Trump is about to enter the White House with multiple fronts in an ongoing skirmish with American intelligence—what happens next?
Tomorrow Donald J. Trump will become our 45th president, an event heralded by his supporters as a big step towards changing the course of our politics and, per their mantra, making America great again. While the festivities have produced giggles from the president-elect’s semi-comical inability to get top talent to play his inauguration, a considerably more serious problem for Trump has emerged on the espionage front.
He weathered last week’s spy-storm, generated by Buzzfeed’s leak of a 35-page dossier of allegations regarding his clandestine ties to the Kremlin, by mocking them in customary Trumpian fashion. In a series of angry tweets, the president-elect denounced the Intelligence Community as the source of that leak—even though it was not—while proclaiming the dossier to be “fake news.” Since he recently compared American spies to Nazis on Twitter, Trump seemingly wants a full-fledged war with the IC from his first day in the Oval Office.
If America’s 17-agency spy empire isn’t on Trump’s side, Vladimir Putin is. In defense of the president-elect, the Kremlin strongman proclaimed the dossier to be “rubbish” and “clearly false information,” mocking reports of Russian kompromat, colorfully adding that those who he claimed were smearing Trump were “worse than prostitutes.”
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Now the whole case has been blown wide open again with yesterday’s bombshell McClatchy report that the IC has been looking into possible ties of, as the McClatchy report put it, “a few Americans who were affiliated with Trump’s campaign or his business empire” to individuals “from Russia and other former Soviet nations.” This has supposedly happened at least since the spring, months before Steele shared his dossier with anyone in Washington. In particular, a specially created IC working group, comprised of representatives from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Departments of Justice and Treasury, looked into clandestine Russian money that may have been sent to finance the Trump campaign.
In other words, the Steele report is hardly more than a cover mechanism for the real IC investigation, which knew everything that was true in that dossier already – and presumably knows what’s not true as well. The IC working group found sufficient information on Trump’s secret ties to Putin to get a Federal court to issue warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gives them access to phone calls, emails, and bank accounts which may be tainted by connections to foreign spies.
Team Trump refused comment on the McClatchy story. Since the Senate Intelligence Committee will be conducting an investigation into Trump’s Russian links, including subpoena powers and full access to what the IC knows, the president-elect may have a great deal to worry about. The clearest sign of Trump’s concern is that, almost 24 hours after the report appeared, he hasn’t taken to Twitter to denounce or mock it. His uncharacteristic silence indicates serious trouble in the Trump camp.
Neither are the Senate and the IC all that Trump has to worry about. Several European intelligence agencies have watched the new president’s clandestine ties to Putin with interest and alarm. For small countries close to Russia, the prospect of an American president colluding with the Kremlin is terrifying. What they know was hinted at in a tweet by Harri Ohra-aho, in response to an all-caps claim tweeted by Trump: “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Ohra-aho’s response, which translates as “Lord, give me patience, AND NOW!” is important mainly because the tweeter is a two-star general serving as the chief of Finnish military intelligence.
Plenty of intelligence services know parts of the truth about our 45th president’s potentially unsavory ties to Moscow. Starting tomorrow, Trump will try hard to shut down IC inquiries, but he cannot curtail the Senate investigation and doesn’t have any power to silence worried allies and partners who consider him a threat to their countries.
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Don't be fooled by any sunshine in DC today — the gathering spy clouds over Trump are dark, real….and Russian.https://t.co/NhBgf6G6QW
— John Schindler (@20committee) January 20, 2017
Manafort is openly GRU, Page is on the Gazprom payroll, and Stone boasts of ties to Wikileaks, an RIS front.
This is not a tough case here.
— John Schindler (@20committee) January 20, 2017
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