President Trump should declassify all information on the Russia investigation - USA TODAY 01/04/19 03:15 from Trump Investigations
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01/04/19 03:15 from Trump Investigations from Michael_Novakhov (32 sites)
President Trump should declassify all information on the Russia investigation USA TODAY The full Mueller report should offer some information on how the Russia conspiracy theory started, but we'll likely need more investigat...
OPINION
President Trump should declassify all information on the Russia investigation
James S. Robbins, Opinion columnistPublished 3:15 a.m. ET April 1, 2019
The full Mueller report should offer some information on how the Russia conspiracy theory started, but we'll likely need more investigation.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller had become something of a messiah figure to the Trump haters. Like a god, he was remote, white-haired and reputed to work miracles. But Mueller ultimately disappointed his worshipers, establishing none of the Russian collusion they had been banking on to bolster their efforts to overturn the 2016 election.
The Russian collusion story had been an article of faith for the Resistance and the press. But why were so many people so deeply convinced of something that was not true? Who was behind not only concocting this fantastic tale but also embedding it in the highest levels of the Justice Department, the intelligence community and the news media?
This question had been on hold during the Mueller investigation. Government officials could not dig into it because anything they might do publicly would have been denounced as interference or “obstruction.” But with the Mueller phase concluded, the gates have opened.
President Donald Trump (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
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President Trump retweeted a link about a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying the Obama administration must account for “abuse of surveillance powers.” “Time to investigate the Obama officials who concocted and spread the Russian conspiracy hoax!” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., tweeted. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called for the appointment of a new special counsel. And former George W. Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleischer asked what could be the ultimate question, “What did Barack Obama know and what and when did he authorize it?”
How Obama's team targeted Trump
The Russia investigation did not come from nothing, of course. Moscow did try to influence the 2016 election, part of a long history of attempted involvement in American politics going back to the days of the Comintern. This Russian activity prompted President Obama to tell Vladimir Putin personally to “cut it out” or face “serious consequences.” And the FBI gave the Trump campaign a standard counterintelligence briefing on the possibility of foreign interference in the summer of 2016, multiple government sources told NBC News and CNN.
Yet Obama officials also treated Trump campaign staffers as targets themselves. They used cooperative foreign intelligence services to chat them up overseas, both to put a layer of deniability between them and this questionable behavior, and to get around prohibitions against spying on American citizens. The recently released transcript of the House Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Government Reform and Oversight interview with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos goes into great detail how this targeting was conducted. Papadopoulos claims that foreign governments are now cooperating to reveal more about these activities.
There are also numerous classified documents related to the collusion illusion that have been either hidden or released in severely redacted form. Last September, President Trump instructed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice immediately to declassify materials related to the Russia investigation, including “all text messages … without redaction” of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Bruce Ohr, as well as documents concerning the warrant application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for Trump adviser Carter Page.
Democrats objected that declassifying text messages regarding the Russia investigation will compromise FBI “sources and methods,” and the move was delayed after "key allies" objected.
Sources and methods must be known
However, sources and methods are the central question when it comes to investigating the investigators. So far as methods are concerned, what we know about them already are hardly worth being classified. They involve a basic counterintelligence technique, getting people to talk. In the Carter Page case, the target was a marginal character on the periphery of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. This is not exactly on the level of the previously classified methods revealed by Edward Snowden.
But if there were some highly technical, super secret surveillance methods being used against others, including Trump himself, it is imperative that they be revealed. The notion that the U.S. government was ordered to use such advanced tools against a major party presidential campaign or a president himself is to say the least troubling, and potentially a criminal abuse of power.
Sources, likewise, should not remain concealed. Their identity is the central question of the investigation. Republicans maintain that the Carter Page FISA warrant was almost entirely based on the discredited Fusion GPS “Russia dossier,” which was bankrolled by the Clinton-run Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
Yet former National Intelligence Director James Clapper claims that the sketchy dossier was not the main source. OK then, what was? Settling this question publicly is more important than protecting any alleged source. The country was on the verge of a grave constitutional crisis that far outweighed this narrow, and perhaps nonexistent, protection rationale. It’s time to have cards on the table.
Many revelations from this investigation to date have given dramatic weight to the idea that the FBI and intelligence community were engaged in an effort to derail the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and later to use an “insurance policy” to subvert the Trump presidency. It is pointless to continue to argue about this in the dark. If there is evidence that supports the Democrats’ charges in these redacted documents, why not let the public know? Hiding behind “sources and methods” won’t cut it.
Trump should declassify these secrets
Last August, former CIA Director John Brennan on Meet the Press called President Trump’s behavior “treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and to aiding and abet the enemy, and I stand very much by that claim.” Now he contritely admits that he might have relied on “bad information.” But Brennan was at the center of the collusion myth from the beginning. He had received “bad information” regarding Russian efforts to penetrate the Trump campaign from foreign intelligence sources dating back to 2015.
Early 2016, Brennan convened an interagency task force at Langley that included representatives from the CIA, the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency. Obama administration officials compiled a list of the key classified documents from this investigation after the 2016 election out of fear that the incoming Trump team would destroy them, according to The New York Times. So where is this list and where are the documents? Who was involved in Brennan’s working group, and were any of them coordinating with the Clinton campaign?
President Trump already has the authority to declassify much of this hidden information. In the spring of 2017, when the president charged that former national security adviser Susan Rice’s “unmasking” of U.S. persons in intelligence products was potentially criminal, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said, “If he’s going to make accusations of criminality against anyone, he needs to show evidence to support that kind of a charge.” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., added that “if the president wants to say that Susan Rice committed a crime, he has the power to declassify. No one else does.”
Couldn’t agree more.
It is probable that the full Mueller report goes into some of these issues, but it is likely that more investigation will need to be done. Democrats calling for transparency should be careful what they wish for. We are looking at what might be an unprecedented level of government interference in the 2016 election that makes Watergate look like a third-rate burglary.
James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors and author of "Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past," has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University and served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Robbins
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Will Robert Mueller Report Impact Other Donald Trump-Related Investigations? | The 11th Hour | MSNBC
Twitter Network Uses Fake Accounts to Promote Netanyahu, Israel ...
New York Times-9 hours ago
TEL AVIV — An Israeli watchdog group has found a network of hundreds of social media accounts, many of them fake, used to smear ...
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A network of hundreds of social media accounts has been working to boost Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's re-election campaign and smear his opponents ahead of next week's election, the New York Times and Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Monday, citing a report by a watchdog group.
The report by the Big Bots Project was written with assistance by the Israeli Alliance, a liberal-leaning organization, the New York Times said. While it found no direct links between the network and Netanyahu or his Likud party, it said the accounts appeared to work in tandem with one another and in coordination with Likud's election campaign.
The network included 154 accounts using fake names, with another 400 accounts suspected of being fake, with all of them apparently being operated by real people and with the posts receiving over 2.5 million hits, the report said. The network has posted about 130,000 tweets since the election was announced, the report said.
The network's activity has increased nearly fivefold since the election was called in December, and it is particularly active at "climactic moments for Netanyahu," the newspaper quoted the report as saying. Its messages were reposted by high-profile people linked to the Likud campaign, including Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister's son, who is an unofficial adviser to the campaign and retweeted members of the network 154 times, according to the report.
All the accounts are linked to one person, Yitzhak Haddad of Ashdod, according to the report, which cited a YouTube channel to which he is in active subscriber that features a message offering money for "responding on Facebook and on the internet with political messages. You just get political messages and you post them."
Haddad admitted to a private investigator that he created videos and posted them online. Asked whether the activity was paid for, he replied, "Yes. [I] post them to Twitter, post it all kinds of places." He also gave an idea of the scale of the operation: "I don't want to say tens of millions," he said, "but loads of money is being invested here. It takes money, there's no volunteering here." He added that he was connected to "very senior people" in Likud. Haddad's attorney said he denied "what was attributed to him" and threatened a million-dollar libel lawsuit against anyone publishing otherwise.
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A Likud spokesman denied the party ran a network of fake accounts and said it had no connection to Haddad.
The network has devoted much of its activity to smearing Netanyahu's primary rival in the election, Benny Gantz, the report said. The evening before the attorney general announced that Netanyahu would be indicted, the network amplified a Facebook post by a woman saying Gantz sexually harassed her when they were in high school, a claim Gantz denied and for which no additional evidence has emerged. Last week, many of the accounts began, almost at the same time, posting messages alleging that Gantz was mentally ill – a claim made in a Likud video clip.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
The international community is sick of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and wants the Blue and White Party to form the next government, the party’s No. 2 candidate, Yair Lapid, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview in Tel Aviv on Sunday.
Lapid has traveled the world and built up strong ties with a variety of world leaders. If Blue and White wins the April 9 general election, he would be foreign minister under Benny Gantz for the first two-and-a-half years and prime minister for the following year and a half as part of the power-sharing agreement they reached when they formed the party.
Lapid has traveled the world and built up strong ties with a variety of world leaders. If Blue and White wins the April 9 general election, he would be foreign minister under Benny Gantz for the first two-and-a-half years and prime minister for the following year and a half as part of the power-sharing agreement they reached when they formed the party.
“Many of the world leaders I am in touch with desperately want Netanyahu to go,” Lapid said. “Bibi has a problem with the Democratic Party, the more moderate Republicans, the majority of US Jews and the European Union – except [for] some Eastern European countries, especially Poland to whom he shamelessly surrendered the memory of the Jews who died there in WWII. He is doing well in some parts of Africa, Latin America and [with] the American president.”
Lapid said that as foreign minister and then prime minister, he would restore Israel’s bipartisan stature and recognize the Reform and Conservative movements. He said Israel has been insulting the majority of North American Jews for too long. He would also try to repair Israel’s ties with the European Union, which is the Jewish state’s largest trading partner.
“We will apply the Kotel [Western Wall] deal in the shortest possible amount of time – but the thing with politics is that it has to do with the amount of power you have,” he said. “Within three months, there will be a Kotel framework and recognition of all streams of Judaism in this country. This is why I keep telling people they have to make a decision.”
Regarding Lapid’s vow to restore dialogue with both sides of the aisle in Washington, he said that includes the Democratic Party’s controversial new congresswomen.
“The same way we expect the IDF to show up to every battle, I expect the Foreign Ministry to show up to every battle,” he said. “[New York Congresswoman] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is someone we need to talk to, in order to make sure she has the real facts about Israel. Otherwise, she only hears the other side.”
Lapid said that while Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has used unacceptable language, he would not rule out engaging with her as well.
“We have to sit with everyone,” he said. “Anyone who would hear the real facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would sympathize with us. “What those two Congresswomen don’t know is that the Palestinians are suffering not because of Israel but because of the Palestinian leaders.”
Lapid said that if Blue and White loses the election, his alliance with Gantz would stay together, because Netanyahu’s government would last less than a year and then fall apart, after an indictment expected to be issued by Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit. He said he expected Gantz to keep his word and not join Netanyahu’s government.
He rejected speculation that President Reuven Rivlin would ask Netanyahu to form the government if the Center-Right wins a majority on April 9, even if Blue and White wins more seats than Netanyahu’s Likud.
“In an election, someone loses and someone wins,” he said. “If we win by four or five seats, no force on Earth can stop us from forming the government.”
He also said that he doesn’t think Gantz will try to enter Netanyahu’s government if the Likud leader receives the presidential mandate to form the next government. If Blue and White wins the elections, he said the first phone calls would be to a “post-Netanyahu” Likud and the Labor Party, as part of an effort to form a national unity government.
“I think [it] will be part of the healing process that the Israeli people need,” he said.
Blue and White’s message, he said, is that it is possible to lead a party, bring change to the country, not be corrupt and put the Israeli people first.
“Bibi is not going to do anything different now that he hasn’t done in 13 years,” Lapid said. “He has been there too long, and it is time for change… Having a government that works for you is going to be a refreshing change for the country – one that works for you, is not corrupt and has new ideas.”
Regarding Gaza, Lapid said that Netanyahu’s mistake was not using the quiet during the three years after Operation Protective Edge in 2014 to bring real change to the Gaza Strip. His party, he said, would advance humanitarian projects and work to change the reality in Gaza to create a price for Hamas if it decides to engage in terrorism against Israel.
Lapid said that the current election campaign was the “ugliest, filthiest and [most] shameful campaign” in Israeli history, and that it has made him angry and disgusted. He said that there was always negativity that came from the “margins,” but that now, it is coming from the “primary candidates” like Netanyahu.
“The worst language and the lowest standards – verbal and behavioral – are those of Bibi, and he is desperate. I never saw anything like it: that an Israeli prime minister is going out there, spreading the worst false rumors in a way you don’t see among the worst European populists.”
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