The Terror of Fake News

[InfiniteDreams]

Schiff is awfully quiet after looking at the intel.

[Parihaka]

Schiff is awfully quiet after looking at the intel.

A positive mouse. Last thing he wants is the database she compiled made public. McCain's suddenly STFU as well.
Don't worry though, they'll be back demanding war with Russia by the end of the week. After all, it was Putin who made Rice do it.

[Parihaka]

The Daily caller stands by its claim that Rice had spreadsheets compiled of Trump Inc.

In response to a question Tuesday from NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, former Obama White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice denied that she “prepared” spreadsheets of surveilled telephone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, however, reported that Rice “ordered” the spreadsheets to be produced.

In addition, former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova, one of TheDCNF’s sources, said Tuesday in response to Rice that her denial “would come as quite a surprise to the government officials who have reviewed dozens of those spreadsheets.”

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday

[Gun Grape]

Some background on the person that broke the Rice "Story".

I bet Fox news is also sticking with the story.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-tr...162928866.html

Trump administration officials and allies were out in force this week promoting the story that Susan Rice, national security adviser in the Obama administration, requested the names of Americans who were caught up in surveillance of Russian officials during last year’s presidential campaign and transition. The most recent, and enthusiastic, endorsement came from Donald Trump, Jr., who proposes the writer who broke the story for a Pulitzer Prize.

“Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story,” tweeted Trump Jr. Tuesday morning. “In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”

Trump. Jr was praising a story published over the weekend by Mike Cernovich, a self-described “free speech activist” and writer, claiming that Rice was behind the request to “unmask” incoming Trump officials whose communications were picked up by intelligence agencies. The names of Americans that appear in transcripts of intercepted communications are routinely disguised, or “masked,” but officials can request to see them for law enforcement or national security reasons. There is no implication that Rice broke the law by her request, but leaking the information to the media, or using it for political purposes, could be ethically (or legally) problematic.

“I leaked nothing to nobody,” said Rice in a Tuesday afternoon interview about the allegations with MSNBC. “Never have, never would.”

Before the Rice story broke, Cernovich was best known as a leading promoter of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed that a Washington, D.C., pizza establishment was the front for a pedophilia ring involving former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. The hysteria over Pizzagate led to a North Carolina man named Edgar M. Welch driving to Comet Ping Pong in Washington and firing shots from an AR-15 inside the restaurant. Welch told the New York Times that he “just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way.”

Trump Jr. is not the first member of the White House to promote Cernovich’s work. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn promoted Cernovich’s book, “The Gorilla Mindset,” on Twitter in October. When Cernovich was interviewed as part of a “60 Minutes” segment on fake news last month, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway called it a “ratings bonanza” and urged everyone to watch.

Cernovich, who describes himself as an author, journalist and documentarian, is one of the most popular alt-right personalities online. In addition to his “60 Minutes” appearance, he was the subject of an October New Yorker profile that laid out his path to notoriety.

“I use trolling tactics to build my brand,” Cernovich told the New Yorker.

Cernovich’s “trolling” has manifested itself in a variety of ways. He was an early figure in Gamergate, which targeted feminists in the video-game industry. He has likened diversity to “white genocide,” stated that date rape isn’t a real thing and said the Black Lives Matter movement “regularly slaughters the innocent.”

Cernovich is not the only conspiracy theorist with a connection to the White House. Then-candidate Donald Trump did a 30-minute interview with Alex Jones’ InfoWars site in December 2015, calling Jones’ reputation “amazing.” Jones has touted a number of unsubstantiated theories, including that 9/11 was an inside job, that chemicals in juice boxes are turning children gay and that a number of politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are actually demons.

Last month Jones apologized for the InfoWars role in promoting Pizzagate. Welch, the gunman who investigated Pizzagate on his own, said he had listened to Jones.

Trump Jr.’s promotion of Cernovich for a Pulitzer faces at least one obstacle: Cernovich himself has admitted that the actual reporting was done by two mainstream journalists, Eli Lake of Bloomberg News and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. Cernovich said he was tipped off by disgruntled colleagues in the two newsrooms, who suspected the publications were sitting on a story that could have embarrassed the Obama administration.

[Parihaka]

Some background on the person that broke the Rice "Story".

I bet Fox news is also sticking with the story.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-tr...162928866.html

Except of course Rice has admitted to everything in the story except that she kept a spreadsheet. Otherwise it's all public fact. I can show you the interviews and transcripts if you like.

[astralis]

by all means, drag Rice up to testify, but it's still one big nothing-burger.

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/sorry-...t-smoking-gun/

Sorry, But Susan Rice Is Not Your ‘Smoking Gun’

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

This week, multiple news outlets reported that Susan Rice, former national security adviser to Barack Obama, had made several requests to “unmask” the names of Trump transition team members from intelligence reports, in order to reveal their redacted names. But while several politicians and pundits have called conspiracy, the reality is likely much more mundane. There’s no fire here. There’s barely any smoke.

The uproar over the Rice reports—senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went so far as to call it a “smoking gun”—has escalated to the point that at least one senator demanded she testify under oath. This outrage relies on a surface-level understanding of how US surveillance works, and Rice’s previous role in that process. It’s secretive, complicated stuff—which makes it all the more important to get right.

Trump Cards

Understanding the allegations against Rice, and why they’re dangerously overhyped, requires a very quick stroll through the last several weeks of President Donald Trump’s claims that the intelligence community, at Obama’s direction, spied on him throughout last year’s campaign.

Exactly a month ago, Trump tweeted that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. Lacking any evidence to support that specific claim, White House officials secretly shared unrelated intelligence reports with House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, who obligingly relayed their existence to the media. The classified report Nunes presented amounted to vague claims of “incidental collection,” ostensibly intended to lend credence to Trump’s original claims. Nunes shared with the press, among other things, his alarm that the real names of certain Trump transition team members appeared in the report, rather than “US PERSON 1” or some similar anonymizing label—a practice known as “unmasking.”

Trump and Surveillance

So much to unpack, already! First: A US citizen’s name appearing in an intelligence report does not mean that person was the target of a surveillance operation. They’re more likely to have been on the other end of a phone call or email with a foreign national, one that the intelligence community believes to have some sort of value, and received clearance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to surveil. People like, say, the sort of diplomats and foreign officials with whom the Trump transition team would have communicated extensively. It’s known as “incidental collection,” and it’s both totally legal and completely unsurprising.

In cases of incidental collection under FISA, the agency who garnered the material automatically “masks” the names of any US citizens. Masking provides an important Fourth Amendment safeguard—but it’s also not an inalienable right.

“The most commonly used standard by which a national security official can ask for a US person named to be unmasked is: Is the identity necessary to understand the foreign intelligence value of the information?” says Carrie Cordero, a national security lawyer who has worked directly on FISA process issues.

This is a standard practice. Elizabeth Goitein, Brennan Center for Justice

Frequently, it is. According to a the intelligence community’s 2016 transparency report, in 2015 the NSA issued 4,290 reports that included identifying information about US citizens under FISA’s Section 702, which allows for surveillance of non-US individuals. In 1,122 of those cases, the agency ultimately unmasked the information.

“This is a standard practice,” says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.

There’s nothing inherently suspicious about incidental collection, and unmasking happens with decent regularity. The only potential scandal that could erupt from some such practices would relate to who requested the unmasking, and why? Which brings us to Susan Rice.
Masked Marauders

It’s easy enough to see how a senior Obama administration official requesting the unmasking of Trump associates could cause a tempest. But less so when you consider the specific associate.

“The national security advisor, every day, as part of the National Security Council, gets a compilation of intelligence reports every morning,” says Goitein. “To the extent that the reports include US person information that has been masked, per standard procedure, you would certainly expect the people who received those reports to be among the people who are requesting the unmasking.”

That aligns with a brief interview Rice gave to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “There were occasions when I would receive a report in which a US person was referred to, name not provided,” Rice said. “Sometimes in that context in order to understand the importance of that report, and assess its significance, it was necessary to find out or request the information as to who that US official was.”

All of which, again, isn’t just legal. It’s routine, especially for someone in Rice’s position at the time.

“There’s certainly nothing illegal about it,” says Cordero. “The decision to request an unmask is a judgment call based on an individual’s national security responsibilities, and their need to understand the context.”

It’s also not “leaking,” as some pundits have characterized it. Unmasked intelligence reports are still intended to remain within a relatively small circle of intelligence officials. There’s no presumption that the names will eventually become public. In fact, in this instance, the public only knows about the unmasking in the first place because the White House told Nunes that it had occurred and he went to the media with it.

There’s also a distinction, which seems to have been lost in the furor, between requesting an unmasking and receiving approval. Rice herself can only ask; as NSA head Mike Rogers testified before the House Intelligence Committee last month, only 20 individuals within the agency are authorized to approve those requests.

“They receive specific training, there are specific controls put in place in terms of our ability to disseminate information out of the databases associated with US persons,” Rogers said at the time. What that means is that the NSA itself agreed that the instances in which Rice requested unmasking warranted that action.

Looking through the fog of all these unfamiliar practices and terms can be exhausting, and it’s easy to see how, without a clear view, the routine could seem nefarious. But just as Trump or his associates being named as part of incidental collection doesn’t indicate any wrongdoing on their part, neither does asking for unmasking to better understand intelligence reports—when you’re the national security adviser, no less—point to any kind of grand conspiracy.

What’s slowly emerging from the Rice accusations isn’t a smoking gun at all. It’s the gears of bureaucracy, grinding as confoundingly in spydom as it does everywhere else.

[YellowFever]

Only problem is 2 days of digging into "Ricegate" has produced more circumstantial evidence against Rice than 100 days and thousands of "journalists" that literally hate Trump could do to build a case against a Putin/Trump collusion.

Cernovich's is on record as saying he got this story because journalists at Bloomberg and NYC were sitting on it and people there leaked it to him.

Must be true because within 10 hours of him releasing it on Twitter, those respective journalists were falling over themselves to get it out and trying to take credit for breaking it.

Wonder why they did that if it was such a nothing burger.

[astralis]

YF,

Only problem is 2 days of digging into "Ricegate" has produced more circumstantial evidence against Rice than 100 days and thousands of "journalists" that literally hate Trump could do to build a case against a Putin/Trump collusion.

when the FBI is looking into the possibility of said collusion, i would say that your comparison of whom has more circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing might be a bit off...:-)

as the article mentions, if Rice actually did anything illegal then the implication is that large portions of our intelligence community were also complicit in aiding such illegal deeds. and somehow kept it all secret until now.

in any case, given the below, I would argue that had Rice -not- looked into it, that would be dereliction of duty.

====

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...a08_story.html

Former Trump adviser admits to 2013 communication with Russian spy

By Tom Hamburger and Alice Crites April 4 at 2:40 PM

Carter Page, who served briefly as a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, made an appearance in a federal espionage case because he communicated several years ago with a Russian intelligence agent under surveillance by the FBI.

In a statement released Tuesday, Page confirmed his role in the 2015 Justice Department spy case, adding another twist to the still-unfolding story of Trump’s peculiar and expanding ties to people connected to Russia.

Page said he assisted U.S. prosecutors in their case against Evgeny Buryakov, an undercover Kremlin agent then posing as a bank executive in New York. Buryakov was convicted of espionage and released from federal prison last week, a few months short of completing a 30-month sentence. Buryakov agreed to be immediately deported to Russia.

Page’s involvement was first disclosed Monday by BuzzFeed, which said Page was identified as “Male 1” in the Justice Department’s complaint against a Russian spy network based in New York.

In a written exchange with The Washington Post, Page confirmed playing a role in the case but declined to discuss details.
Evgeny Buryakov sits in court in New York on Jan. 26, 2015. Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page played a role in the espionage case against Buryakov. (Jane Rosenburg/Reuters)

“Given the very light masking in the original document from January 2015, you can draw your own conclusions,” Page wrote.

According to the court records, the FBI interviewed Page as part of the case against three Russian men identified as agents of the Russian overseas intelligence agency, the SVR. One of them, Buryakov, was operating undercover as an executive in the New York office of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank.

The case resurfaced in news accounts last week when President Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, acknowledged he had met with the head of the same bank in December.

The complaint includes transcripts from 2013 of wiretapped conversations among the Russians discussing their efforts to recruit Male 1, identified as a New York energy trader whom the Russians described as willing to talk.

In his statement, Page compared the revelation of his role to “the politically-motivated unmasking standards seen in the Obama Administration which have recently been exposed.”

He said the information was released as “retribution for my public positions of dissent” against Obama administration policy toward Russia. The information about his role in the case “amplified the reputational damage against me” that has occurred through 2016, Page said. After he was named by Trump as a foreign policy adviser, news reports discussed his travel to Russia and his frequent criticism of U.S. policy toward Russia under Obama.

According to the 2015 complaint filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, Page met with a Russian agent, Victor Podobnyy, in January 2013 at an energy conference in New York. It says that from January to June of that year, Page as Male 1 “provided documents to [Podobnyy] about the energy business.” At the time, the Russians were seeking information on U.S. sanctions and on energy development.

Although Page communicated with the Russian agents in 2013, he said the information he provided was innocuous.

“As I explained to federal authorities prior to the January 2015 filing of this case, I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents” with the spy who was serving then as a junior attache at the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.

“In doing so, I provided him nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students in my Spring 2013 semester ‘Energy and the World: Politics, Markets and Technology’ course which I taught on Saturdays at New York University.”

During an interview with The Washington Post editorial page staff in March 2016, Trump identified Page, once a Merrill Lynch investment banker in Moscow, as a foreign policy adviser to his campaign.

But in January, after Page’s name came up in news reports about Trump administration ties to Russia, Trump press secretary Sean Spicer declared that “Carter Page is an individual the president-elect does not know.”

Page, a longtime energy executive, is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who rose through the ranks at Merrill Lynch before founding his current firm, Global Energy Capital. He previously was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focused on the Caspian Sea region and economic development in former Soviet states. He is also a fellow at the Center for National Policy in Washington and has a PhD from the University of London.

He made a speech in Moscow in July that included some criticism of U.S. policy.

The White House has energetically rejected the idea that Trump or his allies coordinated with Russia during the election. The president has said investigators and the public should focus instead on leaks of information and reports that he and his advisers were improperly surveilled by the Obama administration.

“The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers,” Trump tweeted Monday morning.

Page has said repeatedly in recent weeks that he would like to tell his story to congressional investigators looking at Russian government efforts to influence the course of the 2016 election and the leak of information about that effort.

“I very much look forward to providing further evidence regarding last year’s historic crimes committed against me and all Americans,” Page said.

[YellowFever]

"when the FBI is looking into the possibility of said collusion, i would say that your comparison of whom has more circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing might be a bit off...:-)"

Oh yeah sure, so in an environment filled with Trump haters and people invested in watching him fail, nothing has leaked so far of substance other than the usual innunedos.

So let's have an FBI investigation into Ricegate and see how far that goes.

As someone once said, there is nothing here so it is our duty to keep looking until we find something....or something to that effect.:)

[YellowFever]

Still makes me chuckle when a new headline "explodes" onto the scene with "HE MET A RUSSIAN ON THIS DATE!!!" crap.

I've seen it for 3 months straight now with nothing of substance following it....yawn.

[astralis]

YF,

Oh yeah sure, so in an environment filled with Trump haters and people invested in watching him fail, nothing has leaked so far of substance other than the usual innunedos.

dude, there's a reason why Manafort, Page, Flynn etc all left or resigned. the overall effect is not "nothing".

[YellowFever]

YF,



dude, there's a reason why Manafort, Page, Flynn etc all left or resigned. the overall effect is not "nothing".

And what is that reason, dude?

[YellowFever]

Oh by the way, here, let me break this before the mainstream morons have a conniption fit again.

"Steve Bannon removed from National Security Council"

OMG...THIS PROVE IT!!!!! I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT PROVES BUT....


THIS.PROVES.IT!

[astralis]

And what is that reason, dude?

that there's more than "circumstantial evidence" of deceit regarding Russia floating around Trump's associates-- for instance, Flynn was caught and later admitted to lying, after all.

these issues are of enough substance where Trump has had to change, against his wishes, his national security staff-- and the policies that those staffers supported. for instance, Trump Administration is no longer talking about being buddy buddy with the Russians and Assad to fight ISIS.

similarly, I'll be happy to make a bet with you that there will be no FBI investigation of Rice because there's nothing there.

[YellowFever]

Flynn was canned for lying to the VP, not for his contacts with the Russians.

And as for the rest of your analysis, man, you made a big jump based on your prejudices.

And as to your opinion that Trump is now changing his tune of being "buddy buddy" with Puitn.....

*gasp* could that have been his policy all along but the people in the left reached a different conclusion based on their opinion????

Ah hell, at least he didn't give the Russian a red button where they could reset the relationship.