Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Perverse Or Insightful? Swamp Both Deep and Alligators Connected. John Brennan No Better Than Comey. Israel At 70. Trump's Accomplishments.

Why Hillary destroyed over 30,000 e Mails?


For those who believe in compassion:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGvrmltfMrA
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Is this perverse or insightful. You decide. (See 1 below.)
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The Swamp is not only deep but it is interconnected in ways that are below the surface as well.  (See 2 below.)

And:


https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/04/16/george-soros-judge-demands-all-cohen-records-placed-in-federal-searchable-database/

 Finally:

 McCabe the new Deepthroat. (See 2a below.)
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What Macron fears applies to America as well. (See 3 below.)
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Russia is currently engaged in cyber attacks on America, Great Britain and France as Putin's payback for the Syrian Missile Attack.

John Brennan like Comey was a disaster. (See 4 below.)
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Israel soon turns 70 and its population has also increased substantially.

 http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/As-Israel-celebrates-70th-birthday-population-grows-to-8842-million-550054
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Hating Trump does not erase his accomplishments but it sure satisfies Democrat's desire/perverse need to perpetuate their fraudulent argument Trump is an illegitimate president, unfit to serve and too unstable because he is unlike any president in recent history.

The list below is partial and not totally up to date. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)Donald Trump, Tragic Hero
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON


His very flaws may be his strengths
The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy.

Tragic heroes, as they have been portrayed from Sophocles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes) to the modern western film, are not intrinsically noble. Much less are they likeable. Certainly, they can often be obnoxious and petty, if not dangerous, especially to those around them. These mercurial sorts never end well — and on occasion neither do those in their vicinity. Oedipus was rudely narcissistic, Hombre’s John Russell (Paul Newman) arrogant and off-putting.

Tragic heroes are loners, both by preference and because of society’s understandable unease with them. Ajax’s soliloquies about a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments are Trumpian to the core — something akin to the sensational rumors that at night Trump is holed up alone, petulant, brooding, eating fast food, and watching Fox News shows.
Outlaw leader Pike Bishop (William Holden), in director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, is a killer whose final gory sacrifice results in the slaughter of the toxic General Mapache and his corrupt local Federales. A foreboding Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), of John Ford’s classic 1956 film The Searchers, alone can track down his kidnapped niece. But his methods and his recent past as a Confederate renegade make him suspect and largely unfit for a civilizing frontier after the expiration of his transitory usefulness. These characters are not the sorts that we would associate with Bob Dole, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney.

The tragic hero’s change of fortune — often from good to bad, as Aristotle reminds us — is due to an innate flaw (hamartia), or at least in some cases an intrinsic and usually uncivilized trait that can be of service to the community, albeit usually expressed fully only at the expense of the hero’s own fortune. The problem for civilization is that the creation of those skill sets often brings with it past baggage of lawlessness and comfortability with violence. Trump’s cunning and mercurialness, honed in Manhattan real estate, global salesmanship, reality TV, and wheeler-dealer investments, may have earned him ostracism from polite Washington society. But these talents also may for a time be suited for dealing with many of the outlaws of the global frontier.

At rare times, a General George S. Patton (“Give me an army of West Point graduates and I’ll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I’ll win a war”) could be harnessed to serve the country in extremis. General Curtis LeMay did what others could not — and would not: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. . . . Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” Later, the public exposure given to the mentalities and behaviors of such controversial figures would only ensure that they would likely be estranged from or even caricatured by their peers — once, of course, they were no longer needed by those whom they had benefited. When one is willing to burn down with napalm 75 percent of the industrial core of an often-genocidal wartime Japan, and thereby help bring a vicious war to an end, then one looks for sorts like Curtis LeMay and his B-29s. In the later calm of peace, one is often shocked that one ever had. A sober and judicious General Omar Bradley grows on us in peace even if he was hardly Patton in war.

So what makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their full knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism. Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and Manichean views of the human experience. Clint Eastwood’s Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan cannot serve as the official face of the San Francisco police department. But Dirty Harry alone has the skills and ruthlessness to ensure that the mass murderer Scorpio will never harm the innocent again. So, in the finale, he taunts and then shoots the psychopathic Scorpio, ending both their careers, and walks off — after throwing his inspector’s badge into the water. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) of High Noon did about the same thing, but only after gunning down (with the help of his wife) four killers whom the law-abiding but temporizing elders of Hadleyville proved utterly incapable of stopping.

The out-of-place Ajax in Sophocles’ tragedy of the same name cannot function apart from the battlefield. Unlike Odysseus, he lacks the tact and fluidity to succeed in a new world of nuanced civic rules. So he would rather “live nobly, or nobly die” — “nobly” meaning according to an obsolete black-and-white code that is no longer compatible with the ascendant polis.

In other words, tragic heroes are often simply too volatile to continue in polite society. In George Stevens’s classic 1953 western Shane, even the reforming and soft-spoken gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd) understands his own dilemma all too well: He alone possesses the violent skills necessary to free the homesteaders from the insidious threats of hired guns and murderous cattle barons. (And how he got those skills worries those he plans to help.) Yet by the time of his final resort to lethal violence, Shane has sacrificed all prior chances of reform and claims on reentering the civilized world of the stable “sodbuster” community. As Shane tells young Joey after gunning down the three villains of the film and thereby saving the small farming community: “Can’t break the mold. I tried it, and it didn’t work for me. . . . Joey, there’s no living with . . . a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.”

Trump could not cease tweeting, not cease his rallies, not cease his feuding, and not cease his nonstop motion and unbridled speech if he wished to. It is his brand, and such overbearing made Trump, for good or evil, what he is — and will likely eventually banish him from establishment Washington, whether after or during his elected term. His raucousness can be managed, perhaps mitigated for a time — thus the effective tenure of his sober cabinet choices and his chief of staff, the ex–Marine general, no-nonsense John Kelly — but not eliminated. His blunt views cannot really thrive, and indeed can scarcely survive, in the nuance, complexity, and ambiguity of Washington.

Trump is not a mannered Mitt Romney, who would never have left the Paris climate agreement. He is not a veteran who knew the whiz of real bullets and remains a Washington icon, such as John McCain, who would never have moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush certainly would never have waded into no-win controversies such as the take-a-knee NFL debacle and unvetted immigration from suspect countries in the Middle East and Africa, or called to account sanctuary cities that thwarted federal law. Our modern Agamemnon, Speaker Paul Ryan, is too circumspect to get caught up with Trump’s wall or a mini-trade war with China.

Trump does not seem to care whether he is acting “presidential.” The word — as he admits — is foreign to him. He does not worry whether his furious tweets, his revolving-door firing and hiring, and his rally counterpunches reveal a lack of stature or are becoming an embarrassing window into his own insecurities and apprehensions as a Beltway media world closes in upon him in the manner that, as the trapped western hero felt, the shrinking landscape was increasingly without options in the new 20th century.

The real moral question is not whether the gunslinger Trump could or should become civilized (again, defined in our context as becoming normalized as “presidential”) but whether he could be of service at the opportune time and right place for his country, crude as he is. After all, despite their decency, in extremis did the frontier farmers have a solution without Shane, or the Mexican peasants a realistic alternative to the Magnificent Seven, or the town elders a viable plan without Will Kane?

Perhaps we could not withstand the fire and smoke of a series of Trump presidencies, but given the direction of the country over the last 16 years, half the population, the proverbial townspeople of the western, wanted some outsider, even with a dubious past, to ride in and do things that most normal politicians not only would not but could not do — before exiting stage left or riding off into the sunset, to the relief of most and the regrets of a few.

The best and the brightest résumés of the Bush and Obama administrations had doubled the national debt — twice. Three prior presidents had helped to empower North Korea, now with nuclear-tipped missiles pointing at the West Coast. Supposedly refined and sophisticated diplomats of the last quarter century, who would never utter the name “Rocket Man” or stoop to call Kim Jong-un “short and fat,” nonetheless had gone through the “agreed framework,” “six-party talks,” and “strategic patience,” in which three administrations gave Pyongyang quite massive aid to behave and either not to proliferate or at least to denuclearize. And it was all a failure, and a deadly one at that.

For all of Obama’s sophisticated discourse about “spread the wealth around” and “You didn’t build that,” quantitative easing, zero interest rates, massive new regulations, the stimulus, and shovel-ready, government-inspired jobs, he could not achieve 3 percent annualized economic growth. Half the country, the more desperate half, believed that the remedy for a government in which the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, and the NSA were weaponized, often in partisan fashion and without worry about the civil liberties of American citizens, was not more temporizing technicians but a pariah who cleaned house and moved on. Certainly Obama was not willing to have a showdown with the Chinese over their widely acknowledged cheating and coerced expropriation of U.S. technology, with the NATO allies over their chronic welching on prior defense commitments, with the North Koreans after they achieved the capability of hitting U.S. West Coast cities, or with the European Union over its mostly empty climate-change accords.
Moving on, sometimes fatally so, is the tragic hero’s operative exit. Antigone certainly makes her point about the absurdity of small men’s sexism and moral emptiness in such an uncompromising way that her own doom is assured. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, unheroically kills the thuggish Liberty Valance, births the career of Ranse Stoddard and his marriage to Doniphon’s girlfriend, and thereby ensures civilization is Shinbone’s frontier future. His service done, he burns down his house and degenerates from feared rancher to alcoholic outcast.

The remnants of The Magnificent Seven would no longer be magnificent had they stayed on in the village, settled down to age, and endlessly rehashed the morality and utility of slaughtering the outlaw Calvera and his banditos. As Chris rides out, he sums up to Vin their dilemma: “The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” He knows that few appreciate that the tragic heroes in their midst are either tragic or heroic — until they are safely gone and what they have done in time can be attributed to someone else. Worse, he knows that the tragic hero’s existence is solitary and without the nourishing networks and affirmation of the peasant’s agrarian life.

John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion. If he is lucky, Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate.

By his very excesses Trump has already lost, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.
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2) 
ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW WE CONTINUE AS THE AMERICAN PUBLIC TO BE MANIPULATED.  SAD STUFF WHAT'S GOING ON FOR WAY TOO LONG.  TRUMP DIDN'T NEED THE JOB BUT IS TRYING HIS BEST TO CLEAN UP THIS SWAMP CALLED WASHINGTON D.C.

  
“It is not WHAT you know,
but WHO you know.”
"Meet Lisa H Barsoomian (The Wife of Who?)
In General Articles
Let’s learn a little about Mrs. Lisa H. Barsoomian background.
Lisa H Barsoomian a US Attorney that graduated from Georgetown Law, she’s a protege of James Comey and Robert Muller
Barsoomian with her boss R Craig Lawrence represented Bill Clinton in 1998
Lawrence also represented
Robert Muller three times
James Comey five times
Barack Obama 45 times
Kathleen Sebelius 56 times
Bill Clinton 40 times and
Hillary Clinton 17 times
between 1998 and 2017
Barsoomian herself represented the FBI at least five times
You may be saying to yourself, okay who cares,
who cares about the work history of this Barsoomian woman?
Apparently, someone does
BECAUSE:  Someone out there cares so much that they’ve “purged” all Barsoomian court documents for her Clinton representation in Hamburg vs. Clinton in 1998 and its appeal in 1999 from the DC District and Appeals court dockets (?)
Someone out there cares so much that the internet has been “purged” of all information pertaining to Barsoomian.
Historically this indicates that the individual is a protected CIA operative.
Additionally, Lisa Barsoomian has specialized in opposing Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the intelligence community
And although Barsoomian has been involved in hundreds of cases representing the DC Office of the US Attorney her email address is Lisa Barsoomian at NIH gov.
The NIH stands for National Institutes of Health.
This is a tactic routinely used by the CIA to protect an operative by using another government organization to shield their activities.
It’s a cover, so big deal right, I mean what does one more attorney with ties to the US intelligence community really matter
It deals with Trump and his
recent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports,
the border wall,
DACA,
everything coming out of California,
the Uniparty unrelenting opposition to President Trump,
the Clapper leaks,
the Comey leaks,
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusal and subsequent 14-month nap with occasional forays into the marijuana legalization mix.......and last, but not least, Muller’s never-ending investigation into collusion between the Trump team and the Russians
Why does Barsoomian, CIA operative, merit any mention?
BECAUSE
She is Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s WIFE
That’s why.
Barsoomian’s loyalties are tainted.
How could this not have influenced Rosenstein?
This clearly violates the appearance of impropriety attorney’s rules?
Both owe their careers as US attorneys to Muller, Obama, Bush, and the Clintons.
impartiality? that’s impossible.
Rod Rosenstein has no business involving himself in the Hillary Clinton-DNC funded Steel dossier, and the ongoing Russia investigation.
Much less the selection of his mentor and his wife’s mentor Robert Muller as Special Counsel.
The rules of ethics “required his recusal."
But there was no such recusal. 
THE SWAMP IS DIRTY, DARK, AND DEEP.
https://americans4innovation.b logspot.com/2017/05/proof-robe rt-mueller-cannot-be.html#rose nstein-conflict
https://www.fbcoverup.com/docs /library/2017-05-22-Lisa-Barso omian-represented-William-J- Clinton-98-cv-01459-TPJ-06-11- 1998-PACER-accessed-May-22- 2017.pdf
https://www.fbcoverup.com/docs /library/2017-05-20-R-Craig- Lawrence-DC-Appeals-Court- Docket-PACER-accessed-May-20- 2017.pdf 
2a)

McCabe, the New ‘Deep Throat’

Another top bureau official who leaked, lied and blamed other FBI agents.


 Both Mr. McCabe and Felt were FBI deputy directors. Both leaked information about an FBI investigation that was under way. Both did so for the sake of their own careers, lied about it to their bosses, and even let other FBI agents take the blame.
Start with Felt, who died in 2008. Though sometimes cast as the noble truth-teller of Watergate—in “All the President’s Men” he was memorably played by a chain-smoking Hal Holbrook—reality is less flattering. Felt saw himself as the rightful heir to J. Edgar Hoover. When he was passed over for L. Patrick Gray III, Felt flattered Gray to his face while sabotaging the new FBI director behind his back.

He also let others take the fall. On a Saturday morning in June 1972, a furious Director Gray summoned 27 agents from the Washington field office to the conference room at FBI headquarters. He then cussed them out over a leak to Time magazine. Paul Magallanes, an FBI agent working the Watergate burglary, said Gray called them all “yellow-bellied sniveling agents” and demanded the guilty party step forward. No one did, of course, and Gray vowed to find out who the leaker was and fire him.

Felt never corrected the record on behalf of his falsely accused brother agents. To the contrary, Deep Throat would himself assume control over the investigation into who was leaking—and use that position to admonish other agents about leaks for which he himself was the culprit.

Mr. McCabe is Felt’s heir. Like Felt, he had a highly personal reason for authorizing a leak to The Wall Street Journal and then denying it. In October 2016, the Journal had raised questions about Mr. McCabe’s impartiality on the Hillary Clinton email investigation by reporting that his wife, Jill, had accepted donations from political action committees associated with Terry McAuliffe —a Clinton friend and former member of the Clinton Foundation board. Now the Journal was following up, and asking about an alleged order from Mr. McCabe telling FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation to “stand down.”
To counter the narrative that he might be compromised, Mr. McCabe authorized FBI counsel Lisa Page and a public-affairs officer to tell the Journal about a phone call with a high-ranking Justice official. In this account, Mr. McCabe is the fearless G-man pushing back against Justice complaints that the bureau was still investigating Mrs. Clinton’s family foundation during the election.

In the process the leak made public something Mr. Comey had studiously kept quiet: an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. In a report released Friday, the Justice Department’s inspector general notes that while this disclosure “may have served McCabe’s personal interests,” it did so “at the expense of undermining public confidence in the Department as a whole.”

Mr. McCabe’s disservice to the bureau didn’t stop there. Just as Felt had covered his tracks by shifting blame, Mr. McCabe implicated innocent agents. After the second Journal story appeared, he called the heads of the New York and Washington field offices to berate them for what appears to be his own leak. The head of the Washington office says he was told “to get his house in order.”

Then, in a final Feltian flourish, Mr. McCabe lied to his director.

The IG report says that Messrs. Comey and McCabe give “starkly different accounts” of their conversation about the article containing the leak. Mr. McCabe insists he told Mr. Comey he’d authorized it—and that Mr. Comey had answered it was a “good” idea. Mr. Comey is categorical that Mr. McCabe “definitely did not tell me that he authorized” the leak.
Just two men with different memories? The inspector general thinks not. The circumstantial evidence, the report notes, all runs against Mr. McCabe. Not a single senior FBI official backs Mr. McCabe’s claim that within the bureau people generally knew he’d authorized the leak. It isn’t the only McCabe statement to conflict with accounts given by other agents: At one point, he claimed FBI agents who had interviewed him under oath had wrongly reported he’d denied authorizing the leak.

Back in the early 1970s, Mark Felt leaked information about an investigation in hopes it would eventually lead to his becoming director. In a 1999 interview with Slate’s Timothy Noah, six years before his Watergate role was revealed, Felt rightly declared that if he had been Deep Throat, it would have been “terrible” and “contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information.”

Today Mr. McCabe stands accused of an unauthorized leak that poisoned the FBI’s relationship with Justice and of a “lack of candor” under oath. President Trump is having a Twitter field day calling Mr. McCabe a liar. But the irony of the McCabe defense is that it hinges on having us believe it was not him but Mr. Comey and other FBI agents who gave the false accounts of his actions.
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3) Macron warns of European 'civil war' over growing East-West divide

The European Union risks being torn apart by a “civil war” between its liberal and authoritarian democracies, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France has warned.
Speaking in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Mr Macron said that the EU must “build a new European sovereignty” and embark on much needed reforms to save the bloc.

The ardent Europhile was given a standing ovation and numerous compliments by adoring MEPs during the plenary debate on the future of Europe after Brexit.
“We have a context of division and indeed doubt within Europe,”  Mr Macron said. “There seems to be a sort of European civil war where selfish interests sometimes appear more important than what unites Europe.”

In a thinly veiled swipe at Hungary and Poland, Mr Macron said Europe was in the grips of “a fascination with the illiberal”.

Brussels is at loggerheads with Warsaw over Poland’s controversial judicial reforms and there are also concerns about the rule of law in Hungary after strongman Vikto Orban’s election campaign, which was won by stoking fears over immigration.




Members of the European Parliament hold placards saying "Stop the War in Syria" before a debate on the Future of Europe  Credit: VINCENT KESSLER/REUTERS

“We are seeing authoritiarinism all around us,” Mr Macron said, “ The response is not authoritarian democracy but the authority of democracy.”

“In these difficult times, European democracy is our best chance,” he added before warning against the “deadly tendency” of  national selfishishness and egotism that could lead the continent “to the abyss”.

Evoking the Second Word War, Mr Macron said he belonged to a generation that had never experienced war and that he “suffered the luxury of forgetting what happened to our ancestors”.

“I don’t want to be part of a generation of sleepwalkers. A generation that has forgotten its past,” he declared as the plenary chamber broke into applause.

“I will not give in to any kind of fixation on authoritarianism,” said Mr Macron, “I want to belong to a generation that will defend European sovereignty because we fought to attain it.

“European sovereignty is the system I believe in,” Mr Macron said. “Defending Europe is not defending something abstract or the dilution of our own sovereignty.”
In quotes | Macron on Brexit

Mr Macron, under pressure domestically as he tries to force through unpopular labour reforms, even took a swipe Donald Trump, the US president and at his ally in the strikes on Syria.

“We share so much with country but this country has rejected multilateralism, free trade and climate change,” he said before exhorting MEPs to “listen to the anger of the people of Europe” who felt abandoned by the bloc.

Florian Philippot, a French MEP in Nigel Farage’s Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, attacked Mr Macron, branding him the EU’s “top pupil” repeating all “the canons of the European catechism”.

Mr Philippot, a former member of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, praised Britain “for breaking free of its chains” and to hoots and catcalls called for a Frexit referendum that would allow France to go out into the world.

Mr Macron gave him short shrift and said the French people had spoken when they elected him last year.

“You lost because the French people decided otherwise,” Mr Macron told the MEP.
The French president called for a European fund for communities taking in migrants and insisted that Brexit must not derail EU spending suggesting a tax could be levied to raise money for the EU Budget.  He also demanded that eurozone banking integration picked up pace and other reforms.




Mr Macron's speech will be seen as a direct response to growing authoritarianism in countries like Hungary Credit: Bernadett Szabo/REUTERS

Mr Macron, who praised Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, for his handling of the talks was greeted with unabashed admiration by Europhiles in Strasbourg. Outside the parliament a demonstration was held against the French president.

“The true France is back,” declared Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission.

"This house has waited a long time for a French president like you", Manfred Weber, the German MEP who leads the largest party in the European Parliament, told Mr Macron.

But hard left MEPs accused Mr Macron of breaking international law by launching missile strikes on Syria.

On Brexit, Mr Macron said he was in favour of the "most integrated relations, the closest relations" with the UK.

"There is a solution that we are very familiar with and that is EU membership," he told MEPs. 

"I am very fond of our friendship with the UK but there is no cherry-picking in the single market," he added after praising Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator. 
" I believe in Europe so therefore I believe in what we have done," he said referring to the EU's insistence that Britain's Brexit red lines would limit the UK-EU relationship to a trade deal rather than full access to the single market. 

"We have to be consistent," he said in Strasbourg as Syed Kamall, the most senior Tory MEP shook his head. "That is what democracy is about."
Front Bench promotion - end of article
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4) Ex-CIA Chief Says Obama Rejected Cyber Action Against Russia for Election Meddling

Obama instead issued veiled warning to Moscow


 Despite an unprecedented Russian intelligence operation to influence the 2016 presidential election, former President Barack Obama rejected a plan to conduct retaliatory cyber action against Moscow during the campaign, according to former CIA Director John Brennan.
Brennan disclosed Saturday that Obama opposed a plan to carry out "a cyber event" against the Russians because the former president feared the action would lead to more aggressive interference by Moscow.

"There was consideration about rattling their cages with some type of cyber event," Brennan said during remarks to a journalism conference at the University of California Berkeley.
But based on Obama's fears, the planned cyber action was shelved in favor issuing vague warnings to Russian officials. Brennan did not elaborate on the cyber retaliation plan.
"President Obama was the ultimate decision-maker on that," Brennan said of the lack of response.

The former CIA director defended the Obama administration's handling of what is widely viewed as a significant counterintelligence failure during the presidential election.
After the election, Obama ordered the expulsion of 35 Russian intelligence officers.
Both the FBI and CIA are charged with the conducting counterintelligence–detecting and thwarting hostile intelligence operations. Both agencies failed to halt the Russians in 2016 either in the United States or abroad.

U.S. officials have said the targeting of U.S. and foreign elections by Russia is continuing.
President Trump in February criticized his predecessor in a Tweet for failing to act. "Why didn't Obama do something about the meddling? Why aren't Dem crimes under investigation? Ask Jeff Sessions!" he tweeted.

The disclosure that Obama scrapped a cyber plan to retaliate against Moscow for election interference comes as a former senior counterintelligence official, Michelle Van Cleave, revealed in congressional testimony last week that the Obama administration weakened American counterintelligence programs by downgrading a top counterspy office.
Brennan said he had "great confidence" the Russian influence operation was authorized and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer. The Russian intelligence services also "know what the mission is, know what their capabilities are, and will apply them to issues that are of interest to Russian national security," he said.
Brennan called the meddling "unprecedented in terms of its scope and intensity, and made full use of the digital domain."

The first indications of Russian interference were spotted in late 2015 and early 2016 and the operation was mentioned in press reports in the spring of 2016. By the summer of 2016 the operations were confirmed, he said.

Obama also made clear to the CIA that he did not want the agency doing anything "in reality or in perception" that would have advanced the Russian disinformation and propaganda campaign, Brennan said.

"We were really trying to strike the right balance between doing everything we could to prevent and thwart as well as to uncover and understand what the Russians were doing without doing anything that would almost advance their interests in trying to disrupt our election," he said.

Obama also was afraid any U.S. action against the Russians might be perceived as an outgoing Democratic president working to influence the election outcome.

"So if we did more things and stood at the hilltops and cried out, ‘the Russians, the Russians are trying to help Trump get elected,' and if President Obama who is the titular head of the Democratic Party were to do that, I think that there would have been a lot of people would believe, I think with some justification, that the President of the United States was trying to influence the outcome of a presidential election," Brennan said.

Brennan also said the Obama administration opposed aggressive action because of the president's belief that any effort to punish the Russian might produce stepped up activities.
Russian hackers had been detected navigating inside state election voter registration roll computers and other election-related networks.

"They had things that they could have done that they didn't do," Brennan said of the Russians.

Intelligence agencies concluded in a report issued in early 2017 that Russian civilian and military intelligence agencies conducted an aggressive operation to sow social discord during the 2016 election by opposing Hillary Clinton while seeking to boost Donald Trump's campaign.

The Russian operation included the use of advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, and cyber attacks involving the cyber theft of emails and postings online using covert internet personas.

In February, 13 Russians were indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for running a St. Petersburg, Russia-based internet troll farm that carried out influence operations during the elections.

So far, no action has been taken against the Russian hackers engaged in email thefts.
Kenneth deGraffenreid, former deputy national counterintelligence executive, said Obama's inaction was a major counterintelligence failure.

"If Brennan’s claims are true, the Obama administration’s inaction in the face of this Russian cyber aggression represents a serious counterintelligence failure that has had terrible consequences," deGraffenreid said.

"Good counterintelligence requires an active element beyond collecting and analyzing the secret information that has been uncovered–namely countering this serious foreign intelligence threat in an effective way. The U.S. has the sophisticated tools to do this."
"There simply is no excuse for not doing so," he added. "Our national security depends on American leaders taking the action required."

Despite signs the operation had been underway since 2015, Brennan said he was the first U.S. official to protest the matter during an Aug. 4, 2016, telephone to Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia's FSB security service.

"I told him rather directly that if the Russians were to go down this road, they would pay a significant price," Brennan said. "I told him that all Americans would be outraged by a Russian effort to try and interfere in our election."

A month later at the G-20 summit in China, Obama confronted Putin about the election interference, according to Brennan.

Weeks later, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued an official statement accusing the Russian government of interfering with the election campaign.

Brennan said he believes the softline Obama policy dissuaded Moscow from intensifying the campaign and that he had no regrets.

Additionally, the former CIA chief said he has spoken to Obama who he asserted is "very comfortable with what we did and didn't do."

"I would argue that I think by pushing them back a bit and confronting them with it, both privately as well as publicly, I think we did dissuade them from even going further," he said.
Brennan also said the CIA was told by Obama not to take any action on the Russian intelligence operation over concerns any action would appear the administration was trying to support the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Since leaving office, Brennan has been a Trump critic, taking to Twitter to call the president a "charlatan," "demagogue," and "snake oil salesman."

Brennan said that criticism has cost him financially as "a number of opportunities were rescinded."

Russian cyber intelligence operations are sophisticated and difficult to track, he said.
"And so I fully anticipate that the Russians and others are going to take advantages that are there," Brennan said. "They are going to try to hide their footprints better. They're going to try to prevent the U.S. from understanding what may be happening there. But let's not make a mistake, that environment is ripe for mal actors and they are going to continue to cause us problems."

On the controversial dossier produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, Brennan said the dossier may have been part of a Russian cover operation.
"Well certainly it could be," he said. "I don't know the provenance of the information. As I said I've seen the dossier. It is done by a former accomplished member of the British intelligence service, MI-6. It is sourced to unnamed sources and subsources that alleged these types of activities. So I don't know whether the information in it–some, all or none–is valid or not."

Brennan said he does not believe Steele was manipulated by the Russians for intelligence purposes.

"I do not believe he is acting on behalf of them," he said. "Might he have been unwittingly used? Maybe. So I don't know."

The Steele dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign through the research group Fusion GPS.

The Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to conduct research on Republican candidates but had no role in the dossier.

On his political views, Brennan said he is not a member of any political party and described himself as "an avowed nonpartisan."

In 2016, Brennan disclosed that in 1976 he voted for the Moscow-backed Communist Party USA candidate for president, Gus Hall, during the height of the Cold War.
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5)The left wants you to think Trump is ineffective and failing…I beg to differ (long, but worth the read since you will seldom hear this reported by the mass media.
He promised America First (14 months later)

 100% vote by UN Security Council to sanction North Korea
 41% decline in illegal southern border crossings
 7,482 illegal immigrant arrests, 70% convicted of additional crimes, 52,169 expelled
 Adopted a resolute policy on Afghanistan
 Advocated for practical tertiary education
 Appointed an Education Secretary who is correcting abuses of Title IX
 Appointed an Interior Secretary to improve forest mgmt. and expand users of public lands
 Approves the Keystone pipeline
 Called for International support of Iranian protesters
 Cancelled school lunch program that failed to force children to eat unpopular foods
 Constructed test models of the border fence
 Convinced Japan and South Korea to increase defense spending
 Convinced NATO members to honor min financial commitments
 Decertified Iranian nuclear treaty and sent it to Senate as constitutionally required
 Designated North Korea as a state-sponsor of terrorism
 Eliminated prohibition on interstate health insurance sales
 Ended abuses of the student loan forgiveness program


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