I find it hard to write about Donald Trump.
Not because he is a complicated subject. Quite the opposite. It is that everything about him is so clear. He was a low-rent racist, a shameless misogynist, and an unbalanced narcissist. He is an unrelenting liar and a demagog of two-bit white identity. Do not let anyone forget these things, he goes out of his way every day to remind us of them.
In the end, he will surely be left in the dustbin of history, with Pastor Coughlin and General Edwin Walker. (Exactly - you do not remember it either.)
What else can I add?
Unfortunately, another word also describes it: the president. The fact that this unstable egomaniac occupies the White House is the greatest threat to the national security of the United States in modern history.
Which brings me to the only question about Donald Trump that I find very interesting: Is he a traitor?
Did he get the presidential seat through collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin?
One year after Trump took office, it remains unclear whether the president of the United States is a foreign power agent. Just step back and think about it for a while.
The fact that this unstable egomaniac occupies the White House is the greatest threat to US national security in modern history.
His 2016 campaign is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation that can determine whether Trump or those around him work with Moscow to take control of the US government. Americans now have to live with uncertainty not knowing whether the president has the best interests of the United States or those of the Russian Federation.
Most experts in Washington are now retreating with every opinion that the Trump-Russian story is really about betrayal. They all want to say this about something else - what, they are not sure. They are afraid of using serious words. They are in the business of breaking the Trump-Russian narrative into a long series of biting and incremental stories in which the gravity of the whole case is often lost. They seem to think that betrayal is too much of a conversation stopper, which interrupts the flow of cable and Twitter television. God forbid you might anger the right wing! (And left wing, for that matter.)
But if a presidential candidate or his lieutenant secretly works with a foreign government that is an old enemy of the United States to manipulate and then win a presidential election, it is almost a textbook definition of betrayal.
In Article 3, Section 3, the US Constitution states that "betrayal of the United States, will only consist of war in their favor, or in obeying their Enemy, giving them Help and Comfort."
Under the terms of the Constitution, US law - 18 US Code § 2381 - states that "[b] hoever, due to loyalty to the United States, levies war against them or obeys their enemies, gives them help and comfort in the United Nations -Nation. The State or elsewhere "guilty of treason Those who are found guilty of this crime" shall suffer death, or shall be jailed not less than five years and fined with this title but not less than $ 10,000 and shall not be able to hold office under United States of America. "
FBI Director Robert Mueller, right, arrives on Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting on January 31, 2012.
Now look at the mandate given to former FBI Director Robert Mueller when he was appointed special adviser by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, acting as a substitute for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has resigned for his role in the Trump campaign and the controversy surrounding his own meetings with the ambassador Russia to the United States.
On May 17, 2017, Rosenstein issued a letter stating that he appoints a special adviser to "ensure a thorough and thorough investigation of the Russian government's efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election." He added that Mueller's mandate was to investigate "any links and / or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with Donald Trump's campaign, and any things that arise or may appear directly from the inquiry." Rosenstein noted that "[i ] f The Special Adviser believes that it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Adviser is authorized to adjudicate federal crime arising from the investigation of these matters. "
How well does Mueller's mandate fit the legal definition of treason? It boils down to the rhetorical distinction between giving "help and comfort, in the United States or elsewhere" to "enemies" of the United States and any "links and / or coordination" between the Russian government and the aides of the Trump campaign linked to "The Russian government's efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. "
Sounds like me.
As a practical matter, a special adviser is very unlikely to file a treason charge against Trump or his associates. Treachery is vaguely defined in law and very difficult to prove. As far as it is defined - as providing assistance and comfort to the "enemy" of the United States - the question may come to whether Russia is legally considered an "enemy" of America.
Russia may not meet the legal definition of "enemy", but this is clearly the enemy of the United States. It would make perfect sense for the Russian President and the de facto dictator Vladimir Putin to use his security services to carry out covert operations to influence American politics for Moscow's benefit. Such a program would fall well within the acceptable norms of great power behavior. After all, this is a kind of secret intelligence program that America does regularly against other countries - including Russia.
Throughout the Cold War, the CIA and KGB were constantly engaged in such secret intelligence battles. KGB has a nickname for CIA: glavnyy vrag or "main enemy." In 2003, I wrote a book called The Main Enemy with Milt Bearden, a retired CIA officer who had been head of the Soviet CIA / Eastern European Division when the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Union collapsed. The book is about intelligence wars between the CIA and the KGB.
The current cyber-spy war is just the latest version of "The Great Game," a very romantic name for a secret intelligence battle between the Russian and British kingdoms to rule Central Asia in the 19th century. Russia, the United States and other countries are involved in the game of hidden intelligence all the time - whether they are "enemies" or rivals.
In fact, evidence of a link between Trump's bid for the White House and Russia's ambitions to manipulate the 2016 US elections continues to accumulate. Throughout the end of 2016 and early 2017, a series of reports from the US intelligence community and other government agencies underscores and strengthens almost every element of the Russian hacking narrative, including Russian preferences for Trump. The reports were in part due to their findings exposing the agency to criticism from Trump and his supporters and putting them at odds with Trump's public dismissal of Russia's reported attempt to help him be elected, which he called "false news."
In addition, a series of details have emerged through unofficial channels that seem to corroborate this official assessment. An NSA secret document obtained by The Intercept last year claimed that the Russian military intelligence agency GRU played a role in Russian hacking in the 2016 US election. In August, a Russian hacker claimed to hack the Democratic National Committee under the supervision of an official at the Security Service The Russian Federal, or FSB, which is separately accused of spying for the US and the Dutch intelligence service AIVD has reportedly given significant FBI in information about Russian hacking from the Democratic Party.
On February 16, just hours after this column was published, special advisors announced the 13 Russian indictments and three Russian entities to intervene in US elections. Special advisers accused them of intervening to help Trump and ruin Hillary Clinton's campaign. The indictment marks the first time Mueller filed indictments against Russians in his ongoing investigation.
Given all this, it seems increasingly possible that Russia has withdrawn its most consistent covert action operation since Germany put Lenin on the train back to Petrograd in 1917.
Former KGB headquarters in Moscow, photographed in October 2011.
HERE IS AN EMPATHS important to follow in the Trump-Russian story. First, we must determine whether there is credible evidence for the underlying premise that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win. Secondly, we must find out whether Trump or those around him work with Russia to try to win the election. Next, we must examine the evidence to understand whether Trump and his colleagues are trying to block justice by blocking federal investigations into whether Trump and Russia collude. The fourth line concerns whether Republican leaders are now involved in a criminal conspiracy to impede justice through their intense and sustained effort to discredit Mueller's investigation.
This, my first column for The Intercept, will focus on the first song of the Trump-Russian narrative. I will pour separate columns for each of the other tracks in turn.
The proof that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump's victory was interesting, and it's getting stronger by the day.
There is little doubt now that Russian intelligence officials are behind attempts to hack DNC computers and steal emails and other information from helpers to Hillary Clinton as a means of undermining his presidential campaign. Once they steal the correspondence, Russian intelligence officials use pieces and fronts to wash out emails and put them into the bloodstream of the US press. Russian intelligence also uses fake social media accounts and other tools to create a global echo chamber both for stories about email and for anti-Clinton lie dress up to look like news.
To their disgrace, editors and journalists at the American news organization greatly increased Russian echo space, eager to write stories about Clinton and the Democrats based on email, while showing almost no interest during the presidential campaign exactly how the emails came to be revealed. and distributed. The Intercept itself has faced such allegations. Hacking is much more important than the content itself, but the story is ignored because it's so easy for journalists to write about Clinton John Podesta's campaign chair.
Attacks on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party look like contemporary virtual offspring from countless analog KGB propaganda efforts.
For anyone who has studied the history of the KGB, especially during the Cold War, attacks on the Clinton and Democrats campaign during the 2016 US elections look like the contemporary cyber boom of countless analog KGB propaganda efforts. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the KGB was often involved in an ambitious disinformation campaign designed to sow US suspicion in the developing world. The KGB's "active action" program will use international front organizations, cutouts, and sometimes unnoticed by the press to disseminate their anti-American propaganda.
The most famous and dangerous KGB disinformation campaign from the Cold War is known as Operation Infektion. This is a secret attempt to convince people in developing countries that the United States has created the HIV / AIDS virus.
In 1983, a newspaper in India printed what was said to be a letter from an American scientist who said the virus had been developed by the Pentagon. The letter then indicates that the United States moved its experiment to Pakistan, India's main enemy. Meanwhile, the KGB got an East German scientist to disseminate misinformation in favor of a Moscow-backed conspiracy theory that the US is behind the virus.
While this has never penetrated the mainstream of the US, they are still spreading unconsciously through much of the world.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer during the 1980s when the KGB conducted this disinformation campaign. He was stationed in East Germany in the late 1980s, and there was a good chance he knew about the components of Operation Infektion East Germany.
President Boris Yeltsin shook hands with Vladimir Putin, then head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, at the residence of the country near Moscow in 1998.
AGAINST the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the KGB was damaged and its successor institution changed its name. But the KGB never really left. Instead, he experienced an extensive rebranding that did little to change his culture and traditions.
Main Directorate of KGB, foreign intelligence service, renamed SVR. Like its predecessor, it is still housed in the headquarters of the Main Directorate in Moscow's Yasenevo District, known as "Langley Russia" because of its similarity to the CIA headquarters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I met many former KGB officials in Moscow, including Leonid Shebarshin, the last leader of the First Main Directorate, who ran an agency in 1991 when the communist militant group launched a coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time I met Shebarshin, he retired and run an "economic intelligence" company out of the office at the old Moscow Dynamo Stadium, home of the KGB football team. A mural on his office wall depicts scenes from the Battle of Stalingrad and the Bolshevik Revolution, which marks his preoccupation in the Soviet era.
After the Soviet collapse, the KGB Main Directorate, which handles spying and counter-intelligence hunting, along with other directorates dealing with internal KGB policing functions, is incorporated into a new organization known as the FSB, the Federal Security Service. I conducted an extensive interview with one of the most legendary spy hunters from the Chief of the Second Directorate, Rem Krassilnikov, a man whose personal history shows how the Russian intelligence is interwoven still with his past in the Soviet. Her first name, Brother, was an acronym for Revolutsky Mir- "The World Revolution" of the Soviet leadership had long wanted to make it happen. His father was a general at NKVD, a Stalinist predecessor in the KGB, and every time I spoke with him, Krassilnikov insisted that he still considered the enemy of the United States as his opponent. He proudly took me on tours to various sites around Moscow where he caught the American spy.
No one wants to bother changing the name of the GRU, Russian military intelligence agency. During the Cold War, the KGB regarded the GRU as a lower-class cousin, just as the CIA always looked down upon the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. Today, GRU has added cyber and hacking capabilities like those of the National Security Agency. GRU is involved in Russian hacking in the 2016 American election, according to the NSA's secret document obtained by The Intercept, but still operates in the shadow of the more influential FSB and SVR.
Russian intelligence briefly weakened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but under Putin - the first KGB man to run the country since Yuri Andropov died in 1984 - he rose again. During his KGB career, Putin served on both First and Second Directors. One of the main formative experiences occurred in 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Putin was stationed in eastern Germany at the time, and his biographer had written that the personal insults he felt when witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire helped explain his impulse to bring Russia back into a great power.
In 1998, Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin as director of the FSB. Since coming to power, Putin has put his country's spies in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria in a bid to reaffirm Moscow's global influence.
Why does not he want to spread his eyes to DNC's computer system as well?