Credibility of Donald Trump ‘dirty dossier’ is undermined by basic errors | Daily Mail Online

If the claims cannot be substantiated, what then?

Quotes:

    • ‘The nature of these things is that it is hard to verify intelligence but what is in the report and could have been verified has been found not to stand-up to scrutiny and that is worrying.’ 
      • He highlighted the claim that the president-elect’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had met secretly with representatives of the Russian leadership in late August or early September 2016 in the Czech capital Prague. 

        However, Cohen insists he has never been to the Czech Republic and that on the date suggested for the clandestine rendezvous he was actually at a baseball game in the US with his son. 

        • ‘If there are two such obvious mistakes are there others?,’ he asked. 
          • ‘There is a difference between intelligence and evidence and that is crucial here. 
            • The one-ti me officer, who now works in the private sector, suggested the dossier had been compiled to include what was being alleged in Moscow by Mr Steele’s sources but they were unlikely to have ever provided ‘specific, emphatic evidence.’ 

              He added : ‘It is light on sources because of the need to protect them but that will leave you open to allegations always that material could have been planted. 

              • ‘With his experience, Chris Steele would have known this and is was his judgement the sources are trust-worthy and what they provided was worth passing on.’ Others have suggested the Kremlin had planted much of the material against Mr Trump and his associ ates, mixing false information with genuine material. 
                • Mr Trump points out that he was very much aware of the risk of being spied on in hotel rooms and was accompanied by trusted aides.
                  • The intelligence officers agree such a ‘compromise’ with the purpose of ‘potential blackmail or political leverage’ is unlikely
                    • A potential weakness, the former colleague, said was that his sources would in turn have had their own sources so by the time it reached Mr Steele is was ‘fourth or fifth hand’ and could have included rumour and misinformation. 

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                    Donald Trump dossier: intelligence sources vouch for author’s credibility | US news | The Guardian

                    If the claims cannot be substantiated, what then?

                    Quotes:

                      • The former Foreign Office official, who has known Steele for 25 years and considers him a friend, said: “The idea his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false – completely untrue. Chris is an experienced and highly regarded professional. He’s not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip.”
                        • The official added: “If he puts something in a report, he believes there’s sufficient credibility in it for it to be worth considering. Chris is a very straight guy. He could not have survived in the job he was in if he had been prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way.”
                          • The Foreign Office official who spoke to the Guardian on Thursday acknowledged that the Steele dossier was not perfect. But he pointed out that intelligence reports always came with “gradations of veracity” and included phrases such as “a high degree of probability”. “You aren’t dealing with a binary world where you can say this is true and this isn’t,” the official said.
                            • He added: “The strongest reason for giving this report credence is that intelligence professionals in the US take it seriously. They were sufficiently persuade d by the author’s track record to find the contents worth passing to the president and president-elect.”
                              • The CIA and FBI will have taken various factors into consideration before deciding on its credibility. They could include Trump’s public comments during the campaign, when he urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. The agencies may also have classified, intercepted material provided by the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ.

                                 

                                They must, equally, have considered whether some of the claims in the report might have been part of an elaborate Russian disinformation exercise. “This is unlikely. The dossier is multi-dimensional, involving many different people, and many moving parts,” the official suggested.

                                • But intelligence is not evidence, and Steele would have known, better than anyone, that the information he was gathering was not fact and could be wrong. In the smoke-and-mirrors world of counterespionage, there are few certainties.

                                   

                                  Those caveats do not appear on the documents – but they are given by Steele as a warning to prospective new clients.

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                                Putin says those behind Trump dossier are ‘worse than prostitutes’ | World news | The Guardian

                                If the claims cannot be substantiated, what then?

                                Quotes:

                                  • Vladimir Putin has dismissed the dossier published last week about alleged links between Moscow and Donald Trump, describing the people who ordered it as “worse than prostitutes”.

                                     

                                    Making his first public remarks on the claims three days before Trump’s inauguration as US president, Putin joked about Russian sex workers, who he said were “the best in the world”, but said he did not believe Trump would have met any.

                                    • “This is an adult, and a man who for years organised beauty contests and spoke with the most beautiful women in t he world. I can hardly believe that he ran off to meet with our girls of low social morals. Although of course ours are the best in the world,” said Putin.

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                                    Wait––There’s An Obama White House Connection To Trump Dossier Research Firm? – Matt Vespa

                                    If the claims cannot be substantiated, what then?

                                    Quotes:

                                      • Though many of the claims in the dossier have been directly refute d, none of the dossier’s allegations of collusion have been independently verified. Lawyers for Steele admitted in court filings last April that his work was not verified and was never meant to be made public.

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                                      How credible are reports that Russia has compromising information about Trump? | PBS NewsHour

                                      If the claims cannot be substantiated, what then?

                                        • The New York Times and other major news organizations said they had been aware of the information for months, but could not verify the claims.

                                        • Donald Trump: 

                                          I told many people, be careful, because you don’t want to see yourself on television. There are cameras all over the place, and, again, not just Russia, all over.

                                        • John Sipher: 

                                          That’s right. Yes.

                                          On the negative side, it really is hard to make a distinction if we don’t know who those sources are. He talks about his sources providing various information. In the CIA, before we would put out a report like that, an intelligence report, there could be, you know, hundreds of pages of information on that person’s access, on their suitability, on their personality.

                                          We don’t have that. And, secondly, the fact that a lot of this reporting is the presidential administration in Russia and the Kremlin is a little bit worrying, because, I mean, that’s essentially a hard nut to crack. And U.S. intelligence agencies have been trying to do that for years, and the fact that he has this much data about them does put it into question a little bit.

                                          • Verifying.

                                            John Sipher, if you’re in charge of the investigation to figure out what is and what isn’t right, if anything is accurate in here, what do you need to do now?  

                                          •    John Sipher: 

                                            What you need to do is take each piece of this document and run it to ground.

                                            So, you need to find out — they talk — the issue here is not the salacious details, the blackmail piece. The issue here is the criminal behavior if people in the Trump campaign were working with Russian intelligence to collect information on Americans.

                                            If that’s the case, there’s a lot of detail in there that needs to be verified. And we have to find out, did the people travel on the days they said they traveled, those type of things? So, there are a lot of things to run down that you can run down with your partners and information that you can collect as part of an investigation in U.S. travel records, all these type of things.

                                        • Vladimir Putin has dismissed the dossier published last week about alleged links between Moscow and Donald Trump, describing the people who ordered it as “worse than prostitutes”. 

                                          Making his first public remarks on the claims three days before Trump’s inauguration as US president, Putin joked about Russian sex workers, who he said were “the best in the world”, but said he did not believe Trump would have met any.

                                        • “This is an adult, and a man who for years organised beauty contests and spoke with the most beautiful women in the world. I can hardly believe that he ran off to meet with our girls of low social morals. Although of course ours are the best in the world,” said Putin.

                                        • The former Foreign Office official, who has known Steele for 25 years and considers him a friend, said: “The idea his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false – completely untrue. Chris is an experienced and highly regarded professional. He’s not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip.”

                                        • The official added: “If he puts something in a report, he believes there’s sufficient credibility in it for it to be worth considering. Chris is a very straight guy. He could not have survived in the job he was in if he had been prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way.”

                                        • The Foreign Office official who spoke to the Guardian on Thursday acknowledged that the Steele dossier was not perfect. But he pointed out that intelligence reports always came with “gradations of veracity” and included phrases such as “a high degree of probability”. “You aren’t dealing with a binary world where you can say this is true and this isn’t,” the official said.

                                        • He added: “The strongest reason for giving this report credence is that intelligence professionals in the US take it seriously. They were sufficiently persuaded by the author’s track record to find the contents worth passing to the president and president-elect.”

                                        • The CIA and FBI will have taken various factors into consideration before deciding on its credibility. They could include Trump’s public comments during the campaign, when he urged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. The agencies may also have classified, intercepted material provided by the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ. 

                                           
                                           

                                          They must, equally, have considered whether some of the claims in the report might have been part of an elaborate Russian disinformation exercise. “This is unlikely. The dossier is multi-dimensional, involving many different people, and many moving parts,” the official suggested.

                                        • But intelligence is not evidence, and Steele would have known, better than anyone, that the information he was gathering was not fact and could be wrong. In the smoke-and-mirrors world of counterespionage, there are few certainties. 

                                          Those caveats do not appear on the documents – but they are given by Steele as a warning to prospective new clients.

                                        • ‘The nature of these things is that it is hard to verify intelligence but what is in the report and could have been verified has been found not to stand-up to scrutiny and that is worrying.’ 

                                        • He highlighted the claim that the president-elect’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen had met secretly with representatives of the Russian leadership in late August or early September 2016 in the Czech capital Prague. 

                                          However, Cohen insists he has never been to the Czech Republic and that on the date suggested for the clandestine rendezvous he was actually at a baseball game in the US with his son. 

                                        • ‘If there are two such obvious mistakes are there others?,’ he asked. 

                                        • ‘There is a difference between intelligence and evidence and that is crucial here. 

                                        • The one-time officer, who now works in the private sector, suggested the dossier had been compiled to include what was being alleged in Moscow by Mr Steele’s sources but they were unlikely to have ever provided ‘specific, emphatic evidence.’ 

                                          He added : ‘It is light on sources because of the need to protect them but that will leave you open to allegations always that material could have been planted. 

                                        • ‘With his experience, Chris Steele would have known this and is was his judgement the sources are trust-worthy and what they provided was worth passing on.’ Others have suggested the Kremlin had planted much of the material against Mr Trump and his associates, mixing false information with genuine material. 

                                        • Mr Trump points out that he was very much aware of the risk of being spied on in hotel rooms and was accompanied by trusted aides.

                                        • The intelligence officers agree such a ‘compromise’ with the purpose of ‘potential blackmail or political leverage’ is unlikely

                                        • A potential weakness, the former colleague, said was that his sources would in turn have had their own sources so by the time it reached Mr Steele is was ‘fourth or fifth hand’ and could have included rumour and misinformation. 

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                                      “Moral agency” vs. the National Security Agency

                                       

                                      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has made clear what we owe to Thomas Drake. “If there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake,” said Snowden, “there couldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”

                                      To find out why Ed Snowden said that — and to gain more understanding of how the “national security” state operates when truthtellers get in the way — please read this interview that the RootsAction Education Fund just did with Tom Drake.

                                      As the chair of the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign, Tom Drake deserves and needs our tangible support. If you want to provide some support now, please click here.

                                      Q:  What was your background before you began working at the National Security Agency in 2001?

                                      “I was a contractor with the government, was a principal in a couple of boutique dot coms, did a lot of IT, management and software and systems engineering consulting with industry in the 1990s as the Internet economy and the digital age took off, had worked at Booz Allen & Hamilton, and also served in the Navy, CIA, and Air Force.”

                                      Q:  What were you hoping to accomplish when you got there?

                                      “I was brought into NSA as a senior executive under a special outside hiring program due to pressure from Congress and others that NSA needed to stir up the gene pool and take advantage of the skillsets and expertise of people who had not grown up inside NSA their entire career. The focus of my work at NSA was change leadership and management, communications and bringing the best of government and industry to bear at NSA. However, I went in eyes wide open, knowing that the odds of making any difference were slim.”

                                      Q:  How did the NSA evolve during your time with the agency?

                                      I would say NSA actually devolved. Under then Director Michael V. Hayden he had already thrown in his lot with the military-industrial-intelligence-contractor complex and was spending massive amounts of money to buy NSA’s solutions from large defense firms rather than make them with the best of American ingenuity and inventiveness in service to the common defense needs of the nation. In essence, NSA sold out national security to the highest bidder.

                                      “In addition, NSA embarked on a super-secret mass domestic surveillance regime after 9/11 approved by the White House that was in violation of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”

                                      Q:  What were some of the main problems that you saw emerge while you were an NSA executive?

                                      “I saw and observed many problems at NSA including gross mismanagement, coverup regarding the intelligence surrounding 9/11, financial impropriety, willful violations of the rights of people in secret on a mass scale and also the smothering of programs that were a threat to the big-ticket flywheel contractors and their profits as well as the careers of NSA senior managers.”

                                      Q:  What were the pressures to remain silent about wrongdoing at the NSA?

                                      The pressures to remain silent were enormous. Silence was viewed as institutional loyalty. I was even warned NOT to cooperate with official investigations into NSA conduct and coverup regarding its own actions in violation of the 4th Amendment, covering up its own role in the failure to provide for the common defense and keeping innocent people out of harm’s way on 9/11 and the massive multibillion-dollar programmatic fraud perpetrated under the cover and color of national security.”

                                      Q:  Would you describe what you went through as a crisis of conscience?

                                      “I was confronted by the specter that if I were to remain silent, I was complicit in the subversion of the Constitution by the NSA and abuse of its powers, its coverup of its own culpability in 9/11, and the massive multi-billion programmatic fraud and waste. I chose to exercise moral agency in the face of all this wrongdoing and became a whistleblower. I found myself staring into Pandora’s Box and the abyss was staring back at me. I chose to act and defend the 4th Amendment and the Constitution, the law and regulations and statutes against my own government. After blowing the whistle through many protected channels, I did choose to exercise my 1st Amendment rights and went to the press with unclassified information.”

                                      Q:  What was your departure from the NSA like?

                                      “My departure from NSA was quite abrupt. I was teaching at the National Defense University within their Industrial College of the Armed Forces as a visiting professor of behavioral science focused on strategic leadership, leadership ethics, information strategies and national security policies when I was unceremoniously raided by the FBI.”

                                      Q:  How would you sum up the experience of being threatened and then prosecuted by the Justice Department?

                                      “It was the worst period of my life across some five years facing the prospect of spending many decades in prison for simply calling out the government on its own violations of the Constitution and our rights, its blatant and willful wrongdoing and abject lack of accountability for numerous 9/11 intelligence failures. The government went after me with extreme prejudice involving malicious retaliation and did all they could to turn my truth telling into the acts of a traitor for speaking truth to and about power.

                                      Q:  What were the main reasons that the case against you collapsed in court?

                                      The government’s case ultimately collapsed under the weight of truth. They were unable to prevail in the courtroom and, on my terms 14 months after I was summarily indicted, they dropped all 10 felony counts against me (including five counts for allegedly violating the Espionage Act) in exchange for pleading out to a minor misdemeanor for exceeding the authorized use of a government computer. In addition, Jesselyn Radack (the Director of WHISPeR with ExposeFacts) was key in defending me in the court of public opinion, when I had no voice or advocacy for my whistleblowing against the government. She led the strategic campaign to educate the public regarding my own public interest disclosures as a whistleblower, and what was at stake in what became the signature Espionage Act case under the Obama Administration.”

                                      Q:  What do you want to do in the future as chair of the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign?

                                      “My central focus is educating and reaching out to people on the real dangers facing democracy, the Constitutional Republic and the attacks on human rights and liberties around the world and the steps people can take to defend and shine light on those who would dare take our freedoms away from us in the name of national security, power and secrecy.”

                                      Q:  How does it help your efforts when people make a donation to the Campaign?

                                      “I was financially devastated from the government’s multi-year, multimillion-dollar criminal investigation of me (and others) and subsequent prosecution against me. I am still digging out from a mountain of debt, after coming very close to bankruptcy. I cannot help educate and inform people regarding the disturbing autocratic and authoritarian drift into dystopia without support and aid to continue shining the light on government misdeeds and dangers to democracy and our precious and inalienable rights across the U.S. and the world. Donations to the Whistleblowers Public Education Campaign also support key efforts to partner with others and provide the visibility and voice often drowned out by those defending and protecting abuses of power — of all kinds.”
                                      __________________

                                      PS from the RootsAction Education Fund team:

                                      Persecution of Tom Drake left him deeply in financial debt. Ironically, we are in his debt — morally, politically and ethically. We owe him so much because he stood up for civil liberties and human decency.

                                      Let’s continue to help repay that debt to Tom Drake, who exposed extreme mass surveillance by the NSA.

                                      Living in what is supposed to be a democracy, we get vital information because of the courage of whistleblowers.

                                      Tom Drake has no intention of going silent. He wants to keep writing, traveling and speaking out. But he needs our help.

                                      To make a tax-deductible contribution in support of his work, please click here.

                                      Thank you!    

                                      Please share on Facebook and Twitter.

                                      Background:
                                      Freedom of the Press Foundation: “Beware of Trump Administration’s Coming Crackdown on Leaks — and Journalism”
                                      Minneapolis Star Tribune: “Former NSA Executive Urges Public Vigilance Against Government Overreach”
                                      Vanity Fair: “In the Trenches of Trump’s Leak War”
                                      “The Constitution and Conscience: NSA’s Thomas Drake”: Video of speech on May 2, 2017
                                      >  The Washington Times: “Donald Trump on Edward Snowden: Kill the ‘Traitor’”
                                      Jesselyn Radack, The New York Times: "Whistleblowers Deserve Protection Not Prison"
                                      Jane Mayer, The New Yorker: Thomas Drake — "The Secret Sharer"

                                       

                                      www.RootsAction.org

                                       

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