[News] Trump, Russia, and the 2016 Election

All news related to Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia and to the Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. New details should be cited to reputable sources.

Hmm. Who is WhoWhatWhy?

NYT confirms story Nunes' info came from White House.
WH drafts letter to HIC asking them to investigate leaks from MSNBC interview almost a month ago.

Yeah, this is all completely normal.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Hmm. Who is WhoWhatWhy?

Bleeding heart liberal investigative journalism thingie. Court posted that link on twitter.

Nunes' bad month continues. Meanwhile Spicer is just having a bad year:

Spicer on 3-23:

Q Thanks, Sean. Chairman Nunes today refused to definitively rule out that he received the information he announced yesterday on surveillance, that he got that from the White House. So will you rule out that the White House or anyone in the Trump administration gave Chairman Nunes that information?

MR. SPICER: I don’t know what he actually briefed the President on, but I don’t know why he would come up to brief the President on something that we gave him.

Q Well, that's why it was confusing to many of us, so I was wondering --

MR. SPICER: I don’t know that that makes sense. I did not sit in on that briefing. I'm not -- it just doesn’t -- so I don’t know why he would brief the Speaker and then come down here to brief us on something that we would have briefed him on. It doesn’t really seem to make a ton of sense. So I'm not aware of it, but it doesn’t really pass the smell test.

NYTimes, today: 2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports

WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials played a role in providing Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed that President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.

The revelation that White House officials assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports — which Mr. Nunes then discussed with President Trump — is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.

USA Today: Report: Two White House officials gave surveillance information to Nunes

Neither the White House nor the intelligence committee would confirm the report, but White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the White House has discovered additional information relevant to the congressional investigations and had invited members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to the White House review it.

But Spicer was careful not to address the Times story directly. "In order to comment on that story would be to validate things that I'm not at liberty to do," Spicer said.

"The real crime here is someone telling you I was committing a crime, not the actual crime I committed!" And a good chunk of our citizenry goes "Yeah! You tell 'em!" I tell ya, I can't wait for the Initiative to get those Arks up and running so I can be put into cryo for 600 years and go to Andromeda. I think I'm done with this place.

Putting the source of the leaks aside for a moment, would you find it potentially problematic if even incidental communications involving the other side's campaign ended up being shared between White House officials during the campaign?

Kehama wrote:

"The real crime here is someone telling you I was committing a crime, not the actual crime I committed!" And a good chunk of our citizenry goes "Yeah! You tell 'em!" I tell ya, I can't wait for the Initiative to get those Arks up and running so I can be put into cryo for 600 years and go to Andromeda. I think I'm done with this place.

It makes me think, depressingly, of "A Canticle for Leibowitz". Where mankind follows into a new dark ages.

DS, sorry about misreading on the last page. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, if they got into the voter rolls, and passed that to the campaign, that would be many shades of bad.

NormanTheIntern wrote:

Putting the source of the leaks aside for a moment, would you find it potentially problematic if even incidental communications involving the other side's campaign ended up being shared between White House officials during the campaign?

Setting aside the premise of the outrage, in this case no. People with the proper security clearance shared information with one another and didn't leak it. Are they truly the other side in that case?

Essentially you're asking if it's potentially problematic people talked to one another. I'm going to be really partisan and say I'm ok with it.

More than ok with it. It would be nice if people with the proper clearance for information spoke with one another. For example, perhaps the chair of the House Intelligence Committee could share information with his committee before briefing the people he's supposed to be investigating with information he acquired from those same people? Just a thought.

NormanTheIntern wrote:

Putting the source of the leaks aside for a moment, would you find it potentially problematic if even incidental communications involving the other side's campaign ended up being shared between White House officials during the campaign?

Sure. That would be a problem. Is there a source for that outside of Nunes?

Because it sure looks more like those names were unmasked for a reason, and when Trump's team asked why, the FBI, or whoever, played it off as incidental because they weren't ready to tell them they were being investigated yet.

And if the White House believed that Trump and Co. were guilty of collusion with the Russians, then I would expect them to do anything within their power to preserve that investigation.

What's funny is that conservatives are doing mental gymnastics to put this on Obama. If what he was doing was nefarious, he would have hid the information, not spread it around.

Is the Trump White House Spying on the FBI?

If the Times report is accurate, there seem to be two significant breaches of the rules governing classified information. I stipulate that I am not an ideal messenger here, given my role in Ed Snowden’s NSA disclosures, and I also stipulate that news organizations are using classified leaks to track the Russia investigation. But journalists are not generally bound by secrecy regulations, and sometimes we cannot do our jobs without publishing classified facts. This case is different. Three named officials—two Trump appointees and arguably his leading defender on the Hill—appear to have engaged in precisely the behavior that the president describes as the true national security threat posed by the Russia debate. Secrecy regulations, including SF312, the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, do not permit Ellis and Cohen-Watnick to distribute sensitive compartmented information through a back channel to Nunes. This is true, and their conduct no less an offense, even though Nunes holds clearances sufficient to receive the information through proper channels. The offense, which in some cases can be prosecuted as a felony, would apply even if the White House officials showed Nunes only “tearsheet” summaries of the surveillance reports. Based on what Nunes has said in public, they appear to have showed him the more sensitive verbatim transcripts. Those are always classified as TS/SI (special intelligence) or TS/COMINT (communications intelligence), which means that they could reveal sources and methods if disclosed. That is the first apparent breach of secrecy rules. The second, of course, is the impromptu Nunes news conference. There is no unclassified way to speak in public about the identity of a target or an “incidentally collected” communicant in a surveillance operation.
This brings me to the second question, which I see as the core disclosure of the Times story (even though the Times does not explicitly mention it). If Nunes saw reports that named Trump or his associates, as he said, the initiative for naming names did not come from the originating intelligence agency. That is not how the process works. The names could only have been unmasked if the customers—who seem in this case to have been Trump’s White House appointees—made that request themselves. If anyone breached the president’s privacy, the perpetrators were working down the hall from him. (Okay, probably in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.) It is of course hypocritical, even deceptive, for Nunes to lay that blame at the feet of intelligence officials, but that is not the central concern either.
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If events took place as just described, then what exactly were Trump’s appointees doing? I am not talking only about the political chore of ginning up (ostensible) support for the president’s baseless claims about illegal surveillance by President Obama. I mean this: why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?

Oh boy.

Oh wow. He must be up against it if he's making the offer rather than the other way around.

On the one hand, I don't believe an immunity plea automatically means that he's guilty. It certainly doesn't mean we know what he did. So I don't want to speculate too much.

On the other hand, as someone once said:

Flynn, during a Meet The Press interview on September 25, 2016 wrote:

When you are given immunity, that means you have probably committed a crime

oilypenguin wrote:

Oh wow. He must be up against it if he's making the offer rather than the other way around.

Yeah. I assumed he was already in protective custody.

To be honest, the real big news will be if he has enough to say to warrant immunity. It was already clear that he is a sh*theel.

Yeah, he's likely to say "yeah, I did it but the President had nothing to do with it."

garion333 wrote:

Yeah, he's likely to say "yeah, I did it but the President had nothing to do with it."

Oo, the Scooter Libby play. Good thinking.

A opinion by a law professor who seems to know what he's talking about:
Flynn’s Public Offer to Testify for Immunity Suggests He May Have Nothing to Say

The fact that Flynn and his lawyer have made his offer publicly suggests that he has nothing good to give the prosecutors (either because he cannot incriminate others or is unwilling to do so). If he had something good, Flynn and his lawyer would approach the prosecutors quietly, go through the proffer process in confidence, and reach a deal. Why? Because prosecutors have an interest in keeping their investigation secret, and Flynn’s lawyer knows that. The last thing Flynn’s lawyer would do if he thought he had the goods would be to go public, because that would potentially compromise the criminal inquiry and would certainly irritate the prosecutors, the very people Flynn’s lawyer would be trying to win over.

I suspect that Flynn’s lawyer is really targeting Congress. He is hoping that one of the Congressional committees will take the bait and grant him immunity in exchange for his testimony. If that happened, it would be extremely difficult to prosecute Flynn after he testified. Remember Oliver North? North testified to Congress under a grant of “use immunity,” and even though Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh took stringent measures to wall off his prosecution staff from any information about North’s immunized testimony, the D.C. Circuit overturned North’s conviction, finding that Walsh could not establish that the witnesses who testified against North had not been tainted by exposure to North’s widely publicized testimony. Flynn’s lawyer appears to be hoping for the same result here: Flynn gets immunity, his testimony in Congress gets aired and reported everywhere, and it becomes virtually impossible for prosecutors to bring a case against him.

More at the link.

Yup, that's my fear. He's willing to testify for immunity to save his own skin from perjury and that's it.

Maybe, like Scooter Libby, he was told he'd be protected but I doubt it. Instead we see someone who knows they're coming for him and is doing all he can to stay out of jail.

That and what the lawyer here is saying. That's some lawyer ass sh*t to pull off. Politics!

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8MC5kyU0AAxuW8.jpg:large)

=/

Tanglebones wrote:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8MC5kyU0AAxuW8.jpg:large)

Source?

It's going around twitter; a summary of the Clinton Watts hearing yesterday:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Source?

Here's Clint Watts' draft testimony and here's the CSPAN video of his testimony (he seems to have re-written his testimony pretty significantly).

Thank you both. Given that disinformation spread by social media is literally the heart of this story, I've become very wary of the source for any news.

Unfortunately I couldn't watch that video. Probably Russian DDOS...

Definitely will check it out later. That's some pretty chilling stuff in the summary. The scary question is: what will the US government learn from this experience? That we need to better guard against soft cyber attacks? Or look how easy it is to mislead large groups of people by seeding trolls on the Internet, how can we use that to manipulate voters?

Embarrassment-in-chief tells NBC to stop covering "fake" Russia story, instead tell people about his made up Obama surveillance claims.

The guy just can't face the fact that he was wrong, he has to double-down again and again.

This is probably the best place to mention Mark Cuban's theory about Trump and Russian involvement, which can be summarized as "Trump as clueless dupe", if you need another antidote to the mastermind-conspirator Twitter threads. (Link to an article with a compilation, because I'm not going to inflict Twitter's new interface for threads on you.)

LuLs.

Rep. Devin Nunes said Thursday he is stepping aside as chairman of the House intelligence committee because he is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly disclosing intelligence without proper authorization.