TRUMP.

[Joel]

[Joel]

[inho]

We totally get that it is going to be America first, but which country is going to be the second?

Which of the introductory videos at http://www.everysecondcounts.eu/ you like the most?

[Joel]

[Joel]

https://www.scribd.com/document/3392706 ... from_embed" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Joel]

[Joel]

Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

WASHINGTON — Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the officials’ accounts in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”

He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia. And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.

The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

A report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.

The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.

But the cases are part of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ routine electronic surveillance of the communications of foreign officials.

The F.B.I. declined to comment. The White House also declined to comment Tuesday night, but earlier in the day, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, stood by Mr. Trump’s previous comments that nobody from his campaign had contact with Russian officials before the election.

“There’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period,” Mr. Spicer said in response to a question.

Two days after the election in November, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said “there were contacts” during the campaign between Russian officials and Mr. Trump’s team.

“Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” Mr. Ryabkov told Russia’s Interfax news agency.

The Trump transition team denied Mr. Ryabkov’s statement. “This is not accurate,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said at the time.

The National Security Agency, which monitors the communications of foreign intelligence services, initially captured the calls between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russians as part of routine foreign surveillance. After that, the F.B.I. asked the N.S.A. to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls, and to search through troves of previous intercepted communications that had not been analyzed.

The F.B.I. has closely examined at least three other people close to Mr. Trump, although it is unclear if their calls were intercepted. They are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign; Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative; and Mr. Flynn.

All of the men have strongly denied that they had any improper contacts with Russian officials.

As part of the inquiry, the F.B.I. is also trying to assess the credibility of the information contained in a dossier that was given to the bureau last year by a former British intelligence operative. The dossier contained a raft of allegations of a broad conspiracy between Mr. Trump, his associates and the Russian government. It also included unsubstantiated claims that the Russians had embarrassing videos that could be used to blackmail Mr. Trump.

The F.B.I. has spent several months investigating the leads in the dossier, but has yet to confirm any of its most explosive claims.

Senior F.B.I. officials believe that the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier, Christopher Steele, has a credible track record, and he briefed investigators last year about how he obtained the information. One American law enforcement official said that F.B.I. agents had made contact with some of Mr. Steele’s sources.

The agency’s investigation of Mr. Manafort began last spring as an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. It has focused on why he was in such close contact with Russian and Ukrainian intelligence officials.

The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort’s communications, but it had the N.S.A. scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met.

The F.B.I. investigation is proceeding at the same time that separate investigations into Russian interference in the election are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill. Those investigations, by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are examining not only the Russian hacking but also any contacts that Mr. Trump’s team had with Russian officials during the campaign.

On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said that Mr. Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said the news about Mr. Flynn underscored “how many questions still remain unanswered to the American people more than three months after Election Day, including who was aware of what, and when.”

Mr. Warner said Mr. Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election.”

Correction: February 14, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people (in addition to Paul Manafort) whom the F.B.I. has examined. It is at least three, not at least four.

U.S. Intelligence agencies are lairs so they should show all of the proof they have that they are not lying this time

[Joel]

Trump has the power to declassify whatever he wants — including the Russian intercepts

Late Tuesday evening the New York Times reported that current and former U.S. officials claim that members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as well as other Trump associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials” before the 2016 election.

Donald Trump then spent the early morning Wednesday unhappily tweeting about this:

This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton's losing campaign.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

If in fact all of this is “non-sense,” Trump has the power as president to make that clear immediately — by declassifying all government intercepts of communications between Russian nationals and anyone in his orbit.

The huge edifice of classification by the U.S. government has no basis in laws passed by Congress (with one small and, in this case, irrelevant exception.) Instead, the executive branch classifies material based on presidential executive orders, with the president’s power in turn based on his constitutional role as commander in chief of the armed forces. The Supreme Court has stated that the presidential power “to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from the constitutional investment of power in the president.”

This means that Trump has the power to declassify anything he wants, right now. CNN has reported that he has already been briefed on the contacts between his associates and Russians.

So in theory Trump could ask the National Security Agency and all the other U.S. intelligence agencies to give him all the relevant intercepts and post everything about them on the White House website this afternoon.

In practice, any president, even one who honestly wanted to reveal as much as possible, would want to learn what intelligence capabilities would be revealed by such a disclosure, and then keep aspects of the intercepts secret to conceal the sources and methods that were most significant.

The White House press office did not respond when asked whether Trump plans to use his declassification authority.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, points out that presidents have used their declassification power before in response to public outcry. In 2004 George W. Bush declassified the relevant section of the presidential daily brief headlined “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” At the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency he ordered the declassification of the memos the Justice Department produced advising the Bush White House on the legality of torture.

Beyond Trump himself, others have an incentive to see their names cleared by the release of any intercepts. Paul Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign chairman, is named in Tuesday’s New York Times article as speaking with notable Russians but told the Times, “I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government.” The possible Russian contacts of Roger Stone, an infamous GOP operative who was briefly part of the Trump campaign; Carter Page, a businessman who was on the periphery of the campaign; and Trump’s now-fired National Security Advisor Michael Flynn are all under FBI scrutiny.

None of the four could immediately be reached with questions about whether they would support Trump using his declassification power to release any intercepts of their conversations that exist. Stone told The Guardian on Wednesday that “The president should tell his attorney general that either he finds proof of this, or he puts it to bed and announces none of it happened. … I would relish the opportunity to testify in public under oath on this issue.”

[Joel]

[Joel]

[Elizabeth]

"One world leader just issued a dire warning about the refugee program and it confirms Donald Trump’s suspicions.
Strongman Bashar al-Assad is the President of Syria.
He was interviewed by Yahoo News and was questioned about Trump’s indefinite freezing of the Syrian refugee program.
Assad responded that while he would take no side on the matter, he did declare that terrorists were among the refugees.
“In an exclusive interview with Yahoo News at a presidential office in Damascus, Assad said President Trump’s freeze on admitting refugees from his country — part of an executive order that has drawn widespread protests and is being challenged in federal court — “is an American issue” on which he would not take sides. But asked if some of those who fled are “aligned with terrorists,” Assad quickly replied, “Definitely.”
“You can find it on the Net,” Assad went on: “Those terrorists in Syria, holding the machine gun or killing people, they [appear as] peaceful refugees in Europe or in the West.” He said he couldn’t estimate how many there might be, but he added that “you don’t need a significant number to commit atrocities.” He noted that the 9/11 attacks were pulled off by fewer than 20 terrorists “out of maybe millions of immigrants in the United States. So it’s not about the number, it’s about the quality, it’s about the intentions.”
As for the future of Syria’s 4.8 million refugees, Assad said, “For me, the priority is to bring those citizens to their country, not to help them immigrate.”
Assad is a brutal strongman who committed many atrocities against his people.
But he is also engaged in a battle against rebels who are fighting alongside terrorist groups like ISIS.
And it is a fact that terrorists have used the refugee program to infiltrate Europe and carry out terrorist attacks.
The Washington Post reported four ISIS fighters posed as refugees, and two of them made it all the way to Paris to carry out the deadly nightclub shooting that killed over 120 innocent people:
“On a crisp morning last October, 198 migrants arrived on the Greek island of Leros, all of them seemingly desperate people seeking sanctuary in Europe. But hiding among them were four men with a very different agenda.
The four were posing as war-weary Syrians — all carrying doctored passports with false identities. And they were on a deadly mission for the Islamic State.
Two of the four would masquerade as migrants all the way to Paris. There, at 9:20 p.m. on Nov. 13, they would detonate suicide vests near the Stade de France sports complex, fulfilling their part in the worst attack on French soil since World War II.”
There is an indisputable danger that ISIS will use the refugee program to sneak jihadists into America.
Just because something has not happened does not mean it never will.
Assad is 100% correct that there are terrorists using the refugee program to plant fighters in Western nations.
That is why Donald Trump issued an executive order pausing the program indefinitely.
Activist judges have issued – and upheld – a temporary restraining order against Trump’s ban.
It remains to be seen if they are risking the safety of the nation."

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox ... 69d0542fd3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Joel]

[Joel]

[Joel]

[larsenb]

Does anyone else recognize the rather strange phenomenon of Joel virtually hijacking this Trump thread as almost his personal fiefdom for making snide comments and slams at Trump?

My suggestion: find someone you really like and let us know what is so good about such a person . . . if you can think of one. Much better use of your time, IMHO.

[Joel]

Trump provides so much material to enjoy :)) I guess I can spread my post on more threads. I do have my favorite threads, few of my favorite threads disappear from time to time, this one and the other New you can use are still around. Trump provides fun political theatre :o) he enjoys performing and it is it fun to watch, if anyone else had won I would have not as much fun reading/watching the news on politics as I am!

[Joel]

[larsenb]

Trump provides so much material to enjoy :)) I guess I can spread my post on more threads. I do have my favorite threads, few of my favorite threads disappear from time to time, this one and the other New you can use are still around. Trump provides fun political theatre :o) he enjoys performing and it is it fun to watch, if anyone else had won I would have not as much fun reading/watching the news on politics as I am!

Do you like anything he is doing?

I thought his last Press Conference was fabulous and an extreme breath of fresh air. What did you think of it, I'm wondering? Did you see anything positive about it, or very worthwhile?

[Joel]

He is everything I thought he would be. He is great entertainment and I like that! Plus his wife and daughters are hot! I do think he is a great reflection of the people that voted for him. I do enjoy the press and his relationship, I hope it keeps getting worse! Once Trump leaves office I hope the press will continue this type of relationship with whomever is the next president. If Trump can weaken the powers that a president (along with government in general) has on society then I would see that as a positive. He seems to enjoy exercising the executive power that other presidents help expand though.

[Joel]

[Silver]

Does anyone else recognize the rather strange phenomenon of Joel virtually hijacking this Trump thread as almost his personal fiefdom for making snide comments and slams at Trump?

My suggestion: find someone you really like and let us know what is so good about such a person . . . if you can think of one. Much better use of your time, IMHO.

I noticed, and I heartily endorse it.

Joel, the Lumberjack,
Taking a mighty whack,
On the haughty Trump,
In spite of your harrumph.
See Joel attack?
Attack, Joel, attack!

Larsen, how deliciously ironic of you. Calling out Joel but unable to resist adding a slur about "his own personal fiefdom." You stuck-up bag of hot air. Why don't you follow your own stinking advice: find someone you really like and let us know what is so good about such a person?

[Joel]

It's cool! No worries!

I enjoy Trump whining and seeing others mocking him for it for the same reasons I liked watching Karl Pilkington's show, "An Idiot Abroad"... After Trump's presidency I would find it entertaining if Trump and Karl would do a show together. They have two very different whining styles but it would be loads of laughs :))

[gkearney]

Trump is like a narcotic to the media they simply cannot get enough of him. However I do wonder what he would do if the media were to simply start ignoring him, no more coverage no more news conferences, nothing.

[inho]

Dear President Trump,

While you are making America great again, please do not spread fake news about other countries.

This happened in Sweden Friday night, Mr President

U.S. president Donald Trump gave a speech in Melbourne, Florida, Saturday evening.
While speaking about keeping America safe he mentioned the major terrorist attacks in Nice, Paris and Brussels – and in the same sentence he pointed out an unspecified event in Sweden Friday evening.
”You look at what happened last night in Sweden”, he said.
Mr President, here is what happened in Sweden Friday night:

• 3:24 PM (local time): A man set himself on fire at Sergels torg, a plaza in central Stockholm. He was taken to the hospital with severe burns. There is so far no information on his motives but the intelligence service is not part of the investigation.
• 6:42 PM: The famous singer Owe Thörnqvist had some technical problems during rehearsal for the singing competition ”Melodifestivalen”. (However, the 87 year old singer still managed to secure the victory the very next day.)
• 8:23 PM: A man died in hospital, after an accident in the workplace earlier that day in the city of Borås.
• 8:46 PM: Due to harsh weather in the northern parts of Sweden the road E10 was closed between Katterjåkk and Riksgränsen. Due to strong winds and snow in the region the Met office also issued an avalanche warning.
• 12:17 AM: Police officers initiated a chase for a fleeing Peugeot through central parts of the Swedish capital of Stockholm. The pursuit ended in police officers ramming the suspect at Engelbrektsgatan. The driver is now accused of driving under the influence, traffic violation and car theft.
  
  IN LIGHTER NEWS:
• 11:23 AM: Ok, let’s not be fake news, this story took place in the autumn, but was reported Friday before lunch and we thought you would like it. A wooden moose got the attention of a lovesick moose bull. It all happened in 79 year old Ove Lindqvist’s garden in Byske outside Skellefteå, northern Sweden. ”I thought it was going to start a fight, instead it humped the wooden moose thrice”, he said.

[Silver]

It's cool! No worries!

I enjoy Trump whining and seeing others mocking him for it for the same reasons I liked watching Karl Pilkington's show, "An Idiot Abroad"... After Trump's presidency I would find it entertaining if Trump and Karl would do a show together. They have two very different whining styles but it would be loads of laughs :))

Speaking of whining, or in Trumpish, "winning"...

"We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning," Trump said Wednesday. "Believe me, I agree, you'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. We are going to turn this country around. We are going to start winning big on trade. Militarily, we're going to build up our military. We're going to have such a strong military that nobody, nobody is going to mess with us. We're not going to have to use it."

All the adults in the room know that whenever someone uses the expression "believe me" all the time one should take extreme caution. It is those who say "believe me" all the time who should be the least trusted.

His bragging about the military reminds me of wicked Nephites who thought that winning one battle would guarantee them subsequent victories as well. Mormon decided to stop leading those Nephites when they got that bad.

Or you could equate his comments to those made about the Titanic prior to its maiden voyage. What a blowhard, but Trumpsters still haven't awoken. The moment of chagrin awaits them.