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."

In an era of fake news, fake security threats By The Wayne Madsen Report

In an era of fake news, fake security threats

By The Wayne Madsen Report

Fake air travel security threats have joined the current fake news fad. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration, as well as their British counterparts, have announced a ban on laptop computers, tablets, cameras, Kindles and other e-readers, DVD players, and game consoles in carry-on baggage on the flights of certain airlines originating from or destined to a series of predominantly Muslim nations. Passengers flying from or the designated airports are required to pack laptops and tablets in their check luggage. The decision has resulted in criticism from technical experts in the fields of communications, information technology, and improvised explosive devices or IEDs. Unlike the American ban, the British ban on carry-on items includes certain types of cell phones.

The British ban applies to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. ban applies to Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. While the British include Tunisia and Lebanon on their list, the U.S. does not. On the other hand, while the U.S. list includes Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE on its list, the British do not. U.S.-flag carriers are not affected by the ban, which is unusual since the threats are said to be with the particular airports of departure and destination. American, United, and Delta, which all fly to some of the airports subject to the ban, remain free of the device ban in passenger cabins. Some air travel industry experts believe the Trump administration has imposed the ban as a method of giving the U.S. carriers an advantage over Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar, which all receive subsidies from the governments of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar, respectively. Canada may initiate a similar ban in coming days.

The airports covered by the U.S. ban are Queen Alia International Airport in Amman; Cairo International Airport in Egypt; Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul; King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah and King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Kuwait International Airport; Mohammed V International Airport in Casablanca, Morocco; Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar; and Dubai International Airport and Abu Dhabi International Airport in the UAE. The British ban applies to Ataturk in Istanbul, Rafik Hariri International in Beirut, Lebanon; Queen Alia in Amman, Cairo International, Jeddah and Riyadh airports, and Tunis-Carthage International Airport in Tunis.

The ban does not apply to crew members and it exempts medical devices.

The ban was initiated as a result of some unspecified threats picked up by U.S. and British intelligence from the Middle East, particularly on alleged newer and stealthier explosive device capabilities developed by Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, the chief bomb-maker of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Some intelligence sources claim the ban arose from the detonation of a laptop computer bomb aboard a Somali-flag carrier, Daallo Airlines. The plane managed to land safely and the only casualty was the terrorist. However, that explosion occurred over a year ago, in February 2016.

What makes no sense about the ban is that it assumes that a dedicated trained terrorist could not take advantage of on board WiFi networks to link from a smart phone to a WiFi- enabled component in a laptop or tablet contained in checked bags sitting practically below him or her in an aircraft's luggage compartment. An anonymous senior security official with an international travel organization was reported in the March 21 Washington Post as saying, "Why should I feel safer if the laptop is stowed in the belly of the plane and the perpetrator can use his iPhone to set it off? . . . I’m not personally privy to what the TSA or DHS has, but I just don’t get it."

WMR surveyed the airlines affected by the laptop/tablet ban and discovered which of them offer in-flight WiFi connectivity. Of the 15 air carriers covered by the U.S. and U.K. ban, nine offer in-flight WiFi connectivity.

Airline	WiFi Service
Emirates	Yes
Turkish Airlines	Yes
Royal Jordanian	Yes
EgyptAir	Yes
Etihad Airways	Yes
Qatar Airways	Yes
Royal Air Maroc	No
Kuwait Airways	Yes
Saudi Arabian Airlines	Yes
British Airways	Yes
EasyJet	No
Jet2	No
Monarch Airlines	No
Thomas Cook	No
Thomson	No

Presidential candidate insisted NSA and CIA spied on him By The Wayne Madsen Report

Presidential candidate insisted NSA and CIA spied on him

By The Wayne Madsen Report
A billionaire political outsider who ran for the presidency of the United States claimed that his investigation of deep ties of his opponents to international drug cartels resulted in his surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Responding to the charge by the presidential candidate, the man who had been director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency said, "I am prepared to say that there is not a word of truth in this."

The CIA and its friends in the media labeled the presidential hopeful a conspiracy hound and ridiculed his notion that the U.S. political system was actually run by various hidden dark forces. If one thinks this is a description of the 2016 campaign and the presidential candidate making the charges about the CIA is Donald Trump, they would be wrong.

It was independent businessman H. Ross Perot in 1992 who incurred the wrath of former NSA director and CIA second-in-command Admiral Bobby Ray Inman and stood accused of dabbling in far-out conspiracies.

Perot believed that his efforts to uncover the existence of U.S. prisoners-of-war and missing-in-action servicemen in Laos were stymied by the former CIA director George H. W. Bush, who just so happened to be running for re-election in 1992. Perot claimed that after the Indochina War ended in 1975, Bush, then the CIA director, transferred all responsibility for U.S. POWs/MIAs from the CIA to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Perot believed that Bush wanted the CIA's fingerprints off the POW/MIA issue because it had been involved in the heroin trafficking business in Laos. Perot believed that the reports of possibly over a hundred U.S. MIAs being seen in Laos were ignored because Langley and Bush wanted the secrets possessed by the CIA about the missing U.S. servicemen to remain buried, along with the CIA's secret war in Laos that involved the Royal Laotian Army, Hmong tribesmen, and heroin smuggling.

Perot cited the activities of two CIA fronts, Nugan Hand Bank in Australia and a Hawaii-based company, Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong (BBRDW), in laundering the proceeds of the CIA's Southeast Asian drug-running operations. Moreover, Perot said the CIA proprietary airline, Air America, was involved in transporting heroin out of Southeast Asia. The CIA issued denials all-around about the bank, the Hawaii company, and Air America. Perot claimed that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell and his close friend, Richard Armitage, whose nomination for Secretary of the Army in 1989 was scuttled as a result of pressure from Perot, were involved with BBRDW and the POW/MIA cover-up.


How soon we forget: U.S. Intelligence was accused of spying on Perot in 1992.

Senators John McCain and John Kerry led the charge to keep the POW/MIA-Laos issue secret. Both would later receive the presidential nominations of their respective parties. Perot alleged that a CIA agent was hired by the Bush campaign to hack into Perot's computerized stock trading program, preventing the third party candidate from gaining access to funds for campaign. The incident is similar to the Jeb Bush campaign hiring former British MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to develop a "dirty dossier" on  Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. There is a distinct possibility that the NSA covertly asked its signals intelligence partners in Britain, Australia, and Canada, on George H. W. Bush's orders, to conduct electronic surveillance of Perot in 1992.

There was evidence that the CIA and NSA spied on a presidential candidate -- in 1992 -- with the target being H. Ross Perot.

A "CIA within the CIA" battles against Trump By Wayne Madsen Report

 A "CIA within the CIA" battles against Trump  By Wayne Madsen Report
Even before he was inaugurated on January 20, President Trump faced a virtual "CIA within the CIA" that is bound and determined to derail his intelligence and foreign policy agendas. Past presidents have faced opposition from the Central Intelligence Agency -- John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter are prime examples -- but the opposition was sub rosa and not out in the open as it is today.

A number of former CIA officers have taken to CNN and MS-NBC to voice their opinions that Trump is a threat to U.S. national security. In addition to venting their own spleens about Trump, they are publicly airing the views of hundreds of their former colleagues currently serving within the CIA. 

The conventional punditry in Washington is stressing, without evidence, that Trump's presidential campaign was helped by "Russian intelligence officials." A dodgy British memorandum, created by a former MI-6 spook named Christopher Steele, and embellished by the Jeb Bush campaign, which hired him to dig up dirt on Trump, is being used as "proof" of Russian interfered in the U.S. election. However, what is being overlooked is that "Russian intelligence" may be a substitute for "Russian-Israeli mafia." The Russian-Israeli oligarchs, many of whom are exiled in Britain, Switzerland, and Israel, have no love for Trump and his previous pro-Russian views. 

It recently emerged that Ukrainian parliament member Andrey Artemenko met in January with Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to deliver a proposal that would have "leased" Crimea to Russia for 100 years in exchange for a pullout of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. The "peace plan" appears to have been a red herring since there is no documented evidence of regular Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Artemenko is a shady figure who has been involved with the scandal-plagued Federation of International Football Association (FIFA) and who is a member of the party of the corrupt former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. 

It was Tymoshenko's criminal conviction and imprisonment by the government of president Viktor Yanukovych that helped propel the "Euromaidan" revolution and coup that drove Yanukovych into exile in Russia. Artemenko is also close to the former Ukrainian boxer Vitali Klitschko, the current mayor of Kiev, who recently attended the Munich Security Conference along with Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and such anti-Russian U.S. delegates as Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, neocon Robert Kagan, and Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland, the chief architect of the Euromaidan revolution. At Munich, where the CIA was working overtime to cultivate new relationships and reinforce older ones, the plotters of neo-Cold War intrigue in Ukraine were all present. The CIA would have known about Klitschko's ties to Artemenko and Artemenko's meeting on the Ukraine peace deal with Trump's lawyer Cohen.

Trump, who has surrounded himself with shady characters like Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Hungarian-American fascist Sebastian Gorka, may not be a "puppet" of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as alleged by detractors. Instead, Trump appears to be an unwitting stooge of the Russian-Israeli mafia that wants a green light to depose Putin and replace him with one of their own, someone, for example, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky. 

Khodorkovsky, now in exile, is leading the Russian-Israeli oligarchs in their attempt to undermine Putin. International hedge fund tycoon George Soros was also in Munich, rubbing shoulders with Klitschko and his own puppet, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The intrigue on display in Munich may be complicated, but the end result may be a two-for-one deal for the Russian-Israeli gangsters: the overthrow of Putin and the impeachment of Trump. The result would be a Russian president who would complete the privatization of Russian industry and infrastructure to benefit the exiled mafia oligarchs and a committed "Christian Zionist," Pence, in the Oval Office.

 
Klitschko [left], a colleague of Artemenko, and Ukrainian President Poroshenko [right] in Munich rubbing shoulders with anti-Trump and anti-Russian U.S. politicians, as well as VP Pence and SecDef Mattis. Is the Ukrainian "peace deal" a red herring by Kiev and the Russian-Israeli oligarchs, working with a "CIA within the CIA" to sink Trump? 

As delegates were packing up to leave Munich, there was another interesting development in nearby Vienna. An Austrian appeals court approved the extradition to the United States of Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash to the where he faces corruption charges. After the Euromaidan coup in 2014, Firtash was arrested by Austrian police on an FBI warrant. Firtash was a close political ally of Yanukovych. Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort was a business partner of Firtash. In 2008, Manafort and Firtash were part of a business team that sought to buy Manhattan's Drake Hotel and demolish it to make way for a new skyscraper called the Bulgari Tower, a deal that may have involved the Trump Organization. The Drake deal involved another Trump adviser, Richard Gates. While she was prime minister, Tymoshenko sued Firtash over the Drake deal. Now, an ally of Tymoshenko, Artemenko, has his fingerprints on a Ukrainian peace plan shopped to Trump's lawyer Cohen. 



Also in Munich with Pence, Mattis, Kagan, and Nuland was Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, who gave the Trump Foundation $150,000 for a Trump video speech to Pinchuk's Yalta European Strategy (YES) annual meeting in Ukraine in 2015. Pinchuk, a friend of John McCain, is close to both Poroshenko and Soros and a vocal opponent of Putin.

No one is clean in these machinations but they could very well serve as a basis to impeach Trump under the emolument clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes any personal profit by the president based on foreign links an impeachable offense.

There are forces within the CIA -- the "CIA within the CIA" -- that want a return to the days of Boris Yeltsin, when everything and everyone in Russia was for sale and Russia gladly followed the diktats from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Two things stand in their way, Putin and the Putin-admiring Trump, the latter not seeming to want to "get with the program" of returning to the status quo ante in U.S.-Russian relations.

In the 1975 cinematic thriller "Three Days of the Condor," Robert Redford, who plays Joe Turner and whose CIA codename is "Condor," works at a CIA front operation in Manhattan’s Upper East Side called the "American Literary Historical Society – ALHS." Condor returns from running a lunch errand to find that all his colleagues have been shot to death. The plot centers around a "CIA within the CIA." The producers of the film, which was based on a 1974 novel by James Grady titled "Six Days of the Condor," must have had an inkling about a "CIA within the CIA." 

In "Three Days of the Condor," a CIA front in Manhattan is wiped out by a "CIA Within the CIA." There is more fact than fiction in the 1975 cinematic thriller.

In 1975, the concept of a "CIA within the CIA" prompted Emily Sheketoff, a House Select Committee on Intelligence staffer who was investigating the CIA, to inquire about a "CIA within the CIA," from Robert Gambino, the chief of security for the CIA. It was Gambino who briefed Jeb Bush on his non-official cover assignment in Venezuela, prior to the ex-CIA director's son's departure in 1977 for Caracas to head up the Texas Commerce Bank's operations in the country. Gambino scoffed at the notion of a "CIA within the CIA" in an October 30, 1975 memo. Based on Gambino's ties with ex-director Bush while Jimmy Carter's director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, was in charge of the CIA, Gambino serves as "exhibit number one" when it comes to the "CIA within the CIA." In fact, Sheketoff flat out stated to Gambino that she believed the CIA's Office of Security was then the major component of the hidden CIA.
An intelligence game is now being played out by Langley and it involves unsavory mafiosi in Ukraine, London, and Langley, Virginia. In essence, a "CIA within the CIA" is attempting to stage a "soft coup" in the United States and they have a number of willing accomplices in the media and within Mr. Trump's own inner circle.

The Trump Club: "you ain't in it." By The Wayne Madsen Report

The Trump Club: "you ain't in it."
By The Wayne Madsen Report
If Donald Trump’s most avid anti-globalist supporters believe that their president is "draining the swamp" of their bitterest of foes, they might be surprised that recently, Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis were in the company at the annual Munich Security Conference of Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Trilateral Commission deputy chairman Michael Fuchs, and global political troublemaker George Soros.

As the late comedian and American philosopher George Carlin once said, "It's a big club and you ain't in it."

And, speaking of clubs, Trump is tapping members of his exclusive Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the initiation fee is $200,000, to serve as American ambassadors abroad. These include Robin Bernstein to the Dominican Republic, Patrick Park to Austria, and Brian Burns to Ireland. All were big donors to the Trump presidential campaign.



Trump has "drained the swamp" by giving an award to one of the chief architects of the financing and arming of the Islamic State. Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo's second visit abroad was to Saudi Arabia, where he presented the CIA's George Tenet medal to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. It has been Nayef who has backed radical Islamist groups in the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars. Prior to stopping in Riyadh, Pompeo visited Turkey, where he lauded the government of that growing Islamist dictatorship and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the Erdogan fmaily that personally benefited from the Islamic State's sale of Iraqi and Syrian oil on the international spot market. Turkish nepotism and illegal international deals must have come as music to the ears of Trump who fancies such notions for himself and his family.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, told the crowd of old school conservatives and extreme alt-right faithful that the Trump White House is striving for the "deconstruction of the administrative state." That must have come as welcome news to the globalist bankers who have ordered similar "administrative state" deconstruction as part of draconian austerity measures in Greece, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, and other countries.

Bannon's "deconstruction" is already being felt in Trump's federal worker hiring freeze, which has closed day care centers at U.S. military bases abroad and delayed medical treatment at veteran's hospitals. That is only the tip of the iceberg, as Bannon and his fellow ex-Goldman Sachs colleagues, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, senior White House adviser Anthony Scaramucci, White House economic counselor Dina Habib Powell, National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn, and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman-nominee Jay Clayton draw their knives on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' care, and other social safety net programs.

Trump's team consisting of ex-Goldman Sachs executives and other Wall Street denizens will enjoy the next four years of being in their comfortable elements: Bilderberg, Davos, Bohemian Grove, Cernobbio, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference, and other "big club" venues. And, as Carlin said about the big club, "you ain't in it."

Russian prankster, posing as Ukraine PM, warns McCain of Russian release of POW brainwashing evidence - By The Wayne Madsen Report

Russian prankster, posing as Ukraine PM, warns McCain of Russian release of POW brainwashing evidence - By The Wayne Madsen Report
Russian "phony phone call" prankster, Vladimir Kuznetsov, who does by the name "Vovan," convinced Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain (R-AZ) that he was Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. The recording of the prank call is found below.



McCain told the fake Groysman that he favored sending lethal weapons to Ukraine to fight against Vladimir Putin in eastern Ukraine. McCain also said he sent a letter to President Trump urging increased sanctions against Russia.

The most interesting aspect of the call is McCain's interest in the pranksters warning that Putin ordered the Russian secret service to reveal details of McCain's being "recruited" as a "collaborator" by Russian intelligence during his time as a prisoner-of-war of the North Vietnamese. McCain appears to be genuinely concerned about such a revelation and asks to prankster to keep him informed of further details. McCain asks the prankster to provide further information on the POW story to him through the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington.

At no time during the conversation, does McCain appear to question the veracity of the caller.



If the long-suppressed story about McCain's special treatment by Soviet intelligence is not true, McCain appears to be awfully interested in a "fake" story. The story about McCain first appeared in the Moscow Post on September 18, 2008. The English version of the story was reportedly taken down after pressure was exerted by American "authorities."

The following is a paid translation of the McCain article from Russian to English and is an exclusive to WMR:

So, as it turned out, McCain has worked for many years in the Soviet secret services, recruited during the Vietnamese captivity (in 1967). The KGB's Senator John McCain had the code name Jack Mouse.

"To him it was a special relationship" - Duet [Hanoi Hilton commandant] says, "the power he had more than other Americans."

"Russian advisers spent many days in conversations with him. What they agreed to do, I do not know. However, once he was specially summoned to my office, where he signed some papers. Soon McCain transferred to a hospital, where Soviet doctors worked. Since then, I have not seen him. "

After that, according to the official biography, this was followed five years later by the Vietnamese prisoner transfer, after which the future congressman was released, in 1973, the result of the Paris agreement.

It is believed that all those years McCain spent in Vietnam. However, as we find out from the The Moscow Post journalists that this story is not quite true.

A former KGB agent, Sergei Nikolaev (name for this article has been specially modified), now lives in a European country, where he moved after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the early '70s Nikolaev, he worked for intelligence at Voronezh.

There took place agent training of those not already identified by the West.

Nikolaev remember an American who came to him in winter 1968. He learned that it was McCain, when later often appeared on the TV screen.

"He's passed special training for operations in the United States during a possible war," says Nikolaev.

"He was taught the basics of subversion, disabling communication systems, paralyzing aerodrome operations. McCain had aliases. Therefore, according to the files we called him Jack Mouse. Our wags called him Mickey Mouse. "

Labor pick Acosta part of Epstein-Trump underage sex crime cover-up By The Wayne Madsen Report

Labor pick Acosta part of Epstein-Trump underage sex crime cover-up
By The Wayne Madsen Report
Alexander Acosta, President Trump's pick to replace failed nominee Andrew Puzder as Labor Secretary, has his own political baggage stemming from his actions as U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida in the sweetheart plea deal involving billionaire pederast Jeffrey Epstein. Acosta agreed to a rather unprecedented non-prosecution agreement (NPA) struck with Epstein and his attorneys on October 30, 2007 that saw the federal government waive any future prosecution of Epstein or any of his associates named or unnamed by underage female sexual abuse victims of Epstein. Epstein pleaded guilty to one state of Florida charge of soliciting prostitution from a 14-year old girl.
Although Acosta later mildly criticized the plea deal in an open letter he write in 2011, he did not respond to WMR's request in January 2015 for an interview on the civil case in which four of Epstein's victims sued the U.S. government, claiming that the NPA violated their rights under the Crime Victims' Rights Act. The victims, who are now adults, claimed that the federal government's NPA with Epstein violated the 2004 CVRA. Acosta was clearly aiming to protect Epstein's high-powered friends, including the person who just nominated him as Labor Secretary. Acosta's letter states: "Our judgment in this [Epstein] case, based on the evidence known at the time, was that it was better to have a billionaire serve time in jail, register as a sex offender, and pay his victims restitution than risk a trial with a reduced likelihood of success." Epstein's 13-month "jail time" included the stipulation that he only had to stay in prison in the evening and was free to leave during the day. The Palm Beach Police Department was outraged by Epstein's plea deal.

The NPA was signed on behalf of Acosta by A. Marie Villafana, the then-Assistant U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida who later became the U.S. Attorney under Attorney General Eric Holder. The plea deal with Epstein was concluded after the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami and the FBI investigated Epstein separately from the investigation conducted by the Palm Beach County Police Department and the Florida State Attorney's Office.  The deal cut between Acosta and Villafana and the state of Florida, which was then under the governorship of Republican Governor Charlie Crist and Republican Attorney-General Bill McCollum stated that the federal government would defer to Florida on the prosecution of Epstein. Acosta went on to become the dean of the law school of Florida International University in Miami.
Flight manifests of Epstein's Gulfstream jet and Boeing 727 indicate that Epstein's passengers included a mix of underage sex traffic victims and some of the world's most powerful politicians and businessmen. These include Bill Clinton, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Chicago Pritzker family chieftain and Hyatt Hotels executive chairman Thomas Pritzker (the first cousin of President Obama's Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker), and failed Palm Beach mayoral candidate Gerry Goldsmith. Underage passengers included on the manifest include Virginia Roberts and Cindy Lopez and others listed by their first names: Colleen, Tatianna, Margarita, Carolina, Lisa, Margaret, Dana, Julie, and Jessica. Epstein's two major "procurers" of underage girls are also frequent flyers on Epstein's "Pederast Airlines" -- Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late publishing tycoon and Mossad asset Robert Maxwell, and Sarah Kellen (now Sarah Kensington), the girlfriend of NASCAR driver Brian Vickers. Up to 40 women were identified as being the victims of sexual abuse by Epstein. Court records indicate the number may be higher with one reference to a Jane Doe 103.

In a later lawsuit filed on September 26, 2016 by another Jane Doe, identified as Katie Johnson, it is alleged that there were three additional underage victims of Epstein -- as well as Donald Trump -- in 1994. They are Jane Doe (Johnson), Joan Doe, and Maria, the latter a 12-year old girl who Jane, Joan, and a third witness, Tiffany Doe, allege may have been "disappeared" by Trump after he sexually assaulted and raped her at the Wexner Mansion in Manhattan.
Epstein pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked by FBI agents, "Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?” Epstein also took the Fifth when the FBI asked him: "Have you ever socialized with Bill Clinton in the presence of females under the age of 18?” Fourteen private phone numbers for Trump and members of his family, including his media-shy brother Robert Trump, Robert's wife Blaine Trump, Donald Trump ex-wife Ivana Trump, and Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump, are found in Epstein's address book.

 
Trump and his family's names and numbers found in pederast Jeffrey Epstein's "black book."
The Senate Labor Committee has an opportunity to ask Acosta about the Epstein plea deal during his confirmation hearing. However, do not expect committee chairman Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) to proceed down such a road of inquiry. Alexander's chief of staff, Ryan Loskarn, was arrested at his Washington, DC home in December 13 and found with an entire computer hard disk full of child pornographic videos and photos. Loskarn, who was remanded to his Maryland parents' custody while awaiting arraignment in federal court in Washington, was found hanging in his parents' basement in January 2014. The cause of death was determined, without a full autopsy, to have been suicide.

Neo-Nazis creating power base in Alexandria By The Wayne Madsen Report

Neo-Nazis creating power base in Alexandria

By The Wayne Madsen Report

Controversial white supremacist and neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer is establishing a major center for his National Policy Institute in Old Town Alexandria, just a free trolley ride and a few subway stops away from the U.S. Congress, White House, and Supreme Court.
Spencer moved his operation, which includes a publishing house and a periodical, from Whitefish, Montana to Alexandria after the election of Donald Trump. In mid-November 2016, Spencer and 300 of his neo-Nazi followers met at a raucous meeting in the Ronald Reagan Building, just a few blocks from the White House, where the successor to American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell led the crowd to shouts of "Heil Trump!"
Spencer and his Nazis have been met with hostility from Alexandria's town folk, who have engaged in protests on the second and fourth Sundays of every month outside of his rented $3000 a month two-floor residence and office at 1001 King Street at the corner of Patrick Street. Spencer is located above a shop that makes its own chocolates but the presence of the Nazis upstairs has not deterred customers of the chocolatier from patronizing one of their favorite stores. In fact, on Valentine's Day, the biggest sales day for chocolate sales, BluPrint Chocolatiers completely sold out of their home made products. Customers who dropped by only to be disappointed that the store closed earlier expressed dismay over the presence of Spencer and his operation on the second and third floors of the building.

   
It's pretty clear why Spencer's neo-Nazis chose the building [left] for their headquarters. Unlike the standard red brick colonial buildings in Old Town, their structure is vaguely reminiscent of the apartment building in Linz, Austria [right], where Adolf Hitler was born. There are plans to raze the Linz building.
On Valentine's Day evening, about three dozen anti-Nazi protesters, led by those who support designating Alexandria a "sanctuary city" gathered in front of the Alexandria City Hall where they planned to fill the city council meeting taking place. Many of the protesters were unaware of Spencer's close links to Trump's senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a fellow member of the Duke University Conservative Union in 2006 and 2007. Although Miller is Jewish, he shares many of Spencer's beliefs, especially his anti-immigrant fervor. Miller is the chief architect of Trump's anti-Muslim immigration ban, now suspended by several federal court decisions.

  

SPECIAL REPORT. Trump chief adviser (Stephen Bannon) was aide to two CNOs during the largest pedophile crime in U.S. naval history By the Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Trump chief adviser was aide to two CNOs during the largest pedophile crime in U.S. naval history By the Wayne Madsen Report
President Trump's powerful political adviser Stephen Bannon served as an aide to two Chiefs of Naval Operations, Admirals Thomas Hayward and James Watkins, during one of the largest pedophile crimes that ever took place within naval ranks in the then-207 years of the history of the U.S. Navy. While serving as a Lieutenant (junior grade) aboard the Spruance class destroyer USS Paul F. Foster in the Pacific fleet, Bannon was selected to serve on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, a highly-coveted billet seen as a stepping stone for rapid promotion up the ranks. A February 1, 2017, article in Navy Times referred to Bannon's unusual assignment while still a Lieutenant JG: "Even in the much larger Navy of the 1980s, billets on the CNO’s staff were not easy to come by." So why was Bannon selected for such a position? His Navy awards were what anyone at his rank would have received after sea duty: a Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, a Navy “E” Ribbon, and a Navy Expeditionary Medal. 

Bannon reported to the CNO's staff January 12, 1981, almost a week prior to Ronald Reagan's inauguration. The previous November, Bannon attended the victory party for Reagan at the Century Plaza hotel. Apparently, Bannon developed an intense dislike to President Jimmy Carter during his time aboard the Foster in the Persian Gulf, a time frame that included the botched 1980 operation to rescue U.S. hostages at the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran. Bannon's time aboard the Foster also included the Reagan campaign's act of treason in negotiating an "arms-for-no-hostages" agreement with Tehran that ensured the hostages would not be released until after Reagan's election. The hostages were released simultaneous to Reagan's swearing in on January 20, 1981. 

After working for Admirals Hayward and Watkins, Bannon left the Navy with the rank of Lieutenant on October 30, 1983. He obtained a master's degree in international relations at Georgetown University while working for the CNO. Normally, a master's degree would have been a ticket for Bannon to be promoted to Lieutenant Commander, yet he left the Navy after only seven years. Bannon went to Harvard where he earned an masters of business administration (MBA). After acquiring his MBA, Bannon clinched a job with Goldman Sachs.

While Bannon was a staffer for the CNO in 1982, the FBI identified a key kingpin in child pornography production and distribution in Chicago. The porn distributor admitted, under questioning by FBI agents, that his network of pedophiles included a U.S. naval officer and other influential government employees. It was later discovered that the naval officer was the Commanding Officer of the U.S. Naval Facility in Coos Head, Oregon.

The Naval Investigative Service (NIS) was called in and the Operations Officer at the Oregon naval installation was requested by the FBI and NIS to participate as the lead temporary FBI special agent in a carefully-prepared sting of the base commander to obtain evidence and the identities of co-conspirators.

On September 14, 1982, UPI filed the following report from Coos Bay, Oregon:

"The commander of the Coos Head Naval Facility was relieved of duty and jailed on charges he promoted an obscene sexual performance by a child.

Lt. Cmdr. Larry William Frawley, 38, was arrested Saturday and accused of promoting an obscene sexual performance by a child and using a child in an obscene sexual performance. Both are felony charges.

Police Sgt. Jack Bushmaker said Frawley was lodged in the Coos County Corrections Facility on $10,000 bail.

Frawley's alleged role will not be made known until the investigation is completed, Lt. Cmdr. John Marchi, public affairs officer for the naval base in Seattle, said. He said details will not be at present since the investigation is pending, he said.

Lt. Cmdr. Marney Finch, executive officer at the Coos Head station, is now the interim commanding officer, Marchi said.

Frawley had been at the station since 1980.

Officials declined to say how many children were involved in the case or whether additional arrests were expected."

During the FBI/NIS sting operation, Frawley admitted that his network of pedophiles included senior naval officers, clerics, lawyers, politicians, and judges. Later, the two NIS agents revealed that the Coos Bay scandal "went to the very top" of the Reagan administration. A number of forced retirements of senior naval personnel, including one rear admiral, were announced after Frawley's arrest. There was also a significant foreign intelligence aspect to the case that involved the Soviet Union.



Hayward was the CNO at the time the Chicago kingpin identified the Coos Head base commander as part of his ring, with Bannon serving as his aide. Watkins succeeded Hayward on June 30, 1982. It was during Watkins's watch and with Bannon remaining as his aide that the Navy pedophile scandal broke open with a number of arrests and forced retirements following. Attempts to have further details about the Navy ring publicized by Navy Times and the Eugene (OR) Register-Guard were met with threats against the newspapers editors and publishers by top Navy and Defense Department officials, including members of the CNO's staff. Reporters for the local NBC affiliate, KCBY-TV, were told to stay away from Navy property while reporting on the pedophile story. Armed guards were posted at the entrance to the Navy housing area to deter inquisitive reporters. A Bethesda Naval Hospital team of psychiatrists, child counselors, and other medical personnel who were on stand-by to be flown to Oregon to deal with children traumatized by the Navy pedophile ring were ordered to "stand down." All records bearing the NIS criminal investigation case number, 08-18-82N12PD 718XNA, were purged from Navy computer systems on the orders of the CNO and Secretary of the Navy.

Some important questions remain about Bannon's unusual post-sea duty time in the Navy: was Bannon rewarded with a Georgetown M.A., Harvard Business School MBA, and Goldman Sachs for "services rendered" in helping to suppress from media attention the worst pedophile scandal in the history of the U.S. Navy? Did Bannon use his influence with Breitbart and other alt.right media operations to push the frivolous  "Pizzagate" story, which attempted to tarnish Hillary Clinton's senior campaign staff and donors in order to keep the public's attention away from an actual major pedophile scandal?

U.S. visa ban resulted in worst international airline disruption since 9/11 - by Wayne Madsen report

 U.S. visa ban resulted in worst international airline disruption since 9/11

 by Wayne Madsen Report
President Donald Trump's ill-planned and very poorly enacted travel ban on U.S. visa holders from seven predominantly Muslim nations resulted in the worst disruption of air traffic around the world since the terror attack of 9/11. In defense of his actions, Trump said he banned the visa holders to protect the American people from terrorism. Yet, his actions resulted in confusion in the airline industry only surpassed by the act of terrorism that disrupted air travel for weeks in 2001. All domestic U.S. and international flights to the U.S. were grounded in the wake of the 9/11 attack. 

When confronted with the bedlam caused by his executive order banning the designated visa holders, Trump lied and claimed all the worldwide disruptions were caused by a Delta airlines computer glitch and protests against the ban held at domestic U.S. airports.

Trump's travel ban originally extended to U.S. permanent residents, or "green card" holders, from the seven nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Syria. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly who was not adequately briefed on the executive order before it was issued on January 27, reversed the ban on green card holders two days later. The Washington Post reported that Trump political adviser Steve Bannon traveled to Kelly's office and ordered him to reverse his waiver on green card holders. Kelly refused and told Bannon that he worked for the president, not for Bannon. The tensions between the White House and cabinet-level departments have not been seen in Washington since the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard Nixon from office.

After several U.S. visa holders and permanent residents were detained at U.S. airports, with many being returned to their U.S. gateway airports of origin, a series of orders from federal judges in Boston, New York, Virginia, Seattle, and San Francisco suspended Trump's executive order in whole or in part. As of February 5, Trump's order suspending for 90-days the visas from nationals of the seven designated nations and any refugees is suspended. The temporary restraining order against Trump's order was issued by Judge James Robart in Seattle. Robart, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, was denounced in a Trump tweet as a "so-called judge." Such public presidential language about members of the federal judiciary is unprecedented. Later, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Robart's order, thus maintaining the suspension of Trump's travel ban until an appeal by the Trump Justice Department. Earlier, acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a career Justice Department lawyer, was fired by Trump for refusing to defend the executive order in federal courts. The Seattle suit against the executive order was brought by the Attorneys-General of Washington state and Minnesota. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson stated that his lawsuit was prompted by families affected by the order, as well as the Washington-based firms Amazon and Expedia that were adversely impacted by Trump's actions. 

The travel ban also extended to U.S. borders and ports-of-entry. Canadians and others possessing dual citizenship with the the seven designated countries were refused entry at border crossings in Washington state, Michigan, and other states.

Trump's travel ban resulted in chaos at a number of airports that are final gateways to travel to the United States. The revocation of 100,000 U.S. visas resulted in delayed flights from Middle East airports that normally see huge traffic from Iran and Iraq. These include Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha. A number of dual nationals who were both citizens of the seven designated countries and other nations, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Sweden, were also affected by the ban until Secretary Kelly was able to waive the order's application to green card holders and dual nationals. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said the visa order resulted in massive confusion among the 265 airlines that are its members.

Dubai-based Emirates airline said it was forced to change its pilot and flight attendant rosters to comply with the suddenly-announced U.S. visa ban. This resulted in delayed daily flights to 11 U.S. cities. Other large airlines were forced, without prior notice, to check on their pilots' and flight attendants' passport and visa status. The same dilemma was faced by cruise line operators and merchant lines serving U.S. ports of call. Their crews hail from several countries and include a number of green card holders and dual nationals.

Absurdly, the ban resulted in former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magnus Bondevik, traveling on a Norwegian diplomatic passport that clearly identified him as "former prime minister," was detained and questioned upon arrival at Dulles International Airport. A 2014 Iranian visa in Bondevik's passport triggered the reaction of over-zealous federal agents. Bondevik, a Lutheran minister, was traveling to the United States to attend the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, where Trump bizarrely asked for prayers for former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's poor television ratings on "The Apprentice." Trump appeared encouraged by the laughter from the audience, composed of Washington politicians, diplomats, and jurists, as well as by foreign ambassadors and leaders. However, some of those in attendance said the audience was not laughing with Trump but at him.

The situation at London Heathrow International Airport was hectic, with scores of U.S.-bound passengers, including entire families, refused boarding on flights. Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, and EgyptAir flights were among those affected by delays out of Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports. There were similar hectic scenes as passengers were refused boarding at airports in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Istanbul. Feeder airports, such as Muscat International in Oman, were forced to refuse boarding to expatriate workers in the sultanate who held U.S. green cards, some of whom were connecting to U.S.-bound flights in Istanbul.

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said he may kick out U.S. Customs and Border Protection "pre-clearance" operations from Ireland's Shannon International Airport in response to the U.S. travel ban and its adverse impact on both Shannon and Dublin airports.

Passengers only transiting U.S. airports en route to other destinations were also denied entry to the U.S. airports. Nationals of the seven affected countries were denied boarding at airports ranging from San José, Costa Rica and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic to Nassau and Freeport in the Bahamas because they had to transit U.S. international airports to board their connecting flights to Europe and onward. There was some pressure from Bahamian politicians for the government to expel U.S. Customs and Border Protection pre-clearance facilities from Nassau and Freeport. 



For passengers who were already on planes heading to the United States, there was chaos at U.S. airports where scores of passengers with valid U.S. visas, green cards, and refugee immigration papers were detained for several hours. Arriving passengers were detained for several hours at New York's JFK, Detroit, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington Dulles, San Francisco, and Dallas.

Trump White House officials have also lied when they claim the visa ban is not a "Muslim ban," even though that is what Trump called his proposal during the campaign. The visa ban is not merely limited to the seven designated states but also to other nations, as two athletes invited to a snowshoe competition in Saranac Lake, New York discovered when they applied for a visa at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi. Their visas were refused because the athletes are Muslims from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The U.S. embassy denied the two visas because they are Muslims. However, India is not one of the designated nations under the visa ban. Nor is Australia "officially" affected by the ban, yet one Australian-Iranian national holding an Australian passport was denied a U.S. visa under Trump's ban. U.S. embassy officials in Copenhagen said Trump's ban applies to the 57,424 Danish nationals having dual citizenship with the seven designated Muslim nations. Israeli immigration lawyers warned that Israeli Jews born in any of the seven countries, particularly those from Iran, Iraq, and Yemen, were likely subject to the U.S. travel ban.

Students with U.S. visas from the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia, have also been denied entry to the United States because Washington considers Somaliland to be a part of Somalia, which is covered by the visa ban. However, Somaliland is a partner of the U.S. in efforts to combat piracy in adjacent waters. 

Although the Trump ban has been temporarily suspended by judicial order, the White House has indicated that the ban could be extended to additional nations. White House chief of staff Reince Priebus hinted that Pakistan was likely to be added to the list. If such an order is carried out with the incompetence and lack of foresight of the first order, the world can expect another massive disruption in international travel.

Trump's "fascism forever" Supreme Court pick: shades of Rehnquist by The Wayne Madsen Report

Trump's "fascism forever" Supreme Court pick: shades of Rehnquist 

By The Wayne Madsen Report

President Trump further leads the United States into the depths of fascism in his selection of Neil Gorsuch as the replacement for the late Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the early 1980s, while attending the elite Jesuit-run male-only Georgetown Preparatory school in Washington, DC, Gorsuch founded the "Fascism Forever Club." Gorsuch served as president of the club until his graduation in 1985. At the time he was attending the prep school, Gorsuch's mother, Anne Gorsuch, served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan.


Gorsuch entry in the 1985 Georgetown Prep School yearbook

Anne Gorsuch was a harbinger for the anti-environmental Scott Pruitt, Trump's pick to head the EPA. As EPA administrator, Gorsuch attempted to quash the Clean Air Act while she smoked two packs of Marlboros a day. She died from cancer in 2004. Although the type of cancer was never disclosed, Gorsuch died at the Aurora Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, which has top ratings for lung cancer treatment.

The Fascism Forever Club was billed as an anti-faculty group opposed to what it considered were "left-wing" faculty members.


Gorsuch's 1988 Columbia graduation yearbook, in which Gorsuch extols Kissinger's infamous quote about the illegal and the unconstitutional

In his graduation yearbook at Columbia University in 1988, Gorsuch's photograph is shown alongside his favorite quote, one made by Henry Kissinger on August 29, 1967: "The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer." Kissinger made the statement while a professor at Harvard, where Neil Gorsuch would eventually attend law school.

Gorsuch's early flirtation with fascism complements other fascist tendencies by the Trump administration, including its disregard for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. On February 2, Trump attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, which is sponsored by the secretive Fellowship Foundation led for decades by the 88-year old Douglas Coe. The foundation traces its origins to a Seattle Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide, who advanced anti-labor fascist politics in the post-World War I years. Vereide's anti-union and pro-business prayer breakfast group, a cover for fascist policy-making, soon went nationwide.

In 1989, Coe, who Hillary Clinton once called her "spiritual mentor," said, "Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had... But they bound themselves together in an agreement . . . Jesus said, 'You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.' Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people."

On the day "Punxsutawney Phil," the Pennsylvania groundhog, predicted six more weeks of winter, Trump sat with hundreds of creepy right-wing followers of Coe in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel. They include senators, U.S. representatives, ambassadors, corporate executives, and leaders of foreign nations.

Trump's nomination of Gorsuch is reminiscent of President Nixon's nomination of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court in 1972. Two years earlier, Nixon ordered the White House guards to wear ornamental Prussian military-style hats, something befitting Nixon's "imperial presidency," which ultimately led to his resignation over the Watergate scandal. The Prussian hats did not last very long amid ridicule by the press and late-night TV comedians.

Nixon's nomination of Rehnquist shocked many when it was discovered that as a young lawyer in Arizona, Rehnquist held views similar to those of the far-right John Birch Society: Chief Justice Earl Warren and President Dwight Eisenhower were "pinko" leftists, while Associate Justices William O. Douglas and Hugo Black were outright "commies." In the late 1950s, Rehnquist was opposed to desegregation and lamented the fact that whites and "negroes" might have to "glower at one another" over integrated lunch counters. For all Rehnquist's far right-wing views, Nixon did not like Rehnquist when he first met him in the White House. The future Chief Justice was a bureaucratic flunky in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel at the time. Nixon asked his counsel John Dean about Rehnquist, "Is he Jewish? He looks it." Dean replied that he was of Scandinavian descent.

Rehnquist's far-right background did not prevent him from being confirmed by the Senate as both Associate Justice and, later, as Chief Justice. And, although Gorsuch admired fascism and Kissinger in his earlier years, that did not prevent the Senate from confirming him unanimously on a voice vote as a federal appeals court judge in July 2006. 

Trump's "Monday Night Massacre" -- welcome to the constitutional crisis By the Wayne Madsen Report

January 31-February 1, 2017 -- Trump's "Monday Night Massacre" -- welcome to the constitutional crisis By the Wayne Madsen Report
The firing of acting Attorney General Sally Yates by President Trump on the evening of January 30 reminded many seasoned Washington politicos of President Nixon's firing of three top Justice Department officials during the Watergate scandal in October 1973. Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. After Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus refused to fire Cox, Nixon fired them both. Only Solicitor General Robert Bork was willing to carry Nixon's hatchet.

Yates, a career Justice Department prosecutor, was fired by Trump after she refused to order U.S. attorneys around the country to defend Trump's ban on valid U.S. visa holders entering the United States. In a letter to Justice Department attorneys, Yates wrote; "[F]or as long as I am the Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order." In a tweet, Trump falsely accused Yates of being an "Obama AG" when, in fact, she is a nonpolitical career Justice Department civil service official filling in during an administration transition vacancy.

Yates was filling the job of acting Attorney General while Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions awaits Senate confirmation. Yates was placed in the job because she, as a Justice Department official confirmed for her job by the Senate, was one of the few in the department authorized to sign Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The firing of Yates came after a sixth federal judge, Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to immediately return to the United States an Iranian national who possessed a valid U.S. visa and was deported from Los Angeles to Dubai. The Trump White House continues to insist that Trump's executive order, which bans visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations, overrides judicial orders. That decision by Trump also has placed the country into a constitutional crisis. Trump's point man on the visa ban, lawyer Stephen Miller, believes that the Trump order is not a "ban on Muslims" when, in fact, they are the target of the order as revealed by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Trump insider. Miller, who is Jewish, is a defender of the hate politics espoused by neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer. Miller and Spencer were colleagues at Duke University where they were both members of the Duke Conservative Union.

There are reports that Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, who is also Jewish, is furious over the roles now being played by Miller and political counselor Steve Bannon in crafting extremist policies being signed out by Trump as executive orders. Miller, Bannon, and Trump all insisted that the visa ban order not be cleared with anyone outside or even inside the White House. The Department of Homeland Security and its secretary, John Kelly, was among those not briefed about Trump's order beforehand. In a continuation of the Monday Night Massacre, Trump fired acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Daniel Ragsdale and replaced him with Thomas Homan, a Trump sycophant and a former New York City police official under Giuliani. Even the White House Office of Legal Counsel and the Office of Management and Budget were not briefed on the executive order nor were they even asked if it was legal and within budget and regulatory constraints.

During Yates's Senate confirmation hearing to be deputy Attorney General, Senator Sessions, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, pressed her on saying "no" to the president if he asked her to carry out an unlawful or improper order. Of course, Sessions was then referring to President Obama, but Yates made it clear that the Attorney General had an obligation to uphold the law no matter what the president ordered.



Trump's Monday Night Massacre may have also resulted in three Justice Department U.S. Attorneys being passed over

Trump decided on Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, to succeed Yates. Boente said he would carry out Trump's visa and immigration ban order. However, Trump passed over three other U.S. Attorneys designated to succeed Yates in the event of a vacancy. In a transition order signed by President Obama, succession was to have been passed from Yates to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips, then U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Zachary Fardon, and lastly, Eileen Decker, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. It is not known whether the three attorneys were asked to replace Yates and carry out Trump's order and they turned the White House down or whether they were merely passed over in order to select Boente.


DOJ succession order does not include US Attorney Boente, chosen by Trump to succeed Yates as acting AG

January 31 is a significant date in light of Trump's increasingly-unconstitutional power grabs. January 31, 1933 was the day that the German Reichstag made Adolf Hitler the German chancellor.

A week in office, Trump brings on constitutional crisis By Wayne Madsen Report

 

January 30-31, 2017 -- A week in office, Trump brings on constitutional crisis

By Wayne Madsen Report
The much-anticipated constitutional crisis many feared would come about under President Trump's bombastic style of leadership took only one week into his administration to be realized. Trump's Executive Order banning visitors, including U.S. permanent resident "green card" holders and those with valid U.S. visas, was one of the most poorly planned and implemented White House regulation in recent memory.

At airports across the world and at immigration checkpoints at airports across the United States, permanent U.S. residents were held in detention and some were put on planes back to their points of travel origination. When five federal judges issued temporary stays on the implementation of Trump's executive order, the White House balked. For some reason, the Trump administration believes the judiciary is subservient to the executive branch. It took one federal judge, John Sirica, the chief judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and a Republican nominated by Dwight Eisenhower, to show President Richard Nixon that his "imperial presidency" stopped with the federal judiciary. Sirica, who was a close personal friend of boxing stat Jack Dempsey, went several rounds in court with the Nixon administration over the Watergate scandal. In the end, Sirica delivered a knock out punch to several of Nixon's closest advisers and, eventually, Nixon resigned in disgrace.

The difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon, a lawyer and a former member of the U.S. House and Senate, understood the brinkmanship in which he was engaging with the courts and the independent special prosecutor. Trump, a pampered real estate mogul who was handed his wealth from his Nazi- and Ku Klux Klan-supporting father, Fred Trump, has not the first idea of what kind of constitutional fire he is playing with by ignoring the orders of five federal judges.

Certain pro-Trump media outlets -- the "usual suspects" -- are claiming the five judges are all Democrats. That is one of Trump's "alternate facts." The first judge to issue a stay on Trump's visa ban executive order was Ann Donnelly, a former New York state prosecutor , who was nominated by Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. A native of Michigan and a graduate of Ohio State's Moritz College of Law, nothing suggests that Donnelly is a rank-and-file Democrat. In fact, the Republican Senate voted in 2015 to confirm Donnelly in a 95-2 vote.

When a number of New York City area politicians showed up at JFK International Airport with a copy of Judge Donnelly's order and demanded the release of detainees, clueless Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents feigned ignorance because their ultimate boss, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, had not been briefed beforehand about Trump's cockamamie and ill-prepared executive order.

The next judge to issue a temporary restraining order was Leonie Brinkema, a no-nonsense judge sitting on the bench of the national security "Rocket docket" of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. So named the "rocket docket" court because it often sides with the government in national security-related cases, it would normally be the last court where a national security matter would be ruled against. However, Brinkema, who sentenced the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui to life imprisonment in the Colorado "Supermax" prison, ruled that Trump's executive order was stayed and that removal of green card holders from Dulles International Airport was suspended for seven days.

Brinkema also ordered lawyers be given access to those being detained at Dulles, an order that was immediately ignored when lawyers and three U.S. House members, Virginia Representatives Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly, and Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, as well as New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, were denied access to the detained passengers at the airport by members of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) police, who are answerable not to the DHS or CPB but to the independent MWAA commission, members of which are appointed by the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of DC, with only three appointed by the president. The fact that glorified airport rent-a-cops disregarded a federal court order and those of three members of the House and one U.S. senator is a definite troubling bellwether of things to come.

The third judge to issue a stay on the White House order was Thomas Zilly of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle. Zilly, who ordered all deportations stopped by Trump, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. So much for the brain dead meme by Trump supporters that the order was nullified by "Democrat judges," a major "alternate fact" in Zilly's case.

The fourth and fifth judges who temporarily stayed Trump's deportation order were U.S. magistrate judge Judith Dein and District Court judge Allison Burroughs, both of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston. Dein was nominated by Bill Clinton and Burroughs by Obama. Both were confirmed by Republican-controlled Senates, Dein in 2000 and Burroughs in 2014.

There are comments on a number of dubious pro-Trump websites that are calling for "action" against the five judges. This is where certain Internet keyboard jocks should be very careful. Violence against federal judges by purveyors of the same neo-Nazi hatred advanced by Fred Trump in the 1920s and '30s and by Trump counsel Steve Bannon today is not unknown in the United States. In 1989, U.S. Eleventh Circuit of Appeals judge Robert Vance was assassinated by a mail bomb delivered to his Alabama home. Moody was also convicted for the assassination of civil rights lawyer Robbie Robinson in a mail bomb explosion at his home in Savannah, Georgia. The convicted assassin, Walter Leroy Moody, Jr., was a habitué of Klan meetings throughout the South. In 1979, Judge John Wood, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, was assassinated by Charles Harrison, a reputed member of the right-wing kill squad that assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In 1988, Judge Richard Daronco of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan was assassinated by retired New York police officer Charles Koster, who then killed himself. The FBI revealed there were several "loose ends" in the case. In 2005, the husband and mother of U.S. Judge Joan Lefkow of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago were murdered at the judge's Chicago home. Neo-Nazi Matthew Hale had previously been convicted of soliciting a contract hit man to assassinate Judge Lefkow.



New York Times article refers to the Memorial Day 1927 arrest of President Trump's father, Fred Trump, at an anti-Catholic KKK march in Queens. The apple did not fall far from the tree.

The second Trump executive order that has turned the White House upside down is his dictate to demote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence from members of the "Principals Committee" of the National Security Council. The Principals Committee, which normally include both the JCS chair and DNI, normally meet once a week. In fact, JCS chairman, Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, and DNI-designate Dan Coats, have been relegated to the rank of NSC "deputies." The NSC "Deputies Committee" meets more often than the principals but they carry much less clout. Former CIA director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told NBC News: "My biggest concern is there are actually, under the law, only two statutory advisers to the National Security Council and that's the Director of Central Intelligence, or the DNI, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think pushing them out of the National Security Council meetings, except when their specific issues are at stake, is a big mistake." In other words, Trump's order removed the two NSC members whose membership is based on the law. It is strike two for Trump, as far as his ignorance of the law is concerned.

There are reports that two of Trump's closest advisers -- chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer -- have come close to resigning from a White House they believe is operating by the seat of its pants.

In what might be considered strike three, Trump elevated his political counselor Bannon to the Principles Committee of the NSC. George W. Bush's counselor Karl Rove and Obama's counselor David Axelrod sat in on a few NSC meetings but they were not members nor were they permitted to speak.

The NSC decision by Trump did not sit well with General Dunford's old Marine Corps colleague, retired General James "Mad Dog" Mattis. There are rumblings in the Pentagon that Mattis is not at all pleased that his four-star Marine colleague has essentially been replaced on the NSC by Bannon, whose highest rank in the Navy was Lieutenant. At the Washington elite Alfalfa Club dinner on the evening of January 29, Mattis's unhappiness over the treatment of Dunford was the talk of the gossip circuit as was General John Kelly's irate reaction to the implementation of a visa ban order at Homeland Security over which he had zero input. White House sources at the dinner told The Atlantic's Steve Clemons that the visa ban was ordered not to be discussed with anyone outside the White House or, as was the case with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), even within the White House.

Spicer and Priebus, both of whom attended the Alfalfa Club dinner with Trump taking a pass, may have been using the absence of their vitriolic boss to vent their spleens to other attendees over drinks and dinner. Spicer, who, as a former press secretary for the U.S. Trade Representative under George W. Bush, should know what the satirical Onion is, retweeted one of their spoofs concernbing himself:


"The Onion" spoof proclaiming the Trump administration will "provide the American public with robust and clearly articulated misinformation" may not have been a mistaken re-tweet by the embattled press secretary who once worked for Priebus at the Republican National Committee.

The last president who shut the JCS out from the White House's decision-making process was Nixon. That did not work out too well for him in the long run.

There were early concerns about Trump placing so many generals in the Cabinet. So far, the generals -- Mattis and Kelly, with the addition of Dunford at JCS -- may be the only people standing between a would-be dictator and the U.S. Constitution. The clock had longer to tick out on Nixon. Trump's fast-moving clock toward impeachment is now at September 1973 in Nixonian terms.