angelburst29
The Living Force
Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump, was born, bred, and married into deep state spy families. As S. T. Patrick points out, “some of the more interesting reasons” to question Mueller’s current role may be historical, involving his or his family members’ role in deep state events from the Bay of Pigs, JFK assassination, and Pan Am Flight 103 to 9/11’s Dancing Israelis, the Israeli “art students,” and many others.
April 17, 2018 - Robert Mueller’s Questionable Past
Robert Mueller’s Questionable Past
Robert Mueller is the special counsel tasked with investigating potential Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This appointment has also given Mueller significant leeway in exploring any possible links between the Trump campaign and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Much has been written about Mueller’s conduct, as well as his methods, but some of the more interesting reasons for questioning Mueller’s role may be historical.
Mueller was born into and then married into a family with high-level ties to covert CIA operations.
Since 1966, Mueller has been married to Ann Cabell Standish. The Cabell family includes Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA under Allen Dulles. As part of the fallout of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Cabell was forced to resign by President John F. Kennedy in January 1962. His brother, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas in 1963 where and when Kennedy was assassinated. The 2017 JFK document releases have also proven that Mayor Cabell was a CIA asset.
Mueller, himself, is a relative of Richard Bissell, the CIA’s director of plans at the time when it utilized the U-2 spy plane, formed closer ties to the mafia, planned assassination plots against Castro, and directed the Bay of Pigs invasion.
During his tenure with the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush, Mueller supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am Flight 103) case, and Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the Noriega case, Mueller ignored the ties to the Bush family that Victor Thorn illustrated in Hillary (and Bill): The Drugs Volume, Part Two of the Clinton Trilogy.* Noriega had long been associated with CIA operations that involved drug smuggling, money laundering, and arms running. Thorn significantly links Noriega to Bush family involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Regarding Pan Am Flight 103, the culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain. Pro-Palestinian activists, Libyans, and Iranians have all officially been blamed when U.S. intelligence and the mainstream mass media needed to paint each as the antagonist to American freedom. Mueller toed the line, publicly ignoring rumors that agents onboard were said to have learned that a CIA drug-smuggling operation was afoot in conjunction with Pan Am flights. According to the theory, the agents were going to take their questions to Congress upon landing. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.
In 1995, Mueller worked under Eric Holder as the senior litigator in the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office. When Holder was appointed to the position of deputy attorney general under Janet Reno in 1997, he urged President Bill Clinton to make Mueller the U.S. attorney for San Francisco.
As the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California in 2000, Mueller “strongly opposed” Patty Hearst’s application for a presidential pardon. Mueller wrote, “The attitude of Hearst has always been that she is a person above the law and that, based on her wealth and social position, she is not accountable for her conduct, despite the jury’s verdict.”
As author Brad Schreiber noted in Revolution’s End, the 1974 kidnapping of Hearst was an eventual effect of the CIA-created Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). By vehemently arguing that Hearst was responsible for her association with the SLA—rather than being a victim in a FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) operation gone haywire —Mueller protected the FBI from bearing any responsibility for the SLA’s origin or actions.
Shortly after his inauguration, President George W. Bush chose Mueller to head the FBI. As news organizations were vetting Mueller in 2001, The New York Times stumbled upon former associates who remembered Mueller’s reactions to critics who had questioned the FBI’s actions at Ruby Ridge. During an 11-day siege, officers of the U.S. Marshals and FBI killed Randy Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son.
“Associates recall his anger at members of Congress and others for criticism of the FBI’s 1992 siege of a separatist family at Ruby Ridge in Idaho,” reported Neil A. Lewis. The New York Times further reported the popularity Mueller garnered from officers at both the FBI and the IRS.
Mueller was at the helm of the FBI on Sept. 11, 2001. Many independent researchers have questioned Mueller’s handling of the “five dancing Israelis” who worked for Urban Moving Systems. Callers to the FBI office in New Jersey reported five dancing Middle Eastern men watching and celebrating in clear view as the World Trade Center was destroyed. The Forward, a Jewish weekly publication, later reported that the FBI concluded that at least two of the five Israelis were Mossad agents. It was also concluded that Urban Moving Systems was a Mossad front operation. Unfathomably, the Israeli agents were quietly released from detention.
Also downplayed was the story of the Israelis who claimed to be capitalistic art students. They were traveling the country in hopes of hawking their questionably artistic wares at top-secret facilities and at the homes of those who worked at sensitive security locations. Though the “students” had been reported by the U.S. Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Air Force, the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI itself, the issue was largely ignored in the FBI’s testimony to the 9/11 Commission and by Mueller himself.
Mueller’s history goes deeper than partisanship or personal grudges. He is the consummate establishment insider, a role into which he was born and then married. His résumé has been built upon pleasing those whose career trajectories, family histories, and loyalty to the deep state guide their assignments, associations, and maneuvers. Any hope that Mueller will conduct an impartial investigation of the Trump campaign staff seems whimsical, at best.
The apparent tactics of Mueller’s office seemingly reside in the faulty “There’s the man. . . . Now go find the crime” strategy. If there is fault, it will lie at the feet of individuals, not institutions. This is Mueller’s history and the modus operandi of a career insider who has flourished protecting the interests of his most loyal allies.
28.08.2018 - Comey Lied About Searching Clinton Emails on Sex Offender's Laptop - Report
Comey Lied About Searching Clinton Emails on Sex Offender’s Laptop - Report
When former FBI Director James Comey said “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to comb through hundreds of thousands of emails belonging to sex offender and ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner and exonerate former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “emailgate,” he was not being truthful, according to an investigation.
RealClearInvestigations found that Weiner's laptop, which contained some 694,000 emails that might have been related to Clinton's mishandling of classified information when it was seized in October 2016, was not thoroughly investigated — despite the fact that Comey apparently thought the laptop important enough to reopen the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server, an "October surprise" Clinton supporters and statisticians have cited as a decisive factor in the Democrat's election loss.
A mere 3,077 of those emails were pored over by FBI forensic investigators, which translates to about 0.4 percent. The electronic mail contents purportedly came under scrutiny in late October 2016 when it was discovered that Clinton's senior aide, Huma Abedin, who is married to Weiner, had exchanged emails with the secretary of state on his computer. (Abedin and Weiner have separated, but withdrew their divorce petition in January 2018, reportedly to settle their split privately.)
The FBI said that the only reason it had taken Weiner's laptop as evidence was because it "ended up in our laps," according to page 95 of the Department of Justice inspector general's (IG) June 2018 report on FBI conduct during the 2016 election.
Here is the timeline of Comey's "October surprise."
Comey told the IG he learned of the emails on Weiner's laptop at the start of October 2016, but said it was possible he learned about it in September, when prosecutors in New York investigating Weiner's sexting habit with underage women informed the FBI they'd found a large cache of emails that might be relevant to the bureau's investigation into Clinton's use of a private server.
Per the IG report, "Comey told the OIG that this information ‘didn't index' with him, which he attributed to the way the information was presented to him and the fact that, ‘I don't know that I knew that [Weiner] was married to Huma Abedin at the time.'"
Later in the report, Comey explained the reason why it "didn't index" with him that Weiner had in his possession hundreds of thousands of emails between Clinton and Abedin of the type which Comey was tasked with investigating:"[T]he reason I didn't index it is, it was a passing thing that almost seemed like he [the deputy briefing Comey] might be kidding, and so I don't think I indexed it hard."
Law enforcement officials in New York were never "kidding" when they told the FBI about these emails on Weiner's laptop in September 2016.
While acknowledging that going public about Clinton's emails being found on Weiner's laptop vis-à-vis Abedin would "bring such a storm," the option of not dropping the news to Congress would have been "catastrophic," Comey told the IG.
On October 28, 2016, less than two weeks from Election Day, Comey informed US congressional leadership offices that new evidence had required the FBI to reignite the probe into Clinton's careless handling of sensitive information. The significance of the revelation can hardly be overstated. "Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28," election calculus guru Nate Silver argued in one of the many post-mortems of Clinton's defeat.
Two days later, on October 30, the FBI obtained a warrant to search the laptop, according to page two of the IG report. (Then-FBI agent Peter Strzok waited 48 hours to request the warrant and did it on his home computer, in violation of FBI policy.)
According to RealClearInvestigation's law enforcement sources, the FBI did not take the emails on Weiner's laptop as seriously as Comey had claimed when speaking with Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
The investigative effort concluded that just 3,077 emails had been scrutinized after reviewing internal FBI memos, meeting notes and interviews with FBI agents and supervisors, as well as investigators from the US Congress.
"One career FBI special agent involved in the case complained to New York colleagues that officials in Washington tried to ‘bury' the new trove of evidence," RCI reported Sunday.
Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence" of what the FBI had reviewed in its initial investigation into Clinton's email servers, one official said.
There was no real investigation and no real search. It was all just show — eyewash — to make it look like there was an investigation before the election," Michael Biasello, a 25-year FBI veteran, told RCI.
Material on the laptop "was never previously sent out to the relevant" intelligence agencies "for security review," a law enforcement official told RCI. Bypassing the security review defied FBI policy to send classified material left on an unsecured device to the original classification authorities, as required by a 2014 damage assessment directive.
Three FBI employees finished the inquiry of the laptop in a single 12-hour session on the November 5, according to RCI, one day before Comey cleared Clinton of wrongdoing in a November 6 letter to Congress.
"The FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large number of emails… During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state," Comey wrote in the November 6 letter clearing the Democratic nominee for president.
In September 2017, Weiner was sentenced to jail for almost two years and required to enter a sex offender treatment program.
28.08.2018 - Ex-CIA Officer: US Intelligence 'Likely Bluffing' About Its Agents in Kremlin
Ex-CIA Officer: US Intelligence 'Likely Bluffing' About Its Agents in Kremlin
US intelligence officials who told the New York Times they had high-level intelligence sources in the Kremlin were probably bluffing to bolster their discredited allegations about Russia interfering in the 2016 US elections, retired CIA case officer Philip Giraldi told Sputnik.
"Senior US intelligence officers would never so casually and publicly admit they had high-level intelligence sources in the Kremlin," Giraldi said on Monday. "That is the most elementary of procedures."
The New York Times reported on Friday, citing unnamed US intelligence officials, that US sources in the Kremlin who had warned about Russian intervention in the US 2016 presidential election were now remaining silent about any possible Russian plans to intervene in the upcoming congressional elections in November.
The New York Times also reported that a spokesman for the CIA declined to comment on behalf of the agency. However, Giraldi, who also served as a US Army intelligence officer pointed out that the entire story appeared highly suspect.
"This New York Times exclusive reads like a very bad TV or comic book plot," he said.
The story appeared to be an effort to lend credence to the repeated but entirely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia had interfered in the US 2016 election, Giraldi noted.
"Getting such a lie out through the New York Times to the American public may also be an attempt to add credence to the fact that no evidence existed to support the allegations that Russia ever ordered or attempted to affect the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election at all," Giraldi said.
The New York Times article was filled with inaccuracies and outright lies, Giraldi stated. "The New York Times report is filled with lies and half-truths. In this it is reminiscent of the notorious Judith Miller and Michael Gordon article that was part of the propaganda build up and justification for war with Iraq in 2003," he said.
The story that had been fed to the New York Times reporters was also probably an attempt to spread disinformation among the Russian security services and authorities, Giraldi advised.
"It is far more likely that US intelligence officials are trying to pull off a double bluff and convince the Russians that they have agents there in order to set off a fruitless and distracting counter-intelligence search," he said.
Also, contrary to insinuations in the New York Times article, there was no evidence to indicate that Russia was trying to kill US sources or intelligence agents, Giraldi added.
Nor is there any evidence at all that President Putin or the Russian government is killing spies. The individual case of Sergei Skripal is filled with unresolved doubts and questions and there is no hard evidence at all to blame it on Moscow," he said.
Former CIA director John Brennan, whose 2017 congressional testimony the New York Times reporters cited in their story, was an outright partisan for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Giraldi pointed out.
Philip Giraldi is executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates more even-handed US government policies in the Middle East.
April 17, 2018 - Robert Mueller’s Questionable Past
Robert Mueller’s Questionable Past
Robert Mueller is the special counsel tasked with investigating potential Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This appointment has also given Mueller significant leeway in exploring any possible links between the Trump campaign and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Much has been written about Mueller’s conduct, as well as his methods, but some of the more interesting reasons for questioning Mueller’s role may be historical.
Mueller was born into and then married into a family with high-level ties to covert CIA operations.
Since 1966, Mueller has been married to Ann Cabell Standish. The Cabell family includes Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA under Allen Dulles. As part of the fallout of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Cabell was forced to resign by President John F. Kennedy in January 1962. His brother, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas in 1963 where and when Kennedy was assassinated. The 2017 JFK document releases have also proven that Mayor Cabell was a CIA asset.
Mueller, himself, is a relative of Richard Bissell, the CIA’s director of plans at the time when it utilized the U-2 spy plane, formed closer ties to the mafia, planned assassination plots against Castro, and directed the Bay of Pigs invasion.
During his tenure with the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush, Mueller supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am Flight 103) case, and Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the Noriega case, Mueller ignored the ties to the Bush family that Victor Thorn illustrated in Hillary (and Bill): The Drugs Volume, Part Two of the Clinton Trilogy.* Noriega had long been associated with CIA operations that involved drug smuggling, money laundering, and arms running. Thorn significantly links Noriega to Bush family involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Regarding Pan Am Flight 103, the culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain. Pro-Palestinian activists, Libyans, and Iranians have all officially been blamed when U.S. intelligence and the mainstream mass media needed to paint each as the antagonist to American freedom. Mueller toed the line, publicly ignoring rumors that agents onboard were said to have learned that a CIA drug-smuggling operation was afoot in conjunction with Pan Am flights. According to the theory, the agents were going to take their questions to Congress upon landing. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.
In 1995, Mueller worked under Eric Holder as the senior litigator in the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s Office. When Holder was appointed to the position of deputy attorney general under Janet Reno in 1997, he urged President Bill Clinton to make Mueller the U.S. attorney for San Francisco.
As the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California in 2000, Mueller “strongly opposed” Patty Hearst’s application for a presidential pardon. Mueller wrote, “The attitude of Hearst has always been that she is a person above the law and that, based on her wealth and social position, she is not accountable for her conduct, despite the jury’s verdict.”
As author Brad Schreiber noted in Revolution’s End, the 1974 kidnapping of Hearst was an eventual effect of the CIA-created Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). By vehemently arguing that Hearst was responsible for her association with the SLA—rather than being a victim in a FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) operation gone haywire —Mueller protected the FBI from bearing any responsibility for the SLA’s origin or actions.
Shortly after his inauguration, President George W. Bush chose Mueller to head the FBI. As news organizations were vetting Mueller in 2001, The New York Times stumbled upon former associates who remembered Mueller’s reactions to critics who had questioned the FBI’s actions at Ruby Ridge. During an 11-day siege, officers of the U.S. Marshals and FBI killed Randy Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son.
“Associates recall his anger at members of Congress and others for criticism of the FBI’s 1992 siege of a separatist family at Ruby Ridge in Idaho,” reported Neil A. Lewis. The New York Times further reported the popularity Mueller garnered from officers at both the FBI and the IRS.
Mueller was at the helm of the FBI on Sept. 11, 2001. Many independent researchers have questioned Mueller’s handling of the “five dancing Israelis” who worked for Urban Moving Systems. Callers to the FBI office in New Jersey reported five dancing Middle Eastern men watching and celebrating in clear view as the World Trade Center was destroyed. The Forward, a Jewish weekly publication, later reported that the FBI concluded that at least two of the five Israelis were Mossad agents. It was also concluded that Urban Moving Systems was a Mossad front operation. Unfathomably, the Israeli agents were quietly released from detention.
Also downplayed was the story of the Israelis who claimed to be capitalistic art students. They were traveling the country in hopes of hawking their questionably artistic wares at top-secret facilities and at the homes of those who worked at sensitive security locations. Though the “students” had been reported by the U.S. Marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Air Force, the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI itself, the issue was largely ignored in the FBI’s testimony to the 9/11 Commission and by Mueller himself.
Mueller’s history goes deeper than partisanship or personal grudges. He is the consummate establishment insider, a role into which he was born and then married. His résumé has been built upon pleasing those whose career trajectories, family histories, and loyalty to the deep state guide their assignments, associations, and maneuvers. Any hope that Mueller will conduct an impartial investigation of the Trump campaign staff seems whimsical, at best.
The apparent tactics of Mueller’s office seemingly reside in the faulty “There’s the man. . . . Now go find the crime” strategy. If there is fault, it will lie at the feet of individuals, not institutions. This is Mueller’s history and the modus operandi of a career insider who has flourished protecting the interests of his most loyal allies.
28.08.2018 - Comey Lied About Searching Clinton Emails on Sex Offender's Laptop - Report
Comey Lied About Searching Clinton Emails on Sex Offender’s Laptop - Report
When former FBI Director James Comey said “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to comb through hundreds of thousands of emails belonging to sex offender and ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner and exonerate former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “emailgate,” he was not being truthful, according to an investigation.
RealClearInvestigations found that Weiner's laptop, which contained some 694,000 emails that might have been related to Clinton's mishandling of classified information when it was seized in October 2016, was not thoroughly investigated — despite the fact that Comey apparently thought the laptop important enough to reopen the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server, an "October surprise" Clinton supporters and statisticians have cited as a decisive factor in the Democrat's election loss.
A mere 3,077 of those emails were pored over by FBI forensic investigators, which translates to about 0.4 percent. The electronic mail contents purportedly came under scrutiny in late October 2016 when it was discovered that Clinton's senior aide, Huma Abedin, who is married to Weiner, had exchanged emails with the secretary of state on his computer. (Abedin and Weiner have separated, but withdrew their divorce petition in January 2018, reportedly to settle their split privately.)
The FBI said that the only reason it had taken Weiner's laptop as evidence was because it "ended up in our laps," according to page 95 of the Department of Justice inspector general's (IG) June 2018 report on FBI conduct during the 2016 election.
Here is the timeline of Comey's "October surprise."
Comey told the IG he learned of the emails on Weiner's laptop at the start of October 2016, but said it was possible he learned about it in September, when prosecutors in New York investigating Weiner's sexting habit with underage women informed the FBI they'd found a large cache of emails that might be relevant to the bureau's investigation into Clinton's use of a private server.
Per the IG report, "Comey told the OIG that this information ‘didn't index' with him, which he attributed to the way the information was presented to him and the fact that, ‘I don't know that I knew that [Weiner] was married to Huma Abedin at the time.'"
Later in the report, Comey explained the reason why it "didn't index" with him that Weiner had in his possession hundreds of thousands of emails between Clinton and Abedin of the type which Comey was tasked with investigating:"[T]he reason I didn't index it is, it was a passing thing that almost seemed like he [the deputy briefing Comey] might be kidding, and so I don't think I indexed it hard."
Law enforcement officials in New York were never "kidding" when they told the FBI about these emails on Weiner's laptop in September 2016.
While acknowledging that going public about Clinton's emails being found on Weiner's laptop vis-à-vis Abedin would "bring such a storm," the option of not dropping the news to Congress would have been "catastrophic," Comey told the IG.
On October 28, 2016, less than two weeks from Election Day, Comey informed US congressional leadership offices that new evidence had required the FBI to reignite the probe into Clinton's careless handling of sensitive information. The significance of the revelation can hardly be overstated. "Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28," election calculus guru Nate Silver argued in one of the many post-mortems of Clinton's defeat.
Two days later, on October 30, the FBI obtained a warrant to search the laptop, according to page two of the IG report. (Then-FBI agent Peter Strzok waited 48 hours to request the warrant and did it on his home computer, in violation of FBI policy.)
According to RealClearInvestigation's law enforcement sources, the FBI did not take the emails on Weiner's laptop as seriously as Comey had claimed when speaking with Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
The investigative effort concluded that just 3,077 emails had been scrutinized after reviewing internal FBI memos, meeting notes and interviews with FBI agents and supervisors, as well as investigators from the US Congress.
"One career FBI special agent involved in the case complained to New York colleagues that officials in Washington tried to ‘bury' the new trove of evidence," RCI reported Sunday.
Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence" of what the FBI had reviewed in its initial investigation into Clinton's email servers, one official said.
There was no real investigation and no real search. It was all just show — eyewash — to make it look like there was an investigation before the election," Michael Biasello, a 25-year FBI veteran, told RCI.
Material on the laptop "was never previously sent out to the relevant" intelligence agencies "for security review," a law enforcement official told RCI. Bypassing the security review defied FBI policy to send classified material left on an unsecured device to the original classification authorities, as required by a 2014 damage assessment directive.
Three FBI employees finished the inquiry of the laptop in a single 12-hour session on the November 5, according to RCI, one day before Comey cleared Clinton of wrongdoing in a November 6 letter to Congress.
"The FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large number of emails… During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state," Comey wrote in the November 6 letter clearing the Democratic nominee for president.
In September 2017, Weiner was sentenced to jail for almost two years and required to enter a sex offender treatment program.
28.08.2018 - Ex-CIA Officer: US Intelligence 'Likely Bluffing' About Its Agents in Kremlin
Ex-CIA Officer: US Intelligence 'Likely Bluffing' About Its Agents in Kremlin
US intelligence officials who told the New York Times they had high-level intelligence sources in the Kremlin were probably bluffing to bolster their discredited allegations about Russia interfering in the 2016 US elections, retired CIA case officer Philip Giraldi told Sputnik.
"Senior US intelligence officers would never so casually and publicly admit they had high-level intelligence sources in the Kremlin," Giraldi said on Monday. "That is the most elementary of procedures."
The New York Times reported on Friday, citing unnamed US intelligence officials, that US sources in the Kremlin who had warned about Russian intervention in the US 2016 presidential election were now remaining silent about any possible Russian plans to intervene in the upcoming congressional elections in November.
The New York Times also reported that a spokesman for the CIA declined to comment on behalf of the agency. However, Giraldi, who also served as a US Army intelligence officer pointed out that the entire story appeared highly suspect.
"This New York Times exclusive reads like a very bad TV or comic book plot," he said.
The story appeared to be an effort to lend credence to the repeated but entirely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia had interfered in the US 2016 election, Giraldi noted.
"Getting such a lie out through the New York Times to the American public may also be an attempt to add credence to the fact that no evidence existed to support the allegations that Russia ever ordered or attempted to affect the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election at all," Giraldi said.
The New York Times article was filled with inaccuracies and outright lies, Giraldi stated. "The New York Times report is filled with lies and half-truths. In this it is reminiscent of the notorious Judith Miller and Michael Gordon article that was part of the propaganda build up and justification for war with Iraq in 2003," he said.
The story that had been fed to the New York Times reporters was also probably an attempt to spread disinformation among the Russian security services and authorities, Giraldi advised.
"It is far more likely that US intelligence officials are trying to pull off a double bluff and convince the Russians that they have agents there in order to set off a fruitless and distracting counter-intelligence search," he said.
Also, contrary to insinuations in the New York Times article, there was no evidence to indicate that Russia was trying to kill US sources or intelligence agents, Giraldi added.
Nor is there any evidence at all that President Putin or the Russian government is killing spies. The individual case of Sergei Skripal is filled with unresolved doubts and questions and there is no hard evidence at all to blame it on Moscow," he said.
Former CIA director John Brennan, whose 2017 congressional testimony the New York Times reporters cited in their story, was an outright partisan for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Giraldi pointed out.
Philip Giraldi is executive director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates more even-handed US government policies in the Middle East.
