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This broad­cast was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Con­tin­u­ing dis­cus­sion of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion as the trans­for­ma­tion of the Under­ground Reich into an above-ground mass move­ment, we return to the sub­ject of the sup­posed Russ­ian “hacks” dur­ing the elec­tion, Ger­man Ost­poli­tik and an appar­ent strug­gle between the Amer­i­can “Deep State” and the Trumpenkampfver­bande.

Cit­ing the exten­sive capa­bil­i­ties of the NSA, a group of vet­er­an intel­li­gence offi­cers has con­clud­ed that the “evi­dence” of Rus­sia hav­ing hacked the DNC is not cred­i­ble: “A New York Times report on Mon­day allud­ing to ‘over­whelm­ing cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence’ lead­ing the CIA to believe that Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin ‘deployed com­put­er hack­ers with the goal of tip­ping the elec­tion to Don­ald J. Trump’ is, sad­ly, evi­dence-free. This is no sur­prise, because hard­er evi­dence of a tech­ni­cal nature points to an inside leak, not hack­ing – by Rus­sians or any­one else. . . . . We have gone through the var­i­ous claims about hack­ing. For us, it is child’s play to dis­miss them. The email dis­clo­sures in ques­tion are the result of a leak, not a hack. . . . NSA is able to iden­ti­fy both the sender and recip­i­ent when hack­ing is involved. . . . In oth­er words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee (DNC) or of Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton (HRC) – or any oth­er serv­er in the U.S. – is col­lect­ed by the NSA.  These data trans­fers car­ry des­ti­na­tion address­es in what are called pack­ets, which enable the trans­fer to be traced and fol­lowed through the net­work. . . . The var­i­ous ways in which usu­al­ly anony­mous spokes­peo­ple for U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies are equiv­o­cat­ing – say­ing things like ‘our best guess’ or ‘our opin­ion’ or ‘our esti­mate’ etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been ‘hacked’ can­not be traced across the net­work. Giv­en NSA’s exten­sive trace capa­bil­i­ty, we con­clude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked. The evi­dence that should be there is absent; oth­er­wise, it would sure­ly be brought for­ward, since this could be done with­out any dan­ger to sources and meth­ods. Thus, we con­clude that the emails were leaked by an insid­er – as was the case with Edward Snow­den and Chelsea Man­ning. Such an insid­er could be any­one in a gov­ern­ment depart­ment or agency with access to NSA data­bas­es, or per­haps some­one with­in the DNC. . . .”

In the con­text of the high-pro­file hacks, the pro­gram reviews infor­ma­tion from pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sions in FTR #‘s 917, 923, 924, 925, 926 deal­ing with Wik­iLeaks, Trump’s dirty tricks oper­a­tive Roger Stone, Edward Snow­den, the DNC hack and the Shad­ow Bro­kers “non-hack;” and the “paint­ing of Oswald Red,” includ­ing:

• The fact that Trump’s dirty tricks oper­a­tive Roger Stone was in direct con­tact with Julian Assange pri­or to, and dur­ing, Wik­iLeaks’ pub­lish­ing of the e‑mails from DNC and John D. Podes­ta.
• The fact that Stone promised an “Octo­ber Sur­prise” from Wik­iLeaks that would affect the cam­paign.
• The fact that avail­able evi­dence does NOT impli­cate the Rus­sians in the DNC hack at all.
• The fact that the Shad­ow Bro­kers access­ing of NSA hack­ing tech­nolo­gies was prob­a­bly not a hack at all, but a leak by an insid­er using a thumb dri­ve.
• Edward Snow­den’s sus­pi­cious and, frankly, damn­ing sup­port for the unten­able “the Rus­sians did it” inter­pre­ta­tion of the DNC pen­e­tra­tion and the Shad­ow Bro­kers “non-hack.”
• Snow­den’s curi­ous tweet issued after the DNC hack and just before the Shad­ow Bro­kers sur­faced. Snow­den said “It’s time,” which has nev­er been explained. We sus­pect that it may have been a sig­nal to release the ANT/TAO mate­r­i­al.
• The fact that Wik­iLeaks asso­ciate Jacob Apple­baum, who appears to have assist­ed Snow­den’s flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong, is seen as a sus­pect in the Shad­ow Bro­kers “non-hack.”
• Apple­baum’s and Snow­den’s affil­i­a­tion with the CIA.

Next, the pro­gram high­lights the alle­ga­tion that a DNC insid­er leaked the e‑mails to Wik­iLeaks: “. . . . And, even though The New York Times and oth­er big news out­lets are report­ing as flat fact that Rus­sia hacked the Demo­c­ra­t­ic email accounts and gave the infor­ma­tion to Wik­iLeaks, for­mer British Ambas­sador Craig Mur­ray, a close asso­ciate of Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the Lon­don Dai­ly Mail that he per­son­al­ly received the email data from a “dis­gust­ed” Demo­c­rat. [Might that have been Tul­si Gabbard?–D.E.] . . . Mur­ray added that his meet­ing was with an inter­me­di­ary for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic leak­er, not the leak­er direct­ly. [Might that have been Roger Stone?–D.E.]. . .”

In the con­text of a pos­si­ble Trump mole inside the DNC, pos­si­bly assist­ing the “hacks,” we high­light Tru­menkampfver­bande links to the for­mer DNC Deputy Chair­per­son Tul­si Gab­bard (D‑Hawaii) and to Naren­dra Mod­i’s BJP, a polit­i­cal front and cat’s paw for the Hin­du nationalist/fascist RSS. The salient points include:

• Trump’s busi­ness links with mem­bers of Mod­i’s BJP. “. . . . Mr. Trump’s part­ner in the Trump Tow­er Mum­bai is the Lod­ha Group, found­ed by Man­gal Prab­hat Lod­ha, vice pres­i­dent of the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty — cur­rent­ly the gov­ern­ing par­ty in Par­lia­ment — in Maha­rash­tra State. . . . His part­ner in an office com­plex in Gur­gaon, near New Del­hi, is IREO, whose man­ag­ing direc­tor, Lalit Goy­al, is the broth­er-in-law of a Bharatiya Jana­ta mem­ber of Par­lia­ment, Sud­han­shu Mit­tal. . . .”
• Trump’s inter­view of Gab­bard for a pos­si­ble cab­i­net posi­tion.
• Steven K. Ban­non’s affin­i­ty for Gab­bard:  ” . . . .  Stephen Ban­non, Trump’s chief strate­gist, report­ed­ly likes Gab­bard because of her stance on guns, refugees and Islam­ic extrem­ism . . .”
• Ban­non’s strong affin­i­ty for Modi: ” . . . The campaign’s chief exec­u­tive, Stephen K. Ban­non, is a stu­dent of nation­al­ist move­ments. Mr. Ban­non is close to Nigel Farage, a cen­tral fig­ure in Britain’s move­ment to leave the Euro­pean Union, and he is an admir­er of India’s prime min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi, a Hin­du nation­al­ist Mr. Ban­non has called ‘the Rea­gan of India.’ It may be pure coin­ci­dence that some of Mr. Trump’s words chan­nel the nation­al­is­tic and, some argue, anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ments that Mr. Modi stoked as he rose to pow­er. But it is cer­tain­ly not coin­ci­den­tal that many of Mr. Trump’s biggest Hin­du sup­port­ers are also some of Mr. Modi’s most ardent back­ers. . . .”
• Gab­bard’s asso­ci­a­tion with Modi and the BJP: “. . . . Tul­si Gab­bard, the first Hin­du Amer­i­can in the US Con­gress, called on vis­it­ing Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi here Sun­day and pre­sent­ed him with a gin­ger flower gar­land from Hawaii. Gab­bard, a strong sup­port­er of Modi, is a Demo­c­rat Con­gress­woman from Hawaii. . . . She has also been involved in the plan­ning of Modi’s US vis­it and had last month met two BJP lead­ers Vijay Jol­ly and MP Rajyavard­han Rathore in that con­nec­tion. . . .”
• Gab­bard’s asso­ci­a­tion with the RSS: ” . . . As she hob­nobbed with the Indi­an prime min­is­ter and for­eign min­is­ter among oth­ers, The Tele­graph, a Kolkata-based news­pa­per, called her “the Sangh’s mas­cot” in the US. The Sangh, a moniker for the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh (RSS), is a right-wing hin­dut­va organ­i­sa­tion and the ide­o­log­i­cal guardian of the BJP par­ty that rules India now. . . .”

In an upcom­ing pro­gram, we will exam­ine Gab­bard’s con­tra­dict­ing ide­o­log­i­cal stances and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that she was a Trumpenkampfverbanbe/GOP mole inside the DNC. Was she the source for the leak alleged by Craig Mur­ray?

The FBI has weighed in on the “hacks,” opin­ing that it was Rus­sia try­ing to ele­vate Trump. If so, that would place the FBI and Rus­sia on the same page, as the bureau’s naked­ly par­ti­san behav­ior dur­ing the cam­paign is quite obvi­ous at this point. When the FBI sup­pos­ed­ly detect­ed Rus­sia hack­ing the DNC, it called the IT “Help Desk” and the call was treat­ed by the recep­tion­ist as a prank call.  ” . . . So I was sur­prised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI dis­cov­ered the Russ­ian attack in Sep­tem­ber 2015, it failed to send even a sin­gle agent to warn senior Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee offi­cials. Instead, mes­sages were left with the DNC IT ‘help desk.’ As a for­mer head of the FBI cyber divi­sion told the Times, this is a baf­fling deci­sion: ‘We are not talk­ing about an office that is in the mid­dle of the woods of Mon­tana.’ . . . ”

VICE News has filed a law­suit against the FBI request­ing infor­ma­tion about a num­ber of sub­jects which could prove very explo­sive IF the bureau divulges the full extent of the infor­ma­tion it has on the sub­jects. “ . . . The suit also seeks all FBI emails men­tion­ing Bill Clin­ton, Hillary Clin­ton, for­mer Clin­ton cam­paign vice chair Huma Abe­din, Abedin’s estranged hus­band Antho­ny Wein­er, Trump, for­mer New York City may­or Rudy Giu­liani, Trump advis­ers Corey Lewandows­ki, Roger Stone and Kellyanne Con­way, CNN com­men­ta­tor Jef­frey Lord, Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty, or Fox News anchor Bret Baier, among oth­ers. . . . ”

The lat­ter part of the pro­gram high­lights a num­ber of top­ics that will be cov­ered at greater length in FTR #940.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

• Trump’s appoint­ment of anoth­er “Alt-Right” fig­ure (Stephen Miller) as a top advis­er.
• The appar­ent role of Ukrain­ian fas­cists in gen­er­at­ing the “Rus­sia did it” dis­in­for­ma­tion about the DNC hack.
• The Aus­tri­an Free­dom Par­ty’s net­work­ing with Trump Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er-des­ig­nate Michael Fly­nn and their sup­port for lift­ing Russ­ian sanc­tions.
• Sec­re­tary of State-des­ig­nate Rex Tiller­son­’s oppo­si­tion to sanc­tions against Rus­sia.
• The Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work’s mas­sive hold­ings in Stan­dard Oil of New Jer­sey (Exxon, now Exxon Mobil.)
• Indi­ca­tions that Ukrain­ian fas­cist net­works may be involved with the “Rus­sia did it” meme on the high-pro­file hacks.

1. Cit­ing the exten­sive capa­bil­i­ties of the NSA, a group of vet­er­an intel­li­gence offi­cers has con­clud­ed that the “evi­dence” of Rus­sia hav­ing hacked the DNC is not cred­i­ble. The alle­ga­tions about sup­posed Russ­ian hack­ing are based on “over­whelm­ing cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence,” and the ana­lysts note that NSA could pro­duce extreme­ly pre­cise, detailed infor­ma­tion on where the “hacks” came from. They con­clude that the infor­ma­tion breach­es were per­formed by an “insid­er” with access to the NSA data­base. This rais­es more ques­tions than answers. “A New York Times report on Mon­day allud­ing to ‘over­whelm­ing cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence’ lead­ing the CIA to believe that Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin ‘deployed com­put­er hack­ers with the goal of tip­ping the elec­tion to Don­ald J. Trump’ is, sad­ly, evi­dence-free. This is no sur­prise, because hard­er evi­dence of a tech­ni­cal nature points to an inside leak, not hack­ing – by Rus­sians or any­one else. . . . . We have gone through the var­i­ous claims about hack­ing. For us, it is child’s play to dis­miss them. The email dis­clo­sures in ques­tion are the result of a leak, not a hack. . . . NSA is able to iden­ti­fy both the sender and recip­i­ent when hack­ing is involved. Thanks large­ly to the mate­r­i­al released by Edward Snow­den, we can pro­vide a full pic­ture of NSA’s exten­sive domes­tic data-col­lec­tion net­work includ­ing Upstream pro­grams like Fairview, Storm­brew and Blar­ney. . . . In oth­er words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee (DNC) or of Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton (HRC) – or any oth­er serv­er in the U.S. – is col­lect­ed by the NSA.  These data trans­fers car­ry des­ti­na­tion address­es in what are called pack­ets, which enable the trans­fer to be traced and fol­lowed through the net­work. . . . The var­i­ous ways in which usu­al­ly anony­mous spokes­peo­ple for U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies are equiv­o­cat­ing – say­ing things like ‘our best guess’ or ‘our opin­ion’ or ‘our esti­mate’ etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been ‘hacked’ can­not be traced across the net­work. Giv­en NSA’s exten­sive trace capa­bil­i­ty, we con­clude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked. The evi­dence that should be there is absent; oth­er­wise, it would sure­ly be brought for­ward, since this could be done with­out any dan­ger to sources and meth­ods. Thus, we con­clude that the emails were leaked by an insid­er – as was the case with Edward Snow­den and Chelsea Man­ning. Such an insid­er could be any­one in a gov­ern­ment depart­ment or agency with access to NSA data­bas­es, or per­haps some­one with­in the DNC. . . .”

“US Intel Vets Dis­pute Rus­sia Hack­ing Claims” by Vet­er­an Intel­li­gence Pro­fes­sion­als for San­i­ty; Con­sor­tium News; 12/12/2016.

A New York Times report on Mon­day allud­ing to “over­whelm­ing cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence” lead­ing the CIA to believe that Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin “deployed com­put­er hack­ers with the goal of tip­ping the elec­tion to Don­ald J. Trump” is, sad­ly, evi­dence-free. This is no sur­prise, because hard­er evi­dence of a tech­ni­cal nature points to an inside leak, not hack­ing – by Rus­sians or any­one else. . . .

. . . . We have gone through the var­i­ous claims about hack­ing. For us, it is child’s play to dis­miss them. The email dis­clo­sures in ques­tion are the result of a leak, not a hack. Here’s the dif­fer­ence between leak­ing and hack­ing:

Leak: When some­one phys­i­cal­ly takes data out of an orga­ni­za­tion and gives it to some oth­er per­son or orga­ni­za­tion, as Edward Snow­den and Chelsea Man­ning did.

Hack: When some­one in a remote loca­tion elec­tron­i­cal­ly pen­e­trates oper­at­ing sys­tems, fire­walls or any oth­er cyber-pro­tec­tion sys­tem and then extracts data.

All signs point to leak­ing, not hack­ing. If hack­ing were involved, the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency would know it – and know both sender and recip­i­ent.

In short, since leak­ing requires phys­i­cal­ly remov­ing data – on a thumb dri­ve, for exam­ple – the only way such data can be copied and removed, with no elec­tron­ic trace of what has left the serv­er, is via a phys­i­cal stor­age device.

Awe­some Tech­ni­cal Capa­bil­i­ties

Again, NSA is able to iden­ti­fy both the sender and recip­i­ent when hack­ing is involved. Thanks large­ly to the mate­r­i­al released by Edward Snow­den, we can pro­vide a full pic­ture of NSA’s exten­sive domes­tic data-col­lec­tion net­work includ­ing Upstream pro­grams like Fairview, Storm­brew and Blar­ney. These include at least 30 com­pa­nies in the U.S. oper­at­ing the fiber net­works that car­ry the Pub­lic Switched Tele­phone Net­work as well as the World Wide Web. This gives NSA unpar­al­leled access to data flow­ing with­in the U.S. and data going out to the rest of the world, as well as data tran­sit­ing the U.S.

In oth­er words, any data that is passed from the servers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee (DNC) or of Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton (HRC) – or any oth­er serv­er in the U.S. – is col­lect­ed by the NSA.  These data trans­fers car­ry des­ti­na­tion address­es in what are called pack­ets, which enable the trans­fer to be traced and fol­lowed through the net­work.

Pack­ets: Emails being passed across the World Wide Web are bro­ken down into small­er seg­ments called pack­ets. These pack­ets are passed into the net­work to be deliv­ered to a recip­i­ent. This means the pack­ets need to be reassem­bled at the receiv­ing end.

To accom­plish this, all the pack­ets that form a mes­sage are assigned an iden­ti­fy­ing num­ber that enables the receiv­ing end to col­lect them for reassem­bly. More­over, each pack­et car­ries the orig­i­na­tor and ulti­mate receiv­er Inter­net pro­to­col num­ber (either IPV4 or IPV6) that enables the net­work to route data.

When email pack­ets leave the U.S., the oth­er “Five Eyes” coun­tries (the U.K., Cana­da, Aus­tralia, and New Zealand) and the sev­en or eight addi­tion­al coun­tries par­tic­i­pat­ing with the U.S. in bulk-col­lec­tion of every­thing on the plan­et would also have a record of where those email pack­ets went after leav­ing the U.S.

These col­lec­tion resources are exten­sive [see attached NSA slides 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; they include hun­dreds of trace route pro­grams that trace the path of pack­ets going across the net­work and tens of thou­sands of hard­ware and soft­ware implants in switch­es and servers that man­age the net­work. Any emails being extract­ed from one serv­er going to anoth­er would be, at least in part, rec­og­niz­able and trace­able by all these resources.

The bot­tom line is that the NSA would know where and how any “hacked” emails from the DNC, HRC or any oth­er servers were rout­ed through the net­work. This process can some­times require a clos­er look into the rout­ing to sort out inter­me­di­ate clients, but in the end sender and recip­i­ent can be traced across the net­work.

The var­i­ous ways in which usu­al­ly anony­mous spokes­peo­ple for U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies are equiv­o­cat­ing – say­ing things like “our best guess” or “our opin­ion” or “our esti­mate” etc. – shows that the emails alleged to have been “hacked” can­not be traced across the net­work. Giv­en NSA’s exten­sive trace capa­bil­i­ty, we con­clude that DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked.

The evi­dence that should be there is absent; oth­er­wise, it would sure­ly be brought for­ward, since this could be done with­out any dan­ger to sources and meth­ods. Thus, we con­clude that the emails were leaked by an insid­er – as was the case with Edward Snow­den and Chelsea Man­ning. Such an insid­er could be any­one in a gov­ern­ment depart­ment or agency with access to NSA data­bas­es, or per­haps some­one with­in the DNC.

As for the com­ments to the media as to what the CIA believes, the real­i­ty is that CIA is almost total­ly depen­dent on NSA for ground truth in the com­mu­ni­ca­tions are­na. Thus, it remains some­thing of a mys­tery why the media is being fed strange sto­ries about hack­ing that have no basis in fact. In sum, giv­en what we know of NSA’s exist­ing capa­bil­i­ties, it beg­gars belief that NSA would be unable to iden­ti­fy any­one – Russ­ian or not – attempt­ing to inter­fere in a U.S. elec­tion by hack­ing. . . .

2. Next, the pro­gram high­lights the alle­ga­tion that a DNC insid­er leaked the e‑mails to Wik­iLeaks: “. . . . And, even though The New York Times and oth­er big news out­lets are report­ing as flat fact that Rus­sia hacked the Demo­c­ra­t­ic email accounts and gave the infor­ma­tion to Wik­iLeaks, for­mer British Ambas­sador Craig Mur­ray, a close asso­ciate of Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the Lon­don Dai­ly Mail that he per­son­al­ly received the email data from a “dis­gust­ed” Demo­c­rat. [Might that have been Tul­si Gabbard?–D.E.] . . . Mur­ray added that his meet­ing was with an inter­me­di­ary for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic leak­er, not the leak­er direct­ly. [Might that have been Roger Stone?–D.E.]. . .”

“Mak­ing Rus­sia ‘The Ene­my’ ” by Robert Par­ry; Con­sor­tium News; 12/15/2016.

. . . . . And, even though The New York Times and oth­er big news out­lets are report­ing as flat fact that Rus­sia hacked the Demo­c­ra­t­ic email accounts and gave the infor­ma­tion to Wik­iLeaks, for­mer British Ambas­sador Craig Mur­ray, a close asso­ciate of Wik­iLeaks founder Julian Assange, told the Lon­don Dai­ly Mail that he per­son­al­ly received the email data from a “dis­gust­ed” Demo­c­rat. [Might that have been Tul­si Gabbard?–D.E.]

Mur­ray said he flew from Lon­don to Wash­ing­ton for a clan­des­tine hand­off from one of the email sources in Sep­tem­ber, receiv­ing the pack­age in a wood­ed area near Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty.

“Nei­ther of [the leaks, from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee or Clin­ton cam­paign chair­man John Podes­ta] came from the Rus­sians,” Mur­ray said, adding: “the source had legal access to the infor­ma­tion. The doc­u­ments came from inside leaks, not hacks.”

Mur­ray said the insid­er felt “dis­gust at the cor­rup­tion of the Clin­ton Foun­da­tion and the tilt­ing of the pri­ma­ry elec­tion play­ing field against Bernie Sanders.” Mur­ray added that his meet­ing was with an inter­me­di­ary for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic leak­er, not the leak­er direct­ly. [Might that have been Roger Stone?–D.E.]. . .

4b. In India, Trump’s busi­ness con­tacts encom­pass peo­ple from Naren­dara Mod­i’s BJP.

“World of Poten­tial Con­flict For a Devel­op­er Pres­i­dent” Richard C. Pad­dock, Eric Lip­ton, Ellen Bar­ry, Rod Nord­land, Dan­ny Hakim and Simon Romero; The New York Times; 11/27/2916.

. . . . Mr. Trump’s part­ner in the Trump Tow­er Mum­bai is the Lod­ha Group, found­ed by Man­gal Prab­hat Lod­ha, vice pres­i­dent of the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty — cur­rent­ly the gov­ern­ing par­ty in Par­lia­ment — in Maha­rash­tra State. The Lod­ha Group has already nego­ti­at­ed with the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment; it announced a land­mark pur­chase of a prop­er­ty, known as the Wash­ing­ton House, on tony Alta­mount Road, from the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment for 3.75 bil­lion rupees, almost $70 mil­lion.

His part­ner in an office com­plex in Gur­gaon, near New Del­hi, is IREO, whose man­ag­ing direc­tor, Lalit Goy­al, is the broth­er-in-law of a Bharatiya Jana­ta mem­ber of Par­lia­ment, Sud­han­shu Mit­tal. Mr. Mit­tal, in an inter­view, has denied hav­ing any con­nec­tion with the real estate com­pa­ny. . . .

4c. Some­one we will be exam­in­ing at great length in shows to come is Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tul­si Gab­bard (D‑Hawaii). A major sup­port­er of Bernie Sanders dur­ing the cam­paign, Gab­bard was inter­viewed for a cab­i­net posi­tion.

Gab­bard is viewed pos­i­tive­ly by Steve Ban­non, Trump’s top advis­er and “Alt-Right” king­pin.

“Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep. Tul­si Gab­bard ‘Under Seri­ous Con­sid­er­a­tion’ for Trump Cab­i­net”; ABC News; 11/21/2016.

. . . . Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep. Tul­si Gab­bard, a high-pro­file Bernie Sanders sup­port­er dur­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries, is “under seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion” for var­i­ous Cab­i­net posi­tions in Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion, accord­ing to a senior offi­cial on the tran­si­tion team.

Accord­ing to the offi­cial, the 35-year-old Hawaii con­gress­woman is being looked as a can­di­date for sec­re­tary of state, sec­re­tary of defense or Unit­ed Nations ambas­sador. If select­ed, Gab­bard will be the first woman as well as the youngest pick for Trump’s Cab­i­net.

She met with him this morn­ing in his New York City offices at Trump Tow­er. The Trump tran­si­tion source said that their sit-down was a ‘ter­rif­ic meet­ing’ and that the Trump team sees her as very impres­sive. . . .

4d. “Alt-Right” king­pin Stephen Ban­non, Trump’s top pol­i­cy advis­er, is a fan of Gab­bard.

“Don­ald Trump Met with Bernie Sanders Sup­port­er Tul­si Gab­bard to Dis­cuss Syr­ia” by Alex Daugh­er­ty; McClatchy DC ; 11/21/2016.

” . . . .  Stephen Ban­non, Trump’s chief strate­gist, report­ed­ly likes Gab­bard because of her stance on guns, refugees and Islam­ic extrem­ism along with her abil­i­ty to invoke strong anti-estab­lish­ment pop­ulist sen­ti­ment on the left. . . .”

4e. Ban­non is also a fan of Modi.

In FTR #889, we syn­op­sized Pierre Omid­yar’s polit­i­cal career, includ­ing his par­tial bankrolling of the Maid­an coup that brought the heirs to the Nazi-allied OUN/B to pow­er in Ukraine and his finan­cial sup­port for the elec­tion of Hin­du nationalist/fascist Naren­dra Modi in India.

Inter­est­ing­ly, and per­haps sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Don­ald Trump has drawn sup­port from Hin­du nation­al­ists of the Modi stripe.

There is an impor­tant ele­ment of net­work­ing here: Stephen K. Ban­non is a sup­port­er of Mod­i’s move­ment, as well as that of Nigel Farage.

” . . . . Mr. Trump may be large­ly indif­fer­ent to the rea­sons behind his Hin­du loy­al­ists’ fer­vor, but his most senior advis­ers are not. The campaign’s chief exec­u­tive, Stephen K. Ban­non, is a stu­dent of nation­al­ist move­ments. Mr. Ban­non is close to Nigel Farage, a cen­tral fig­ure in Britain’s move­ment to leave the Euro­pean Union, and he is an admir­er of India’s prime min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi, a Hin­du nation­al­ist Mr. Ban­non has called ‘the Rea­gan of India.’

It may be pure coin­ci­dence that some of Mr. Trump’s words chan­nel the nation­al­is­tic and, some argue, anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ments that Mr. Modi stoked as he rose to pow­er. But it is cer­tain­ly not coin­ci­den­tal that many of Mr. Trump’s biggest Hin­du sup­port­ers are also some of Mr. Modi’s most ardent back­ers. . . .”

In FTR #882, we not­ed sim­i­lar­i­ties in fas­cist move­ments around the world, high­light­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties between Hin­du nationalist/fascists from Mod­i’s RSS and Euro­pean and Amer­i­can fas­cists. Those sim­i­lar­i­ties are front and cen­ter in the over­lap between sup­port­ers of Modi and those of Trump. The Trumpenkampfver­bande and Mod­i’s cadre demo­nize Mus­lims.

“Among Don­ald Trump’s Biggest Fans: Hin­du Nation­al­ists” by Jere­my Peters; The New York Times; 10/14/2016.

. . . . This cel­e­bra­tion of Mr. Trump in New Del­hi in May, and oth­ers like it in India this year, are the work of a small, devot­ed and increas­ing­ly vis­i­ble fac­tion of Hin­du nation­al­ists in India and the Unit­ed States who see Mr. Trump as the embod­i­ment of the cock­sure, polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect, strong­man brand of pol­i­tics they admire.

That some of Mr. Trump’s most pas­sion­ate fol­low­ers are Indi­an may seem, at first, some­what strange, giv­en how fond he is of scorn­ing Asian coun­tries where cheap labor saps demand for Amer­i­can work­ers. A poll on Asian-Amer­i­cans’ polit­i­cal lean­ings con­duct­ed in August and Sep­tem­ber found that just 7 per­cent of Indi­an-Amer­i­cans said they would vote for Mr. Trump.

But in one of the more pecu­liar pair­ings of this most pecu­liar polit­i­cal sea­son, Mr. Trump has unwit­ting­ly fash­ioned a niche con­stituen­cy in the over­lap between the Indi­an right and the Amer­i­can right, which share a lot of the same anx­i­eties about ter­ror­ism, immi­gra­tion and the loss of pres­tige that they believe their lead­ers have been too slow to reverse. . . .

. . . . “There’s a lot of par­al­lels there,” said Sha­l­abh Kumar, the found­ing chair­man of the Repub­li­can Hin­du Coali­tion. “Mr. Trump is all about devel­op­ment, devel­op­ment, devel­op­ment; pros­per­i­ty, pros­per­i­ty, pros­per­i­ty; tremen­dous job growth. And at the same time, he rec­og­nizes the need to con­trol the bor­ders.”

As one of Mr. Trump’s biggest Hin­du finan­cial back­ers, Mr. Kumar, who runs an elec­tron­ics man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny in Illi­nois and grew up in the state of Pun­jab along the Pak­istani bor­der, has helped orga­nize a speech by the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee in Edi­son, N.J., at a Bol­ly­wood-themed char­i­ty con­cert on Sat­ur­day. The pro­ceeds will ben­e­fit ter­ror­ism vic­tims.

“It will be an incred­i­ble evening,” Mr. Trump said in a video pro­mot­ing it, one of the few eth­nic events he has agreed to do dur­ing this cam­paign.

Mr. Trump may be large­ly indif­fer­ent to the rea­sons behind his Hin­du loy­al­ists’ fer­vor, but his most senior advis­ers are not. The campaign’s chief exec­u­tive, Stephen K. Ban­non, is a stu­dent of nation­al­ist move­ments. Mr. Ban­non is close to Nigel Farage, a cen­tral fig­ure in Britain’s move­ment to leave the Euro­pean Union, and he is an admir­er of India’s prime min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi, a Hin­du nation­al­ist Mr. Ban­non has called “the Rea­gan of India.”

It may be pure coin­ci­dence that some of Mr. Trump’s words chan­nel the nation­al­is­tic and, some argue, anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ments that Mr. Modi stoked as he rose to pow­er. But it is cer­tain­ly not coin­ci­den­tal that many of Mr. Trump’s biggest Hin­du sup­port­ers are also some of Mr. Modi’s most ardent back­ers.

At times, the sim­i­lar­i­ty of Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Modi’s polit­i­cal vocab­u­lary is strik­ing. . . .

4f. Tul­si Gab­bard is a sup­port­er of Modi, net­work­ing with Mod­i’s BJP and help­ing to plan Mod­i’s U.S. vis­it.

“Tul­si Gab­bard, US Con­gress­woman Calls on Modi” [IANS]; Times of India; 9/29/2014.

. . . . Tul­si Gab­bard, the first Hin­du Amer­i­can in the US Con­gress, called on vis­it­ing Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi here Sun­day and pre­sent­ed him with a gin­ger flower gar­land from Hawaii.

Gab­bard, a strong sup­port­er of Modi, is a Demo­c­rat Con­gress­woman from Hawaii.

The 33-year-old Gab­bard is the first prac­tis­ing Hin­du Amer­i­can in the Con­gress who took her oath on the Bhag­wad Gita.

She had spo­ken to Modi after his vic­to­ry in the Indi­an gen­er­al elec­tions and con­grat­u­lat­ed him and the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP).

She has also been involved in the plan­ning of Modi’s US vis­it and had last month met two BJP lead­ers Vijay Jol­ly and MP Rajyavard­han Rathore in that con­nec­tion.

Gab­bard has always main­tained that it was a “great blun­der” by the US gov­ern­ment to have denied a visa to Modi in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat riots. . . .

4g. Gab­bard, it turns out, is also net­worked with the RSS, the fas­cist par­ty for which the BJP serves as a polit­i­cal catspaw.

“Tul­si Gab­bard, the First Hin­du in U.S. Con­gress, on Modi, Hin­duism, and Link­ing Islam to Ter­ror” by Manu Bal­achan­dran; Quartz (India); 3/02/2016.

. . . . Speak­ing at a fundrais­ing event for the BJP in August 2014 . . . Gab­bard said that Modi’s elec­tion vic­to­ry was only pos­si­ble because “peo­ple stood up, one by one by one by one, and said we will demand that this change occurs.” . . . Gab­bard was treat­ed as roy­al­ty on her vis­it to India last year. As she hob­nobbed with the Indi­an prime min­is­ter and for­eign min­is­ter among oth­ers, The Tele­graph, a Kolkata-based news­pa­per, called her “the Sangh’s mas­cot” in the US. The Sangh, a moniker for the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh (RSS), is a right-wing hin­dut­va organ­i­sa­tion and the ide­o­log­i­cal guardian of the BJP par­ty that rules India now. . . .

5. Josh Mar­shall has a piece that high­lights a notable piece in the recent New York Times report about how the dam­age done by who­ev­er hacked the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee was com­pound­ed by the fact that the DNC’s IT staff didn’t take seri­ous­ly the FBI’s warn­ings that it might have been hacked. Back in Sep­tem­ber of 2015, when the FBI informed the DNC about the bureau’s sus­pi­cion that the DNC might be the tar­get of a hack, the FBI didn’t actu­al­ly have some­one come by and talk with them. No, they called the DNC, and the calls were for­ward­ed to the IT “help desk”. That was it. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the tech sup­port con­trac­tor who talked with the agent inter­pret­ed it as a prank and ignored it.

“ . . . . It goes with­out say­ing that FBI Head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, DC has a very clear under­stand­ing of who runs the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee, start­ing – at the time – with the sit­ting Mem­ber of Con­gress who ran the orga­ni­za­tion. Then there’s the exec­u­tive direc­tor. The finance chair. Myr­i­ad exec­u­tive, nation­al com­mit­tee per­sons. If this was a seri­ous busi­ness, which obvi­ous­ly it was, and the FBI thought it was impor­tant to get the atten­tion of a deci­sion-mak­er in the orga­ni­za­tion, it would have been very easy to do. But the way it was han­dled was some­thing like the equiv­a­lent of see­ing a prob­lem at a major cor­po­ra­tion and leav­ing mes­sages with the recep­tion­ist. . . . .”

In relat­ed news, the FBI has been issu­ing warn­ings since Octo­ber of 2015 about a wave of peo­ple imper­son­at­ing FBI agents and oth­er gov­ern­ment agents in order to scam peo­ple.

“The Unfold­ing Chron­i­cle of WTF by Josh Mar­shall; Talk­ing Points Memo
Editor’s Blog ; 12/15/2016.

This is just a small part of a sprawl­ing sto­ry. But indulge me for a moment while I focus in on it. John Podes­ta has apiece out tonight in the Post which is a broad indict­ment of the FBI, for its obses­sion with Sec­re­tary Clinton’s pri­vate email serv­er and its lack­adaisi­cal indif­fer­ence to Russ­ian sab­o­tage efforts against her par­ty and then her cam­paign. In the begin­ning of that piece Podes­ta zeroes in on some­thing that jumped out at me too when I read the big New York Times sto­ry on the his­to­ry of the Clin­ton hacks.

Here’s the pas­sage.

As the for­mer chair of the Clin­ton cam­paign and a direct tar­get of Russ­ian hack­ing, I under­stand just how seri­ous this is. So I was sur­prised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI dis­cov­ered the Russ­ian attack in Sep­tem­ber 2015, it failed to send even a sin­gle agent to warn senior Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee offi­cials. Instead, mes­sages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.” As a for­mer head of the FBI cyber divi­sion told the Times, this is a baf­fling deci­sion: “We are not talk­ing about an office that is in the mid­dle of the woods of Mon­tana.”

Here’s the pas­sage in the Times piece, which I need to quote at some length to cap­ture the fla­vor of the pas­sage (with a few sen­tences high­light­ed) …

When Spe­cial Agent Adri­an Hawkins of the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion called the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee in Sep­tem­ber 2015 to pass along some trou­bling news about its com­put­er net­work, he was trans­ferred, nat­u­ral­ly, to the help desk.

His mes­sage was brief, if alarm­ing. At least one com­put­er sys­tem belong­ing to the D.N.C. had been com­pro­mised by hack­ers fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors had named “the Dukes,” a cyberes­pi­onage team linked to the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment.

The F.B.I. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years try­ing to kick the Dukes out of the unclas­si­fied email sys­tems of the White House, the State Depart­ment and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-pro­tect­ed net­works.

Yared Tamene, the tech-sup­port con­trac­tor at the D.N.C. who field­ed the call, was no expert in cyber­at­tacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and con­duct a cur­so­ry search of the D.N.C. com­put­er sys­tem logs to look for hints of such a cyber­in­tru­sion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Spe­cial Agent Hawkins called back repeat­ed­ly over the next sev­er­al weeks — in part because he wasn’t cer­tain the caller was a real F.B.I. agent and not an impos­tor.

“I had no way of dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing the call I just received from a prank call,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an inter­nal memo, obtained by The New York Times, that detailed his con­tact with the F.B.I.

It was the cryp­tic first sign of a cyberes­pi­onage and infor­ma­tion-war­fare cam­paign devised to dis­rupt the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the first such attempt by a for­eign pow­er in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. What start­ed as an infor­ma­tion-gath­er­ing oper­a­tion, intel­li­gence offi­cials believe, ulti­mate­ly mor­phed into an effort to harm one can­di­date, Hillary Clin­ton, and tip the elec­tion to her oppo­nent, Don­ald J. Trump.

Like anoth­er famous Amer­i­can elec­tion scan­dal, it start­ed with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Water­gate com­plex, the bur­glars plant­ed lis­ten­ing devices and jim­mied a fil­ing cab­i­net. This time, the bur­glary was con­duct­ed from afar, direct­ed by the Krem­lin, with spear-phish­ing emails and zeros and ones.

An exam­i­na­tion by The Times of the Russ­ian oper­a­tion — based on inter­views with dozens of play­ers tar­get­ed in the attack, intel­li­gence offi­cials who inves­ti­gat­ed it and Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who delib­er­at­ed over the best response — reveals a series of missed sig­nals, slow respons­es and a con­tin­u­ing under­es­ti­ma­tion of the seri­ous­ness of the cyber­at­tack.

The D.N.C.’s fum­bling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russ­ian intru­sion was lost. The fail­ure to grasp the scope of the attacks under­cut efforts to min­i­mize their impact. And the White House’s reluc­tance to respond force­ful­ly meant the Rus­sians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a deci­sion that could prove crit­i­cal in deter­ring future cyber­at­tacks.

The low-key approach of the F.B.I. meant that Russ­ian hack­ers could roam freely through the committee’s net­work for near­ly sev­en months before top D.N.C. offi­cials were alert­ed to the attack and hired cyber­ex­perts to pro­tect their sys­tems. In the mean­time, the hack­ers moved on to tar­gets out­side the D.N.C., includ­ing Mrs. Clinton’s cam­paign chair­man, John D. Podes­ta, whose pri­vate email account was hacked months lat­er.

I don’t nor­mal­ly like to block­quote so much of anoth­er arti­cle. But I do so here for a spe­cif­ic rea­son: I want to cap­ture not just the nar­ra­tive of events but the edi­to­r­i­al gloss. The impres­sion is one of a Clin­ton cam­paign or DNC that couldn’t keep its eye on the ball, missed the clues. “The D.N.C.’s fum­bling encounter with the F.B.I. meant the best chance to halt the Russ­ian intru­sion was lost. “

Clear­ly, one wish­es that Tamene would have esca­lat­ed the calls to the right per­son in the orga­ni­za­tion. But even run­ning the very small (under 25 peo­ple) orga­ni­za­tion I do, it’s not sur­pris­ing to me that it turned out the way that it did. Even at our small lev­el, the vol­ume of over-the-tran­som infor­ma­tion is immense. Most times that infor­ma­tion is han­dled by peo­ple who don’t have all the infor­ma­tion to judge whether a par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tion is crit­i­cal or insub­stan­tial or whether it’s a hoax or not. Our team does a great job of it, as you can judge by how many leads and scoops we’ve found over the years in the tor­rent of email traf­fic we receive every day. Still, stuff gets missed. And we’re a real­ly small oper­a­tion. The idea that an FBI inves­ti­ga­tion into for­eign gov­ern­ment espi­onage against one of the country’s two major polit­i­cal party’s would have been han­dled with a call to the com­put­er help line is almost beyond belief.

It goes with­out say­ing that FBI Head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, DC has a very clear under­stand­ing of who runs the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee, start­ing – at the time – with the sit­ting Mem­ber of Con­gress who ran the orga­ni­za­tion. Then there’s the exec­u­tive direc­tor. The finance chair. Myr­i­ad exec­u­tive, nation­al com­mit­teep­er­sons. If this was a seri­ous busi­ness, which obvi­ous­ly it was, and the FBI thought it was impor­tant to get the atten­tion of a deci­sion-mak­er in the orga­ni­za­tion, it would have been very easy to do. But the way it was han­dled was some­thing like the equiv­a­lent of see­ing a prob­lem at a major cor­po­ra­tion and leav­ing mes­sages with the recep­tion­ist.

As Podes­ta puts it …

What takes this from baf­fling to down­right infu­ri­at­ing is that at near­ly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be both­ered to dri­ve 10 min­utes to raise the alarm at DNC head­quar­ters, two agents accom­pa­nied by attor­neys from the Jus­tice Depart­ment were in Den­ver vis­it­ing a tech firm that had helped main­tain Clinton’s email serv­er.

Defeat is bit­ter, espe­cial­ly if you have rea­son to believe that you were cheat­ed in some sense. It makes it vast­ly hard­er to let go. But I get why Podes­ta went apoplec­tic about this. I don’t believe the right ‘pri­vate serv­er inves­ti­ga­tion’ hand knew what the left ‘counter-espi­onage’ hand was doing. So much of his­to­ry is writ­ten in the dead weight of bureau­crat­ic iner­tia and con­fu­sion. In any case these are dif­fer­ent beasts. They each need­ed to be han­dled on their own terms. But again, it is aston­ish­ing that the FBI knew this intru­sion was afoot for the bet­ter part of a year before mak­ing any real attempt to con­tact the prin­ci­pals of the orga­ni­za­tion.

…

6. Here’s a law­suit worth keep­ing an eye on: Vice News is suing the FBI for a wide range of records relat­ed to the FBI’s inves­ti­ga­tions and actions relat­ed to Hillary Clin­ton and Don­ald Trump in the lead up to the 2016 elec­tion. It fol­lows on a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request for the same doc­u­ments ear­li­er this month. “ . . . The suit also seeks all FBI emails men­tion­ing Bill Clin­ton, Hillary Clin­ton, for­mer Clin­ton cam­paign vice chair Huma Abe­din, Abedin’s estranged hus­band Antho­ny Wein­er, Trump, for­mer New York City may­or Rudy Giu­liani, Trump advis­ers Corey Lewandows­ki, Roger Stone and Kellyanne Con­way, CNN com­men­ta­tor Jef­frey Lord, Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty, or Fox News anchor Bret Baier, among oth­ers. . . . ”

“FBI Sued for Files on Elec­tion-Era Probes” by Josh Ger­stein; Politi­co; 12/13/2016.

A jour­nal­ist and a uni­ver­si­ty researcher are suing the FBI for a slew of records relat­ing to the law enforce­ment agency’s activ­i­ties in the months lead­ing up to the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

The suit, filed Tues­day in fed­er­al court in Wash­ing­ton, demands a wide range of FBI files and emails per­tain­ing to the agency’s inves­ti­ga­tion into Hillary Clinton’s pri­vate email serv­er and its inquiries into the Clin­ton Foun­da­tion. The law­suit also demands infor­ma­tion on a vari­ety of peo­ple, enti­ties and top­ics asso­ci­at­ed with the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign such as Bre­it­bart News, Bre­it­bart chair­man Steve Ban­non (who has been picked to serve as a top White House advis­er to Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump) and the “alt-right.”

The suit also seeks all FBI emails men­tion­ing Bill Clin­ton, Hillary Clin­ton, for­mer Clin­ton cam­paign vice chair Huma Abe­din, Abedin’s estranged hus­band Antho­ny Wein­er, Trump, for­mer New York City may­or Rudy Giu­liani, Trump advis­ers Corey Lewandows­ki, Roger Stone and Kellyanne Con­way, CNN com­men­ta­tor Jef­frey Lord, Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty, or Fox News anchor Bret Baier, among oth­ers.

Vice News reporter Jason Leopold and Harvard/MIT researcher Ryan Shapiro sub­mit­ted the request on Decem­ber 2. Nor­mal­ly, agen­cies are enti­tled to at least 20 busi­ness days to respond to a FOIA request before a suit is filed. How­ev­er, the case filed Tues­day claims the FBI failed to respond to a demand for expe­dit­ed pro­cess­ing of their request, appar­ent­ly on grounds of the pub­lic and media inter­est in the FBI’s pre-elec­tion actions.

Some in both the Clin­ton and Trump camps have claimed that FBI Direc­tor James Comey’s late Octo­ber dis­clo­sure that his agency was review­ing new emails rel­e­vant to the Clin­ton probe and a fol­low-up let­ter attempt­ing to put the mat­ter to rest swung the elec­tion to Trump by gen­er­at­ing more rounds of media cov­er­age about the email probe, one of Clinton’s major lia­bil­i­ties in the cam­paign.

“Cur­rent FBI Direc­tor James Comey also insists, notwith­stand­ing the FBI’s pre­vi­ous trans­gres­sions, today’s Bureau tru­ly is out­side and above pol­i­tics. How­ev­er, numer­ous lead­ing polit­i­cal and news media fig­ures from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum explic­it­ly assert the FBI repeat­ed­ly and with sig­nif­i­cant impact affect­ed the out­come of the 2016 U.S. Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion,” Leopold and Shapiro’s attor­ney, Jef­frey Light, wrote in the com­plaint.

…

7. That’s going to be one hel­lu­va law­suit if it pans out. And note that per­haps the most explo­sive doc­u­ments weren’t men­tioned in that arti­cle. That would be the doc­u­ments relat­ing to alleged FBI inves­ti­ga­tions into Trump that also took place last year. It would be espe­cial­ly explo­sive if true since these inves­ti­ga­tions were alleged­ly tak­ing place at the same time James Comey wrote his infa­mous let­ter about newsly dis­cov­ered Clin­ton emails 11 days before the elec­tion that Comey felt com­pelled to tell the world about for some rea­son:

“VICE News Sues FBI” by Jason Leopold; Vice News; 12/13/2016.

Our FOIA suit demands info on Trump, the Clin­tons, and Bre­it­bart News

VICE News is suing the FBI, demand­ing the bureau release records relat­ed to its curi­ous dis­clo­sures, behind-the-scenes actions, and appar­ent leaks in the days lead­ing up to the U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

The wide-rang­ing Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act law­suit was filed Tues­day morn­ing in con­junc­tion with Ryan Shapiro, a doc­tor­al can­di­date at MIT and research affil­i­ate at the Berk­man Klein Cen­ter for Inter­net & Soci­ety at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty. Ear­li­er this month, VICE News and Shapiro filed more than 50 FOIA requests with the FBI seek­ing doc­u­ments about the bureau’s dis­cus­sions regard­ing Don­ald Trump, along with oth­er doc­u­ments that would shed light on the FBI’s deci­sion a week before the elec­tion to tweet new­ly post­ed records from a long-dor­mant Twit­ter account about Bill Clinton’s 2000 par­don of financier Marc Rich.

The par­don, a con­tro­ver­sial deci­sion by the for­mer pres­i­dent, was inves­ti­gat­ed at the time by cur­rent FBI direc­tor James Comey while he was U.S. attor­ney.

…

Accord­ing to an Oct. 30 report in the Wall Street Jour­nal, “Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, inter­nal dis­agree­ments with­in the bureau and the Jus­tice Depart­ment sur­round­ing the Clin­tons’ fam­i­ly phil­an­thropy heat­ed up.”

Our law­suit “seeks pub­lic dis­clo­sure of spec­i­fied gov­ern­ment records to make sense of the piv­otal role of the FBI, as well as of oth­er agen­cies, in per­haps the most con­tro­ver­sial pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in mod­ern U.S. his­to­ry,” says our com­plaint, filed in U.S. Dis­trict Court for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia by FOIA attor­ney Jef­frey Light.

“Despite sub­se­quent dis­clo­sures of over­whelm­ing evi­dence to the con­trary, since its incep­tion, the FBI staunch­ly main­tained it was a pure­ly apo­lit­i­cal enti­ty,” the com­plaint notes. “How­ev­er, numer­ous lead­ing polit­i­cal and news media fig­ures from across the polit­i­cal spec­trum explic­it­ly assert the FBI repeat­ed­ly and with sig­nif­i­cant impact affect­ed the out­come of the 2016 U.S. Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.”

This is the fourth Trump-relat­ed FOIA law­suit VICE News and Shapiro have filed since Sep­tem­ber. We sued the FBI, Secret Ser­vice, and IRS for infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing a pair of incen­di­ary com­ments Trump made on the cam­paign trail last sum­mer — includ­ing one in which he called on Rus­sia to track down 30,000 “miss­ing” Clin­ton emails — as well as audits of Trump’s tax returns span­ning more than a decade.

In Novem­ber, we sued the FBI for doc­u­ments about var­i­ous Trump busi­ness enti­ties, includ­ing Trump Enter­tain­ment Resorts, Inc.; the Trump Orga­ni­za­tion; Trump Uni­ver­si­ty; and the Trump Foun­da­tion, and any doc­u­ments about their role in poten­tial vio­la­tions of fed­er­al law.

Two weeks ago, the FBI, in a let­ter dis­closed to us 10 days after the elec­tion, revealed that the bureau may very well have been inves­ti­gat­ing Trump when Comey dis­closed to Con­gress pri­or to the elec­tion that the agency had found addi­tion­al emails that “appear to be per­ti­nent” to its inves­ti­ga­tion of Clinton’s pri­vate email serv­er.

“The nature of your request impli­cates inves­tiga­tive records the FBI may or may not com­pile pur­suant to its broad crim­i­nal and nation­al secu­ri­ty inves­tiga­tive mis­sions and func­tions,” the FBI let­ter said. “Accord­ing­ly, the FBI can­not con­firm or deny the exis­tence of any such records about your sub­ject as the mere acknowl­edg­ment of such records exis­tence or nonex­is­tence would in and of itself trig­ger fore­see­able harm to agency inter­ests.”

“Two weeks ago, the FBI, in a let­ter dis­closed to us 10 days after the elec­tion, revealed that the bureau may very well have been inves­ti­gat­ing Trump when Comey dis­closed to Con­gress pri­or to the elec­tion that the agency had found addi­tion­al emails that “appear to be per­ti­nent” to its inves­ti­ga­tion of Clinton’s pri­vate email serv­er.”

Oh what a shock­er. If true, of course. And that’s why it’s going to be very inter­est­ing to see how forth­com­ing the FBI is about this alleged pair of inves­ti­ga­tions. Espe­cial­ly since one of the alleged FBI inves­ti­ga­tions into Trump was about Trump pub­lic call dur­ing a press con­fer­ence for “Rus­sia” to release hacked Clin­ton Hillary’s emails. That’s rather top­i­cal! And the oth­er inves­ti­ga­tion was report­ed­ly about Trump dog-whistling to his sup­port­ers to assas­si­nate Hillary. Always top­i­cal!

So who knows what the chances are of this law­suit suc­ceed­ing, but let’s keep our fin­gers crossed. After all, the politi­ciza­tion of the FBI in order to get bla­tant fas­cist elect­ed pres­i­dent is one of the top­i­cal top­ics you could pos­si­bly have, day in and day out, once that fas­cist is actu­al­ly elect­ed:

8. Next, the pro­gram high­lights a top­ic that will be detailed at greater length in the next pro­gram. The OUN/B milieu in the U.S. has appar­ent­ly been instru­men­tal in gen­er­at­ing the “Rus­sia did it” dis­in­for­ma­tion about the high-pro­file hacks. A Ukrain­ian activist named Alexan­dra Chalu­pa has been instru­men­tal in dis­trib­ut­ing this dis­in­for­ma­tion to Hillary Clin­ton and influ­enc­ing the progress of the dis­in­for­ma­tion in the media. ” . . . . One of the key media sources [46] who blamed the DNC hacks on Rus­sia, ramp­ing up fears of cryp­to-Putin­ist infil­tra­tion, is a Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can lob­by­ist work­ing for the DNC. She is Alexan­dra Chalupa—described as the head of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Committee’s oppo­si­tion research on Rus­sia and on Trump, and founder and pres­i­dent of the Ukrain­ian lob­by group ‘US Unit­ed With Ukraine Coali­tion’ [47], which lob­bied hard to pass a 2014 bill increas­ing loans and mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine, impos­ing sanc­tions on Rus­sians, and tight­ly align­ing US and Ukraine geostrate­gic inter­ests. . . . In one leaked DNC email [50] ear­li­er this year, Chalu­pa boasts to DNC Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Luis Miran­da that she brought Isikoff to a US-gov­ern­ment spon­sored Wash­ing­ton event fea­tur­ing 68 Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ists, where Chalu­pa was invit­ed ‘to speak specif­i­cal­ly about Paul Man­afort.’ In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source [46] ‘prov­ing’ that the Rus­sians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s cam­paign was under the spell of Krem­lin spies and sor­cer­ers. . . .”

“The Anony­mous Black­list Quot­ed by the Wash­ing­ton Post Has Appar­ent Ties to Ukrain­ian Fas­cism and CIA Spy­ing” by Mark Ames; Alternet.org; 12/7/2016.”

. . . . Still the ques­tion lingers: Who is behind Pro­pOrNot? Who are they? We may have to await the defama­tion law­suits that are almost cer­tain­ly com­ing from those smeared by the Post and by Pro­pOrNot. Their descrip­tion sounds like the “About” tab on any num­ber of Wash­ing­ton front groups that jour­nal­ists and researchers are used to com­ing across:

“Pro­pOrNot is an inde­pen­dent team of con­cerned Amer­i­can cit­i­zens with a wide range of back­grounds and exper­tise, includ­ing pro­fes­sion­al expe­ri­ence in com­put­er sci­ence, sta­tis­tics, pub­lic pol­i­cy, and nation­al secu­ri­ty affairs.”

The only spe­cif­ic clues giv­en were an admis­sion that at least one of its mem­bers with access to its Twit­ter han­dle is “Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can”. They had giv­en this away in a hand­ful of ear­ly Ukrain­ian-lan­guage tweets, par­rot­ing Ukrain­ian ultra­na­tion­al­ist slo­gans, before the group was known.

One Pro­pOrNot tweet, dat­ed Novem­ber 17, invokes a 1940s Ukrain­ian fas­cist salute “Hero­iam Sla­va!!” [17] to cheer a news item on Ukrain­ian hack­ers fight­ing Rus­sians. The phrase means “Glo­ry to the heroes” and it was for­mal­ly intro­duced by the fas­cist Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists (OUN) at their March-April 1941 con­gress in Nazi occu­pied Cra­cow, as they pre­pared to serve as Nazi aux­il­iaries in Oper­a­tion Bar­barossa. As his­to­ri­an Grz­gorz Rossolińs­ki-Liebe, author of the defin­i­tive biog­ra­phy [18] on Ukraine’s wartime fas­cist leader and Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tor [19] Stepan Ban­dera, explained [20]:

“the OUN‑B intro­duced anoth­er Ukrain­ian fas­cist salute at the Sec­ond Great Con­gress of the Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists in Cra­cow in March and April 1941. This was the most pop­u­lar Ukrain­ian fas­cist salute and had to be per­formed accord­ing to the instruc­tions of the OUN‑B lead­er­ship by rais­ing the right arm ‘slight­ly to the right, slight­ly above the peak of the head’ while call­ing ‘Glo­ry to Ukraine!’ (Sla­va Ukraїni!) and respond­ing ‘Glo­ry to the Heroes!’ (Hero­iam Sla­va!).”

Two months after for­mal­iz­ing this salute, Nazi forces allowed Bandera’s Ukrain­ian fas­cists to briefly take con­trol of Lvov [21], at the time a pre­dom­i­nant­ly Jew­ish and Pol­ish city—whereupon the Ukrain­ian “patri­ots” mur­dered, tor­tured and raped thou­sands of Jews [22], in one of the most bar­bar­ic [23] and blood­i­est pogroms ever.

Since the 2014 Maid­an Rev­o­lu­tion brought Ukrain­ian neo-fas­cists [24] back into the high­est rungs of pow­er [25], Ukraine’s Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors and wartime fas­cists have been reha­bil­i­tat­ed [26] as heroes [27], with major high­ways and roads named after them [28], and pub­lic com­mem­o­ra­tions. The speak­er of Ukraine’s par­lia­ment, Andriy Paru­biy [29], found­ed Ukraine’s neo-Nazi “Social-Nation­al Par­ty of Ukraine” [30] and pub­lished a white suprema­cist man­i­festo, “View From the Right” [31] fea­tur­ing the par­lia­ment speak­er in full neo-Nazi uni­form in front of fas­cist flags with the Nazi Wolf­san­gel sym­bol. Ukraine’s pow­er­ful Inte­ri­or Min­is­ter, Arsen Avakov, spon­sors [32] sev­er­al ultra­na­tion­al­ist and neo-Nazi mili­tia groups like the Azov Bat­tal­ion [33], and last month he helped appoint anoth­er neo-Nazi[34], Vadym Troy­an [35], as head of Ukraine’s Nation­al Police [36]. (Ear­li­er this year, when Troy­an was still police chief of the cap­i­tal Kiev, he was wide­ly accused [35] of hav­ing ordered an ille­gal sur­veil­lance oper­a­tion on inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Pavel Sheremet just before his assas­si­na­tion by car bomb [37].)

A Ukrain­ian intel­li­gence ser­vice black­list as PropOrNot’s mod­el

Since com­ing to pow­er in the 2014 Maid­an Rev­o­lu­tion, Ukraine’s US-backed regime has waged an increas­ing­ly sur­re­al war on jour­nal­ists who don’t toe the Ukrain­ian ultra­na­tion­al­ist line, and against treach­er­ous Krem­lin pro­pa­gan­dists, real and imag­ined. Two years ago, Ukraine estab­lished a “Min­istry of Truth” [38]. This year the war has gone from sur­re­al para­noia [39] to an increas­ing­ly dead­ly [40] kind of “ter­ror.” [41]

One of the more fright­en­ing poli­cies enact­ed by the cur­rent oli­garch-nation­al­ist regime in Kiev is an online black­list [42] of jour­nal­ists accused of col­lab­o­rat­ing with pro-Russ­ian “ter­ror­ists.” [43]  The web­site, “Myrotvorets” [43] or “Peacemaker”—was set up by Ukrain­ian hack­ers work­ing with state intel­li­gence and police, all of which tend to share the same ultra­na­tion­al­ist ide­olo­gies as Paru­biy and the new­ly-appoint­ed neo-Nazi chief of the Nation­al Police.

Con­demned by the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists [44] and numer­ous news orga­ni­za­tions in the West and in Ukraine, the online black­list includes the names and per­son­al pri­vate infor­ma­tion on some 4,500 jour­nal­ists [45], includ­ing sev­er­al west­ern jour­nal­ists [43] and Ukraini­ans work­ing for west­ern media. The web­site is designed to fright­en and muz­zle jour­nal­ists from report­ing any­thing but the pro-nation­al­ist par­ty line, and it has the back­ing of gov­ern­ment offi­cials, spies and police—including the SBU (Ukraine’s suc­ces­sor to the KGB), the pow­er­ful Inte­ri­or Min­is­ter Avakov and his noto­ri­ous far-right deputy, Anton Geraschenko.

Ukraine’s jour­nal­ist black­list website—operated by Ukrain­ian hack­ers work­ing with state intelligence—led to a rash of death threats against the doxxed jour­nal­ists, whose email address­es, phone num­bers and oth­er pri­vate infor­ma­tion was post­ed anony­mous­ly to the web­site. Many of these threats came with the wartime Ukrain­ian fas­cist salute: “Sla­va Ukrai­ni!” [Glo­ry to Ukraine!] So when PropOrNot’s anony­mous “researchers” reveal only their Ukrainian(s) iden­ti­ty, it’s hard not to think about the spy-linked hack­ers who post­ed the dead­ly “Myrotvorets” black­list of “trea­so­nous” jour­nal­ists.

The DNC’s Ukrain­ian ultra-nation­al­ist researcher cries trea­son

Because the Pro­pOrNot black­list of Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist “trai­tors” is anony­mous, and the Wash­ing­ton Post front-page arti­cle pro­tects their anonymi­ty, we can only spec­u­late on their iden­ti­ty with what lit­tle infor­ma­tion they’ve giv­en us. And that lit­tle bit of infor­ma­tion reveals only a Ukrain­ian ultra­na­tion­al­ist thread—the salute, the same obses­sive­ly vio­lent para­noia towards Rus­sia, and towards jour­nal­ists, who in the eyes of Ukrain­ian nation­al­ists have always been dupes and stooges, if not out­right col­lab­o­ra­tors, of Russ­ian evil.

One of the key media sources [46] who blamed the DNC hacks on Rus­sia, ramp­ing up fears of cryp­to-Putin­ist infil­tra­tion, is a Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can lob­by­ist work­ing for the DNC. She is Alexan­dra Chalupa—described as the head of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Committee’s oppo­si­tion research on Rus­sia and on Trump, and founder and pres­i­dent of the Ukrain­ian lob­by group “US Unit­ed With Ukraine Coali­tion” [47], which lob­bied hard to pass a 2014 bill increas­ing loans and mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine, impos­ing sanc­tions on Rus­sians, and tight­ly align­ing US and Ukraine geostrate­gic inter­ests.

In Octo­ber of this year, Yahoo News named Chalu­pa [48] one of “16 Peo­ple Who Shaped the 2016 Elec­tion” [49] for her role in pin­ning the DNC leaks on Russ­ian hack­ers, and for mak­ing the case that the Trump cam­paign was under Krem­lin con­trol. “As a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­sul­tant and proud Ukrain­ian-Amer­i­can, Alexan­dra Chalu­pa was out­raged last spring when Don­ald Trump named Paul Man­afort as his cam­paign man­ag­er,” the Yahoo pro­file began. “As she saw it, Man­afort was a key fig­ure in advanc­ing Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin’s agen­da inside her ances­tral home­land — and she was deter­mined to expose it.”

Chalu­pa worked with vet­er­an reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to pub­li­cize her oppo­si­tion research on Trump, Rus­sia and Paul Man­afort, as well as her many Ukrain­ian sources. In one leaked DNC email [50] ear­li­er this year, Chalu­pa boasts to DNC Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Luis Miran­da that she brought Isikoff to a US-gov­ern­ment spon­sored Wash­ing­ton event fea­tur­ing 68 Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ists, where Chalu­pa was invit­ed “to speak specif­i­cal­ly about Paul Man­afort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source [46] “prov­ing” that the Rus­sians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s cam­paign was under the spell of Krem­lin spies and sor­cer­ers.

(In 2008, when I broke the sto­ry [51] about the Man­afort-Krem­lin ties in The Nation with Ari Berman, I did not go on to to accuse him or John McCain, whose cam­paign was being run by Manafort’s part­ner, of being Manchuri­an Can­di­dates under the spell of Vladimir Putin. Because they weren’t; instead, they were sleazy, cor­rupt, hyp­o­crit­i­cal politi­cians who fol­lowed mon­ey and pow­er rather than prin­ci­ple. A media hack feed­ing fren­zy turned Man­afort from what he was—a sleazy scumbag—into a fan­tas­ti­cal Krem­lin mole [52], forc­ing Man­afort to resign from the Trump cam­paign, thanks in part to kom­pro­mat mate­r­i­al leaked by the Ukrain­ian SBU [53], suc­ces­sor to the KGB.)

Mean­while, Chalupa’s Twit­ter feed went wild accus­ing Trump of treason—a crime that car­ries the death penal­ty. Along with well over 100 tweets hash­tagged #Trea­so­nous­Trump [54] Chalu­pa repeat­ed­ly asked pow­er­ful gov­ern­ment offi­cials and bod­ies like the Depart­ment of Jus­tice [55] to inves­ti­gate Trump for the cap­i­tal crime of trea­son. In the weeks since the elec­tion, Chalu­pa has repeat­ed­ly accused [56] both the Trump cam­paign and Rus­sia of rig­ging the elec­tions, demand­ing fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tions. Accord­ing to The Guardian [57], Chalu­pa recent­ly sent a report to Con­gress prov­ing Russ­ian hacked into the vote count, hop­ing to ini­ti­ate a Con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion. In an inter­view with Gothamist [58], Chalu­pa described alleged Russ­ian inter­fer­ence in the elec­tion result as “an act of war.”

To be clear, I am not argu­ing that Chalu­pa is behind Pro­pOrNot. But it is impor­tant to pro­vide con­text to the boasts by Pro­pOrNot about its Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist links—within the larg­er con­text of the Clin­ton campaign’s anti-Krem­lin hys­te­ria, which crossed the line into Cold War xeno­pho­bia time and time again, an anti-Russ­ian xeno­pho­bia shared by Clinton’s Ukrain­ian nation­al­ist allies. To me, it looks like a clas­sic case of blow­back: A hyper-nation­al­ist group whose extrem­ism hap­pens to be use­ful to Amer­i­can geopo­lit­i­cal ambi­tions, and is there­fore nur­tured to cre­ate prob­lems for our com­peti­tor. Indeed, the US has cul­ti­vat­ed extreme Ukrain­ian nation­al­ists as prox­ies [59] for decades, since the Cold War began.

As inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Russ Bel­lant doc­u­ment­ed in his clas­sic exposé, “Old Nazis, New Right,” Ukrain­ian Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors were brought into the Unit­ed States and weaponized [60] for use against Rus­sia dur­ing the Cold War, despite what­ev­er role they may have played in the Holo­caust and in the mass slaugh­ter of Ukraine’s eth­nic Poles. After spend­ing so many years encour­ag­ing extreme Ukrain­ian nation­al­ism, it’s no sur­prise that the whole pol­i­cy is begin­ning to blow back.

9. It looks like Steve Ban­non will have some Alt-Right com­pa­ny in the White House advi­so­ry staff: Stephen Miller, for­mer chief aide to Trump’s pick for Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jeff Ses­sions, is set to be Trumps senior advi­sor for pol­i­cy. He’s also report­ed­ly quite close to Alt-Right ring-leader Richard Spencer going back to their time at Duke University’s Duke Con­ser­v­a­tive Union.

“Trump’s Newest Senior Advis­er Seen as a White Nation­al­ist Ally” by Josh Harkin­son; Moth­er Jones; 12/14/2016.

Stephen Miller drew praise from a top white nation­al­ist, who hopes he’ll “do good things for white Amer­i­ca.”

Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s newest pick to be a senior advis­er in the White House has long ties to a promi­nent white nation­al­ist, who sees him as an ally of the move­ment.

Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, will serve as a senior White House advis­er for pol­i­cy, Trump’s tran­si­tion team announced Tues­day. Miller is a for­mer staffer for the nativist Sen. Jeff Ses­sions (R‑Ala.), now Trump’s nom­i­nee for attor­ney gen­er­al. The announce­ment of Miller’s new role drew praise from white nation­al­ist leader Richard Spencer. “Stephen is a high­ly com­pe­tent and tough indi­vid­ual,” Spencer, who famous­ly coined the term “alt-right” to describe the insur­gent right-wing move­ment that has attract­ed white nation­al­ists and suprema­cists, told Moth­er Jones on Wednes­day. “So I have no doubt that he will do a great job.”

Spencer and Miller first came to know each oth­er in the late 2000s as stu­dents at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, where they both belonged to the Duke Con­ser­v­a­tive Union. Miller earned notice for stand­ing up for white lacrosse play­ers false­ly accused in 2006 of gang rap­ing a black woman. Spencer also defend­ed the Duke lacrosse play­ers, writ­ing about the case for Pat Buchanan’s Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive, which lat­er hired him as an edi­tor.

Spencer told me that at Duke, Miller helped him with fundrais­ing and pro­mo­tion for an on-cam­pus debate on immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy that Spencer orga­nized in 2007, fea­tur­ing influ­en­tial white nation­al­ist Peter Brimelow. Anoth­er for­mer mem­ber of the Duke Con­ser­v­a­tive Union con­firms that Miller and Spencer worked togeth­er on the event. At DCU meet­ings, accord­ing to a past pres­i­dent of the group, Miller denounced mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and expressed con­cerns that immi­grants from non-Euro­pean coun­tries were not assim­i­lat­ing.

“I knew [Miller] very well when I was at Duke,” Spencer told me when I vis­it­ed him at his home in White­fish, Mon­tana, a few weeks before the elec­tion. “But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this, because I don’t want to harm Trump.”

Miller wrote about two dozen columns for the Duke Chron­i­cle, and his arti­cles assailed mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism (which he called “seg­re­ga­tion”) and paid fam­i­ly leave (which he said results in men get­ting laid off). He also denied there was sys­tem­at­ic racism (which he dubbed “racial para­noia”).

When con­tact­ed by Moth­er Jones in Octo­ber, Miller did not respond on the record to spe­cif­ic ques­tions about his activ­i­ties with the DCU or his views on race and immi­gra­tion, but he denied ever being close to Spencer. “I have absolute­ly no rela­tion­ship with Mr. Spencer,” he said in an email that month. “I com­plete­ly repu­di­ate his views, and his claims are 100 per­cent false.”

Before join­ing the Trump cam­paign last year, Miller, who is 30, served as Ses­sions’ chief of com­mu­ni­ca­tions. “Those who worked with them say that Ses­sions and Miller had a ‘mind meld,’” Julia Ioffe wrote in a June Politi­co pro­file of Miller. Ses­sions and Miller worked close­ly in oppos­ing the Supreme Court con­fir­ma­tion of Sonia Sotomay­or, who Ses­sions implied might not be impar­tial due to her His­pan­ic her­itage. In 2014, after the Sen­ate had passed a bipar­ti­san deal on com­pre­hen­sive immi­gra­tion reform, Ses­sions helped kill it in the House by dis­trib­ut­ing anti-immi­gra­tion fig­ures and talk­ing points that were writ­ten by Miller.

Dur­ing the cam­paign, Miller, as a senior advis­er to Trump, warmed up crowds at Trump ral­lies with fiery, pop­ulist speech­es draw­ing from a nativist play­book. “We’re going to build that wall high and we’re going to build it tall,” he pro­claimed at a Trump event in Dal­las in June. “We’re going to build that wall, and we’re going to build it out of love. We’re going to build it out of love for every fam­i­ly who wants to raise their kids in safe­ty and peace…We’re build­ing it out of love for Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­cans of all back­grounds.”

…

10. Orig­i­nal­ly found­ed by Third Reich vet­er­ans as a vehi­cle for the polit­i­cal reha­bil­i­ta­tion of NSDAP mem­bers, Austria’s Free­dom Par­ty has net­worked with Putin and Trump’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er des­ig­nate Michael Fly­nn. The pri­ma­ry focus is on lift­ing the sanc­tions imposed on Rus­sia. This step is also favored by cor­po­rate Ger­many, as dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 918 and 919. ” . . . . Free­dom Par­ty leader Heinz-Chris­t­ian Stra­che and Nor­bert Hofer, the los­ing can­di­date in this month’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, signed a “work­ing agree­ment” with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin’s Unit­ed Rus­sia par­ty in Moscow on Mon­day, accord­ing to a state­ment issued by the Aus­tri­an par­ty. It added that Stra­che met last month in New York with Michael Fly­nn, nom­i­nat­ed to become Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er. Stra­che wants to roll back ‘the sanc­tions that are harm­ful and ulti­mate­ly use­less for the econ­o­my,’ accord­ing to the Free­dom Par­ty state­ment. . . . ”

“Aus­tri­an Pop­ulists Go to Moscow to Pitch Trump-Putin Bridge” by Boris Groen­dahl and Jonathan Tirone; Bloomberg Pol­i­tics; 12/19/2016.

* Free­dom Par­ty chiefs in ‘diplo­mat­ic talks’ with Unit­ed Rus­sia
* Par­ty has opposed sanc­tions on Rus­sia; leads in Aus­tri­an polls

Austria’s pop­ulist Free­dom Par­ty said it wants to bro­ker an end to sanc­tions on Rus­sia by using its con­tacts with the White House and the Krem­lin to reduce east-west ten­sions.

Free­dom Par­ty leader Heinz-Chris­t­ian Stra­che and Nor­bert Hofer, the los­ing can­di­date in this month’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, signed a “work­ing agree­ment” with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin’s Unit­ed Rus­sia par­ty in Moscow on Mon­day, accord­ing to a state­ment issued by the Aus­tri­an par­ty. It added that Stra­che met last month in New York with Michael Fly­nn, nom­i­nat­ed to become Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er.

Stra­che wants to roll back “the sanc­tions that are harm­ful and ulti­mate­ly use­less for the econ­o­my,” accord­ing to the Free­dom Par­ty state­ment, which described itself as “a neu­tral and reli­able medi­a­tor and part­ner.” The del­e­ga­tion met with Unit­ed Russia’s inter­na­tion­al sec­re­tary, Sergei Zheleznyak, accord­ing to a spokesman for the Russ­ian par­ty.

This is the first for­mal agree­ment with a major par­ty from EU-mem­ber state since the bloc imposed its sanc­tions on Rus­sia for annex­ing Crimea and sup­port­ing sep­a­ratists in East­ern Ukraine.

While the Free­dom Par­ty was defeat­ed for the Aus­tri­an pres­i­den­cy by an inde­pen­dent can­di­date, it tops nation­al opin­ion polls with about a third of the vote.

Par­ty offi­cials have in the past called for an end to Euro­pean Union sanc­tions against Rus­sia and voiced sup­port for Russia’s annex­a­tion of Crimea. In a Face­book post­ing, Stra­che said that Rus­sia had “freed Alep­po” from Islam­ic State.

“Aus­tria needs inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal and busi­ness con­tacts rather than neg­a­tive and dam­ag­ing sanc­tions,” Stra­che said on Face­book. Aus­tria was neu­tral dur­ing the Cold War. Aus­tri­an com­pa­nies includ­ing oil and gas group OMV AG and Raif­feisen Bank Inter­na­tion­al AG have close busi­ness ties to Moscow.

Dur­ing this year’s pres­i­den­tial bal­lot, Hofer cam­paigned on the promise to build a bridge between Trump and the Krem­lin. The election’s win­ner, for­mer Green Par­ty leader Alexan­der Van der Bellen, off­set Hofer’s appeals by argu­ing Austria’s most impor­tant eco­nom­ic inter­ests are inside the EU. . . .

11. Trump’s nom­i­nee to be Sec­re­tary of State is Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tiller­son, who, like the Aus­tri­an Free­dom Paraty (and cor­po­rate Germany/Bormann cap­i­tal net­work) wants the sanc­tions on Rus­sia lift­ed.

“Trump Lines Up Estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans to Vouch for Tiller­son” by Michael D. Shear; The New York Times; 12/13/2016.

After wag­ing an 18-month assault on the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment, Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald J. Trump changed course on Tues­day and enlist­ed the party’s high priests of for­eign pol­i­cy to help him win the con­fir­ma­tion of Rex W. Tiller­son as sec­re­tary of state.

Sev­er­al for­mer Repub­li­can sec­re­taries of defense and state sought to dis­miss bipar­ti­san con­cerns about Mr. Tiller­son, the Exxon Mobil chief exec­u­tive, over his two-decade rela­tion­ship with Pres­i­dent Vladimir V. Putin of Rus­sia. At the cen­ter of the debate are ques­tions about Mr. Tillerson’s vocal oppo­si­tion to Amer­i­can sanc­tions imposed on Rus­sia as he pur­sued oil and gas deals in that coun­try. . . .

. . . . . A series of state­ments fol­lowed from for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney and for­mer sec­re­taries of state James A. Bak­er III and Con­doleez­za Rice, among oth­ers. In an inter­view, Robert M. Gates, who served as sec­re­tary of defense under Pres­i­dent Oba­ma and Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, strong­ly endorsed Mr. Tiller­son, a long­time friend, call­ing him some­one who “knows the world like the back of his hand.”

Mr. Gates, whose con­sult­ing firm has rep­re­sent­ed Exxon Mobil, said that sen­a­tors con­cerned about Mr. Tillerson’s rela­tion­ship with Mr. Putin are bas­ing their crit­i­cism “on a super­fi­cial watch­ing” of video clips of the Exxon exec­u­tive receiv­ing the Russ­ian Order of Friend­ship in 2013 with Mr. Putin. . . .

12. The Man­ning text high­lights the piv­otal role of the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion in Ger­man heavy indus­try and, in turn, the influ­ence of the Her­mann Schmitz trust in the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion. ” . . .Vast­ly diver­si­fied, it is said to be the largest land-own­er in South Amer­i­ca, and through stock­hold­ings, con­trols Ger­man heavy indus­try and the trust estab­lished by the late Her­mann Schmitz, for­mer pres­i­dent of I.G. Far­ben, who held as much stock in Stan­dard Oil of New Jer­sey as did the Rock­e­fellers. [Exxon is Stan­dard of New Jer­sey, now merged with Mobil, which is Stan­dard Oil of New York–D.E.] . . .”

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; p. 292.

. . . .The Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion con­tin­ues to wield enor­mous eco­nom­ic influ­ence. Wealth con­tin­ues to flow into the trea­suries of its cor­po­rate enti­ti­ties in South Amer­i­ca, the Unit­ed States, and Europe. Vast­ly diver­si­fied, it is said to be the largest land-own­er in South Amer­i­ca, and through stock­hold­ings, con­trols Ger­man heavy indus­try and the trust estab­lished by the late Her­mann Schmitz, for­mer pres­i­dent of I.G. Far­ben, who held as much stock in Stan­dard Oil of New Jer­sey as did the Rock­e­fellers. . . .