the actual analysis of the information coming in from all sources. This brings us to the National Security Agency. These are the people who monitor every single electronic communication they can scoop up. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’ve learned that the NSA is also scooping up, storing and disseminating that information, (American citizens communications inside the U.S.A.) to the CIA, FBI and others who should not have it.
I’ve always known that the NSA is listening in, however, prior to Snowden, I assumed they had a mechanism in place to filter out and delete anything that could violate the 4th Amendment rights of Americans. Now we all know differently. The NSA is another agency that needs a good hosing down and returning to their roots of eavesdropping on the rest of the world…for a change.
When Donald Trump takes office, and his new people move into the intelligence services, I suspect there’s going to be a lot of very shocked people. I also suspect there’s going to be a lot of dismissals as well. (Not sure about prosecutions though) I’m also hoping that President Trump take a long, hard look at the FISA courts and how they aren’t actually protecting the rights of Americans. We shall see what happens over the course of the next 4 years. It should be interesting at least.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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