This unstable individual is a threat to the US-Australia alliance, a serious security risk, as well as danger to world peace and international trade - an erratic politician Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull insists on publicly supporting as an "American patriot", who he is prepared to follow into a war of Trump's own making and, who he will be hosting on a proposed visit to Australia.
The
New York Times,
18 July 2018:
WASHINGTON — Two weeks
before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified
intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had
personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.
The evidence included
texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a
top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the
Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.
Mr. Trump sounded
grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence
briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings
that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have
unanimously endorsed.
The shifting narrative
underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump regularly picks and chooses
intelligence to suit his political purposes. That has never been more clear
than this week.
On Monday, standing next
to the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump said he accepted Mr.
Putin’s denial of Russian election intrusions. By Tuesday, faced with a
bipartisan political outcry, Mr. Trump sought to walk back his words and sided
with his intelligence agencies.
On Wednesday, when a
reporter asked, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.?” Mr. Trump shot back, “No”
— directly contradicting statements made only days earlier by his director of
national intelligence, Dan Coats, who was sitting a few chairs away in the
Cabinet Room. (The White House later said he was responding to a different
question.)
Hours later, in a CBS
News interview, Mr. Trump seemed to reverse course again. He blamed Mr. Putin
personally, but only indirectly, for the election interference by Russia,
“because he’s in charge of the country.”
In the run-up to this
week’s ducking and weaving, Mr. Trump has done all he can to suggest other
possible explanations for the hacks into the American political system. His
fear, according to one of his closest aides who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, is that any admission of even an unsuccessful Russian attempt to
influence the 2016 vote raises questions about the legitimacy of his
presidency.
The Jan. 6, 2017,
meeting, held at Trump Tower, was a prime example. He was briefed that day by
John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director; James R. Clapper Jr., the director of
national intelligence; and Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National
Security Agency and the commander of United States Cyber Command.
The F.B.I. director,
James B. Comey, was also there; after the formal briefing, he privately told
Mr. Trump about the “Steele dossier.” That report, by a former British
intelligence officer, included uncorroborated salacious stories of Mr. Trump’s
activities during a visit to Moscow, which he denied.
According to nearly a
dozen people who either attended the meeting with the president-elect or were
later briefed on it, the four primary intelligence officials described the
streams of intelligence that convinced them of Mr. Putin’s role in the election
interference.
They included stolen
emails from the Democratic National Committee that had been seen in Russian
military intelligence networks by the British, Dutch and American intelligence
services. Officers of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the G.R.U. had
plotted with groups like WikiLeaks on how to release the email stash.
And ultimately, several
human sources had confirmed Mr. Putin’s own role.
That included one
particularly valuable source, who was considered so sensitive that Mr. Brennan
had declined to refer to it in any way in the Presidential Daily Brief during
the final months of the Obama administration, as the Russia investigation
intensified.
Instead, to keep the
information from being shared widely, Mr. Brennan sent reports from the source
to Mr. Obama and a small group of top national security aides in a separate,
white envelope to assure its security.
Mr. Trump and his aides
were also given other reasons during the briefing to believe that Russia was
behind the D.N.C. hacks.
The same Russian groups
had been involved in cyberattacks on the State Department and White House
unclassified email systems in 2014 and 2015, and in an attack on the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. They had aggressively fought the N.S.A. against being ejected
from the White House system, engaging in what the deputy director of the agency
later called “hand-to-hand combat” to dig in…..
Read the full
article here.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
The White House on Monday threatened to strike back at critics of President
Donald Trump’s contacts with Russia by revoking the security clearances of six
former U.S. officials, drawing accusations that he was abusing his power and
aiming to stifle dissent.
Donald Trump is
doing anything he can to hold on to his base ― even employing propaganda tricks
straight out of 1984.
On Tuesday, the
President spoke at a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Kansas City and
told his followers to forget about anything else other than what he tells them.
“Just remember, what you
are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” he said.
…ThinkProgress chillingly notes that Trump’s demand
directly correlates to the “final, most essential command” of the ruling
totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984: “to
reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”
Trump decided to jump
headfirst into that belief by telling the crowd, “We don’t apologize for
America anymore. We stand up for America. We stand up for the patriots who
defend America.”
Jake Tapper noted on
Twitter that those comments came eight days after he blamed the U.S. for poor relations with Russia.
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