Donald Trump invited Vladimir Putin, who is still orchestrating hacks of our power grid, to the White House.

So wen I visit I will take you room. You can have the couch, understood?

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

President Trump has reportedly invited Vladimir Putin to the White House for a visit, according to a statement from the Kremlin. Putin aide Yury Ushakov told reporters Monday that during a March 20 phone conversation, Trump “suggested that the first meeting could be held in Washington” between the two leaders. “If everything goes well, I hope that the American side would not refuse its proposal to discuss the possibility of organizing the summit talks.” According to an Agence France-Presse reporter, a senior U.S. official did “not deny” that Trump “floated the idea of a White House summit,” noting that “no planning has begun as yet.” According to a TASS state media report, Ushakov told journalists that since the U.S. and Russia has expelled their respective diplomats from their countries, “there have been no specific discussions of a possible meeting.” He also said Russia “would like to believe that preparations for such a meeting will begin.” The news follows reports Trump congratulated Putin on his re-election over the phone on that call after his staff told him explicitly not to—as well as a suspected poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil and amid special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. 

I have said this before, but let me say it again, Donald Trump does not work for the American people.

Donald Trump works for the Kremlin.

And and by way of proof do you remember when Trump kicked out those 60 Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of that former spy in Britain?

Yeah well that was only for show, because he is allowing all of them to be replaced by new Russian diplomats who will also be spying for the Kremlin.

Like I said, Trump does not work for us. ANY of us.

Former Russian spy reveals Vladimir Putin's "who to poison next list." Christopher Steele is on it, but guess who isn't.

Courtesy of The Mirror: 

A Russian spy who defected to Britain today reveals he was also poisoned – and claims he is on a hit-list of EIGHT targets he says Vladimir Putin wants dead. 

Boris Karpichkov says he survived an assassination attempt – but lost nearly five stone and all of his body hair. 

The ex-KGB major has since learned of seven others – including double agent Sergei Skripal – he believes the Russian President wants to execute. 

In a terrifying development, Karpich­kov says he has been warned to watch for weapons disguised as e-cigarettes but which conceal deadly nerve gas.

 Karpich­kov does not believe he will see his next birthday, and he has reason to worry since the Kremlin was most likely behind the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Others that  Karpichkov identified as being on Putin's hit list include the following:

• OLEG GORDIEVSKY, 79 . MI6 spirited Britain’s top Cold War double agent out of Russia in 1985 in the boot of a Ford saloon. He has provided British Intelligence with information ever since. 
• BILL BROWDER, 53 . A US-born British financier banned from Russia in 2005. Interpol rejected Russian extradition requests after Browder was sentenced in his absence to nine years for tax fraud. 
• CHRISTOPHER STEELE, 53 . Former MI6 officer running private intelligence firm. Made ­unsubstantiated claims of Russian spies holding compromising video of US President Donald Trump cavorting with prostitutes. 
• IGOR SUTYAGIN, 53 . Russian nuclear weapons specialist accused of spying for Britain, for which he served 11 years for treason. Swapped in 2010 along with Skirpal for Russian sleeper agents in a US spy network including femme fatale Anna Chapman. 
• YURI SHVETS, 65 . Former KGB major who defected to America in 1994. A key witness in the police investigation into the 2006 poisoning of former spy Alexander Litvinenko. 
• VLADIMIR REZUN (alias VIKTOR SUVOROV), 70 Captain in GRU Soviet military intelligence until his defection to Britain in 1978. Now writes controversial books on Soviet military history.

I would remind you that Putin is not the only one targeting Christopher Steele: 

Two Republican senators have called for the investigation of Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled a dossier on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. 

In a letter to the US justice department, Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham claimed there was reason to believe that Steele had misled US authorities over his contacts with journalists and called for him to be investigated. 

The letter, the first criminal referral from Congress since it started investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, comes at a time when Republicans are seeking to divert those investigations from scrutinising Donald Trump’s links to Russia to focus instead on whistleblowers, the FBI, and the special counsel investigating the issue, Robert Mueller.

Christopher Steele is not an American citizen and yet he felt obligated to reveal to the US authorities that the Republican candidate for president might be compromised, and for his trouble he is marked for death by the Russian leader and is the target of an investigation by the Republicans attempting to protect that Kremlin agent who now resides in the White House.

You know we need more Americans like British citizen Christopher Steele. Individuals who actually put their lives at risk protecting the interests of the United States of America.

As I allude to in my headline one of the prominent names missing from this list is Donald J Trump. And I imagine there are no other Republicans that should fear being added either.

Nor anybody in the Trump White House for that matter as they even refused to identify Russia as the culprit behind these recent attacks. 

Sarah Sanders condemns poisoning of ex-spy in U.K. but declines to accuse Russia despite statements from PM Theresa May. pic.twitter.com/NDGtSiLxab

— Axios (@axios) March 12, 2018

But you can bet your ass that if Hillary had been elected she would be at the very top of this list, with an added financial incentive included for the agent who managed to take her out.

Newsweek reports that veteran intelligence experts believe that Trump is indeed a Kremlin asset.

Courtesy of Newsweek: 

In a December 18 interview on CNN, retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, virtually called Trump a Putin puppet. The Russian president, Clapper noted, is a former KGB “case officer,” or spy recruiter, who “knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president. That’s the appearance to me.” (Pressed to clarify his “asset” comment, Clapper said, “I’m saying this figuratively.”)

“Wow,” tweeted former CIA Russian hand John Sipher. “The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin’s behavior. Our president shouldn’t have fallen for it.”

Wow. The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin's behavior. Our President shouldn't have fallen for it. https://t.co/J6YdGCxCi4

— John Sipher (@john_sipher) December 18, 2017

Veteran spy handlers have judged Trump an easy mark for Putin, who spent years in the KGB sizing up and exploiting a target’s vulnerabilities. They note how easily he falls for praise, as when Putin thanked him and the CIA for helping him thwart a bomb attack plot in St. Petersburg. “POTUS is a [spy] handlers’ dream,” Asha Rangappa, a former special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said. “He responds, without fail, to praise and flattery and telegraphs his day-to-day thoughts on Twitter. Likewise, said Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former FBI deputy assistant director of national security and counterterrorism. “He often very publicly states he goes by his instincts. If that is accurate, he may be the ultimate unwitting asset of Russia.”

And so on. The steady drip of revelations emerging from multiple Trump investigations—his business deals with Russian investors, his associates’ many undeclared meetings with Kremlin agents, his resistance to accepting evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his indiscretion with Israeli intelligence—draws a far darker picture.

Some veteran intelligence operators think it’s well past time to shift the narrative on Trump’s disturbing affinity for Putin, which the president insists is innocent and good for world peace. “Everyone continues to dance around a clear assessment of what’s going on,” says Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer responsible for evaluating foreign threats. “My assessment,” he tells Newsweek, “is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”

For a while now I have started to think that the investigations are no longer focused on collusion, but instead are fathering information about a conspiracy between Trump and team, and the Russians.

It is not just that the Russians helped the Trump campaign, and the Trump campaign accepted that help.

It is that there was a long term strategy that Putin worked out to insert an actual Russian asset into the White House, and that asset is Donald Trump himself.

And if that is the case than it makes what Sarah Kendzior said the other day, all the more troubling.

Man who wrote book "How to Catch a Russian Spy" says this about Jared Kushner: "This man is either a Russian agent, aspiring to be a Russian agent, or was a Russian agent."

Naveed Jamali on Kushner: This man was either a Russian agent, aspiring to be a Russian agent or was a Russian agentpic.twitter.com/H1IAEFH9fn

— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) July 23, 2017

Watch the eyebrows on that guy in the lower left box.

Now I have no idea if Jamali is right about this or not, but the guy DID work as a double agent in order to out a Russian spy recruiter, worked for American intelligence, and wrote a book exposing how Russians target and woo potential spies.

So he DOES have the credentials to back up this claim.

Man I can hardly wait to read Trump's tweets in response to this.

Trump's tweets are a goldmine for spies, and they can use them to anticipate his next move or even determine what they will be.

Mexico was just ranked the second deadliest country in the world, after only Syria. Drug trade is largely the cause. We will BUILD THE WALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2017

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Trump’s Twitter feed is a gold mine for every foreign intelligence agency. Usually, intelligence officers’ efforts to collect information on world leaders are methodical, painstaking and often covert. CIA operatives have risked their lives to learn about foreign leaders so the United States could devise strategies to counter our adversaries. With Trump, though, secret operations are not necessary to understand what’s on his mind: The president’s unfiltered thoughts are available night and day, broadcast to his 32.7 million Twitter followers immediately and without much obvious mediation by diplomats, strategists or handlers. 

Intelligence agencies try to answer these main questions when looking at a rival head of state: Who is he as a person? What type of leader is he? How does that compare to what he strives to be or presents himself as? What can we expect from him? And how can we use this insight to our advantage? 

At the CIA, I tracked and analyzed terrorists and other U.S. enemies, including North Korea. But we never had such a rich source of raw intelligence about a world leader, and we certainly never had the opportunity that our adversaries (and our allies) have now — to get a real-time glimpse of a major world leader’s preoccupations, personality quirks and habits of mind. If we had, it would have given us significant advantages in our dealings with them. 

Trump’s tweets offer plenty of material for analysis. His frequent strong statements in reaction to news coverage or events make it appear as if he lacks impulse control. In building a profile of Trump, an analyst would offer suggestions on how foreign nations could instigate stress or deescalate situations, depending on what type of influence they may want to have over the president.

Great, so not only is Trump embarrassing the country with his constant tweeting, but he is also allowing foreign spies to monitor and perhaps manipulate him like no other president before him.

A little further down in the article are these two paragraphs: 

What Trump doesn’t say can be very revealing, too. For instance, the lapse of time between when the USS Fitzgerald collided with a cargo ship off the coast of Japan (12:30 p.m. on June 16, in Washington) and when the president tweeted about the incident (10:08 a.m. the next day) was nearly 23 hours. The tragedy marked the U.S. Navy’s most significant loss of life aboard a vessel since terrorists bombed the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. 

Typically, a president would quickly make public remarks about a significant military loss. With Trump, intelligence analysts would note the inconsistency compared with previous administrations and search for similar patterns. Is Trump so hands-off that he waited for his secretary of defense to speak? Did something else capture his attention during those hours that he found to be a higher priority? Between the crash and his first public statement about it, Trump tweeted a video of his remarks on a new Cuba policy, a picture of himself signing the Cuba memorandum and a reference to his campaign promise about Cuba; he also retweeted Sean Hannity, a Fox News personality, promoting an upcoming show on the “Deep State’s allies in the media” working to undermine Trump. 

Fairly easy to determine from his tweets that Trump does not know how to respond to a national crisis or emergency until he receives instruction from his aides, but has a knee jerk reaction to every perceived slight which inspires a quick and most often inappropriate off the cuff response.

At the end of the article there is this observation:

Even deleted tweets would be of interest. Trump mostly appears to delete tweets because of spelling errors, later replacing them with a correction. For an intelligence analyst, this would confirm that Trump’s Twitter feed really is a raw insight into his thought process, without much input from aides. 

Analysts would also be likely to use technology to perform content analysis on the president’s tweets in the aggregate. Intelligence agencies can employ a more robust version than the open-source projects that news organizations have used, because they can marry Trump’s tweets with information they collect through intercepts and other means. Software could look for patterns in speech or word categories representing confidence related to policy, whether Trump is considering opposing points of view and if he harbors uncertainty toward any subject. Computers can perform metadata analysis to build timelines and compare Trump’s Twitter feed with his known public schedule, creating a database of when and where he tweets and what else he’s doing at the time. Anything that provides a digital footprint adds context to the analysis. 

Trump says it’s the press’s fault that he uses Twitter as much as he does. His aides clearly want him to stop, but the president just as clearly wants and needs to be heard unfiltered. Fortunately for him, the platform lets him speak directly to his supporters whenever he chooses. Unfortunately for the rest of us, they aren’t the only ones listening.

So there you have it, yet another reason to be mortified, and possibly even terrified, by this presidency.

You know when I pictured a Trump presidency I quite literally pictured an apocalyptic landscape where the entire country was in various stages of decay and self destruction.

I actually think I might have underestimated how bad it was going to be.

We're not even half way through the first year yet.

It appears that without British secret agents we may never have discovered Trump's ties to Russia. Update!

Courtesy of The Guardian: 

Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told. 

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added. 

Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said. 

The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.

Actually even after being spoon fed the information it STILL took the American Intelligence agencies an ungodly amount of time to respond:

The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow ahead of the US election. This was in part due to US law that prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants. “They are trained not to do this,” the source stressed. 

“It looks like the [US] agencies were asleep,” the source added. “They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’ “

The message was: ‘Watch out. There’s something not right here.’”

"It looks like the US agencies were asleep." Well there's an understatement for you.

Apparently the information was considered so sensitive that it was handled at the :director level" which meant that it was delivered to CIA chief, John Brennan by the director of British Intelligence.

As reported earlier the CIA really cannot investigate American citizens, so the information was then passed on to members of Congress, and from them to the FBI.

I then took the FBI even longer to respond effectively because they were focused on the Russian hackers trying to damage Hillary Clinton, and NOT to help Donald Trump.

Just imagine if the FBI had not had their heads so far up their asses, they could have started to investigate this as early as late 2015. How might THAT might have affected the outcome of the 2016 election?

I swear the more we learn about who knew what and when, the more upsetting it is that things worked out the way that they did.

Update: Oops I almost missed this bit buried in the last paragraph:  

One source suggested the official investigation was making progress. “They now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion,” the source said. “This is between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.”

Well now, THAT is certainly some good news to start off your Friday.

Brother of Donald Trump's Secretary of Education met with Putin ally to establish a communication back channel for the future president.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. 

The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions. 

Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

Wait, what?

The article goes on to point out that Erik Prince is the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy Devos and that he donated a quarter of a million dollars to Trump's campaign.

This is how a spokesman for Prince responded to this story:

“Erik had no role on the transition team. This is a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump. Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?”

Actually you know this seems to be potentially a hell of a lot more concerning than a simple terrorist plot. So I am good with the intelligence community pursuing this.

Here is a little something else to keep in mind from a report early last month: 

An alleged computer server connection between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, an influential financial institution in Russia with connections to both the Russian and Ukrainian elite, is still being investigated by the FBI, according to a new report by CNN. 

The FBI’s counterintelligence team, which is also looking into Russia’s suspected hacking of Democratic National Committee servers and the email account of her campaign chairman, is investigating why a computer server owned by Alfa Bank repeatedly looked up a computer server owned by the Trump Organization in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Eighty percent of the attempts to look up that Trump computer server were performed by Alfa Bank — 2,820 in total — with almost all of the rest being conducted by Spectrum Health, a medical facility chain for which Dick DeVos, the husband of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, serves as chairman of the board.

Paul Vixie, who designed the DNS system used by the modern internet, previously told Slate that the most likely explanation for the interactivity between the Alfa Bank and Trump Organization servers is that they “were communicating in a secretive fashion.” 

The explanation offered by Alfa Bank is that this was all probably due to spam, but it was discounted because it was only happening between these entities and was not widespread.

And just to add a little more fuel to the fire here, yesterday we also learned that two years ago Trump's former campaign adviser, Carter Page, had been recruited by Russian spies:

Two years before joining the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser, New York business consultant Carter Page was targeted for recruitment as an intelligence source by Russian spies promising favors for business opportunities in Russia, according to a sealed FBI complaint. 

Page confirmed to ABC News that he is the individual identified as "Male-1" in a 2015 court document submitted in a case involving the Russian spies. 

Page told ABC News he cooperated in the case, and felt the Feds "unmasked" him by describing him in January 2015 in a manner that would be known to energy insiders. 

"I didn't want to be a spy," he said in an interview early Monday afternoon. "I'm not a spy."

Okay can we just go ahead and state for the record that Donald Trump, and his team, were colluding with the Russians?

Or are we still not sure?

While at Fox News Roger Ailes spied on other reporters, and even had at least one female staffer date them to gather information.

Courtesy of Media Matters:

BRIAN STELTER: In terms of the money, this is Gabriel Sherman's reporting in New York magazine. He's been a leader on this story, wrote a book about Roger Ailes a number of years ago. A lot of what he's reporting I think reporters have suspected for a while. I'll give you an example. About ten years ago I had a crush on a woman at Fox News. She was a low level staffer. I was in college at the time. So I was going out on what I thought were dates. Chris, I thought these were dates. These were not dates. She was actually reporting back to Fox News about me. She was reporting back about what I thought of her and about CNN and MSNBC and Fox. Because I was a reporter on the beat, they were actually spying on me that way. Now I didn't think that was a big deal at the time. I thought it was the way Fox operates. Fox is a political organization. But now we know they were actually sending out private investigators. They were tailing other reporters. 

 BILL CARTER: They were following reporters around. We knew covering Fox you'd have to deal with that. You'd get a call from them saying, "You better be right on this story" or the implication was, "We'll dig into your past, we'll dig into your private life." 

STELTER: So we sort of knew but now we know much much more. Because these reports, like from Gabriel Sherman, saying that money, that Ailes was using Fox News money, for his own private spending.

I found out a year later, after she left Fox. No hard feelings. I don't think it was even an "effective" operation https://t.co/QD46s1G2uh

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 9, 2016

Damn that is some Mata Hari shit right there.

Now I'm wondering about who else the Fox News lady spies were sent out to keep tabs on.

I would call this Nixonian, but in reality I don't think that even Tricky Dick went to these extremes. 

Edward Snowden claims that he is torture proof and that his information cannot be hacked. Somewhere there is an uncharacteristic smile creeping across the face of Vladimir Putin.

Cannot be tortured into talking you say?

Courtesy of Business Insider:

The dramatic plot of the Edward Snowden NSA whistleblowing saga has just taken an interesting twist: in a letter to U.S. Senator Gordon Humphreys, Snowden declares himself impervious to torture. 

Furthermore, he claims his encryption cannot be hacked. 

From his letter, posted in the Guardian: 

[N]o intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China). 

You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture. 

You know the idea of saying something like this, while sitting in Russia, under the watchful of ex-KGB agent Vladimir Putin, seems the very definition of insanity.

If Putin WANTS to see what Snowden has, assuming he has not already seen it,then he WILL see what Snowden has. Period!

If Snowden thinks that Putin is on his side, or shares his vision of respecting the rights of people not to be spied on by their government, then he is a bigger fool than any of us may have thought.

What's more, if Snowden is granted asylum by the Russian government his trouble may have only just begun.