Shame on FBI’er Peter Strzok, Fail!

Posted on December 4, 2017December 4, 2017 by Denise Simon

The FBI agent who was kicked off of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia team over the summer for sending pro-Clinton and anti-Trump text messages took part in the Jan. 24 interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, it was reported on Monday.

Peter Strzok, a former FBI section chief in the bureau’s counterintelligence division, conducted the interview of Flynn at the White House, according to Circa reporter Sara Carter.

Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the FBI during that interview. He acknowledged giving false statements about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period. More here.

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Peter Stzrok reviewed and cleared the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin emails in RECORD TIME before the election and said he FOUND NOTHING. A source familiar with FBI supervisory agent Peter Stzrok’s involvement in the Hillary Clinton server investigation confirmed CNN’s report that he changed ‘grossly negligent’ to ‘extremely careless.

FBI Agent Strzok was also involved part of review over Abedin/Weiners emails found with classified information and data. He was also connected with the dossier.

It is important to understand there is a high probability that he and Andrew McCabe coordinated all the investigations and made recommendations of which Director Comey accepted without challenge. Can it be that the Clinton operation actually coordinated all the associated investigations due to the fact that Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife, Jill, was very close to Terry McAuliffe including an estimated $700,000 in campaign funds for the wife to run for a local political run in Virginia?

McAuliffe, who chaired Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid, said that despite the loss, he is ready to work with president-elect Donald Trump. He said he sent Trump a congratulatory letter the day after the election, and looks forward to Trump’s plans to improve the nation’s infrastructure.

Clinton and McAuliffe have had long and closely entwined careers. McAuliffe put up $1.35 million as collateral on Clinton’s mortgage to buy their home in Chappaqua, N.Y. The Clintons, in turn, have provided McAuliffe a large network for his business and political enterprises.

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All kinds of Hillary bundlers donated to Jill McCabe’s campaign, people inside the Hillary campaign itself including power positions. Check out the names and amounts here.

Now an Inspector General is reviewing the whole matter of Peter Stzrok and that report is estimated for release in March of 2018.

TheHill: A government watchdog confirmed Saturday that it is reviewing allegations involving agency officials amid reports that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team removed an FBI agent after an investigation into the agent potentially sending anti-Trump text messages.

The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) indicated that its probe into the communications of agency officials is part of the watchdog’s larger review of the FBI’s actions before and after the 2016 presidential election.

“The OIG has been reviewing allegations involving communications between certain individuals, and will report its findings regarding those allegations promptly upon completion of the review of them,” the OIG said in a statement.

The OIG said its review comes as a result of its January 2017 statement that it would look into actions by the Justice Department and FBI in its handling of the investigations during the 2016 election.

In the statement, the watchdog said it had set out to “consider whether certain underlying investigative decisions were based on improper considerations and that we also would include issues that might arise during the course of the review.”

Mueller’s investigation saw its most dramatic turn yet on Friday, when Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his communications with Russian officials that took place during the presidential transition.

Finally, the U.S. is Re-Tooling a Cold-War Base in Iceland

Posted on December 4, 2017December 4, 2017 by Denise Simon

The Russians have been aggressively moving in on that region for the last several years such that under the Obama administration, the United States was in no position to respond.

Keflavik_base_05_bþj.png Officially closed in 2006, Currently the Keflavík Airbase is being used by planes from the US and other NATO members (Iceland is a member nation). As Iceland does not have an army or an air force NATO allies periodically deploy fighter aircrafts to provide air policing. The plane crews are only a small fraction of the thousands of US servicemen that used to by stationed at Keflavík. The condos that they used to live in with their families have now been turned into a school campus, a hotel and other civilian facilities. More here.

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Russian submarines are also patrolling the North Atlantic more frequently than at any time since the end of the Cold War

The United States has a long relationship with Iceland, and by treaty since 1951 continues to be responsible for the defense of the country. Iceland has no military, but the country’s coast guard fulfills most military missions, and is responsible for maintaining Keflavik as a military installation. More here.

BI: The Pentagon is preparing to spend millions of dollars to fix up a Cold War-era air base in Iceland as Washington rushes to keep an eye on a new generation of stealthy Russian submarines slipping into the North Atlantic.

Tucked away in the 2018 defense budget sitting on President Donald Trump’s desk is a provision for $14.4 million to refurbish hangars at Naval Air Station Keflavik to accommodate more U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft, a key surveillance asset for locating and tracking submarines, a defense official confirms.

The move comes as new Russian nuclear and conventional submarines have been making more frequent trips through the area known as the “GIUK gap” — an acronym for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom — the route for the Russian Northern Fleet to enter the Atlantic Ocean.

The United States and Iceland have agreed to increase rotations of the American surveillance planes to Iceland next year, Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael confirmed to Foreign Policy.

Inside the alliance, there is concern over NATO’s ability to locate and track the new Russian submarines as they move silently into the open ocean. NATO officials have admitted that the past two decades of anti-piracy operations near Africa and support for ground operations in the Middle East have distracted from the anti-submarine mission which was at the core of the Cold War mission in the Atlantic.

After allowing its naval forces to fall into disrepair in the 1990s, Russian President Vladimir Putin set out on a major military overhaul in the 2000s, clawing back capability by designing and building new diesel- and nuclear-powered boats, making them quieter, more lethal, and longer-legged than their Soviet predecessors.

Russia’s undersea fleet “is in the best state it has been in since the fall of the Soviet Union,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at the Center for Naval Analyses. “A lot of effort has been spent on drilling, training, and readiness.”

The Russian submarine force of about 50 hulls is a fraction of the 400 the Soviet Union floated during the Cold War, but they boast vastly improved technical capabilities that put them on par with their American rivals, experts said.

“This time they’re going for quality rather than quantity,” added Magnus Nordenman of the Atlantic Council.

In an unclassified assessment of Russian military strength issued earlier this year, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that Moscow’s new nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines are “capable of delivering nuclear warheads from thousands of kilometers away. This strategic capability puts the Russian Navy in the top tier of foreign navies.”

The pride of the Russian fleet is the nuclear-powered Yasen-class guided missile submarine, which can carry 32 Kalibr cruise missiles. While the missile’s range isn’t known for sure, Russian subs have fired the Kalibr into Syria from about 700 miles away.

Moscow has two Yasen-class subs operational, and plans to build an additional eight in coming years.

In late November the British first sea lord, Adm. Sir Philip Jones, said that the naval superiority Western navies have enjoyed in recent decades is disappearing and resurgent powers like Russia are testing the Royal Navy in home waters.

The Russian Yasen-class nuclear attack submarine Severodvinsk Wikimedia Commons

“It’s now clear that the peaks of Russian submarine activity that we’ve seen in the North Atlantic in recent years are the new norm,” he said.

France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Turkey signed a letter of intent this summer to start development of new submarine-detecting aircraft. More airborne assets are needed because the number of sub-hunting ships that can patrol the waters on the North Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean is far reduced since the Cold War.

Navies generally use frigates to conduct anti-submarine warfare — known as ASW operations — and the number of frigates in use by NATO allies has fallen to about 50, down from the 100 or so in the early 1990s.

Partly to fill that gap, the U.S. Navy is working to rush a new class of 20 frigates into service beginning in 2020. Last month, the service issued a notice to the defense industry to come up with a multi-mission frigate design that could be built within the next two years capable of conducting air defense and anti-submarine operations.

Russia has traditionally been constrained in its access to the open ocean, and the loss of the Baltic states and Poland, and of Black Sea ports in Romania and Bulgaria, mean modern Russia has a harder time getting out to sea than the Soviet Union did.

In the event of conflict with the West, Moscow’s Baltic and Black Sea fleets would likely be bottled up by NATO, “so that leaves the Northern Fleet as their power-projection fleet — it’s how they get out into the Atlantic,” the Atlantic Council’s Nordenman said.

While the Northern Fleet has primarily been designed to hold NATO at a distance from Russia, or exact a cost for any push by NATO forces, the increasing ability of its stealthy submarines to slip past American surveillance and pop up off the U.S. Eastern seaboard unannounced is a major concern for policymakers.

“The U.S. Navy needs to have a clear answer as to how they’re going to track these submarines,” said Kofman.

“Iceland is key,” Nordenman added. During the Second World War, U.S. anti-submarine forces in Iceland helped hunt down German U-boat wolf packs that had enjoyed a safe haven in the middle of the ocean, a role the island seems set to reprise.

“It’s the unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic that you can fly from,” Nordenman said.

Is the Homeland Prepared for NoKo Missiles?

Posted on December 3, 2017December 3, 2017 by Denise Simon

Or China or Russia?

Ever wonder why there is no defense system in Hawaii or other remote Pacific Island? Unless, we are poised to deploy the new SM-6 which has had remarkable recent test results.

(Is there a defense system for electronic warfare or cyber?)

What if North Korea or Iran launched a nuclear missile aimed at the United States? Could we prevent it from arriving?

That’s the basic motivation behind US homeland missile defense, a complex system of ground-based radars, satellite sensors, and interceptor missiles designed to destroy incoming warheads. If the system operated as promised, sensors would track intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) throughout their launch and flight. Interceptor missiles based in Alaska and California would then collide with and destroy the incoming weapons.

ICBM launches have three distinct phases of flight. During the boost phase, a rocket launches the warhead at high speeds above the atmosphere, where it continues in free-fall through the vacuum of space. The midcourse phase begins with the rocket separating from the warhead, which continues unguided and unpowered, hundreds of miles above the Earth. The reentry, or terminal, phase sees the warhead descend at high speeds back through the Earth’s atmosphere toward the ground.

US homeland missile defense (also called “strategic missile defense”) is designed to destroy ICBMs during their midcourse phase, using interceptor missiles launched from the ground (hence the official name, “ground-based midcourse defense,” or GMD).

The process begins with infrared sensors on satellites, which monitor known launch locations for the tell-tale heat signature produced by launching rockets. Once a launch is established, tracking is transferred to radar systems, which help verify the missile’s trajectory. More here.

A target missile launches from the Marshall Islands during a test intercept run. Photo: US Missile Defense Agency

The U.S. agency tasked with protecting the country from missile attacks is scouting the West Coast for places to deploy new anti-missile defenses, two Congressmen said on Saturday, as North Korea’s missile tests raise concerns about how the United States would defend itself from an attack.

West Coast defenses would likely include Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missiles, similar to those deployed in South Korea to protect against a potential North Korean attack.

The accelerated pace of North Korea’s ballistic missile testing program in 2017 and the likelihood the North Korean military could hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear payload in the next few years has raised the pressure on the United States government to build-up missile defenses.

Congressman Mike Rogers, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee and chairs the Strategic Forces Subcommittee which oversees missile defense, said the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), was aiming to install extra defenses at West Coast sites. The funding for the system does not appear in the 2018 defense budget plan indicating potential deployment is further off.

When asked about the plan, MDA Deputy Director Rear Admiral Jon Hill‎ said in a statement: “The Missile Defense Agency has received no tasking to site the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense System on the West Coast.”

THAAD is a ground-based regional missile defense system designed to shoot down short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles and takes only a matter of weeks to install.

A Lockheed Martin representative declined to comment on specific THAAD deployments, but added that the company “is ready to support the Missile Defense Agency and the United States government in their ballistic missile defense efforts.” He added that testing and deployment of assets is a government decision.

In July, the United States tested THAAD missile defenses and shot down a simulated, incoming intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM). The successful test adds to the credibility of the U.S. military’s missile defense program, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent years due in part to test delays and failures. More here.

NoKo’s Hwasong 15, the Unexpected ICBM Launch

Posted on December 1, 2017December 1, 2017 by Denise Simon

SEOUL, South Korea — The intercontinental ballistic missile North Korea launched this week was a new type of missile bigger and more powerful than any the country had tested before, South Korean officials said on Thursday.

Photos from the North’s official Korean Central News Agency are providing valuable clues about the capabilities of the missile, named the Hwasong-15. North Korea said it carried a “super-large heavy warhead which is capable of striking the whole mainland of the U.S.”

North Korea’s Hwasong series represents the most successful and formidable part of its ballistic missile arsenal, and photographs of the test suggested improvements over the Hwasong-14, a missile first tested over the summer that showed the country’s capacity to strike the continental United States.

Private analysts agreed that the Hwasong-15 looked bigger and more powerful than the Hwasong-14.

AP

South Korean defense officials say North Korea runs more than 160 mobile missile launching vehicles and is building more. Such vehicles make it easier to hide and transport missiles and harder for the United States and its allies to track signs of imminent missile attacks.

AP

In a report published Thursday, Mr. Elleman said his “initial calculations indicate the new missile could deliver a moderately sized nuclear weapon to any city on the U.S. mainland.”

But he also said the North Koreans would need to conduct additional tests to establish the Hwasong-15’s reliability. And like other aerospace experts, Mr. Elleman pointed out that North Korea had yet to show it had mastered technology to ensure a missile warhead survives the rigors of violent re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Still, he said, “if low confidence in the missile’s reliability is acceptable, two or three test firings over the next four to six months may be all that is required before Kim Jong-un declares the Hwasong-15 combat ready.” More here.

According to the ImageSat analysts, who are closely following North Korean military activity, this is “the first time that they have decided to rebuild a site that they have used before.”

The photos, dated Nov. 23 and 24, appear to show the development of another launch pad just a few yards away from the one used during the July 4 Hwasong-14 ICBM launch, as well as a newly renovated access road.

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North Korea has also continued work on its submarine-launched ballistic missile program, according to new analysis on Friday, also from 38 North. Satellite images show that the country is preparing to deploy one of its submersible test stand barges, presumably to work on or conduct an underwater ICBM launch. The country also continues to produce fissile material for its weapons.

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While there is some dispute about the exact capabilities of the HS-15, it appears that the missile is so large—and indeed North Korean statements explicitly state the weapon is designed to carry a “super heavy” [3] warhead—that it might irrelevant if Pyongyang possesses warhead miniaturization technology or not. In fact, by some estimates, North Korea has intentionally overbuild the HS-15 so that future variants might be able to carry multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV).

Other than the massive size of the HS-15—which appears to be comparable in size to the Soviet SS-19 Stiletto or SS-24 Scalpel—there are some visible technological advancements.

“The single biggest technological change I see in the missile is the absence of verniers (separate, small steering engines). It looks like they have gimbaled engines now,” Pollack said.

“That’s a significant advance. I wouldn’t rule out the involvement of foreign specialists there. We already know they’ve collaborated with Iran on some missile projects. Not that Iran has ever shown off this particular technology…”

The launch vehicle might have been developed with Chinese help however—or at least modified from Chinese supplied equipment.

“The chassis looks familiar – it’s a nine-axle version of the eight-axle chassis the Chinese supplied earlier. The NKs may have managed to modify one of the six or so chassis they have on hand,” Pollack said. “(The cab has been altered, too.) I doubt they have really learned to build these from scratch – they’ve been putting far too much effort into building big trucks instead for this purpose. If they’ve already got better technology, why bother doing that?” More here.

DoJ Issues an Arrest Warrant of Jose Zarate, Steinle’s Killer

Posted on December 1, 2017December 1, 2017 by Denise Simon

The Department of Justice issued an arrest warrant in the U.S. District Court in Texas for Jose Garcia Zarate for a supervised release violation.

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His original criminal complaint filed in May of 2016, shows that Zarate’s criminal history in the United States goes back to 1993.

San Francisco owns this, meanwhile:

The San Francisco Superior Court knew this case would be such a big event, they issued a MEDIA GUIDE.

Zarate was acquitted of first and second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and found not guilty of an assault with a weapon. He was only guilty of possessing a firearm by a felon.

Now under the Department of Justice, ICE will take custody of of Mr. Garcia where U.S. Marshals will transport him under the arrest warrant pursuant to the Western District of Texas. This arrest warrant was originally issued in 2015 and has been amended since that time with additional charges.

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While we grieve for Kate and her family:

The timeline since he was acquitted for the murder of Kate Steinle:

SAN FRANCISCO — Latest on the trial of a Mexican man in a killing on a San Francisco pier (all times local):

1:45 p.m.

A federal judge in Texas has unsealed an arrest warrant for the Mexican man found not guilty of killing a woman on a San Francisco pier.

U.S. District Judge Alia Moses unsealed the warrant for Jose Ines Garcia Zarate on Friday. It was issued in July 2015 after Garcia Zarate was arrested in the slaying of Kate Steinle days earlier on a San Francisco pier.

Garcia Zarate had been convicted in federal court of illegally re-entering the U.S. and was on supervised release at the time of Steinle’s slaying. Federal officials allege the Steinle shooting violated the terms of his supervision.

The Justice Department has said it will look at possible illegal re-entry and/or violation of supervised release charges against Garcia Zarate after jurors in San Francisco acquitted him of murder in Steinle’s shooting.

12:15 p.m.

The office of Mayor Ed Lee issued a statement that San Francisco is and always will be a “Sanctuary City” as thousands of Twitter users bashed a verdict finding a Mexican man not guilty of killing a woman.

Lee did not elaborate in the statement issued Friday.

Two former city supervisors also defended San Francisco’s sanctuary policy, which prohibits local cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener says that public safety is improved when people who are in the country illegally can go to police without fear of deportation.

David Campos, who now chairs the San Francisco Democratic Party, said the jury system worked.

Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was released from jail despite a federal immigration detainer request in 2015 and months later, he shot and killed Kate Steinle on a city pier.

9:30 a.m.

The Justice Department is considering bringing federal charges against a Mexican man found not guilty of killing a woman on a San Francisco pier.

Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores tells Fox News that the U.S. Attorney General’s Office is looking at every option to prosecute Jose Ines Garcia Zarate “to the fullest extent available under the law because.”

A Department of Justice official says federal prosecutors will look at possible illegal re-entry and/or violation of supervised release charges.

A San Francisco jury on Thursday found Garcia Zarate not guilty of killing Kate Steinle in a case that touched off a national immigration debate.