What Is It with Trump and Russia

Hmmm:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation cannot tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia. Why? Because doing so would jeopardize a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.

But the Feds’ stonewalling risks something far more dangerous: Failing to resolve a crisis of trust in America’s president. WhoWhatWhy provides the details of a two-month investigation in this 6,500-word exposé.

The FBI apparently knew, directly or indirectly, based upon available facts, that prior to Election Day, Trump and his campaign had personal and business dealings with certain individuals and entities linked to criminal elements — including reputed Russian gangsters — connected to Putin.

The same facts suggest that the FBI knew or should have known enough prior to the election to justify informing the public about its ongoing investigation of potentially compromising relationships between Trump, Putin, and Russian mobsters — even if it meant losing or exposing a valued informant.

The Steele dossier got additional confirmation, and this bit is key:

In the report, Steele spoke of an "established operational liaison between the TRUMP team and the Kremlin… an intelligence exchange had been running between them for at least 8 years."

Members of the Obama administration believe, based on analysis they saw from the intelligence community, that the information exchange claimed by Steele continued into the election.

"This is a three-headed operation," said one former official, setting out the case, based on the intelligence: Firstly, hackers steal damaging emails from senior Democrats. Secondly, the stories based on this hacked information appear on Twitter and Facebook, posted by thousands of automated "bots", then on Russia's English-language outlets, RT and Sputnik, then right-wing US "news" sites such as Infowars and Breitbart, then Fox and the mainstream media. Thirdly, Russia downloads the online voter rolls. The voter rolls are said to fit into this because of "microtargeting". Using email, Facebook and Twitter, political advertising can be tailored very precisely: individual messaging for individual voters. "You are stealing the stuff and pushing it back into the US body politic," said the former official, "you know where to target that stuff when you're pushing it back."

This would take co-operation with the Trump campaign, it is claimed. 

"If you need to ensure that white women in Pennsylvania don't vote or independents get pissed in Michigan so they stay home: that's voter suppression. You can figure what your target demographics and locations are from the voter rolls. Then you can use that to target your bot."

This is the "big picture" some accuse the FBI of failing to see. It is, so far, all allegation - and not just the parts concerning Donald Trump and his people. For instance, the US intelligence agencies said last October that the voter rolls had been "scanned and probed" from a server in Russia.

But the Russian government was never shown to have been responsible. There are either a series of coincidences or there is a conspiracy of such reach and sophistication that it may take years to unravel.

"I hear a lot of people comparing this to Watergate," said Congressman Eric Swalwell, a Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. "Let me just tell you, the complexity of this case is unlike anything we've ever seen. "Watergate doesn't even come close. That was a burglary in the Metro section of the Washington Post. "It doesn't have the international waypoints [of this]. Russia's M.O. is to avoid attribution. This investigation is going to take time."

In his testimony, the FBI director gave away nothing of the details of the inquiry. As I wrote in January, it is being done by a "counter-intelligence taskforce" that includes the CIA, with the FBI leading. I wrote then that the secret US intelligence court had granted an order, a so-called Fisa warrant, to intercept the electronic records of two Russian banks.

The White House cited this report several times as evidence for President Trump's tweets that "Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower… This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!" It isn't. Since Watergate, no president can simply order the CIA or FBI to tap someone's phone.

I wrote that: "Neither Trump nor his associates are named in the Fisa order." If they were, the court would have to see "probable cause" that they were agents of a foreign power. It is possible that the communications of Trump associates were picked up in monitoring of foreign entities, such as the Russian banks, so-called "incidental collection". This is presumably what the White House spokesman, Sean Spicer, is talking about when he asks Congress to investigate an "abuse of power" by the Obama administration.

Comey was careful in his testimony to say the investigation was into "co-ordination" rather than collusion. "Collusion is not a term, a legal term of art," he said, "and it's one I haven't used here today, as we're investigating to see whether there was any co-ordination…"

Comey's testimony confirmed there was an open investigation over the links between the Trump campaign and Russia - but not much more "Explicit or implicit coordination?" a Congressman asked. "Knowing or unknowing," Comey replied. The investigation, then, is into a range of possibilities: at one end, unwitting co-operation with Russia by members of the Trump campaign; at the other conscious "co-ordination".

Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager, Robby Mook, said that if Trump's aides knew of Russia's plans, there should be charges of treason. Trump's enemies ask us to believe that some of his people were either traitors or dupes.

The president himself has another version of events: there was no "co-ordination"; the whole thing is a monstrous lie created by the Obama administration, fed by the intelligence community and amplified by the "dishonest" media, billowing black clouds of smoke but no fire.

When the dossier was released, he tweeted: "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" These two stories cannot be reconciled. With each new drip of information, option three - the chance that this is all a giant mistake, an improbable series of coincidences - seems further out of reach.

I think it's quite striking that Michael Flynn was actually anti-Russia until he joined the Trump campaign.  So, it's not that people brought into the campaign made Trump more pro-Russia, it was the other way around. That fits with the idea that Trump was pro-Russia way back... not just recruited recently.