This is really happening ...and I have no clue about what to do
AND you know putin is laughing his fanny off ,,, geez americans! are there any INTERESTED AMERICANS left out there? HELLO HELLO ...this is America calling other Americans who give a shit ... you there?
aw hell let's go back to fighting about smoking again ... no wonder people do that! it must keep you from thinking ... ;)
Trump has been slamming US intel agencies. They just fired back.
Updated by Jennifer Williamsjennifer@vox.com Jan 5, 2017, 3:40pm EST
Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcell Lettre II, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and US Cyber Command and National Security Agency Director Admiral Michael Rogers testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 5, 2017. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump, who takes the oath of office in just 15 days, has been publicly smearing the integrity and legitimacy of the US intelligence community on Twitter — disputing their assessment that Russia tried to influence the US election and mocking their erroneous pre-Iraq War assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Today, the intelligence community — and their supporters in Congress — fired back.
In a fiery Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats to the United States, the country’s top spies — along with several senators from both parties — lambasted what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described as Trump’s "disparagement" of the intelligence community.
“Mr President-elect: When you listen to these people, they’re the best among us and they’re trying to protect us,” declared Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Clapper and others at the hearing also warned of the potential damage Trump’s comments could do to the nation’s ability to work with other nations to confront security threats like ISIS and the continued threat of radical Islamist terror.
“I have received many expressions of concern from foreign counterparts of what has been interpreted as the disparagement of the intelligence community,” said Clapper.
In response to a question from Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich about how the president-elect’s “dismissive attitude towards the intelligence community” was impacting morale in the intelligence agencies, Clapper tersely stated, “I haven’t done a climate survey, but I hardly think it helps it.”
Admiral Mike Rogers, commander of the US Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, went further, expressing his concern that damage to the morale of the intelligence community’s professional workforce could potentially lead to the departures of key personnel.
“What we do is in no small part driven in part by the confidence of our leaders in what we do,” said Rogers. “And without that confidence, I just don’t want a situation where our workforce decides to walk.”
Although Rogers himself didn’t mention Trump by name, his comment was striking because he has been rumored to be under consideration to replace Clapper and become the incoming Trump administration’s top spy.
For someone whose signature campaign promise was to “Make America Great Again,” publicly trashing one of the fundamental pillars of the country’s national security apparatus seems an odd way to go about restoring the country’s greatness in the eyes of the world. What the fight is all about
What the fight is all about
The intelligence community — including the CIA, the FBI, the director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security — has stated unequivocally that the Russian government directed the hacks of the email accounts of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), with specific intent to influence the outcome of the US presidential election.
But Trump has consistently disputed their conclusion — which is based on actual forensic evidence, some of which is publicly available — suggesting instead that maybe the DNC actually hacked itself. “It could also be China; it could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds. You don't know who broke into the DNC,” Trump said during the first presidential debate.
Except that at least four different US intelligence agencies filled with professionals whose job it is to investigate these sorts of things have told us: It was Russia. Period. Full stop. And Trump knew this. He’d already been briefed on it at least once before that first debate. Yet he still said we didn’t know anything about who did it.
That alone was distressing. But back then, he was just a candidate. Now, he’s the man who is about to serve as the commander in chief of the entire US armed forces and the one empowered to dictate what the intelligence community focuses its resources on. Which means that his comments now are far more dangerous. A president blindly believing everything he’s told is bad. A president trusting Russia more than his own intelligence agencies is worse.
“I’m the first to acknowledge there’s room for a wide range of opinions of the results we generate. We don’t question that for one minute. And every intelligence professional knows that,” Rogers told the Senate panel.
“I have had plenty of times in my career when I have presented my intelligence analysis to commanders and policymakers and they’ve just looked at me and said, ‘Hey Mike, thanks, but that’s not the way I see it,” or “You’re gonna have to sell me on this.’ That doesn’t bother any of us,” he said.
But, as Clapper pointedly stated, “there is a difference between healthy skepticism about intelligence information and disparagement."
And disparagement is exactly what Trump is doing. He’s publicly slandering the US intelligence community and choosing instead to promote the claims of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — an avowed anti-American activist with close ties to Russia — that Russia had nothing to do with the email hacks.
As Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill asked, “Who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community?”
It’s a good question. Unfortunately, it’s not clear Trump has thought about — or cares about — the answer.
U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win
Play Video 2:42 - U.S. intelligence captured Russian officials’ communications celebrating Trump’s victory The Post’s Adam Entous reports that U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted electronic communications, known as “signals intelligence,” in which top Russian officials celebrated the outcome of the U.S. election. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
By Adam Entous and Greg Miller January 5 at 6:05 PM
Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.
Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks.
Those and other data points are at the heart of an unprecedented intelligence report being circulated in Washington this week that details the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and catalogues other cyber operations by Moscow against U.S. election systems over the past nine years.
The classified document, which officials said is over 50 pages, was delivered to President Obama on Thursday, and it is expected to be presented to Trump in New York on Friday by the nation’s top spy officials, including Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and CIA Director John Brennan.
Play Video 3:10 - Senate hearing exposes differences between Trump and intelligence officials
Given the president-elect’s skepticism about the intelligence community — particularly its conclusions about Russia — the Trump Tower briefing has taken on the tenor of a showdown between the president-elect and the intelligence agencies he has disparaged.
[ Top U.S. intelligence official testifies on Russian interference in election] .. http://tinyurl.com/h3nzbr4
“The Russians felt pretty good about what happened on Nov. 8 and they also felt pretty good about what they did,” a senior U.S. official said.
U.S. officials declined to say whether the intercepted communications were cited in the classified version of the report commissioned by Obama, and they emphasized that although the messages were seen as strong indicators of Moscow’s intent and clear preference for Trump, they were not regarded as conclusive evidence of Russian intelligence agencies’ efforts to achieve that outcome.
“There are a variety of different exhibits that make the case, different factors that have provided the intelligence community with high confidence” that Russia sought in part to help elect Trump, said a second senior U.S. official who has reviewed intelligence findings on Russia’s cyber operations.
Officials emphasized that “signals intelligence,” as such communication is known, is treated by analysts with caution because statements can be taken out of context and sophisticated adversaries including the Kremlin are adept at spreading disinformation.
U.S. officials who have reviewed the new report said it goes far beyond the brief public statement that Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued in October, accusing Russia of having “directed” cyber operations to disrupt the U.S. election, and concluding, in a reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Play Video 2:37 - Trump denies CIA's assessment that Russia tried to help him win election
The new report incorporates material from previous assessments and assembles in a single document details of cyber operations dating back to 2008. Still, U.S. officials said there are no major new bombshell disclosures even in the classified report. A shorter, declassified version is expected to be released to the public early next week.
Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 election and the question of how the United States should respond have become bitterly polarizing issues in Washington, sowing discord among Republicans on Capitol Hill .. http://tinyurl.com/jjsu7ez , complicating the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations, and exacerbating an increasingly toxic relationship between the president-elect and U.S. spy services.
Senior lawmakers have called for a full investigation of the Russian hacking. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Clapper said that Moscow’s cyber assault on the election went beyond interference and into “activism.”
At Thursday’s hearing, Clapper said that U.S. spy agencies “stand actually more resolutely” behind conclusions they reached last year on Russia’s determination to undermine the U.S. election. He also appeared to take aim at Trump’s social media sniping at U.S. intelligence services, saying that “there’s a difference between skepticism and disparagement.”
Obama last week announced a series of measures designed to punish Russia, actions he characterized as “a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests.” Obama moved to impose economic sanctions on Russian intelligence agencies, expelled dozens of alleged Russian intelligence operatives from the United States, and shuttered two compounds that for decades had purportedly served as retreats for Russian diplomats but were described by the administration as locations for espionage activities.
Meanwhile, Trump continued his string of Twitter attacks, accusing U.S. intelligence agencies — with the word “intelligence” set off in quotation marks — of delaying a planned briefing on Russia and the election, a charge that U.S. officials disputed. He also appeared to side with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has denied that his organization got the hacked emails from Russia, over U.S. spy agencies, which think that WikiLeaks got the material through middlemen with ties to the Kremlin.
Trump appeared to retreat on Thursday, accusing the “dishonest media” of misrepresenting his comments about Assange. “The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence,’?” he said, “when in fact I am a big fan!”
[Insert: DUH! gawd, Donald, you're fooling a lot of people on that one, and on the rest]
U.S. officials said the captured messages, whose existence has not previously been disclosed, added to the confidence level at the CIA and other agencies that Putin’s goals went beyond seeking to undermine confidence in America’s election machinery and ultimately were aimed at tilting a fiercely contested presidential race toward a candidate seen as more in line with Moscow’s foreign policy goals.
Even so, the messages also revealed that top officials in Russia anticipated that Clinton would win and did not expect their effort to achieve its goal.
Russian officials “were as surprised as the rest of the world,” said the second U.S. official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
“In this case, you do learn things after the fact based on how they feel about it,” the first official said, adding that the intercepts added to the intelligence community’s “shifting level of confidence.”
The intercepts also echoed some public comments in Moscow. “Trump understood the mood of the people and kept going until the end, when nobody believed in him,” Putin said at a news conference last month, adding with a wry smile, “except for you and me.”
U.S. intelligence officials think that Putin has for years held a grudge against Clinton, whom he accused of fomenting demonstrations in Moscow in 2011 and 2012 that embarrassed Putin and rattled the former KGB operative’s confidence in his grip on power.
Russia’s elite spy services have for years used cyberespionage capabilities to gather information on U.S. policymakers and political candidates — as the United States does on Russia. But Moscow’s decision to dump thousands of stolen emails into public view on WikiLeaks was seen as a provocative departure from the traditional lanes of espionage, U.S. officials said.
Clapper on Thursday said there is a difference between “an act of espionage, which we conduct, as well, and other nations do, versus an attack.”
U.S. officials said that Russia’s goals appear to have shifted over time. Moscow’s initial hacking operations targeted almost every major candidate, including Trump’s Republican primary rivals, as part of a fairly typical clandestine collection program.
Russia’s initial objective may have been merely to meddle and undermine the legitimacy of an assumed Clinton victory. But as Trump captured the GOP nomination and showed that he could remain competitive with Clinton, Russia’s aims became more ambitious, officials said. The final months of the race saw a steady stream of leaked emails that damaged Clinton’s candidacy, without any corresponding release to embarrass Trump.
Russia also used social media and “fake news” platforms as an “accelerant” to try to boost Trump and undermine Clinton, the second official said.
.. the president-elect does more backsliding than a grizzly cub caught on his back in a snow-slide .. we won't subject the grizzly cub to an avalanche, Donald on the other hand... varoom.
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