Spying

One more time, I hope the last one, let's VERY quickly take a look at spying and US politics.

As part of the Democrats' desperation move to delegitimize and perhaps even abort the Trump presidency, the obedient and well-trained progressive national media took up the theme of Russian hacking of our election and of Russian intel efforts on behalf of Trump's candidacy. Please see the many pieces I have posted on this if you want more details of my views on this.

The Democrats, trying to avoid discussing that their terrible candidate used an illegal private server for classified work while she served as SecState, and to distract from the steady and corrosive drip-drip of information coming out of Wikileaks re a range of Democratic shenanigans, hit on the story of the Trump campaign being in bed with Putin and his agents. A series of "bombshell" "leaks" from what was claimed were intel sources alleged that the Russians were working to get Trump elected and that the Trump campaign not only knew this but was collaborating with Moscow. President Obama, awakening from his eight-year slumber re foreign intel operations against the USA, expelled a number of Russian diplomatic personnel and closed two Russian facilities in New York and in Maryland. As time passed, the Russian story took some different paths: one was a relatively short-lived effort to claim that Russian hackers could have gotten into our voting machines to rig them for Trump; the other, still with us, was to claim that key Trump personnel had meetings with Russian diplomats, including the "spy master" Russian Ambassador. A poor choice of words when testifying before the Senate ended up costing National Security Advisor Flynn his job, and nearly killed off AG Sessions's term before it had even begun. The AG agreed to recuse himself from any DOJ/FBI investigation into Russian involvement in our elections.

Editorial aside: I think Trump's personnel made a mistake. Flynn resigning and Sessions recusing appeared to give credibility to a massive Democratic hatchet job carried out by people who had little to no history of concern for US security. End editorial aside.

As the ceaseless "leaks" and demands for an investigation continued, President Trump angrily tweeted that Obama had placed him and his campaign under surveillance. This unleashed another torrent of abuse from the Dems, their media, and the RINOs demanding that Trump provide the evidence of this spying. They demanded a level of proof not demanded from those claiming Trump was in cahoots with Putin. Well, we now have the Congressional intel oversight committees reporting that they have found no evidence of Obama-ordered surveillance of Trump. Trump's spokesman countered that Obama asked British intelligence to do the deed to avoid American fingerprints. The British have denied that they did any such thing.

Editorial aside: I have worked with British intel folks, and would be very surprised if they had agreed to spy on Trump, at least on an official level. While PM May certainly expressed no love for Trump before the elections, getting Britain involved in US politics in this manner would provide little potential reward as a counter to the many, many liabilities of this sort of behavior being uncovered in our very Wikileaky times. This is not to say that ex-British intel personnel or some sort of once removed type of personnel, e.g., contracted hackers, might, perhaps, maybe, possibly have done something along those lines. Let us not forget that as Hollywood has established, anybody with a Russian or a British accent is almost certainly a villain, so there is that. End of editorial aside.

OK. We are left with the following.

The Dems claim that Trump is in bed with the Russians; Trump denies it and countercharges that the Dems had him under surveillance. We have here a problem. If the Dems have official intel on Trump's connections with Russia, how did they get it? Presumably from the official intel services which then it would appear were monitoring Russian contacts with Trump's people. If there was no surveillance order given to US intel, from where did the intel on Russian contacts come? The British is apparently the Trump answer. I have a more plausible one. I think there was surveillance of Russian activity, probably by the NSA, and it found nothing to show that Trump had contacts with the Russians; the Obamistas and the Clintonistas then made up the accounts of Russian interference. In other words, they lied. That's the most charitable explanation I can develop. There, of course, are harsher ones which I hope are not accurate, ones that would show, once again, Obama's misuse of the nation's intel and enforcement capabilities.

My two roubles and three pennies worth of analysis.