If the Russians were genuinely interested in recruiting Donald Trump or any member of his family to be an agent to spy clandestinely, long-term, for its foreign and military intelligence services, the FSV RF and the GRU, would they (meaning Putin) send a Russian national lawyer (Natalia Veselnitskaya) with direct ties to the Russian government into overt meetings with potential targets for recruitment in the Trump Tower?

If the government of the People’s Republic of China were genuinely interested in spying on President Donald Trump or anything going on at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Florida, would the PRC’s intelligence service, the MSS, have sent a readily-recognizable Chinese national woman (Yujing Zhang)  with poor English language skills and an array of technical equipment, covert communications, and malware to try and talk her way through staff and Secret Service checkpoints with poorly prepared and very shaky multiple cover stories?

The answer to both these questions is a resounding “No!”

And yet, the Fools on the Hill (members of Congress) and their go-to stooge, Robert Mueller III, have just spent the last 2-1/2 years and tens of millions of dollars trying to show that President Donald J. Trump and his presidency have been fatally contaminated by exactly these kinds of foreign influence operations.

If the very few honest and competent Senators and Representatives among the Fools on the Hill Club dig deeper, what they are likely to find is that both the Russians and the ChiComs have been running what is often referred to as “discoverable influence operations” (or discoverable intelligence operations) in the US.  I’m quite certain this possibility occurred to or was explained to them long before now, though judging from their actions, you might reasonably ask if they were listening to the explanation.  The key word is “discoverable.”

Most covert or clandestine intel operations run in other countries are intended to remain hidden from the counterintelligence services of the host country and the target country.  Learning that your successfully recruited spy has been discovered is the next-to-last thing either a case officer  or the espionage agent want.  (Only more disturbing to the case officer or spy would be having the spy discovered by counterintelligence and the CO or spy does not know about it!)

For example, Robert Philip Hanssen is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.   The KGB (later the FSV) and Hanssen used proper tradecraft to keep his identity and espionage activities secret from the FBI and others in the US counterintel community for as long as they could.   Hanssen and the FSV hoped he would never be discovered.    Once he was discovered, Hanssen was of no further use to the FSV.  He became a throwaway and will die in prison.

In contrast with “normal” human intelligence operations like Hanssen, discoverable influence/intelligence operations are expected to be discovered by host country counterintelligence.  In fact, they’re designed to be discovered.  Their discovery is part of the aggressor intelligence service’s operation strategy.

The host and target countries’ counterintelligence discovery of the operation, the methods used to discover or failure to discover it, and the amount of time it took for the countries to discover and correctly assess it provides the aggressor’s intelligence services with useful information about the skills, capabilities, and limitations of opposing counterintelligence services.

How we have responded and continue to respond to the absurd charges of “Russian collusion” against candidate, nominee, and now-President Trump has provided foreign intelligence services with valuable information about the United States intelligence and counterintelligence services’ own capabilities and limitations.    It has also further revealed more of our own social, political, and economic vulnerabilities.

I just finished watching Attorney General William Barr’s press conference in which he officially releases the public version of the Mueller report.

If you didn’t watch the entire press conference that lasted just under 24 minutes, here is a link to it.  The press conferences begins at 18:50.  After his prepared remarks, AG Barr took questions from the skews media.  He left the podium at 42:05.

My observations:

–It’s reassuring to finally have a real Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice, an AG that understands the duties of that department and the potential for abuses by people employed in it.

–Most of the press corps demonstrated by their conduct and many of their questions that they are profoundly ignorant and lacking in sufficient subject matter knowledge to be reporting on the Justice Department.    Though they had not yet seen the redacted public version of the Mueller report, they were clearly underinformed about the special counsel processes and the role of the Attorney General.

–Unlike the members of the skews media, AG Barr listens carefully and has the skill and ability to politely, succinctly, and clearly answer questions and point out the illogic used to frame many of them.

–Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would rather have been in The Mad Dentist’s chair and having his teeth extracted without painkiller than standing behind AG Barr at the press conference.

As AG Barr promised, the entire redacted version of the Mueller report has been posted on the Department of Justice’s website.

AG Barr also explained that with the exception of 6(e) material, key Congressional Committee chairmen will be allowed to view the otherwise unredacted version of the Mueller report.  I have little doubt that the names of all those allowed to view it will be recorded on a bigot list.

The headline for journalist John Solomon’s April 7, 2019, column for The Hill online is framed as a question:

Ukranian to US prosecutors:  Why don’t you want our evidence on Democrats?

The answer is that the proffered “evidence” appears to implicate Democrat soon-to-be-presidential-candidate Joe “Hands-On” Biden and his son, Hunter, in statutory violations that make Paul Manafort look like a choir boy.

But if that’s so, then why hasn’t the Trump Department of Justice jumped all over the “evidence” and run with it to the nearest television skews camera crew and microphones?

Here’s a thought:   Attorney General Barr is actually competent and ethical.  I suspect he fully understands that some of the ultra-liberal loyalist attorney holdovers from the Lynch and Holder DoJ are as difficult to get rid of as a bad case of foot fungus.   It was these attorneys who turned a willful blind eye to the facial absurdity of the Steele Dossier’s allegations about presidential candidate Trump.  They would love for AG Barr to damage the Trump presidency by being as stupid as Holder and Lynch were.

In fact, Barr and some of the many honest FBI employees and DoJ attorneys may very well be carefully and critically examining the evidence offered by the Ukranians implicating the Biden Gang.  They may even be looking at some of the Biden Gang’s dealings with the People’s Republic of China (we hope!).

There is nearly incontrovertible evidence Barack Obama and his AGs Lynch and Holder sought to use the law enforcement and intelligence resources of the United States government in a tyrranical move to defeat Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election.   Their effort had a lot of help from our demonstrably failed “free press” including Bezos’ Bozos at the Washington Post, Sulzberger’s and Slim’s Slimes at the New York Times, and nearly all the network and cable “skews” departments.

AG Barr’s DoJ is trying to remove the  septic tank sludge layer and sterilize the institutional space that Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Loretta Lynch produced at DoJ.  Hopefully Barr won’t get sucked in by the stuff he’s trying to clean up.

Fox News is reporting that 29-year-old Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, the Mexican citizen who shot and killed 42-year-old Kittitas County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Thompson and wounded 22-year-old Kittitas Police Officer Benito Chavez Tuesday night, was in the US illegally.    Imagine that.

According to ICE, Flores Del Toro entered the U.S. at Laredo, Texas, in April 2014 on a temporary agricultural worker visa.  There was no record of the murderer ever leaving the US or extending his visa.

Hopefully the continuing investigation will reveal his list of employers in the US as well as his motivation for shooting and killing Deputy Thompson and wounding Officer Chavez.   I’m assuming that there will be an effort to determine from whom and by what means Flores Del Toro illegally obtained the gun he used to murder Deputy Thompson and wound Officer Chavez.

Flores Del Toro was shot during the exchange of gunfire with the officers and died at the hospital.

According to John Solomon’s article entitled Senior Ukrainian official says he’s opened probe into US election interference
posted March 20, 2019, at 10:33 AM EDT, online at The Hill, “Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko … is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to the benefit of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”

Solomon’s article suggests that NABU’s Sytnyk provided the allegedly damaging financial information about Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine specifically to undermine the Trump campaign and to provide support for the Clinton campaign.

Sounds like meddling by a high-level Ukraine official (Sytnyk) in the US presidential election.

Someone might wonder what benefit Sytnyk received in advance or was promised after Clinton became President.   And who provided that benefit?

[

Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was Josef Stalin’s marshal of the Soviet Union.   In 1921, Beria was chosen for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—the infamous Cheka—the new Soviet Union’s secret police in charge of eliminating “enemies of the state,” and he became known for the violent methods he employed. By maneuvering Georgia to succumb to centralized Bolshevik control, Beria rose to the position of chairman of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known as the NKVD, in the region.and the ruthless head of the secret police, the NKVD.  (Paragraph source:  https://www.biography.com/people/lavrentiy-beria-21345281)

Beria reportedly said, “Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime.”

Beria began with a presumption “the man,” any and every man, was guilty of something.  In the absence of evidence of “the crime,” Beria would simply fabricate evidence to prove “the man’s” guilt of something.  Then he would order “the man” executed or imprisoned.  “The man’s” actual guilt of anything was meaningless.  It was enough that Beria, Stalin, and others believed him to be an enemy of the state.

Beria would likely have been proud of the methods employed by Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, US Representative Adam Schiff, and US Representative Jerrold Nadler and others to try and find a reason, any reason at all, to prosecute or at least impeach and remove Donald J. Trump for daring to win the 2016 election and be sworn in as President of the United States.  It appears to me they began with “a man” whom they wanted to remove or drive from office, and then they began the process of trying to find evidence, any evidence at all that would support a process, any process, to remove him.

I’d say Rosenstein, Schiff, and Nadler would look right at home in Beria’s uniform.

On Monday, March 11, 2019, The Washington Times published an online article headlined Support for Trump dwindles among ICE officers.

The article succinctly outlines the allegation of the National ICE Council, the union that represents ICE officers, that “… President Trump … has failed to follow through on his get-tough [campaign] promises, saying catch-and-release of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. is not only still happening, but has gone into ‘overdrive’.”

The article refers to a letter from leaders of the National ICE Council addressed to President Trump expressing their explicit concerns.  Here are links to each of the four pages in the letter:

Page 1     Page 2     Page 3     Page 4

This sounds like a letter of desperation from ICE officers.  For them (or more accurately, the National ICE Council representing them) to go directly to the President and over the heads of ICE Acting Director Ron Vitiello and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is a very remarkable act suggesting ICE’s lack of confidence in both Secretary Nielsen and Acting Director Vitiello.  More importantly, it informs the President of the obvious friction between ICE officers and their counterparts in the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection.

Often these types of letters are never seen by the President.  This one should reach him unfiltered and unedited by DHS or White House staff.  If the allegations in the letter by National ICE Council members are timely and accurate, then the Senate should not just rubber-stamp its approval for Vitiello’s appointment and the President should have a private discussion with Secretary Nielsen.

If the letter does make it to the President’s desk, I hope he reads it and takes appropriate action.

If you’re seriously interested in better understanding the issues, policies, and practices that are covered by the very broad umbrella term “border security,” then I strongly recommend you obtain a copy of a entitled Border Security, Second Edition.  The second edition was revised and copyrighted in 2018.

Because this was written primarily as an almost 500-page academic university textbook, it does not place sole emphasis on terrorism or illegal migration.  Neither is it driven by some political agenda.   It is written for colleges and universities that have or may be contemplating homeland security programs as either standalone programs or incorporated  in political science, anthropology, journalism, or sociology courses.

However, it is very expensive.  From Amazon the cost of the trade paper book plus tax and shipping was nearly $78.00.

Being the cheapskate that I am and before deciding to buy the book for myself, I obtained it through the Hayden Library via interlibrary loan from Central Carolina Community College.   That’s a very good way to try before you buy.

Rather than risk violating copyright by scanning and including the 8-page detailed Contents, I’ll just list the chapters and titles. (more…)

President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress again this week.  In a few weeks, Cohen will be headed off to federal prison for three years or so after being convicted of lying to Congress in preceding testimony.  And based on his testimony this week, House members Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows have requested the Attorney General open an investigation into their allegations that Cohen perjured himself once again.

Now, readers might reasonably ask, “Why in the world would Michael Cohen lie under oath again this past week when he’s toddling off to Hotel Chez Fed?”

The answer may well have been provided in January in a Facebook post by a Trump official and Cohen friend, Lynne Patton, who works in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In her Facebook post, Patton reportedly said, “What many of you may not be aware of is the fact that I can personally confirm that the ONLY reason Michael Cohen ‘turned on’ the President of the United States is because Mueller threatened to throw his wife in jail for up to 30 years.”  Patton’s post reportedly went on to explain, “[Cohen’s wife]  is the co-guarantor of a $20M personal loan that Mueller discovered Michael secured back in 2015 by falsely inflating the value of his taxi medallions—effectively making her part & parcel to the federal charge of ‘Making False Statements to a Financial Institution,’ to which Cohen ultimately plead guilty.”

If this report is accurate and complete, then Mueller and the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York may have offered Michael Cohen this deal:  Give us information that will either let us convict President Trump of a crime or at least allow our Democrat friends in Congress to impeach the President of the United States or your wife will spend a long time in jail.

Of course, Mueller and the USA of SDNY would insist that Michael Cohen’s information would have to be verifiable and factual.  Wouldn’t they?

Well … we are talking about pretty much the same US Department of Justice that appears to have submitted falsified by omission affidavits to the FISA court to get illegal warrants to violate the civil rights of Carter Page in order to put the squeeze on him in much the same manner they’ve squeezed Michael Cohen.

We better hope that Attorney General William Barr is honest and diligent about ferreting out dishonest and corrupt attorneys and other officials inhabiting various offices of the US Department of Justice.  It’s getting more and more difficult for we, the people, to say convincingly as John Adams did that we have established a government of laws and not of men.

Readers may recall that in January of this year, a group of high school students from Covington Catholic High School in Covington, KY, were visiting national monuments in Washington, DC.  Some of the students, including plaintiff Nicholas Sandmann, had purchased MAGA caps as souveniers and were wearing them.

During their visit, the students were approached by various demonstrators and were racially and politically derided by anti-Trump demonstrators.

Several of the national skews media including the Washington Post newspaper repeatedly reported the circumstances inaccurately, incompletely, and in a way that incorrectly suggested the high school students were the instigators.

Subsequently, one of the students (Sandmann) and his parents contacted a private attorney who investigated the incident and found sufficient reason to allege that the Washington Post had defamed Nathan Sandmann and damaged his reputation.

Fox News is reporting that on Tuesday, February 19, 2017, the attorney filed a lawsuit alleging defamation against the Washington Post.  The lawsuit was filed in Kentucky.  Here is a link to the complaint filed today in the lawsuit NICHOLAS SANDMANN, by and through his parents and natural guardians, TED SANDMANN and JULIE SANDMANN, Plaintiffs, v. WP COMPANY LLC d/b/a THE WASHINGTON POST, Defendant.

The complaint outlines the events and timeline of events explaining why this lawsuit was filed on behalf of Nicholas Sandmann.  In particular, it explains how his reputation has allegedly been damaged by the defendant, the Washington Post.  If you take the tine to read the complaint (it is pretty much written in plain English rather than outdated formal legalese), you will get a much better understanding of what it is important to prove in court during a defamation lawsuit.

As noted on the webpage of Hemmer DeFrank Wessels, PLLC, the Kentucky law firm who, along with Georgia attorney Lin Wood, are representing the plaintiff, “Lin [Wood] and Todd [McMurtry] will continue to bring wrongdoers before the court to seek damages in compensation for the harm so many have done to the Sandmann family. This is only the beginning.”

“This is only the beginning,” is a pretty good indication that other lawsuits may be filed against other news media and even some entertainment personalities whose prominence and permanence may have added to the damage of Nicholas Sandmann.