U.S. Spies Heard Russians Discuss Ways to Sway Trump

Posted on May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 by Denise Simon

Image result for general flynn In Russia, this is called ‘active measures’ and there have been several panels before congress providing testimony highlighting with evidence all the methods used by Russia. This type of political intrusion is part of the Russian hybrid warfare not only against the United States but other countries in Europe, Eastern Europe and NATO.

Primer: The Senate has issued 2 subpoenas to Flynn’s two businesses. Additionally, another AG in Virginia has also issued a separate subpoena. Flynn had/has 2 businesses connected to him, Flynn Intel LLC and Flynn Intel Inc., both based in Alexandria, Va.

Image result for general flynn

WASHINGTON — American spies collected information last summer revealing that senior Russian intelligence and political officials were discussing how to exert influence over Donald J. Trump through his advisers, according to three current and former American officials familiar with the intelligence.

The conversations focused on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman at the time, and Michael T. Flynn, a retired general who was advising Mr. Trump, the officials said. Both men had indirect ties to Russian officials, who appeared confident that each could be used to help shape Mr. Trump’s opinions on Russia.

Some Russians boasted about how well they knew Mr. Flynn. Others discussed leveraging their ties to Viktor F. Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine living in exile in Russia, who at one time had worked closely with Mr. Manafort.

The intelligence was among the clues — which also included information about direct communications between Mr. Trump’s advisers and Russian officials — that American officials received last year as they began investigating Russian attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of Mr. Trump’s associates were assisting Moscow in the effort. Details of the conversations, some of which have not been previously reported, add to an increasing understanding of the alarm inside the American government last year about the Russian disruption campaign.

The information collected last summer was considered credible enough for intelligence agencies to pass to the F.B.I., which during that period opened a counterintelligence investigation that is ongoing. It is unclear, however, whether Russian officials actually tried to directly influence Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn. Both have denied any collusion with the Russian government on the campaign to disrupt the election.

John O. Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., testified Tuesday about a tense period last year when he came to believe that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was trying to steer the outcome of the election. He said he saw intelligence suggesting that Russia wanted to use Trump campaign officials, wittingly or not, to help in that effort. He spoke vaguely about contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, without giving names, saying they “raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”

Whether the Russians worked directly with any Trump advisers is one of the central questions that federal investigators, now led by Robert S. Mueller III, the newly appointed special counsel, are seeking to answer. President Trump, for his part, has dismissed talk of Russian interference in the election as “fake news,” insisting there was no contact between his campaign and Russian officials.

The White House, F.B.I. and C.I.A. declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Mr. Manafort. Mr. Flynn’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The current and former officials agreed to discuss the intelligence only on the condition of anonymity because much of it remains highly classified, and they could be prosecuted for disclosing it.

Last week, CNN reported about intercepted phone calls during which Russian officials were bragging about ties to Mr. Flynn and discussing ways to wield influence over him.

In his congressional testimony, Mr. Brennan discussed the broad outlines of the intelligence, and his disclosures backed up the accounts of the information provided by the current and former officials.

“I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election. And they were very aggressive,” Mr. Brennan said. Still, he said, even at the end of the Obama administration he had “unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons, involved in the campaign or not, to work on their behalf again either in a witting or unwitting fashion.”

Mr. Brennan’s testimony offered the fullest public account to date of how American intelligence agencies first came to fear that Mr. Trump’s campaign might be aiding Russia’s attack on the election.

By early summer, American intelligence officials already were fairly certain that it was Russian hackers who had stolen tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That in itself was not viewed as particularly extraordinary by the Americans — foreign spies had hacked previous campaigns, and the United States does the same in elections around the world, officials said. The view on the inside was that collecting information, even through hacking, is what spies do.

But the concerns began to grow when intelligence began trickling in about Russian officials weighing whether they should release stolen emails and other information to shape American opinion — to, in essence, weaponize the materials stolen by hackers.

An unclassified report by American intelligence agencies released in January stated that Mr. Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.”

Before taking the helm of the Trump campaign last May, Mr. Manafort worked for more than a decade for Russian-leaning political organizations and people in Ukraine, including Mr. Yanukovych, the former president. Mr. Yanukovych was a close ally of Mr. Putin.

Mr. Manafort’s links to Ukraine led to his departure from the Trump campaign in August, after his name surfaced in secret ledgers showing millions in undisclosed cash payments from Mr. Yanukovych’s political party.

The Russian government views Ukraine as a buffer against the eastward expansion of NATO, and has supported separatists in their yearslong fight against the struggling democratic government in Kiev.

Mr. Flynn’s ties to Russian officials stretch back to his time at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which he led from 2012 to 2014. There, he began pressing for the United States to cultivate Russia as an ally in the fight against Islamist militants, and even spent a day in Moscow at the headquarters of the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, in 2013.

He continued to insist that Russia could be an ally even after Moscow’s seizure of Crimea the following year, and Obama administration officials have said that contributed to their decision to push him out of the D.I.A.

But in private life, Mr. Flynn cultivated even closer ties to Russia. In 2015, he earned more than $65,000 from companies linked to Russia, including a cargo airline implicated in a bribery scheme involving Russian officials at the United Nations, and an American branch of a cybersecurity firm believed to have ties to Russia’s intelligence services.

The biggest payment, though, came from RT, the Kremlin-financed news network. It paid Mr. Flynn $45,000 to give a speech in Moscow, where he also attended the network’s lavish anniversary dinner. There, he was photographed sitting next to Mr. Putin.

A senior lawmaker said on Monday that Mr. Flynn misled Pentagon investigators about how he was paid for the Moscow trip. He also failed to disclose the source of that income on a security form he was required to complete before joining the White House, according to congressional investigators.

American officials have also said there were multiple telephone calls between Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, on Dec. 29, beginning shortly after Mr. Kislyak was summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States was expelling 35 people suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions.

American intelligence agencies routinely tap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls showed that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office, officials have said.

But after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of the calls, Mr. Flynn was fired as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after a tumultuous 25 days in office.

Does June Cobb Hold the Secrets of JFK’s Assassination?

Posted on May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 by Denise Simon

Did you ever believe the Warren Commission Report? Me neither. Have you ever heard the name June Cobb? Well, if you can find her…what could she reveal about her time in Cuba and Mexico City?

JUNE COBB’S PENETRATION OF CASTRO’S INNER CIRCLE

What Could a Mysterious U.S. Spy Know About the JFK Assassination?

John F. Kennedy buffs are awaiting the release of documents about June Cobb, a little-known CIA operative working in Cuba and Mexico around the time of the president’s assassination.

Politico: She may have been one of the bravest and best-placed American spies in the history of the Cold War, but few people outside the CIA know the mysterious story of June Cobb.

The existing information in the spy agency’s declassified files depicts Cobb as an American Mata Hari—an adventure-loving, death-defying globetrotter who moved to Cuba to work for Fidel Castro, the country’s newly installed strongman, then found herself recruited to spy for the CIA after growing disenchanted with Castro’s revolution. The era’s rampant sexism is obvious in her job evaluation reports: Cobb’s CIA handlers wrote down speculation about her sex life and her failed romance in the 1950s with an opium farmer in the jungles of South America. And the reports are filled with appraisals of Cobb’s looks, noting especially her fetching blue eyes. “Miss Cobb is not unattractive,” her CIA recruiter wrote in 1960. “She is blonde, has a slender figure, although she has a somewhat hard look, making her appear somewhat older than her 33 years.”

According to another, undated evaluation, she had a “wiry” figure but had been attractive enough to catch the Cuban dictator’s eye. Cobb, the report said, was reputedly “a former girlfriend of Castro’s.” True or not, she was close enough to get a job on the Cuban dictator’s senior staff in Havana in 1960, the perfect perch to spy for the CIA. Cobb’s agency work in Havana and later in Mexico leads us to the most puzzling aspect of her life—that she later found herself drawn deeply into the mysteries of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. After the murder, she reported to her CIA bosses that she had identified a trio of witnesses who could tie Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Cuban diplomats and spies in Mexico City, where Oswald had traveled just weeks before the assassination.

What did June Cobb know at the time? Historians of the Cold War—and anyone with an interest in JFK’s 1963 assassination and the possibility of Cuban involvement—are on the verge of learning much more about the extraordinary, often bizarre, sometimes tragic life of the American spy who was born Viola June Cobb, the full name that appeared on her birth certificate back home in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1927. The National Archives has recently acknowledged that it is preparing to release a 221-page file of long-secret CIA documents about Cobb that—for reasons the Archives says it cannot yet divulge—are somehow linked to JFK’s murder.

The Cobb file is among the most tantalizing of an estimated 3,600 assassination-related documents scheduled to be made public by late October under the 25-year deadline established by the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Under the 1992 law, the full library of long-secret files will be released automatically by the National Archives later this year unless President Donald Trump blocks their release on national security grounds. The White House has not signaled what Trump, who for years has promoted mostly baseless conspiracy theories, including about JFK’s assassination, will do.

What we know about Cobb so far comes largely from millions of pages of other documents from the CIA, FBI and other federal agencies that were declassified years ago under the 1992 law. Within those documents are dozens of files that identified Cobb as a paid CIA operative when she worked on Castro’s staff in Havana and later when she moved to Mexico. Some of the documents tie her to a lingering questions about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in late September 1963, not long before Kennedy’s November assassination. In Mexico, Oswald came under CIA surveillance when he met there with both Soviet and Cuban spies. Previously released documents also show Cobb’s involvement in CIA surveillance of a U.S.-based pro-Castro group, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which Oswald championed in the months before Kennedy’s murder.

There is one document about Cobb that has remained completely off-limits to the public all these years: the 221-page file identified as “FOLDER ON COBB, VIOLA JUNE (VOL VII)” on a skeletal index released by the Archives last year. It is one of the 3,600 documents that were withheld from public view entirely in the 1990s at the request of the agencies that originally produced them—in Cobb’s case, the CIA. The index prepared by the Archives shows that, as of 1998, when her file was last officially reviewed, the spy agency said the document was “not believed relevant” to the Kennedy assassination but could do unspecified harm if made public before the October 2017 deadline.

But the history of the assassination has needed to be rewritten since the 1990s, in part because of the CIA’s documented duplicity, which raises the question of whether Cobb’s file could in fact be relevant. A 2013 report by the CIA’s in-house historian acknowledged that the agency had conducted a “benign cover-up” in the years immediately after Kennedy’s assassination in an effort to keep investigators focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The agency told the Warren Commission—the panel led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that concluded in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone—that there was no evidence of a conspiracy in JFK’s death. The CIA has also admitted that it failed to tell the commission that the agency had attempted throughout Kennedy’s presidency to assassinate Castro and that Castro knew about the plots, which could have given the Cuban an obvious motive to retaliate. Many of the Castro plots involved CIA operatives working out of Mexico City at the time Oswald visited the city in 1963. In the late 1970s, the CIA refused to help investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations find Cobb for an interview about what might have happened to Oswald in Mexico, according to the panel’s declassified files.

Gus Russo, a historian and journalist who has written two widely praised books about the assassination, managed to track down Cobb when she living in New York City more than a decade ago and interviewed her about her spying career. “I have always felt that June Cobb was one of the most fascinating characters I came across over decades of looking at this story,” he said in an interview. “She came across as a female James Bond at a time when there were few, if any, female James Bonds.” He added, “I found her to be completely credible and utterly uninterested in notoriety.” Her whereabouts today are a mystery.

A listed phone number for Cobb in Manhattan is disconnected. Messages sent to her email address, the one Russo used years ago, were returned as “undeliverable.” Phone calls to women with her name in her home state of Oklahoma were unreturned. If still alive, she would have turned 90 this year.

During the 1960s, when her prominent work on Castro’s staff in Havana drew the attention of curious journalists, Cobb granted a few interviews in which she explained how she ended up in Cuba. After dropping out of the University of Oklahoma in the late 1940s, she decided to seek excitement far from the flatlands of Oklahoma and moved to Mexico City, to study at a university there. In Mexico, she fell in love with a fellow student, a young Colombian, who enticed her to join him on an adventure in the jungles of Ecuador, where he hoped to open a business growing poppies for opium production—not clearly illegal in Ecuador at the time. She said she went for several months, only to leave him when he grew addicted to his own product. In a 1962 article about Cobb, the muckraking columnist Jack Anderson reported that, according to U.S. government sources, Cobb had other motives for fleeing: Her boyfriend had taken up with other women in Ecuador, and so—“in a fit of jealousy”—Cobb flew back to the United States and “squealed on him” to American narcotics agents.

Whatever really happened in the South American jungle, Cobb found herself working as a journalist in New York as Castro came to power in 1959. She told Anderson that she had gotten swept up in the initial excitement of Castro’s revolution after meeting the Cuban leader when he traveled to New York shortly after taking the reins, before he acknowledged he was a Communist. Within weeks of the meeting, Cobb said, she was invited to Havana to serve as one of Castro’s principal English-language translators—she spoke fluent Spanish—and to handle his contacts with American news organizations. “I suppose you can call me a sucker for lost causes,” she told Anderson.

She was assigned an office only several hundred feet away from Castro’s and, according to CIA reports, saw him face-to-face regularly. Within months, she said, she found herself disenchanted with the revolution, especially as Castro became more vocally anti-American and drew closer to the Soviet Union. “I do doubt that he was a Communist all along,” she later told congressional investigators. “I think that is one of his many falsehoods.”

In 1960, previously declassified CIA records show, she was recruited to begin spying for the United States. In interviews at the time, Cobb tried to deny ties to U.S. intelligence but acknowledged how close she had been to Castro and his key deputies, including his brother Raúl and guerilla leader Che Guevara. CIA files describe Cobb as having had an adventurous love life—she is “promiscuous,” her American handler in Mexico said flatly—but make no final judgment about whether she had a physical relationship with the Cuban leader.

“Her association with Fidel Castro and his entourage has been another shattered ‘dream,’ one of a whole series in her life,” her CIA recruiter wrote at the time, explaining her motives for becoming a spy. “Miss Cobb has undergone much emotional stress in her life and is no longer sure that the revolutionary movement she was so idealistically motivated by a few months ago is the right thing.” Previously declassified CIA document show that Cobb’s information was valuable in preparing the spy agency’s detailed psychological profiles of Castro and his deputies and in monitoring their activities.

A photograph of June Cobb from an August 1962 profile in Parade magazine. | Parade Magazine

By choosing to spy, the records show, Cobb knew she was risking her life, especially after another American prominent in Castro’s government, William Morgan of Toledo, Ohio, who had fought alongside Castro’s army in the revolution, was charged with treason in 1961 by his former Cuban allies and executed by firing squad. “He was a boy with ideals,” Cobb said later of Morgan.

Fearing she faced a similar end, Cobb decided to leave Cuba shortly after Morgan’s arrest and was transferred by the CIA to Mexico City, where she took on assignments monitoring Cuban agents, as well Mexicans who were sympathetic to Castro’s government—work that would eventually draw her into investigations of the Kennedy assassination.

Cobb figures prominently in one of the greatest of the unsolved mysteries about Oswald’s trip to Mexico weeks before the assassination—whether he was in contact there with Cuban or Soviet agents who knew he had spoken openly about killing Kennedy, possibly as an act of retaliation for JFK’s efforts to overthrow Castro’s government. Previously declassified government files suggest that, at one point, Oswald marched into the Cuban embassy compound in Mexico City and announced loudly: “I’m going to kill Kennedy.”

According to other declassified files, Cobb reported to the CIA’s Mexico City station in October 1964, nearly a year after JFK’s assassination, that she had learned from a prominent Mexican writer and two other Mexican sources that they had all seen Oswald at a dance party during his trip the year before that was also attended by Cuban diplomats and others who had spoken openly of their hope that Kennedy would be assassinated. Cobb’s sources said Oswald had been at the party in the company of two other young American men, who appeared to be his traveling companions and whose identifies have never been established. The questions raised by Cobb’s reports were obvious: Had any of those people encouraged Oswald to murder JFK or offered to help him escape after the assassination? (Nothing in the previously released documents involving Cobb support theories that Castro personally ordered Kennedy’s death.)

Cobb speaks with Amazonian natives in Ecuador. | Parade Magazine

The CIA’s Mexico City station, its files reveal, was determined to dismiss Cobb’s report, perhaps eager to have the official record show that Oswald was a lone wolf whose plans to kill Kennedy could never have been foiled by the spy agency’s officials. Cobb’s key witness, the Mexican novelist and playwright Elena Garro, was interviewed by the FBI, but the CIA disparaged her account, even though other witnesses would come forward to support it. Other leads offered by Cobb were never pursued. And in any case, by the time all of this came out, it was too late for the Warren Commission to act: Two weeks before Cobb’s information landed with her CIA handlers in Mexico, the commission had issued its final report in Washington and shut down its investigation.

Moscow’s Igor Sergun: Cong. Rohrabacher to your ‘Like Button’

Posted on May 19, 2017May 19, 2017 by Denise Simon

One part of this Moscow mess began in 2012, when the FBI held a private session with Congressman Dana Rohrahacher, (CA), Mike Rogers, Michigan, and according to one former official, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, telling them they were the targets of Russian influence and possible targets of recruiting.

Of note, Igor Sergun died in January of 2016, but his operations were already underway.

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Sergun is credited as an important figure in the renaissance of the GRU, which had suffered deep staff and budget cuts prior to his arrival. Under Sergun, the agency regained political power within the Russian government as well as control over the Spetsnaz special forces, making it “crucial in the seizure of Crimea and operations in the Donbas,” as well as “as the lead agency for dealing with violent non-state actors.”

Perhaps the United States should take a hard look at the actions Ukraine has taken regarding Russian intrusion.

Poroshenko this week ordered Ukrainian Internet providers to block Vkontakte and Odnoclassniki. The sites are similar to Facebook and are two of the most popular social networking sites in the former Soviet space.

More than 25 million Ukrainians, in a country of about 43 million people, use the Russian sites to connect with friends, join groups and use the online messaging systems.

Poroshenko said the new restrictions were necessary to further protect Ukraine from Kremlin hybrid warfare, including disinformation campaigns, propaganda and military attacks. The two neighbors and former Soviet republics have been embroiled in a brutal, three-year war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced about 1.7 million eastern Ukrainians.

Supporters of the ban said it would also protect Ukrainians from the Russian security services’ ability to monitor and gather metadata from the sites’ users. Ukrainian government officials said the sites are closely monitored by Russia’s FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. More here from LATimes.

One must take the time to see the evidence the domestic intelligence agencies and private cyber companies along with data analysis experts are uncovering and studying. Further, since we citizens cannot attend meetings, some in classified settings that are held in Congress and we don’t get any information from the investigations, there are some interviews with professionals that are sounding the alarm bells.

Are you sick of Russia and hearing about Putin? Sure you are, but so is our government and other global leaders, rightly so. You are going to have to understand some facts and buckle in….there is more to come. Until the United States crafts a policy, decides on responses and pass legislation, Russia has nothing to stop their actions. What actions?

In part from Time: On March 2, a disturbing report hit the desks of U.S. counterintelligence officials in Washington. For months, American spy hunters had scrambled to uncover details of Russia’s influence operation against the 2016 presidential election. In offices in both D.C. and suburban Virginia, they had created massive wall charts to track the different players in Russia’s multipronged scheme. But the report in early March was something new.

It described how Russia had already moved on from the rudimentary email hacks against politicians it had used in 2016. Now the Russians were running a more sophisticated hack on Twitter. The report said the Russians had sent expertly tailored messages carrying malware to more than 10,000 Twitter users in the Defense Department. Depending on the interests of the targets, the messages offered links to stories on recent sporting events or the Oscars, which had taken place the previous weekend. When clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a program allowing Moscow’s hackers to take control of the victim’s phone or computer–and Twitter account.

As they scrambled to contain the damage from the hack and regain control of any compromised devices, the spy hunters realized they faced a new kind of threat. In 2016, Russia had used thousands of covert human agents and robot computer programs to spread disinformation referencing the stolen campaign emails of Hillary Clinton, amplifying their effect. Now counterintelligence officials wondered: What chaos could Moscow unleash with thousands of Twitter handles that spoke in real time with the authority of the armed forces of the United States? At any given moment, perhaps during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Pentagon Twitter accounts might send out false information. As each tweet corroborated another, and covert Russian agents amplified the messages even further afield, the result could be panic and confusion.

***

Americans generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments–literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it.

That’s where the algorithms come in. American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups according to defining characteristics like religion and political beliefs or taste in TV shows and music. Other algorithms can determine those groups’ hot-button issues and identify “followers” among them, pinpointing those most susceptible to suggestion. Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.

That is what Moscow is doing, more than a dozen senior intelligence officials and others investigating Russia’s influence operations tell TIME. The Russians “target you and see what you like, what you click on, and see if you’re sympathetic or not sympathetic,” says a senior intelligence official. Whether and how much they have actually been able to change Americans’ behavior is hard to say. But as they have investigated the Russian 2016 operation, intelligence and other officials have found that Moscow has developed sophisticated tactics.

In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election.

What the officer didn’t know, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, was that U.S. spies were listening. They wrote up the conversation and sent it back to analysts at headquarters, who turned it from raw intelligence into an official report and circulated it. But if the officer’s boast seems like a red flag now, at the time U.S. officials didn’t know what to make of it. “We didn’t really understand the context of it until much later,” says the senior intelligence official. Investigators now realize that the officer’s boast was the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn’t just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote. Like much of America, many in the U.S. government hadn’t imagined the kind of influence operation that Russia was preparing to unleash on the 2016 election. Fewer still realized it had been five years in the making.

Putin publicly accused then Secretary of State Clinton of running a massive influence operation against his country, saying she had sent “a signal” to protesters and that the State Department had actively worked to fuel the protests. The State Department said it had just funded pro-democracy organizations. Former officials say any such operations–in Russia or elsewhere–would require a special intelligence finding by the President and that Barack Obama was not likely to have issued one.

After his re-election the following year, Putin dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering. Russian intelligence agencies funded “troll farms,” botnet spamming operations and fake news outlets as part of an expanding focus on psychological operations in cyberspace.

One particularly talented Russian programmer who had worked with social media researchers in the U.S. for 10 years had returned to Moscow and brought with him a trove of algorithms that could be used in influence operations. He was promptly hired by those working for Russian intelligence services, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. “The engineer who built them the algorithms is U.S.-trained,” says the senior intelligence official.

Soon, Putin was aiming his new weapons at the U.S. Following Moscow’s April 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. considered sanctions that would block the export of drilling and fracking technologies to Russia, putting out of reach some $8.2 trillion in oil reserves that could not be tapped without U.S. technology. As they watched Moscow’s intelligence operations in the U.S., American spy hunters saw Russian agents applying their new social media tactics on key aides to members of Congress. Moscow’s agents broadcast material on social media and watched how targets responded in an attempt to find those who might support their cause, the senior intelligence official tells TIME. “The Russians started using it on the Hill with staffers,” the official says, “to see who is more susceptible to continue this program [and] to see who would be more favorable to what they want to do.”

Finish reading this remarkable report here. There is much more detail, including cyber operations, candidates, analysis and concocted political scandals. If one wonders why there is yet no evidence presented yet by the FBI and what the members of Congress are told, you now have a clue. This investigative process is a very long one and attributions as well as analysis is cumbersome and heavy on expert resources.

Trump’s EO on Voter Fraud Commission

Posted on May 11, 2017May 11, 2017 by Denise Simon

Read the text here. The ‘voting rights’ division at the Justice Department may just have an issue with this, but the commission should happen along with a technology fix going into the future. We cannot forget that DHS contacted several states prior to the voting season last Fall concerning registration databases and voting machines. Some states cooperated while others frankly did not only not trust government intrusion but DHS.

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Trump signs executive order launching voter fraud commission

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to launch a commission to review alleged voter fraud, a White House official confirmed to Fox News, after months of claiming voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.

The order, titled “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity,” would establish a bipartisan commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, to review alleged voter fraud and suppression. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has investigated voter fraud in Kansas, will serve as vice chair.

“The commission will also include individuals with knowledge and experience in election management and voter integrity,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders said on Thursday at the White House daily press briefing. “The commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine confidence in elections and identify system vulnerabilities.”

Huckabee-Sanders announced five members to the commission on Thursday: Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson (R), New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner (D), Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D), Christie McCormick, commissioner of the election assistance commission, and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell(R).

The White House said the commission will review practices that affect the integrity of federal elections–spanning improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting and voting suppression.

“We expect the report to be complete by 2018,” Huckabee-Sanders said. “The experts will follow the facts where they lead–we’ll share updates as we have them.”

Trump originally vowed to create such a commission in January. Days after his inauguration, Trump took to Twitter calling for a “major investigation into VOTER FRAUD,” saying that depending on the results of the investigation, “we will strengthen up voting procedures!” He cited “illegal” voters and “those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time)” which he claimed cost him the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won by 3 million votes.

But on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed the commission.

“Putting an extremist like Mr. Kobach at the helm of this commission is akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department,” Schumer said. “President Trump has decided to waste taxpayer dollars chasing a unicorn and perpetuating the dangerous myth that widespread voter fraud exists.”

Voting experts and many lawmakers have said they haven’t seen anything to suggest that millions of people voted illegally, including House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz. The Utah Republican said his committee won’t be investigating voter fraud.

In a lunch meeting with senators in February, Trump said that he and former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte would have won in New Hampshire if not for voters bused in from out of state. New Hampshire officials have said there was no evidence of major voter fraud in the state.

In a February interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump said the main issue of voter fraud was registration, and vowed to look at the situation “very, very carefully.”

“When you look at the registration and you see dead people that have voted, when you see people that are registered in two states, that have voted in two states, when you see other things, when you see illegals, people that are not citizens and they are on registration roles,” Trump said. “We can be babies, but you take a look at registration, you have illegals, you have dead people, you have this, it’s a really bad situation, it’s really bad.”

The decision to revisit the voter fraud issue comes during a tumultuous week, after Trump on Tuesday fired FBI Director James Comey. The administration cited Comey’s handling of the Clinton email probe, but Democrats also question what role his bureau investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 race played.

In a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian election tampering in March, voter fraud became a topic of questioning — Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked Comey if the FBI had any evidence that votes were changed in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio, to which Comey answered “No.”

After winning the election, Trump singled out several states and claimed fraud in their voting system, but officials in those states insisted that his claims were unfounded.

Shady Globalism Hurts Personally When it Involves Water

Posted on March 15, 2017March 15, 2017 by Denise Simon

We witnessed the Flint, Michigan water crisis, where it was just safe to drink and few cared until they did. The water crisis goes far beyond Michigan where drinking water and water for showers, cooking and washing clothes is just not safe. Gray or used water is scooped to flush toilets. Where you ask? California and it was not due to the 5 year drought. The crisis goes beyond California, it is in Arizona and the corn/wheat belt in the middle of the country.

Really? How does globalism fit into the issue?

Big corporations, Wall Street and Hedge Funds as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are part of the crisis.

Individual farmers and small agriculture business has faded away, sold out to big Agri-corporations where offers to buy the land is a cover as the water and aquifers are more valuable. Water is the new gold or oil. Urban and suburban areas, just plain people are paying the price to save water for the sake of water to be available for bigger operations. In fact it is so bad, domestic and foreign interests are pumping water in one location and transferring via privately owned pipe to locations up to and perhaps more than 100 miles away.

When it comes to the EPA controlling water access and use, the agency was not wrong but it was actually wrong for reasons far beyond the headlines. The EPA is protecting, controlling and managing water not for the individual but rather for Wall Street firms and foreign investments.

The EPA is not the only agency, it includes the Department of Agriculture. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue has not yet been confirmed however Scott Pruitt has been confirmed as Secretary of the EPA.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia

Exports of U.S. food and agricultural products to Saudi Arabia reached a record $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2014. Major exports include coarse grains, soybeans, dairy products, and vegetable oils.

In September 2012, the United States signed a trade and investment framework agreement (TIFA) with the Gulf Cooperation Council (which includes Saudi Arabia, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain) to continue expanding and liberalizing trade relations. More here.

Trade is a good thing for sure for farmers but the little guy is shut out of the trade system due to access of water and volume. The United States is feeding the Middle East.

The Office of Agricultural Affairs (OAA) is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), which has 93 offices covering 171 countries

OAA promotes and facilitates exports of U.S. agricultural products to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

OAA promotes exports of U.S. agricultural products by:

Conducting and participating in market development activities with non-profit U.S. high value food product and commodity trade associations.

Hosting trade promotion events.

Identifying possible opportunities for U.S. products, and placing potential importers in contact with U.S. exporters.

Recruiting representatives of Saudi food and agricultural product importers to attend major regional and U.S. based food and agricultural shows.

Providing match making and trade lead services.

OAA facilitates the export of U.S. agricultural products by:

Reporting on market opportunities and conditions.

Resolving trade policy issues by working with the governments of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and with the Gulf Standardization Organization (GSO).

Counseling and informing exporters and importers of U.S. agricultural products.

Developing and maintaining contacts in the food, logistics and agriculture sectors.

Coordinating workshops, technical seminars, and other events with non-profit U.S. commodity trade associations and other organizations.

***

The Middle Eastern kingdom, Saudi Arabia, needs hay for its 170,000 cows. So, it’s buying up farmland for the water-chugging crop in the drought-stricken American Southwest. 14,000 acres to be exact. Almarai Co. bought land in January that roughly doubled its holdings in California’s Palo Verde Valley, an area that enjoys first dibs on water from the Colorado River. The company also acquired a large tract near Vicksburg, Arizona, becoming a powerful economic force in a region that has fewer well-pumping restrictions than other parts of the state.

“Southern California and Arizona have good water rights. Who knows if that will change, but that’s the way things are now,” said Daniel Putnam, an agronomist at the University of California, Davis.

Over the last decade, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates emerged as significant buyers of American hay as their governments moved to curb water use. Together they accounted for 10 percent of U.S. exports of alfalfa and other grasses last year.

The land purchases signal that Almarai doesn’t just want to buy hay; it wants to grow. And it’s not the only Arab-owned Gulf company to take that approach.

Al Dahra ACX Global Inc., a top U.S. hay exporter based in Bakersfield, California, is owned by Al Dahra Agriculture Co. of United Arab Emirates. It farms extensively in Southern California and Arizona and, according to its website, plans to add 7,500 acres in the United States for alfalfa and other crops. The exporter packages crops grown across the West at its two plants in California and one in Washington state.

Most of the farms that Arab companies own worldwide are in developing nations. For instance, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has holdings in Latin America and Africa.

But part of the kingdom’s long-term food security strategy means investing in higher-cost countries with greater political stability, said John Lawton, owner of Agriculture Technology Co., a farming company in Saudi Arabia. More here from CSMonitor.

*** What about household use of water that is not drinkable?

The problem is that the groundwater it is using is unsafe for nearly 800,000 residents, according to the state’s water resources control board, because of longtime contamination from nitrates and arsenic.

That’s meant less drinkable water in California’s struggle to survive more than three years of severely dry weather.

“Most areas affected by contamination don’t have surface water supplies so they have to find new groundwater sources,” said Kurt Souza, a branch chief of the division of drinking water at the California State Water Resources Control Board.

“But that’s not always easy to do,” Souza added. “Sometimes you can find new ground locations for water and sometimes you can’t.”

The lack of rain and subsequent heavy demand on ground wells—which are also facing supply problems—is making a bad situation worse, said Sara Aminzadeh, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance, a statewide advocacy group for safe water. According to the state water resources study, unsafe levels of arsenic are the top contaminant in groundwater supplies, followed by nitrates.

Nitrates are most often traced to farming chemicals and animal waste. Arsenic is found naturally in soil and rock in much of the world and seeps into groundwater.

Chronic low exposure to arsenic has been traced to respiratory problems in children and adults as well as having links to diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancers of the skin. More here from NBC, video included.

For more confusion on the shadiness of the whole thing, here are a few additional items. If it is going on in California, perhaps we need to investigate and ask the same questions in other farming regions of the country. Then perhaps we need deeper research out of the EPA and the Department of Agriculture where most of this gained additional traction and success under the Obama administration.

By the way, it was never really about that pesky Delta Smelt fish that the other environmentalists were trying to protect. That was a cover story.

The Monterey Amendment: Monterey Amendment ended up in court, challenged by the Planning and Conservation League, Citizens Planning Association of Santa Barbara County, and a small SWP contractor, the Plumas County Flood Control and Water Conservation District.In 2000, a state appeals court agreed with the challengers that the Environmental Impact Report for the amendment did not analyze provisions for completion of the SWP or permanent water shortages.
In 2003, a settlement was reached that called for preparation of a new EIR, more detailed reporting of the project’s actual delivery capability and public participation on any project amendments.

DWR in 2007 released a draft EIR, which discusses the project alternatives, growth inducement, water supply reliability, as well as potential areas of controversy and concern. The final EIR was released in 2009. DWR decided to continue to operate the SWP under the existing Monterey Amendment to the SWP long-term water supply contracts, including the Kern Water Bank transfer, and under the Settlement Agreement entered in PCL v. DWR. DWR’s decision was challenged by two groups of plaintiffs on issues relating to the adequacy of the EIR and the validity of the Monterey Amendment. The cases are currently being heard by the trial court. Final resolution of the issues is likely to take a number of years.
Roll International Corporation/Kern Water Bank: The Wonderful Company LLC, formerly known as Roll Global, is a private corporation based in Los Angeles, California. With revenues of over $4.8 billion,^[1] it functions as a holding company for Stewart and Lynda Resnick, and as such is a vehicle for their personal investments in a number of businesses. The company currently counts as business divisions the following brands: flower delivery service Teleflora, juice company POM Wonderful, bottled water company FIJI Water, Wonderful Pistachios and Wonderful Almonds (formerly Paramount Farms), Wonderful Citrus (formerly Paramount Citrus), sea freight company Neptune Pacific Line, JUSTIN Vineyards and Winery, pest control company Suterra, and in-house marketing agency Wonderful Agency
Paramount Farming: Paramount Farming Company, LLC produces almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates in California. It also offers pomegranate, mango, tangerine, blueberry, and cherry juices. The company was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Bakersfield, California. Paramount Farming Company, LLC operates as a subsidiary of Roll International Corporation.
Westside Mutual Water Co., LLC.
IN 2014, California will establish statewide management of water pumped from the ground, under legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Jerry Brown. This really limits household usage and benefits big farming entities.
California is sinking even faster than scientists had thought, new NASA satellite imagery shows. Some areas of the Golden State are sinking more than 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) per month, the imagery reveals. Though the sinking, called subsidence, has long been a problem in California, the rate is accelerating because the state’s extreme drought is fueling voracious groundwater pumping.
New NASA imagery reveals that parts of California are sinking at an astonishing rate, with some parts of the San Joaquin Valley sinking as much as 2 inches per month.

Credit: Canadian Space Agency/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 2:00 p.m. E.T.

California is sinking even faster than scientists had thought, new NASA satellite imagery shows.

Some areas of the Golden State are sinking more than 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) per month, the imagery reveals. Though the sinking, called subsidence, has long been a problem in California, the rate is accelerating because the state’s extreme drought is fueling voracious groundwater pumping.

“Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows — up to 100 feet (30 meters) lower than previous records,” Mark Cowin, director of California’s Department of Water Resources, said in a statement. “As extensive groundwater pumping continues, the land is sinking more rapidly, and this puts nearby infrastructure at greater risk of costly damage.” [It’s Raining Spiders! The Weirdest Effects of California’s Drought]

What’s more, this furious groundwater pumping could have long-term consequences. If the land shrinks too much, and for too long, it can permanently lose its ability to store groundwater, the researchers said.

The state’s sinking isn’t new: California has long suffered from subsidence, and some parts are now a few dozen feet lower than they were in 1925, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But the state’s worst drought on record — 97 percent of the state is facing moderate to exceptional drought — has only accelerated the trend. To quantify this accelerated sinking, researchers at the Department of Water Resources and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, compared satellite imagery of California over time. Thanks to images taken from both satellites and airplanes using a remote-sensing technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), which uses radar to measure elevation differences, researchers can now map changes in the surface height of the ground with incredible precision. For the current study, the team stitched together imagery from Japan’s satellite-based Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar and Canada’s Earth Observation satellite Radarsat-2, as well as NASA’s airplane-based Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar.

Certain hotspots are shrinking at an astonishing rate — regions of the Tulare Basin, which includes Fresno, sank 13 inches (33 cm) in just eight months, they found. The Sacramento Valley is sinking about 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) per month. And the California Aqueduct — an intricate network of pipes, canals and tunnels that funnels water from high in the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern and central California to Southern California — has sunk 12.5 inches (32 cm), and most of that was just in the past four months, according to the new study.

The unquenchable thirst for groundwater in certain regions is largely a result of agriculture: Most of the state’s agricultural production resides in the fast-sinking regions around some of the state’s most endangered river systems — the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. As the heat and lack of rainfall have depleted surface-water supplies, farmers have turned to groundwater to keep their crops afloat.

Subsidence isn’t just an aesthetic problem; bridges and highways can sink and crack in dangerous ways, and flood-control structures can be compromised. In the San Joaquin Valley, the sinking Earth has destroyed the outer shell around thousands of privately drilled wells.

“Groundwater acts as a savings account to provide supplies during drought, but the NASA report shows the consequences of excessive withdrawals as we head into the fifth year of historic drought,” Corwin said. “We will work together with counties, local water districts, and affected communities to identify ways to slow the rate of subsidence and protect vital infrastructure such as canals, pumping stations, bridges and wells.”