“Did the U.S. “Intelligence Community” judge that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election?”  No, says Amb. Jack Matlock, drawing on his unique personal experience — with Russia AND the U.S. Intelligence. No duck hunter, Matlock nonetheless shoots le gran canard of “Russian interference” quite dead.

http://jackmatlock.com/2018/06/musings-ii-the-intellience-community-russian-interference-and-due-diligence/
June 29, 2018

On the technical side, Amb. Matlock includes the following; please note the last sentence:

Among the assertions are that a persona calling itself “Guccifer 2.0” is an instrument of the GRU, and that it hacked the emails on the Democratic National Committee’s computer and conveyed them to Wikileaks. What the report does not explain is that it is easy for a hacker or foreign intelligence service to leave a false trail. In fact, a program developed by CIA with NSA assistance to do just that has been leaked and published.

Retired senior NSA technical experts have examined the “Guccifer 2.0” data on the web and have concluded that “Guccifer 2.0’s” data did not involve a hack across the web but was locally downloaded. Further, the data had been tampered with and manipulated, leading to the conclusion that “Guccifer 2.0” is a total fabrication.

Modest Proposal for Trump-Putin Summit on July 16…


Trimming military exercises in Europe would get support
By Ray McGovern, Washington Post, June 29, 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trimming-military-exercises-in-europe-would-get-support/2018/06/28/a6f65b1c-7969-11e8-ac4e-421ef7165923_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b8fb7b4adcd8

Kudos to former U.S. ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow for proposing tangible steps to “reduce the risk of direct conflict” with Russia, while cautioning in his June 25 op-ed that “There is no grand bargain with Putin.” First among Mr. Vershbow’s suggested measures for agreement at a summit was trimming the size of military exercises in Europe.  ( See:

A parallel suggestion was made by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close aide and spokesman Dmitry Peskov two days after Donald Trump’s election. Mr. Peskov, in New York ostensibly to attend a championship chess match, talked to the Associated Press about “confidence-building measures.” He proposed a “slow down or withdrawal of NATO’s military potential from our borders,” adding that Russia sees “NATO’s muscles . . . getting bigger and bigger and closer.”
In early June 2016 in Berlin, I had a previously scheduled meeting with the chairman of the German Bundestag Defense Committee in his office. I took note of the launch that very morning of Anaconda 2016, the largest war game since the Cold War, with 31,000 NATO troops from 24 countries.  The chairman left me with the clear impression that he would fully agree with the sentiments expressed by Mr. Vershbow and Mr. Peskov.
Ray McGovern, Arlington
The writer is former chief of the
Soviet foreign policy branch of the CIA.

Good News: Social Media Rivulets Can Drown Mainstream: The “fatal” poisoning of the Skripals in UK, actually, is poisoning any residual credibility still enjoyed by bottom-feeding stenographers disguised as journalists. Cold warriors are in Panic.  See: Putin At War: Social Media Surge on Skripal

By The Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Lab, April 5,2018
 
Hat tip to Fred Weir and EastWestAccord: See:
https://eastwestaccord.com/fred-weir-russian-news-influences/ ]

The following is excerpted from witty Weir’s comment on facebook, June 21, 2018:

“Russian news influences”

“I keep seeing stories like this [see the Medium.com link — the first link above], literally dozens of them, whose main thrust is a breathless warning that Russian news influences — whether from direct sources like RT or “Kremlin line” ones like the Ron Paul Institute [?!?!?] — are totally wiping the floor with mainstream media, along with Western government press departments and the whole universe of Western think tanks, NGO’s and opinion setters. …

“What this [arch-Establishment Atlantic Council] article, and all the others like it, fails to address is what I would have thought is the giant polka-dotted elephant in the room: how the hell are they doing that? … how exactly are these Russian opinion-changing alchemists [causing people to] doubt their own government and media? … the Russians can’t possibly match the firepower of the Western mainstream media, and all of its resources, so what is it? Black magic? Some secret PR sauce? Have the British public been infected by a virus that makes them susceptible to certain Russki keywords? …”
The virus, of course, is a virulent one; it is called truth.  Those who deal in it can take some encouragement from the above … and perhaps even some Schadenfreude at the panicking bottom feeders and their masters.

Ray interviewed on radio yesterday on what has finally morphed into “FBI/DOJ-gate,” after the DOJ Inspector General documented strong DOJ/FBI bias: kid-gloves treatment for Hillary Clinton, and just opposite for Donald Trump. Former FBI Deputy Director’s McCabe lawyer, Lisa Page, to key investigator/lover Peter Strzok: [Trump is] “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”  Strzok: “No, no he won’t. We’ll stop it.”  House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes had not been given that text. There may be hell to pay for that.

The actual interview starts at minute 2:45; at minute 11:30 Ray begins to draw a sharp contrast between House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, R, California, and his Senate counterpart Richard Burr, R, Virginia.  Burr is joined at the hip with the CIA — so clearly compromised that he recently greased the skids to get known torturer Gina Haspel confirmed as CIA director.

Nunes is just the opposite; he is clearly determined to exercise his committee’s Constitutional responsibility to investigate, and to report his findings about who really did interfere in the 2016 election.  Nunes has broken the meek mold of virtually all predecessor Intelligence Committee chairmen and violated Establishment etiquette, saying publicly — and forcefully — that if senior officials at Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and elsewhere have committed crimes, “You’re darn right the we’re going to put them on trial.”

See the last minute or so of:
http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/russia-probe

As for DOJ IG Michael Horowitz, he appears to have done a commendable job so far, with the caveat that he is very dependent on his associates — many of whom have a lot to hide — for evidence relating to their own abuses.

And Horowitz is, after all, a lawyer.  So no one should be surprised at a lawyerly parsing of words.  His report says:  “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence … that political bias directly affected the specific investigative decisions.”  Any lawyer will tell you that this just means that no one has admitted to that in formal testimony and that Horowitz, so far, can find no piece of paper or digital text in which, for example, Strzok depicts exactly how he planned to carry out his brag to his mistress that “We’ll stop” Trump from becoming president.

Finally, the IG report uses the term “Midyear Examination” or simply “Midyear” (and, in the process, pins the blame on the FBI and DOJ for continuing to insist on euphemisms for what amounted to an Inspector Clouseau-type investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deliberate use of insecure computers that resulted in the compromise of classified information — some of it extremely sensitive; NSA is keeping mum about the worst).  Sadly, U.S. “Justice” people are still resorting to euphemisms to refer to Mrs. Clinton’s playing fast and loose with laws to protect secret information, which all government officials promise to take seriously.

More word games: Recall that a year ago, after being fired by President Trump, James Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Obama-appointed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had directed him, at the height of the 2016 campaign, not to call the probe into Clinton’s use of a private server an “investigation.”  Comey testified: “At one point, the attorney general had directed me not to call it an investigation, but instead to call it a ‘matter,’ which confused me and concerned me.”  Comey added, “and that gave me a queasy feeling.”
And not only you, Jim.  Did you ever think of looking into what your boys and girls were up to?