RUTHFULLY YOURS

G. Murphy Donovan was the former Director of Research and Russian (nee Soviet) studies at USAF Intelligence when James Clapper was the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on Public Television shortly before the presidential election for an extended interview with Charlie Rose. Mister Rose, like many of his peers these days, swings between hard news at dusk and bimbo chat at dawn. Indeed, Charlie is the very model of a Beltway double-dipper, a celebrity groupie who feeds at public and commercial troughs, PBS and CBS.

On any given day, Rose might be seen giggling with celebrities in the morning and then lofting softballs to political touts in the evening. The Council on Foreign Relations was the venue for the recent Clapper show. “Impartial, non-profit” think tanks are often used to provide the appropriate gravitas to administration spin. The Clapper performance, just before the November election, seemed to be of a piece with several other Intelligence officials who campaigned against Donald Trump.

And the Clapper interview, like many administration dog-and-pony shows, was not about transparency or openness or even information per se. In another day, any public chat with an Intelligence official might have been relegated to the desinformatsiya file. Today, Intelligence officials like Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan play other, and some might say sinister, if not partisan roles.

Whether the subject is Islamism, Vladimir Putin, or fake news; the name of the game at the moment is overtly political. Call it spin control.

Clapper’s appearance on Public Television was a subtle version of partisan Intelligence spin. Michael Morell, former acting director of CIA and Michael Hayden, former director of NSA have been on the anti-Trump stump since the 2016 campaign began. Recall that Hayden (aka Elmer Fudd) presided over the worst warning failure in American history and that Morell was a principal in the Benghazi fiasco.

The hypocrisy oozing from the peddling of this week’s narrative about Russian “meddling” in the U.S. presidential election is thick even by the sorry standards of modern American politics.

I feel entitled to be amused, having maintained, through a decade of bipartisan idiocy, that Putin’s thug-ocracy is an enemy of the United States: from the Bush-administration howler that Russia is our “strategic partner,” through eight years of the Obama-Hillary “reset”; from Obama’s mumbling as Putin annexed Crimea and other swathes of Ukraine (after Obama, as a senator, joined with senior Republicans to disarm Ukraine), through Bush’s mumbling as Putin annexed swathes of Georgia. I saw Russia as a major problem long before it began violating the “new START” treaty that Obama signed and Republicans approved; before Secretary Clinton helped Putin cronies acquire a major slice of American uranium stock; and before Obama’s promise to Vlad (communicated through Putin-puppet Medvedev) that he’d have “more flexibility” to cut deals after the 2012 election.

Suffice it to say that if the American political class is suddenly worried about Russian aggression, deceit, cyber-espionage, and collaboration with Iran (in order to — get this! — fight terrorism), I welcome it to the club. And if the gray beards are fretting over Donald Trump’s potential coziness with our enemies, that’s good to hear . . . although it would have been nice to have a fraction of that fretting when it came to the Obama-Clinton operational coziness with our enemies.

All that said, the Democrats’ Chicken Little routine can’t be serious, nor is the chattering class that pretends to take it seriously.

To begin with, it would be shocking if the Russians had not attempted to meddle in our election. Historically, they’ve done it countless times (I assume, every time). That’s what hostiles do, they make mischief when and where they can. Democrats, moreover, conveniently forget that they’ve historically welcomed such mischief-making — such as when Jimmy Carter pleaded with Leonid Brezhnev for Soviet help in the futile effort to defeat Ronald Reagan in 1980 and when Ted Kennedy pleaded with Yuri Andropov for Soviet help in the futile effort to defeat Reagan in 1984.

Democrats claim Russian hackers stole victory from Hillary Clinton, yet President Obama told alleged comedian Trevor Noah that they released “what were frankly not very interesting emails that didn’t have any explosive information in them.” Well, either the content of the emails influenced the outcome, or not—which is it? And that isn’t the only contradiction in this narrative.

Another is the amazingly reckless information security programs of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. New details Wednesday in the New York Times still manage to astonish, even from someone who ran her own homebrew email server out of her basement as Secretary of State.

The Times reported that a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent repeatedly called the DNC and left multiple voicemails warning that its computer system appeared to have been compromised. DNC staffers never called back for seven months because they told the Times they weren’t sure he was a real agent.

The Clinton campaign faults the FBI for not showing up in person at the DNC, as if it is the FBI’s fault the FBI wasn’t taken seriously. Yet two separate hacking rings, uncoordinated and unknown to each other, penetrated the DNC system.

Meanwhile, campaign chairman John Podesta was taken in “phishing” email, a relatively unsophisticated deception to trick someone into giving up a password. His aides thought the message was perhaps suspicious, but the IT team told them it was legitimate and to follow the link. Mr. Podesta also hadn’t activated two-factor authentication on his Gmail account, which might have provided another layer of security.

Not to blame the victims, but the reality of the modern era is that cyberattacks are a constant menace that requires vigilance. When the Chinese can steal millions of individual records from the Office of Personnel Management, any campaign must know that it is likely to be a target and take countermeasures to protect sensitive information.

Joe Kennedy told his kids never to write anything down that might one day appear on the front page of the Times. The modern analogue is to turn on two-factor authentication.

A serious person might ask: Why did John Podesta, the Democratic Party, and various of its media affiliates head into the fever swamps after Donald Trump won the election?

We knew months ago that the Trump phenomenon could drive women mad and make grown men weep, but how to explain the adoption of a Tom Clancy conspiracy, to wit: Vladimir Putin, using hacker slaves in a Kremlin basement, stole the election for Mr. Trump? Therefore let’s sequester the 538 folks from the Electoral College in a safe house for a CIA briefing before they vote to validate the results of the 2016 election.

Several explanations press into view, the simplest being . . . embarrassment.

Mr. Podesta and his associates lost the election, or at least the one that has been deciding U.S. presidential results since George Washington carried the Electoral College vote in 1789. (Gen. Washington got 69 votes, John Adams 34.)

This year’s loss happened in large part because the Hillary campaign ignored Bill Clinton’s advice to pursue the blue-collar vote that won him the presidency. The Clinton campaign thought Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” would win a third straight time. Staring out across the U.S. political map today, they look now like the coalition of the descendant.

Little surprise that the people responsible for this debacle are filling the skies with Putin-elected-Trump flak to divert eyes from why they lost states they should have won.

Another, more plausible explanation would be the belief among Democrats that the Trump victory is a temporary political bubble.

Mr. Trump won by gaining the support of les deplorables who formerly voted Democrat or who had stopped voting altogether after losing faith in the system. That is a thin, volatile presidential base.

If President Trump doesn’t deliver prosperity that satisfies these new voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, they’ll abandon the Trump Republicans. Then, like Silly Putty, the Democrats’ Blue Wall of electoral-vote states will reform in 2020. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://zinke.house.gov/issues/foreign-affairs

Ryan Zinke spent 23 years as a U.S. Navy SEAL and believes in peace through strength. America has a responsibility to assist our allies in times of need and carry out humanitarian aid missions. The worsening situation in the Middle East puts America at risk. Two priorities Rep. Zinke sees include stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and defeating and destroying ISIS by way of military force, diplomacy and humanitarian aid. Airstrikes alone will not be effective. Congress must ensure American troops who are put in harms way are equipped with the tools, personnel, and rules of engagement to win and win decisively.

Foreign Policy & National Security | Congressman Ryan Zinke