The Morning Briefing: Panicked CIA Turns to PR Firm The New York Times

Good Thursday morning.

Here is what’s on the president’s agenda today:

The president has a working lunch with governors on workforce freedom and mobility
President Trump delivers remarks on second chance hiring

Panicked CIA turns to their PR firm The New York Times to get in front of DoJ investigations

The intelligence community’s crisis communication firm, The New York Times, spun into action yesterday, “reporting” that A.G. Barr is going to investigate the CIA’s participation in the RUSSIA-collusion hoax.

Before I get into the details of this press release written by and published in the NYT, take a moment and ask yourselves, should there be oversight for the CIA? Who conducts that oversight? The CIA “sources” referenced in the NYT press release seem a little miffed that some folks want to check their math.

According to the press release:

The ties between the efforts by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to examine Russia’s election interference are broader. In the summer of 2016, the intelligence community formed a task force housed at the C.I.A. to investigate Russian interference. The group shared intelligence with F.B.I. investigators who opened the bureau’s Russia inquiry in an effort to determine whether any Americans were working with the Russians on their interference during the election.

What about CIA activity before “the summer of 2016”? This is the time period when some foreign intel assets were recording and trying to entrap George Papadopoulos (Papa-D.) Papa-D met with a fake “RUSSIAN spy” (but likely Western intelligence asset) Joseph Mifsud in April 2016. Now the pretend story is that after Papa-D met with Mifsud and “learned” the RUSSIANS had dirt on Hillary, he shared that information with Australian diplomat/spy Alexander Downer and a honey pot in May. Downer waited until July (“the summer of 2016”) to tell the U.S. and that kicked off the counterintelligence investigation. Why would a Western asset like Mifsud, who trains spies in Italy at The Link, tell a low-level volunteer what he “heard” about the RUSSIANS? Did the CIA deploy Mifsud to fish Papa-D back in April? Was it that punk Brennan? The British spooks? Let’s find out.

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Resistance network ABC News: Trump would take foreign dirt on opponent

ABC News troll George Stephanopoulos interviewed President Trump yesterday (why did the WH agree to this?) and the Clinton water boy asked the president if he would call the FBI or accept information on his opponent from a foreign power. Trump responded: “I think maybe you do both.”

“I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening,” Trump continued. “If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’ — oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

“It’s not an interference, they have information…If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI — if I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘oh let’s call the FBI.’ The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it. When you go and talk, honestly, to the congressman, they all do it, they always have, and that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.”

People went bananas. But why? It’s not illegal. Campaigns take dirt from all over the place. The candidate or senior officials don’t take the meetings, they want plausible deniability, but they have a contractor or distant underling get the splatter on them. You bet campaigns take dirt from anywhere and everywhere.

Now, what if your campaign pays foreign entities to acquire such dirt on a political opponent and conceals the payment via a law firm cutout to avoid public disclosure? What if it’s from a hostile foreign power also engaged in cyberwarfare against your country? What if that information is used by a federal government as a pretext to surveil that opponent’s campaign? How bout dat? Why isn’t former Clinton staffer and Clinton Foundation donor George Stephanopoulos curious? Oh, the Bill Clinton campaign took a ton of money from the Chinese back in the 90s.

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