Trump is now more dangerous than he has ever been.

when Trump suggested during the campaign that he welcomed the Russians to hack the DNC, that should have suggested a problem.

And the unraveling continues ~ I'm grateful that Josh Marshall is tracking and explaining how all the stand-alone facts fit together ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

TPM EDBLOG
Piecing Together More Details on Trump and Russia
By Josh Marshall Published April 13, 2017, 10:48 PM EDT

We’ve had a flurry of articles this week about the Trump/Russia story. I want to flag some details which are now apparent as we look at each of the articles together.

Let’s start with the news that Carter Page was surveilled by the FBI using a FBI warrant obtained in the summer of 2016. The Washington Post and New York Times stories on this tell a slightly different story on the precise timing of the first warrant. The Times says August. The Post at least seems to say July. I wouldn’t make too much of this disagreement. It’s possible the Post story is speaking loosely in one case or I over-interpreted a key sentence.

In any case, here’s the point to focus on.

The Post article, based on its government sources, reported that Carter Page was the only Trump associate to be surveilled with a FISA warrant during 2016. That was notable, if only to rule out others. Was Paul Manafort or Mike Flynn ever the subject of a FISA warrant? Apparently not, since Page was the only one, according to these sources. Good information to have. But it’s also notable in this sense. Carter Page seems like a real clown. You don’t have to be a genius to be a spy or operating at the behest of a foreign government. But if it’s only Page, a clownish figure who clearly wasn’t that closely involved with the campaign, maybe this whole story is a bit more tenuous than many imagine.

Let’s put a pin in that for a second. Because I don’t think that’s the only read of these facts. But the Times includes another detail.

According to the Times, the FBI waited until August when there were clear indications that Page was no longer working with the campaign to get a warrant. In other words, the FBI believed they had probable cause to believe Page was knowingly working as the agent of a foreign power but still refrained from seeking a FISA warrant because of the inherent and quite understandable sensitivities and problems of surveilling an American citizen working for a Presidential campaign.

That raises an interesting possibility. Were there other people tied to Trump the FBI might have wanted to surveil but did not because they remained associated with the campaign? This is just an inference. But it’s a possibility worth considering when we ask why Page and why just Page.

(One small footnote to this point. The Times article reads: “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the warrant, the official said, after investigators determined that Mr. Page was no longer part of the Trump campaign, which began distancing itself from him in early August.” That’s not when he left the campaign officially. Page resigned from the campaign at the end of September. This isn’t necessarily a contradiction. It sounds like they felt they could move ahead once active contact had stopped and the Trump campaign was publicly distancing themselves from him.)

But here’s the final point, which may shed light on each of the questions above. The Guardian published a story today suggesting that the first red flags about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia came from Britain’s GCHQ, the British analog of the NSA. We already knew that there were key early reports came from friendly intelligence agencies in northeastern Europe. But this is more specific. In addition to details, which I’ll note in a moment, what appear to be UK sources say that US intelligence and law enforcement was behind the curve and somewhat laggard on finding out what was happening. If that is accurate, that’s key information.

Here’s a key passage.


The story goes on to say that the then-head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, went directly to James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence, with the information. (In other words, no bureaucratic intermediaries: the top intel person in the UK going to the top person in the USA.) That was in the summer of 2016. (Again, a much vaguer time frame than we’d like.) This appears to have kicked off that feverish round of calls and meetings Clapper had with the bipartisan “gang of eight” congressional leaders – leadership and heads of intelligence committees.

Let’s begin by saying that even if it had negative consequences in this particular case, we want our intelligence agencies to be very reticence about surveillance in the US, particularly when it comes to political officials and political campaigns. So this seems not only plausible but not really a bad thing, or at least a negative outcome from a generally good thing. But it could provide some explanation of the FBI’s and CIA’s seemingly laggard approach to this case. It might also explain why only Page was actively and directly surveilled. Remember too that Page had also come up as a target of recruitment by Russian intelligence agents three years earlier. If you were going to look at anyone, Page seems like he was low hanging fruit in terms of being a good place to start and probably the easiest to get a warrant on. Of course, reporting on this suggests there was other more direct evidence on Page.

I’ll end on a somewhat different point. I’ve noted earlier that the FBI especially and likely the CIA too had direct information about Trump’s business associations with people involved with Russian and post-Soviet organized crime. From my read, which I’ve set forth here, the FBI clearly had pretty deep institutional knowledge of Trump’s ties to oligarchs and organized crime figures in Russia well before he ran got into the 2016 presidential race. While the FBI is the agency leading the current investigation, I think will still need to know much, much more about what the FBI knew prior to 2016, what its relationship was with Trump going back to the 1980s and how all this played into the progress of the investigation in 2016 and particularly the critical summer and fall months of that year.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/piecing-together-more-details-on-trump-and-russia

Interesting read ~ I have not yet read the full Prospect interview with Richard Dearlove [live-linked below] yet ~ there are other "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

TPM EDBLOG
Trump and the Russia Money
By Josh Marshall Published April 17, 2017, 5:14 PM EDT

Folks following the Trump/Russia story have been talking about this article in the British Prospect, an interview with Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 (1999-2004), the UK’s analogue to the CIA. The attention has been on this passage of the interview in which Dearlove talks about or speculates about whether Donald Trump may have been bailed out by loans from Russia or other parts of the former Soviet Union during the 2008 financial crisis.


This is quite an interesting comment, to say the least.

But there are a few caveats to consider. Dearlove hasn’t been in government since 2004. Former top spies tend to remain fairly in the know, at least informally. But Dearlove was not in office during either of the key points, not in 2008 or 2016. More importantly, the interview as a whole is only partly about Trump and to the extent it is about him it’s about him as part of the ‘nationalist’ wave sweeping the EU and US, not about the Russia story itself. Finally, is Dearlove sharing some authoritative information, things he’s seen suggested or simple speculation?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions. It’s all rather unexplained, just put out there. Still, it’s relatively specific on 2008 as a crisis point. We are now led to believe that British intelligence was the first to get wind – in late 2015 – of questionable contacts between members of the Trump entourage and Russian intelligence operatives. So what are we to make of this suggestion?

First, it broadly lines up with a lot that we know. Before the ties between Trump and Russia became a story in 2016, it was already widely known that Trump had been effectively blackballed by all the big US banks for years. Deutschebank, which is of course a German bank, has been the only major bank to continue loaning Trump money for about twenty years. So we know most big banks wouldn’t lend to Trump well before 2008. So that part largely checks out.

We also know that in the decade before he ran for President, Trump became increasingly reliant on money out of the former Soviet Union. This was both for purchases of apartment units, to fund major projects like Trump Soho, in Lower Manhattan, in addition to many other projects.

We are close to adding the first members of our expanded investigative team to dig into stories just like this. And high on my list is putting together a comprehensive timeline of the myriad Russian connections Trump managed to put together over the last two decades. You can know almost countless individual stories, nuggets of information, clues and pieces of evidence. But sometimes seeing it all visualized is key to really understanding what’s going on. I’m eager to see that visualization.

Dearlove points to 2008, an economic crisis when lots of individuals and companies teetered on the edge of bankruptcy or collapse. My impression however, is that Trump starts really building up the big Russia ties a few years earlier – in the 2003-2006 period. Lots of the stories and connections you’ve likely heard about, they trail back to those years. There are some that come long before and others that come after. But it’s in that period when lots of different deals, connections, business partnerships and so forth come together. In other words, Trump seems to have had a lot of the relationships and partnerships and money flows in place a good couple years before 2008. Of course that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have drawn on those connections to weather 2008 too.

Of course, this may end up coming back to projects like Trump SoHo itself. It was happening during the financial crisis and seemed to get various infusions of money out of Russia to keep it moving forward. Quite a lot more digging is required to get to the bottom of Trump’s business dealings with Russia sources of money during the W. Bush and Obama eras. We still only know the outlines. Perhaps Dearlove knows more.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-and-the-russia-money

I swear - you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. No-one would believe any of it.

Those are the "alternative facts" Trump would rather you not believe.

I was literally just reading that report while you were posting the link, shift ~ GMTA!

There's been a LOT of chatter about the DiC's "deep links to organized crime", including with Russian mobsters, for years ~ glad to see the "rumors" finally going main-stream ~

The DiC is in VERY deep doo-doo and is desperate to get public attention OFF this entire Russia investigation ~

Sooz

* Edited for clarity ~

Has anyone noticed how things have been really really quiet on this front lately.

Sid, the House and Senate have been in Spring Recess for the past 2+ weeks ~ but both are back now, and things are heating up again ~ with Nunes now sidelined, the House investigation has a lot to make up for ~

Sooz

Turning again to the House investigation, this is good news ~ I have a lot of faith in Adam Schiff ~ he's been a bulldog in this investigation ~ Sooz

TPM LIVEWIRE
House Intel Panel ‘Back On Track’: Yates, Brennan, Clapper Asked To Testify
By Allegra Kirkland Published April 21, 2017, 12:49 PM EDT

After a troubled two months that saw the “temporary” recusal of Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), announced Friday that the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. election was “back on track.”

Schiff and the new senior Republican on the committee, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX), sent out letters asking key Obama administration officials and senior intelligence officials to testify before the committee.

FBI Director James Comey and National Security Advisor Adm. Mike Rogers were invited to appear at a closed hearing on May 2, according to a statement from Schiff’s office. Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates also were asked to appear in an open hearing that would be scheduled after May 2.

Those officials were initially scheduled to come before the committee in March. But Nunes scrapped their appearances after going public with claims that he’d seen intelligence reports that showed information about President Donald Trump and his staffers was “incidentally collected,” and Nunes asserted that the identities of those persons were inappropriately unmasked in the reports.

Other lawmakers from both parties who later viewed the same reports said the documents showed no evidence of wrongdoing. At the time of the cancelations, Schiff charged that Nunes was trying to “choke off” public information about the Russia probe.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/schiff-house-intelligence-committee-back-on-track-hearings

This is a GREAT resource for all things related to the DiC/Russia investigation, broken out by issue and date: LawFareBlog: #RealNews on Trump et L'Affaire Russe ~ I will cross-post this link in our Links/Resources forum ~

Sooz

The Senate investigation has 2 BIG witnesses today ~ it appears that the DiC is VERY nervous about any Flynn questions ~ I wonder WHY ~ ~ Sooz

Mr. Clapper and Ms. Yates made the White House/admin. look like complete fools today.
And I think one of the criteria for a Senator from Louisiana is "dumb as dirt".

Agreed, oskar ~ I got hooked and ended up watching the full 2-1/2+ hours of the hearing ~ Sally Yates was a ROCK STAR, calmly/nicely shooting down several GOP/TPers ~ and who knew James Clapper has a sense of humor? ~ ~ I'll post whatever videos I find tomorrow morning ~

Sooz

I watched almost to the end but we were expected for dinner at some friends.
Here's the CSPAN video link: https://www.c-span.org/video/?427577-1/ ... ompromised

This should be damning - but - Trump supporters don't care:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2017/politics/trump-russia-connections/

"United States of America - a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia Inc."

America's government has been compromised by a hostile foreign power. Where's the outrage?

Unfortunately, his base only gets outraged when Fox News or any other alt fact site or media tells them to.

Sally Yates was spectacular during this hearing yesterday ~ she faced off, and won, against a few GOP/TPers who were obviously trying to sabotage her ... Cornyn, Grassley, and Cruz amongst others ~ Sooz

Yates Fuels Questions About Trump's 18-Day Delay in Firing Flynn
Bloomberg / Steven T. Dennis and Chris Strohm / 14 hrs ago

(Bloomberg) -- Eighteen days.

That’s how much time passed from acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s warning to the White House that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with Russian officials to the administration’s decision to fire him.

The White House will be under increasing pressure to explain what it did during that period after Yates’ Senate testimony on Monday, her highest-profile appearance since President Donald Trump fired her Jan. 30 for refusing to enforce his initial travel ban. Her revelations come as FBI and multiple congressional committees intensify their scrutiny of Russia’s meddling in last year’s election and any possible connections to Trump aides or associates.

Yates, an Obama administration holdover, said she reached out to White House Counsel Donald McGahn in late January after noting discrepancies between classified intelligence reports on Flynn’s behavior and Pence’s descriptions of what the national security adviser told him.

Blackmail Potential

In two White House meetings on Jan. 26 and Jan. 27, Yates said she told McGahn that the classified information suggested that Flynn was potentially subject to blackmail because the Russians would know he had misled Pence.

"We felt it was critical we get this information to the White House," Yates told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee in a hearing alongside former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. "We believed that General Flynn was compromised with respect to the Russians. To state the obvious, you don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.”

McGahn, Yates said, asked her why it mattered “if one White House official lies to another White House official.” Yates said she emphasized legal concerns about Flynn’s “underlying conduct,” calling Flynn’s behavior "problematic in and of itself.” Pence and the administration also needed to know they were making false statements based on information Flynn had given them, she said.

Flynn was eventually dismissed on Feb. 13, four days after the Washington Post reported he had discussed sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which he misled Pence about.

‘False Assurances’

“Why did the President wait until General Flynn’s false assurances to the Vice President and others become public before removing him from his post,” Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is pursuing its own investigation into Trump-Russia ties, said in a statement.

After the Senate Judiciary subcommittee’s hearing ended, Trump said in one of a series of tweets that Yates had given the media “nothing but old news.” He went on to say, “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?”

Yates’s testimony came just hours after the disclosure that then-President Barack Obama warned Trump during the presidential transition against hiring Flynn as his national security adviser. Obama raised his concerns during his Oval Office meeting with Trump on Nov. 10, according to an Obama administration official who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Obama had fired Flynn from a post as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer acknowledged and quickly discounted the warning from Obama, telling reporters Monday that “President Obama made it known that he wasn’t exactly a fan of General Flynn’s, which shouldn’t come as a surprise” given Flynn’s role as an outspoken Trump supporter and Obama critic.

Trump has stood by Flynn -- an early supporter during the presidential campaign -- even after his dismissal, saying in a March 31 Twitter posting that the lieutenant general is the subject of a “witch hunt” and should be given “immunity” from prosecution to tell congressional committees his story.

Trump had started the week seeking to preempt any potentially damaging testimony through tweets blaming the Obama administration for giving Flynn a security clearance and urging that Yates be questioned about whether she was responsible for leaks about him.

“Ask Sally Yates, under oath, if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to W.H. Counsel,” Trump tweeted.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, did just that, asking both Yates and Clapper whether they leaked information about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador or authorized anyone else to do so. Both answered no and said they didn’t know how the information ended up in news reports.

Some senators sought to focus the discussion on the “unmasking” of U.S. persons such as Flynn in intelligence reports after they are overheard or mentioned in surveillance of foreign intelligence targets. Clapper defended the unmasking of Americans, who normally aren’t mentioned by name in the reports, as important in some cases to understand what the foreign targets were trying to do.

‘Huge Deal’

"I did feel an obligation as DNI that I should attempt to understand the context in who this person was," said Clapper, who left office at the end of the Obama administration on Jan. 20. He said there was a big difference between unmasking a name and leaking it to the public, which he agreed was a crime. He sought to steer the focus of the hearing toward what he described as Russia’s continuing efforts to undermine democracies by interfering in elections in the U.S. and Europe.

“That to me is a huge deal,” Clapper said. “They are going to continue to do it and why not? It proved successful."

Yates also was challenged by Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas on her refusal to defend Trump’s initial travel ban in court, a decision that led to her firing.

She defended the decision to overrule the department’s own experts on whether an executive order is constitutional, pointing to her 2015 testimony during her confirmation hearing to be deputy attorney general that she would be willing to tell a president "no."

"All arguments have to be based on truth," she said, adding that she concluded that Trump’s order, which would have banned entry to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries, “was not lawful."

Cornyn said her decision to countermand the president’s order on policy grounds was “enormously disappointing.”

"I believed that it was unlawful,” she replied.

--With assistance from Margaret Talev and Arit John

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/yates-fuels-questions-about-trumps-18-day-delay-in-firing-flynn/ar-BBATwoG?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=U145DHP

The Republicans who tried the "gotcha" route were owned by both Yates and Clapper. They were made to look like the partisan fools they are. Graham at least appeared to be serious about this investigation.

"Witness intimidation" is a federal crime ~ just sayin' ~ ~ Sooz

TPM LIVEWIRE
CNN Panel Taken Aback By Trump Tweets On Yates: It’s ‘Beyond The Pale’ (VIDEO)
By Caitlin MacNeal Published May 8, 2017 1:09 pm

A panel discussion on CNN Monday afternoon highlighted how unusual it was for President Donald Trump to publish a tweet attacking former acting Attorney General Sally Yates mere hours before she testified in Congress.

“He’s the President of the United States and the former acting attorney general is about to testify under oath before the United States Congress and you tweet, ‘Ask Sally Yates under oath if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to the White House counsel,'” CNN’s John King said.

“I started, before I got into covering politics all the time, I used to cover the courts a lot. A lawyer would call that witness intimidation,” he added.

“Completely,” CNN reporter Dana Bash said in response. “Look, I think we have all been kind of desensitized in some way to his tweets and to his statements that are so out of the norm. This is beyond out of the norm. This is inappropriate. For the President of the United States to be this aggressive with somebody who used to work for him, who is coming before the United States Congress with sworn testimony hours later, is beyond the pale. It just is.”

King emphasized that it was unusual for Trump to make such a plea in public.

“To go public like this is striking,” he said.

Trump’s tweet about Yates came before she was expected to inform a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that is investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election that she’d warned White House Counsel Don McGahn about former national security adviser Michael Flynn discussing U.S. sanctions with a Russian official.

Watch a clip via CNN:


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cnn-panel-trump-tweets-sally-yates-beyond-the-pale

Both Yates and Clapper were asked exactly that... several times. Their answers made those who asked look like complete fools.

Another gold star for my pal Bruce! ~ ~ Sooz

yeah, they were right to be worried about her.

Sometimes I find Keith Olbermann too bombastic to take seriously ~ but that's just me ~ he sure does nail this well-deserved rant! ~ ~ emphasis/bolding below is mine ~ Sooz

Olbermann: Sally Yates is 'American hero'
By John Bowden - 05/09/17 07:37 AM EDT


Keith Olbermann is heaping praise on former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, calling her an "American hero" and applauding her remarks in front of a Senate panel.

"In the era of Trump, she stands out like a champion,” Olbermann said on his GQ podcast, "The Resistance."

Olbermann also attacked President Trump for firing Yates after she came to him to present evidence that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then serving as national security adviser, was possibly compromised by the Russians.

“You are the goddamn president of the goddamn United States, and your acting attorney general tells your White House counsel that your national security adviser was ‘compromised’ with respect to the Russians ... and you don’t want him to be in a position where the Russians have leverage over him. And you fire the acting attorney general, not the national security adviser?" Olbermann asked.

“Which are you ― an idiot or a traitor?” he asked.

Olbermann ended his broadcast by saying that the Trump administration's incompetence was enough to remove Trump from office.

“No matter who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer, our country is not safe in the hands of these idiots. Trump and all of them must go, and they must go now. Resist. Peace.”

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/332478-olbermann-sally-yates-is-an-american-hero?rnd=1494330219

Olberman's inaccuracies don't help.