Nunes and Schiff unintentionally let the Trump cat out of the bag By The Wayne Madsen Report

Nunes and Schiff unintentionally let the Trump cat out of the bag

By The Wayne Madsen Report

Although journalists and those who believe in open government hate it, there is a reason why senior intelligence officials often reply "no comment" to questions surrounding intelligence matters. In the world of intelligence gathering, even the most innocuous comment can reveal information not intended for the ears of the general public. In the world of operational security, these minor tidbits of information are known as "essential elements of friendly information" or simply, EEFI.

In the partisan bickering that broke out on March 22 between House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) and the ranking member on the intelligence oversight committee, Adam Schiff (D-CA), both, likely unintentionally, revealed EEFI concerning the U.S. intelligence community's "incidental surveillance" of Donald Trump and his transition team between Election Day, November 8, and the inauguration on January 20.

During a March 22 briefing for reporters outside the White House after a controversial briefing for Trump and his advisers, Nunes revealed that "dozens" of intelligence reports he was given about the Trump "incidental surveillance" made "no mention of Russia." Nunes said the information was brought to him by "sources who thought we should know it." Nunes said the interceptions of the Trump team were "legally collected" pursuant to a warrant issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge and involved "foreign" surveillance not involving Russia.
Nunes elaborated further in stating that “normal, formal surveillance” provided to him yielded "significant information" about both Trump and his "team." But Nunes provided a caveat to that particular revelation, stating that details about Trump and his team had "little or no apparent foreign intelligence value" and  "were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting" because their identities had been "unmasked" within the U.S. intelligence community during the transition phase. However, if the "formal" surveillance of Team Trump did not involve foreign intelligence, that means it must have involved a law enforcement matter and was authorized by a Title III "wiretap" order authorized by a normal federal court outside of the FISA aegis and carried out by the FBI and Justice Department's Electronic Surveillance Unit.

Nunes's EEFI offering provides the following points of interest:

- The incidental surveillance made no mention of Russia.
- The formal surveillance was of little or no intelligence value.
- The formal surveillance, while of no value to intelligence agencies, may have been of great interest to law enforcement, especially the FBI. Hence, FBI director James Comey's reticence to provide details concerning its investigation of the Trump transition team during his recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.
- If some of the surveillance information made no mention of Russia, perhaps it did mention other countries.

The definition of "team" is important since if it extended beyond the transition team to the campaign team, it would include Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, national security adviser Michael Flynn, and foreign policy adviser Carter Page. It is now known that Manafort was contracted to the pro-Russian political party in Ukraine that was ousted in the 2014 U.S.-inspired coup while Page also had business dealings with the Russian government-owned energy firm Gazprom and Flynn's consulting company had Russian business connections.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that Nunes's statement appeared to reveal "classified information." It, at the very least, revealed EEFI from which more sensitive intelligence can be derived.

Trump's problems may not be found with Russia but, ironically, south of the U.S. border, a border which the president is trying to seal with a great and "beautiful" wall.

The "incidental surveillance" of Trump and his associates, which was cited by Nunes and made no mention of Russia, may very well been a result of National Security Agency and its FIVE EYES partners' surveillance of a major fraud case involving billionaire former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli, who escaped an arrest warrant in Panama and is now living in Miami. Last September, at the height of the U.S. presidential campaign, Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela requested the Obama administration's State and Justice Departments to extradite Martinelli.

Martinelli is wanted by Panama for embezzlement of funds, wiretapping his political and business enemies, insider stock trading, money laundering, and other crimes. So far, the Trump administration has taken no action on the Panamanian extradition request. Perhaps that is because in Panama, Trump is known as the "American Martinelli." Moreover, Martinelli is a close friend and business associate of Trump. Martinelli, exiled in Miami as a fugitive from justice and wanted by Panama, was invited to attend Trump's inauguration in Washington. Before he deleted it, Martinelli posted a photograph of his Inaugural invitation on Twitter. As president, Martinelli was on hand for the 2011 opening of Trump's first tower in Panama City, the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower. During the ceremony, Trump referred to Martinelli as his "friend."

The ties between Trump and Martinelli run even deeper. The bank in which Martinelli owns a significant stake, Global Bank Corporation, was a co-trustee of Trump's Ocean Club. When the Trump property developer, Newland International Properties Corporation, defaulted on its Global Bank loan in 2013, the Martinelli bank was forced to bail out Newland. The real estate scams surrounding the Trump Panama Hotel Management LLC, Trump Panama Condominium Management LLC -- both incorporated in Delaware -- Newland Properties, Trump Ocean Club Unit 2710 Inc., K Group -- which pays Trump Marks Panama $5 million per year for using the Trump brand name -- the Trump Organization, the Trump Ocean Club, and Global Bank are merely the tip of the iceberg surrounding the overall criminal accusations surrounding Trump's friend Martinelli.

 
Left: Trump [center] at ribbon cutting ceremony for Trump Ocean Club tower in Panama City in 2011. Now a wanted fugitive, President Ricardo Martinelli [right], as well as Donald Trump Jr. [left], join Trump. Right: Trump at White House meeting with Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski on February 24, 2017. Martinelli and Kuczynski are subjects of major international criminal investigations. Were Trump and his associates caught up in FISA and Title III surveillance of the Odebrecht scandal and are they also involved?

Hundreds of thousands of documents were leaked from the Panama City law firm Mossack Fonseca, which incorporated thousands of offshore shell companies for the Central Intelligence Agency, narcotics syndicates, Arab oil sheikhs, and businessmen like Martinelli, Trump, and Trump's Argentine friend, President Mauricio Macri. It is known that Latin America's largest ever bribery scandal that involves the huge Brazilian building contractor Odebrecht SA, now laps at the shores of the Trump Organization via Martinelli.

In December 2016, during the presidential transition phase, the U.S. Justice Department announced a settlement with Odebrecht in which the firm and its affiliate Braskem agreed to pay a fine of $3.6 billion for violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Most of the fine collected by Justice was to be turned over to Brazil, which began the investigation of Odebrecht with its "Lava Jato" (Car Wash) probe.

As part of its deal with DOJ, what information did Odebrecht's executives share with Justice Department prosecutors concerning its operations in Panama, especially those involving the Trump Tower and Martinelli? Any involvement of Trump with the Odebrecht and Mossack Fonseca criminal scandals would have prompted any U.S. judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or on the bench of a regular U.S. court district to authorize electronic surveillance of the Trump Organization. When Nunes stated the "incidental surveillance" of Trump and his associates did not involve Russia, was he actually implying it involved another country, perhaps Panama?

The political fallout from Odebrecht is beginning to stick to Trump. Odebrecht paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to politicians in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, Guatemala,the Dominican Republic, Antigua and Barbuda, Angola, Mozambique, and other countries and some of these politicians are linked to Trump business enterprises. 
Argentina's Macri has been linked to the Odebrecht bribery scandal mainly through the connections to the firm of his cousin Angelo Calcaterra, Macri's Energy Minister Juan José Aranguren, and other officials of his government. With the help of business associates of Macri, a Trump Tower was built in Uruguay in 2012. Trump has been pressuring Macri and his friends to build the first Trump Tower in Buenos Aires and a Buenos Aires building permit for the deal was apparently the subject of a phone conversation between Trump and Macri after Trump's election in November.

However, not all has been well between the Trump and Macri families over the years. Franco Macri, the father of the Argentine president, believed the mastermind behind the kidnapping for ransom of Mauricio Macri in 1991 was none other than Donald Trump, who the elder Macri described as the "true intellectual author" of the crime. Perhaps that is why the right-wing Mauricio Macri openly endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.
In Peru, an arrest warrant has been issued for former President Alejandro Toledo who stands accused of receiving a $10 million bribe from Odebrecht for a highway contract. Toledo was on his way to Israel but is now in the United States. The current President of Peru, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, was Toledo's finance minister. The Trump administration has not responded to Peruvian requests for Toledo's extradition from the U.S. and Kuczynski has been mired in allegations concerning his own connections with Odebrecht. Perhaps that was the reason why Kuczynski followed up a phone call with Trump with a personal visit to the White House in February. All Trump and Kuczynski spoke about during their joint remarks was Kuczynski receiving an award from Princeton University, Kuczynski's two daughters attending Princeton and Columbia, and Peru's decision to buy some U.S. military vehicles. If Kuczynski and Trump are subject to FISA and Title III wiretaps concerning Odebrecht, they may have found more than family to chat about. Kuczynski previously asked Trump to extradite his former boss Toledo to Peru. But with Kucynski now a target of the Odebrecht probe, he may have asked Trump to keep Toledo under wraps in the U.S. and not singing to a Peruvian court.

The U.S. Attorney's Office most likely to have been assigned the investigation of the Martinelli extradition request is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. This office has historically been occupied by right-wing prosecutors linked to Latin American right-wing leaders, many of which, like Martinelli, maintain residences in the Miami area. If Trump is looking at protecting those who could spill the beans on his and his Trump Organization's own ties to Odebrecht, what better way than to nominate a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida to his cabinet. Trump nominated such a former U.S. Attorney, Alexander Acosta, to be his Secretary of Labor. Acosta was involved in negotiating as U.S. Attorney the sweetheart plea deal with convicted child molester and Trump billionaire friend Jeffrey Epstein. The deal immunized from future prosecution Epstein's VIP friends who were involved in his underage sex operations. 

As a former U.S. Attorney in Miami and former dean of Florida International University law school, Acosta has enough clout to help ward off any federal investigations emanating from the Miami U.S. Attorney's Office, which would include advocating for the extraditions of Martinelli and Toledo back to their home countries where they might start naming names, including that of Trump and his associates. Odebrecht, the company that built Miami International Airport, may also have dirt on southern Florida politicians, including members of the Republican Cuban-American political "mafia," which also includes Acosta. Odebrecht maintained a Division of Structured Operations, which was dubbed the "Department of Bribery" by U.S. Justice Department investigators. Were Trump and members of his business empire caught up in a legitimate DOJ investigation of Odebrecht, with ancillary intelligence being provided by the NSA and its Canadian counterpart, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), which conducts full-time surveillance of Latin American communications? If the answer is yes, and it appears to be so, that would explain Nunes and Schiff talking around the issue, which involves the collection of raw signals intelligence data on a massive number of foreign businesses and "U.S. persons."

National Security Letters, the Deceitful Media & the Convergence of Interests

This week we interviewed Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower; the interview should be posted in 3 or 4 weeks. I know you’re going to find it interesting and enlightening. Speaking of AT&T, check out our contributor Ishmael’s informative interview with Jeff Farias here.

I have a few noteworthy tidbits below. Don’t pay attention to their publication dates, since the issues, these cases and reports, are ‘timeless’ in nature.

Another Police State Government Villains & an Irate Minority Fighter Story

This week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy watchdog organization, released a comprehensive and eye-opening report on a bogus subpoena issued by a US attorney in Indiana to force Indymedia.us , an independent alternative news site to hand over all the data containing about their users who visited the site on a particular day. Not only that, consistent with other National Security Letters practices, the Justice Department issued gag order to prevent the site from speaking about the subpoena:

The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated Clair’s First Amendment rights, by ordering her not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a U.S. attorney’s permission.

Because Indymedia follows EFF’s Best Practices for Online Service Providers and does not keep historical IP logs, there was no information for Indymedia to hand over, and the government withdrew the subpoena. However, as the report describes, that wasn’t the end of the tale: Ms. Clair wanted EFF to be able to tell the story of the subpoena and shine a light on the government’s illegal demand, yet the subpoena ordered silence. Under pressure from EFF, the government admitted that the subpoena’s gag order had no legal basis, and ultimately chose not to go to court to try to force Ms. Clair’s silence despite earlier threats to do so.

This is another story of our government villains determined to butcher the Constitution and speed up our descent towards a police state. This is another example illustrating how government abuses are thriving and expanding in secrecy. In this case, it took an irate, a determined, and a believer in Constitutional Rights, to get up and challenge the attempted despotism. In this particular case, the despotic villains backed down. But as EFF appropriately questions:

How often does the government attempt such illegal fishing expeditions through internet data? How many online service providers have received similarly bogus demands, and handed over how much data, violating how many internet users’ privacy? How many of those subpoena recipients have been intimidated into silence by unconstitutional gag orders?

Let’s hope the number of those who choose to speak up and fight back keeps increasing. But meanwhile, in addition to sitting and wishing and hoping, let us each be one of the irate minority who keeps on fighting until we become the majority, and the villains are restrained and ruled by we the people.

The Deceitful Media Pimping Tyranny

Freedom daily had a well-presented piece by James Bovard on the US media. I get tons of links and references everyday, and usually all I can do is a quick glance. With this one I was hooked after the first paragraph, and I’m sure those of you who’ve been visiting my site for a while would know why:

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public.

And no, it is not because he uses my favorite adjective, pimp! Keep reading the article, because Bovard goes on providing some good and highly relevant examples and cases. Here is another right-on-target remark after he presents relevant cases supporting his view:

Deceit has become ritualized in U.S. foreign policy. From 2002 onwards, the White House Iraq Group spewed out false information that the New York Times and other prominent media outlets routinely accepted without criticism or verification. After many of the assertions were later discovered to be false, the White House and much of the media treated the falsehoods as irrelevant to the legitimacy of the U.S. invasion. The lack of attention paid to political lies is itself symptomatic of the bias in favor of submitting to rulers regardless of how much people are defrauded.

…

The pursuit of respectability in Washington usually entails acquiescing to government lies. Many if not most members of the Washington press corps are government dependents. Few Washington journalists have the will to expose government lies. That would require placing one in an explicitly adversarial position to the government. It is not that the typical journalist is intentionally covering up government lies, but that his radar is not set to detect such occurrences. Lies rarely register in Washington journalists’ minds because they are usually supplicants for government information, not dogged pursuers of the truth. Raising troublesome questions will not help you get any “silver platter” stories.

And finally his conclusion, the punch line, to which I wholeheartedly subscribe:

If Americans wish to retain the remnants of their liberty, they cannot trust the media to warn them about government tyranny. In order to recognize government deceit, there is no substitute for more citizens to make more effort to find the truth for themselves.

Don’t worry about the article’s November 5 date. It’s been relevant for many years, and will be relevant for the foreseeable future. So I encourage you to go read the piece, and come back

as an even more determined and irate minority!

The Convergence of Interests: MIC & Members of Congress

Our friend and regular Boiling Frogs Post commenter Metem kindly sent this over a year old but way under-reported and highly important report my way, assuming I’d seen it already. Well, I had not, and although not surprised by its content, I am grateful to have it and share it with you here.

This article, Congress Invested in Defense Contracts, made it to the Project Censored top 25 censored stories for 2009-2010. It is based on a report issued by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which made public the fact that more than 151 members of Congress have up to $195 million invested in major defense contractors that are earning profits from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

When General David Petraeus, the top US military officer in Iraq, went to Capitol Hill to brief Congress in April of 2008, he was addressing lawmakers who had a lot more than just a political stake in the Iraq occupation. Along with their colleagues in the House and Senate, the politicians who got a status report from the general and the US ambassador to Iraq had millions of dollars of their own money invested in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD).

Guess which lawmaker made it to the top of the list, became number one, with the most money invested in companies with DoD contracts? Someone I am not familiar with: Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), with $49,140,000.

But the number two man is familiar to all. I bet many of you are guessing McCain or Lieberman. Well, that’s not the case. Number two happens to be Senator John Kerry (D-Mass), with up to $38,209,020. Just in case the comas cause this to be difficult to make out, that is more than 38 million dollars, my friends.

Here are a few others who made it into the top 10: Rep. Hayes, with $37+ Million; Rep. Sensenbrenner Jr., with $7+ M; Rep. Harman, with $6 +M; Rep. Upton, with $8+M; and Sen. Rockefeller, with $2 million dollars.

And the implications:

Forty-seven members of Congress (or 9 percent of all members of the House and Senate) in 2006 were invested in companies that are primarily in the defense sector. The average share price of these corporations today is nearly twice what it was in 2004. Lawmakers’ investments in these contracting firms yielded them between $15.8 million and $62 million in income between 2004 and 2006, through dividends, capital gains, royalties and interest, the Center found.

Companies with congressional investors received more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006. The minimum value of Congress members’ personal investments in defense contracting firms increased 5 percent from 2004 to 2006, but because lawmakers are only required to report their assets in broad ranges, the value of these investments could have risen as much as 160 percent—or even dropped 51 percent.

The above data is only the personal gain minus ‘the lobby’ gain. There is more into this:

Lawmakers aren’t just benefiting from the defense sector personally, but also politically. In the first three months of 2009, the defense sector gave nearly $2 million to candidates, party committees and political action committees, with 57 percent of that going to Democrats. In the 2008 election cycle, the sector gave $23.5 million. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chairman, has collected more money from the sector than any other lawmaker since 1989 at $2.6 million. Murtha has gotten some heat—and a lot of attention—this year for his connections to now-defunct lobbying firm PMA Group, which the FBI is investigating for allegedly violating campaign finance laws. The firm’s clients were primarily defense companies that sought earmarks from Murtha’s subcommittee.

This is the sorry state of those entrusted with the oversight of our government and its practices. So who has the oversight of these overseers? Who gets to watch for these kinds of mammoth conflicts of interests, and who gets to hold the overseers who’ve been given the authority to exercise accountability accountable? Last time I checked, that was ‘we, the people.’ Now when will we, the people, start exercising these rights? When will we say ‘it is time to kick out, haul out, some a..es from the place called the United States Congress? Just asking…

Tags: Bogus Subpoena, Boiling Frogs Post, DOJ, EFF, FBI National Security Letters, indymedia.us, mainstream media, media, MIC, NSL, Police State, Senator Kerry, sibel edmonds.