Mick Hartley

A good summary of the latest Trump debacle (of which there will, no doubt, be many more) from a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. John Schindler:

At this point, it’s functionally impossible to differentiate between social media claims made by the Trump administration, the Kremlin, the Wikileaks-Greenwald axis, and the Alt-Right. Now that Moscow has taken up the Nazi-frog meme beloved by the Alt-Right, any propaganda line between these groups has been erased altogether.

As usual, the president-elect is denying anything and everything, howling gigantic curses via Twitter against his foes and their “fake news.” He has pointed the finger at the Intelligence Community, bizarrely comparing 2017 America to Nazi Germany. Trump’s online meltdown has included a lot of tweeting in capital letters, and has cited the Kremlin as proof of his innocence. We’re in a new and uncharted era when the soon-to-be-president thinks Moscow is to be taken at face value in espionage matters.

In truth, the provenance of the 35-page dossier is well known in proper channels. Some of its assertions have been made by other NATO intelligence agencies, privately. Some of its claims are false, some are true, and some may linger between truth and fiction indefinitely. What’s important here is that the IC leadership decided to brief a small circle of the most senior American officials on that dossier’s findings. They don’t do that, ever—treating raw private intelligence reports by foreigners as worthy of briefing to “the top”—unless they can corroborate significant portions of it….

The president-elect wants this mess to go away at once, before it swallows his new administration whole. This morning, in his first press conference since last summer, Trump’s team was adamant that the dossier is “fake news.” The president elect angrily pronounced leaks of intelligence a “disgrace,” seeming to forget how gleefully his campaign greeted IC leaks which badly harmed Hillary Clinton over her emails….

News organizations more respectable than Buzzfeed sat on the dossier for months, sensing it was a spooky morass of truth and fiction that could not be untangled to meet proper journalistic standards. Several tried, in fact, but after efforts to verify the claims failed, they declined to publish.

There is a darker possibility, however—namely that the dossier was leaked to muddy the waters, perhaps even to distract from even more troubling information about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin.

Russian intelligence calls this provokatsiya—provocation—and it’s as commonplace as kompromat in their ranks. This wouldn’t be the first time that Kremlin spies leaked secret information, partly true, to throw spies and journalists off the real trail. “It would be what I’d do,” explained a former KGB senior officer whom I’ve known for years. Possessing long experience with provocation against Western governments, my friend added how Russian spies would approach this: “I would certainly let the media know some of what we have on Trump, to confuse reporters, and also to let the new president know we can take him down at any time, so he better do what Moscow wants.”….

The Trump presidency is certainly not going to be dull.