RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT

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Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat unchecked

Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6.

They sought to convince Trump that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without diminishing his electoral win, according to three officials involved in the sessions. More important, they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This was part of the normalization process,” one participant said. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”

But as aides persisted, Trump became agitated. He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma.
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The feeble American response has registered with the Kremlin.

U.S. officials said that a stream of intelligence from sources inside the Russian government indicates that Putin and his lieutenants regard the 2016 “active measures” campaign — as the Russians describe such covert propaganda operations — as a resounding, if incomplete, success.

Moscow has not achieved some its most narrow and immediate goals. The annexation of Crimea from Ukraine has not been recognized. Sanctions imposed for Russian intervention in Ukraine remain in place. Additional penalties have been mandated by Congress. And a wave of diplomatic retaliation has cost Russia access to additional diplomatic facilities, including its San Francisco consulate.

But overall, U.S. officials said, the Kremlin believes it got a staggering return on an operation that by some estimates cost less than $500,000 to execute and was organized around two main objectives — destabilizing U.S. democracy and preventing Hillary Clinton, who is despised by Putin, from reaching the White House.

The bottom line for Putin, said one U.S. official briefed on the stream of post-election intelligence, is that the operation was “more than worth the effort.”
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Bannon and McMaster clashed in front of Trump during an Oval Office discussion about NATO in the spring, officials said. Trump, sitting behind his desk, was voicing frustration that NATO member states were not meeting their defense spending obligations under the treaty. Bannon went further, describing Europe as “nothing more than a glorified protectorate.”

McMaster, an ardent supporter of NATO, snapped at Bannon. “Why are you such an apologist for Russia?” he asked, according to two officials with knowledge of the exchange. Bannon shot back that his position had “nothing to do with Russians” and later told colleagues how much he relished such confrontations with McMaster, saying, “I love living rent-free in his head.”
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But the language was stripped out at the last minute by NATO critics inside the administration who argued that “it didn’t sound presidential enough,” one senior U.S. official said. A month later, Stephen Miller, a White House adviser close to Bannon, carried out a similar editing operation in Brussels where Trump spoke at a dedication ceremony for NATO’s gleaming new headquarters.
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His demeanor with the German leader was in striking contrast with his encounters with Putin and other authoritarian figures. “Who are the three guys in the world he most admires? President Xi [Jinping] of China, [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and Putin,” one Trump adviser said. “They’re all the same guy.”

Merkel has never fit into that Trump pantheon. Before her arrival, senior White House aides witnessed an odd scene that some saw as an omen for the visit. As McMaster and a dozen other top aides met with Trump in the Oval Office to outline issues Merkel was likely to raise, the president grew impatient, stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom.

Trump left the bathroom door open, according to officials familiar with the incident, instructing McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. A senior White House official said the president entered the restroom and merely “took a glance in the mirror, as this was before a public event.”
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Trump Objects to Defense Law’s Anti-Russia Provisions
The president, in signing the defense authorization, made clear his opposition to countering Kremlin ‘hybrid warfare operations.’
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Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast


President Donald Trump Tuesday night signaled his reluctance to enforce congressionally-passed restrictions on Russia.

In signing the massive annual military spending bill, known formally as the National Defense Authorization Act, Trump objected to several measures Congress passed to toughen U.S. policy toward Russia, which U.S. intelligence has assessed interfered in the 2016 election to benefit him.

Several provisions of the bill, Trump wrote in his signing statement — effectively a presidential caveat to new laws – could “potentially dictate the position of the United States in external military and foreign affairs and, in certain instances, direct the conduct of international diplomacy.”

It’s the latest installment in a pattern in which Trump carves out an exception to his typical bellicosity for Russia, even as he describes a federal investigation aimed at uncovering his campaign’s ties to the Kremlin as a politicized fraud.

Among those provisions Trump cited as potentially violative of his authority is section 1239, which directs Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the military to “develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to counter threats by the Russian Federation.”

Subsection A of the requirement, to which Trump also specifically objected, directs the strategy to attribute and defend against “hybrid warfare operations short of traditional armed conflict against the United States and its allies and partners.” In particular, such a strategy should “identify and defend against” Russia’s “use of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda in social and traditional media” – something The Daily Beast, as well as the congressional Russia inquiries, have extensively documented.

The strategy Congress directed also seeks action against “corrupt or illicit financing of political parties, think tanks, media organizations and academic institutions” and “the use of coercive economic tools, including sanctions, market access, cryptocurrencies, and differential pricing, especially in the energy section.” It explicitly seeks unnamed measures to bolster early detection of “hybrid warfare operations by the Russian federation” and to support actions “to support NATO allies and non-NATO partners” – like those in Eastern Europe concerned about Russian irredentism, as seen in Ukraine – “in maintaining their sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

In the signing statement, first reported by USA Today, Trump did not explicitly say he would let those provisions languish. Instead, he asserted his authority to reject them, writing that his administration will “treat these provisions consistent with the President's exclusive constitutional authorities as Commander in Chief and as the sole representative of the Nation in foreign affairs to determine the terms on which recognition is given to foreign sovereigns and conduct the Nation's diplomacy.”

The test will come in mid-April 2018, when the just-signed NDAA requires Mattis and Tillerson, or whomever is then the secretary of state, to submit the strategy document to Congress. Or, perhaps now, they won’t.

Those weren’t the only Russia-related measures in the NDAA Trump called out as faulty.

Section 1231 extends a recent restriction, first enacted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, against military-to-military cooperation with Russian forces. That was a measure the U.S. military, in January, feared then-national security adviser Mike Flynn wanted the generals to violate in Syria, as The Daily Beast reported in June.

Section 1232 prevents the Pentagon from spending money to do anything “that recognizes the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea,” absent an explicit justification bearing Mattis’ personal imprimatur.

Section 1069 requires the security agencies to strengthen vetting processes for foreign investments “that could potentially impair the national security of the United States.” Specifically, Congress wants to bolster processes assessing, among other things, “the counterintelligence risks posed by purchases or leases of Federal land.”

Flynn’s guilty plea to special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia, stated that last December, Flynn, with the knowledge of the presidential transition team, sought to minimize Russian responses to sanctions approved by Barack Obama that expelled Russian intelligence operatives and repossessed two facilities in Maryland and New York that they used.

Trump didn’t just object to NDAA provisions governing Russia.

He has a problem with measures Congress took to strengthen defense ties to India and Taiwan – the latter occurring after Trump lavished praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping last month in Beijing – as well as strengthening Nigeria’s security apparatus. He called out a measure requiring an “analysis of the adequacy of the existing legal framework” against the Islamic State, a framework that many in Congress believe is strained beyond recognition. And he criticized a section requiring his administration to describe “United States strategic objectives in Somalia,” a theater of war he has escalated, and provide “benchmarks for assessing progress toward such objectives.”



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fact

fact

Fukk you thought it was?
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How you gonna ROFL with a hollow back?
Orbital-Fetus said:
GOP is going to be a dumpster fire when this is all said and done.
bums passing by won't even pick through it.
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But if there is one thing that we have come to know as fact, they might not pick through the dumpster, but they will try to stick thier dikk in it, if it is a 13 yr old boy or girl
 
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