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      Biden to Tap More Former Obama Officials for Top National Security Jobs

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      Trump Was Briefed on Uncorroborated Intelligence About Chinese Bounties

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Was Briefed on Uncorroborated Intelligence About Chinese BountiesThe unverified intelligence echoes a similar report, deemed credible by the C.I.A. but dismissed by the president, that Russian military agents had offered payments for attacks on Americans in Afghanistan.President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, this month at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington.Credit…Erin Scott for The New York TimesDec. 30, 2020President Trump was briefed this month about intelligence reports that China had offered to pay bounties to fighters in Afghanistan who attacked American soldiers there, but the information was uncorroborated and comes months after Mr. Trump dismissed as a “hoax” a C.I.A. assessment that Russia had paid for such attacks.It is unclear whether the intelligence on China shows that any bounties were paid, or whether any attacks on American personnel were even attempted. United States intelligence agencies collect enormous amounts of information, much of which turns out to be false or misleading.The information, included in the president’s written briefing on Dec. 17 and relayed verbally by the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien — was earlier reported on Wednesday night by Axios and confirmed by U.S. officials.It comes at a time when Trump administration officials, including the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, have sought to put more pressure on China, partly in the hope of limiting any plans by the incoming Biden administration to ease tensions with Beijing.Mr. Trump, Mr. Ratcliffe and other officials have also sought to direct attention toward Chinese misbehavior in areas where other American officials consider Russia to be a greater threat, including computer hacking and the use of disinformation to disrupt American politics.After the disclosure this month that the United States government had been subjected to a huge cyberbreach that American officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, confidently attributed to Russia, Mr. Trump angrily cast doubt on that notion and sought to implicate Beijing. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, charging that the news media avoids “discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”The Axios report said on Wednesday that the underlying intelligence on the bounties, about which it obtained no further details, would be declassified, although it was unclear why or for whom. White House officials would not elaborate but did not dispute that the intelligence was uncorroborated.Although tensions between the United States and China have escalated significantly during the Trump era, Beijing is not known to provide substantial support to anti-American proxies in combat zones like Afghanistan, and some national security experts were initially skeptical that Beijing would support attacks on Americans. By contrast, many considered similar reports about Russian bounties to be credible.If confirmed, and particularly if traced to political leaders in Beijing, such an action by China would constitute a grave provocation that might demand a response by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after he takes office in January.A Biden transition official would not say on Wednesday night whether Mr. Biden, who now receives official daily intelligence briefings, had been presented with the same information as the president.But the official said that the Biden team would seek to learn more about it from the Trump administration and that it underscored the importance of a fully cooperative transition process, including with the Defense Department, which Mr. Biden on Monday accused of “obstruction.”“Right now,” Mr. Biden said in Wilmington, Del., “we just aren’t getting all the information that we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas.”Months before the report involving China, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating reports collected this year, and first reported by The New York Times, that Russian military intelligence agents had offered to pay Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for the killing of American soldiers there.The C.I.A. assessed with medium confidence that Russia had covertly offered and paid the bounties to a network of Afghan militants and criminals. The National Security Agency placed lower confidence in the intelligence. But Mr. Pompeo, for one, took the reports seriously enough to issue a stern face-to-face warning this summer to his Russian counterpart.Mr. Trump was similarly provided with a written briefing on that intelligence, but publicly he dismissed it as “fake news” and an extension of what he called the “Russia hoax,” including the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to the Kremlin. At the same time, the president suggested that subordinates had not done enough to draw the report about Russia to his attention.“If it reached my desk, I would have done something about it,” Mr. Trump said in July. United States officials have said that the assessment regarding Russia was included in his written intelligence brief in February, but that he rarely reads that document.In multiple subsequent conversations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump did not raise the matter.Many questions are outstanding about the unverified intelligence regarding China, including when such bounties were said to be offered, by whom and to whom. The United States and its coalition partners in Afghanistan are fighting not only the Taliban but also Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and various other militant and criminal groups.The reportedly planned release of more information comes at a time when Democrats and many career intelligence officials are concerned that Trump officials like Mr. Ratcliffe have sought to selectively declassify intelligence for political purposes, like the Russia investigation and election interference.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barr Says C.I.A. ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining Russian Election Interference

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Says C.I.A. ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining Russian Election InterferenceIn an interview with a Wall Street Journal columnist, the attorney general defended his legacy and criticized the special counsel’s investigation.Attorney General William P. Barr will depart the Justice Department next week.Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesDec. 18, 2020, 7:15 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s examination of the investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has cleared the C.I.A. of suspicions that it targeted President Trump and his associates, Attorney General William P. Barr said in an interview published on Friday.“The C.I.A. stayed in its lane” and he did not “see any sign of improper C.I.A. activity,” Mr. Barr told the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel. His comments made more explicit his disclosure this month that the investigation by John H. Durham, a prosecutor whom Mr. Barr appointed as a special counsel in the case, had narrowed to focus on the F.B.I.Mr. Barr stopped short of fully absolving the C.I.A.; he confirmed that Mr. Durham was reviewing the early 2017 assessment by the agency and other parts of the intelligence community that concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had favored Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.Mr. Barr has drawn criticism for his previous uses of the term “spying” to describe investigative activities, though he has applied it more generally to the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation than to the C.I.A.’s scrutiny of the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference campaign. Mr. Barr reserved harsh judgment for the F.B.I.’s investigation, calling parts of it “outrageous.”Mr. Barr, who will depart office next week, sought to burnish his legacy in the interview. He has been widely criticized for his interventions in cases involving Mr. Trump’s associates, his portrayal of the Mueller report that a judge called “distorted” and “misleading” and other efforts to advance the president’s political agenda, but he insisted he was an impartial arbiter of justice who stopped the Justice Department from being used as a “political weapon.”Mr. Barr said he had planned to stay on as attorney general if Mr. Trump had won re-election but his relationship with the mercurial president had frayed at times, making his continued role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer tenuous.Mr. Barr did not assert that election fraud had played a role in Mr. Trump’s election loss and brushed off the president’s repeated criticisms that he should have disclosed a federal investigation into President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, which would have violated Justice Department guidelines.While apparently clearing the C.I.A. of any wrongdoing, Mr. Barr has been deeply skeptical of the F.B.I.’s reasoning for opening a counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 into whether any Trump campaign associates were secretly conspiring with Russia to tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor.The investigation should never have been opened, Mr. Barr said. “The idea that this was done with the collusion of the Trump campaign — there was never any evidence. It was entirely made up.”The investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, has fueled similar unfounded accusations that a so-called deep state of government officials were working together to hobble Mr. Trump’s campaign and the administration.But an independent review by the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that officials had sufficient reason to open the investigation and found no evidence that agents acted with political bias. But agents also made serious mistakes in parts of the investigation, including some involving documents related to a wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, which have been amplified by right-wing media and wielded as proof that the F.B.I. was on a witch hunt.Mr. Barr told The Journal that the F.B.I.’s use “of confidential human sources and wiretapping to investigate people connected to a campaign was outrageous.”The inspector general concluded that the use of informants and undercover agents complied with Justice Department and F.B.I. policies but suggested those steps lacked oversight.Mr. Barr’s appointment of Mr. Durham as a special counsel grants Mr. Durham the kind of authorities given to Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel who eventually oversaw the Russia investigation. That should ensure that any report written by Mr. Durham is made public, Mr. Barr said.Mr. Barr said that Mr. Durham was focused on a “small group at the F.B.I.” — an apparent reference to the former senior officials who played a role in authorizing Crossfire Hurricane.Mr. Barr said Mr. Durham was also looking at “the activities of certain private actors,” a possible reference to Christopher Steele, a British former spy who helped assemble a dossier of anti-Trump material that was passed to the F.B.I. and used as part of the application to wiretap the former Trump adviser, Carter Page.Mr. Durham has spent significant time examining the dossier, including the actions of F.B.I. officials who came later to understand that it had significant problems but failed to convey that to the secret court that approves the highly classified wiretaps, people familiar with Mr. Durham’s investigation said.As part of his investigation, Mr. Durham prosecuted a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that an agent relied on to renew one of the Page wiretap applications. The inspector general had found the document and referred it to prosecutors.In the interview, Mr. Barr also criticized the appointment of Mr. Mueller, the former F.B.I. director whom Mr. Barr once closely worked with in the early 1990s when he first ran the Justice Department.Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller should have looked at the information the F.B.I. provided him more critically. “The Mueller team seems to have been ready to blindly accept anything fed to it by the system,” he said.The attorney general derided Mr. Mueller’s prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty twice to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the then Russian ambassador in late 2016 and admitted to illegally lobbying for Turkey.After a federal judge had dismissed Mr. Flynn’s many claims of prosecutorial wrongdoing and F.B.I. abuses in late 2019, Mr. Barr then appointed a U.S. attorney to review the case.Prosecutors then sought to drop the criminal case against Mr. Flynn but before a judge could rule on the matter, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Flynn, ensuring the Justice Department under the Biden administration could not prosecute him for violating the lobbying laws too.Mr. Barr said the case against Mr. Flynn was “entirely bogus.”The judge overseeing the Flynn case, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, disagreed with Mr. Barr’s sweeping conclusion. In an opinion this month, Judge Sullivan said that the Justice Department’s arguments for dropping the case were dubious and that he likely would have rejected them.The judge also rejected evidence that the department had supplied to the court in an attempt to show that the F.B.I. had tried to entrap Mr. Flynn.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Who Doesn’t Love the Sacred Freedom to Spy?

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      In July, Yahoo News revealed that US President Donald Trump issued a secret order in 2018 authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct offensive cyber operations against various nations deemed to be adversaries of the US. Trump generously invited the CIA “to both conduct cyber operations and choose its target, without the White House’s approval.” 

      Bobby Chesney, writing for the website Lawfare, describes the order as a “blanket authorization for the CIA to conduct cyber operations against certain named adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—and potentially others.” Chesney remarks that some commentators cited expressed concern “that the reduced external scrutiny of CIA covert activities and the sped-up timeline for approvals will result in undue or unwise risk-taking.”

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      According to the authors of the Yahoo article, the directive was “driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA” but not subjected to political review. They cite a “former U.S. government official” who called the order “very aggressive.”

      The article tells us that once it had the authorization, the CIA went into action. “Since the [order] was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list,” Yahoo reports. 

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Wish list:

      The designation of actions whose implementation by any normal human being is theoretically unrealistic, unaffordable or that would be considered immoral if carried out, but which can be immediately converted into an operational action plan by those who are given unlimited resources and held to zero accountability

      Contextual Note

      The scope of this secret order should not be underestimated. Yahoo cites “former officials” who explain that “it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations.”

      That is a serious innovation that potentially redefines and constrains the very idea of freedom of expression. According to Yahoo, the new powers granted to the CIA “open the way for the agency to launch offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program.

      Not only does this mean that the CIA may do whatever it chooses with no oversight and absolute impunity, but it also means that it can decide what type of expression can be suppressed and which people or groups can be either silenced or disrupted. Theoretically, the CIA’s brief is confined to overseas operations, but by including the right to target everything from media and charities to “individuals affiliated with these organizations,” the scope of such opaque operations appears limitless.

      Historical Note

      At a moment in history when the Democratic Party, despite a lack of any serious evidence, has not stopped its four-year-old campaign of complaining about real or imaginary Russian meddling in US elections via social media, this story about US meddling apparently proved embarrassing enough for its preferred media to largely ignore it.  

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      And yet the fact that Donald Trump, the incarnation of political evil, granted the CIA the power not just to disseminate propaganda or spread lies — as Russia is accused of doing — but to conduct “aggressive offensive cyber operations” against media, charities and individuals suspected of any form of complicity with an adversary should shock any American who still believes in democratic principles and that antique notion of “fair play.”

      Lawfare calls it “a major story.” But the revelation doesn’t seem to have shocked many people in the mainstream US media. Bonnie Kristian in Newsweek picked up the story and worried, with good reason, that the unaccountable actions of the CIA “could tip the balance of U.S. relations with one of these targeted nations into outright war.” Fox News also reported it, with a tone of general approval, seeing it as part of a “strategy to bolster the government’s defenses against foreign adversaries.” 

      The major outlets identified as the “liberal mainstream” preferred to let the story rot on the sidelines. The New York Times apparently thought it wasn’t news fit to print. The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC treated the story with benign neglect, having more urgent news to promote. This may seem paradoxical since these outlets will usually jump on any item that reveals Trump to be a dangerous wielder of absolute power. In this case, he specifically overturned a safeguard the previous administration had put in place.

      In its permanent campaign to undermine President Trump, the liberal media might have been tempted to pounce on the story for another reason linked to electoral politics. Siladitya Ray, in an article for Forbes, cites a former State Department attorney and national security expert, Rebecca Ingber, who complains of Trump’s hypocrisy. “It’s rich that the President who claims the ‘deep state’ is working to undermine him is happy to delegate such broad authority to cause destruction — it’s almost as though he’s not *really* all that concerned with tight presidential control over the national security state when it’s not about his own personal interests,” Ingber tweeted.

      Ingber is right to point to the paradox, but she unwittingly reveals why the liberal media preferred to ignore the story. The big four mentioned above (The Times, The Post, CNN and MSNBC) have become active promoters of the intelligence community, to the point of complicity, if not hero worship. The two cable TV channels employ former heads of the CIA (John Brennan) and National Intelligence (James Clapper) as their “experts” on everything to do with intelligence, including assessing risks coming from abroad. This of course means that the last thing they would be inclined to warn about or even deign to mention is accrued power to the intelligence agencies.

      In an article for Axios, Zach Dorfman, who is the lead author of the Yahoo story, offers what he sees as the historical perspective. “The big picture: Some officials emphasize that Trump-era shifts in U.S. offensive cyber operations are part of a natural evolution in U.S. policies in this arena, and that many changes would have been granted under a new Democratic administration as well,” he writes.

      This can be interpreted in two ways. One reading is that Dorfman wants us to believe that we have entered a troubled period of history in which people’s democratic rights have been canceled and therefore action may be needed to return to true democracy. The other is the idea that we simply must accept the fatality of a “natural evolution.” 

      This suggests that it has little to do with Trump. Any responsible president from either party would, for the sake of security, do the same thing. It’s the logic of what Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter in the Harvard Business Review describe as “the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.”

      By now we know how this plays out. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader at the time, remarked in 2017 about what Americans believe concerning the political economy. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” she said. National security merits a similar remark: We’re cybercriminals, and that’s just the way it is.

      Dorfman’s second conclusion is probably close to the truth — or, as Trump likes to say when referring to embarrassing facts, “It is what it is.” Any president would do the same thing. It’s the system that requires it, not the chief executive. The same is certainly true in Moscow. Some may describe that as proof of the fact that it is pretty much a level playing field, which is probably true. It’s just that it’s a very brutal sport.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More