Chicago Tribune wrote:The FBI notified the Illinois Republican Party in June that some of its email accounts may have been hacked, but party officials were not told that it was part of a wide-ranging federal investigation of Russian activity in the nation's political system, the state GOP's executive director said Sunday.
Politico wrote:A foreign government messing around in our elections is, I think, an existential threat to our way of life. To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11,” (former CIA chief) Morell said in an interview posted Sunday on The Cipher Brief. “It is huge and the fact that it hasn’t gotten more attention from the Obama Administration, Congress, and the mainstream media, is just shocking to me.”
In the 1990s, long before Stephen K. Bannon became the chairman of Breitbart News and one of Donald Trump's top advisers, he was just another guy in Beverly Hills who liked Shakespeare and wanted to make movies.
The Navy veteran and former Goldman Sachs investment banker was a feverish reader who kept books neatly stacked on the floor of his condo that couldn't fit on his shelves. Bannon had the tastes of a liberal-arts major, sampling ideas from ancient civilizations all over the world. He liked Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy book, according to his former longtime writing partner, Julia Jones.
"Before 9/11, he was different," said Jones, a liberal who fondly remembered discussing philosophy with Bannon. "He talked about Plato and Socrates all the time." At one point the pair developed a proposal for a TV show to feature philosophers from a wide range of traditions, including non-European mystics and shamans.
But Bannon, who kept a photo of Ronald Reagan over his desk, started down a more hard-line path of conservative thought after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to those who knew him during his time in Hollywood.
"He went further into a world of absolutes — black and white, good vs. evil," Jones said. "He was so open to such a world of great thinkers. I don't know how that same person could have chosen such a narrow path."
Today, Bannon represents a new ideological force inside the Republican party, an anti-establishment activist and businessman propelled from the fringes of the GOP to its very center — seen by his critics as the proverbial barbarian who has breached the gates.
Bannon is Trump's choice for chief White House strategist, a self-professed nationalist with a vision of reshaping U.S. policies on immigration, trade and the economy, but whose agenda and influence on the president-elect are little understood by the public.
A survey of Bannon's intellectual influences over the years reveals a voracious reader willing to expose himself to a range of international thinkers, but who holds hard-line, us-versus-them views on immigration and Islam; a Roman Catholic who thinks of the world in terms of epic battles between good and evil, who has been driven toward action by the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis; a veteran of the Cold War and of Wall Street who believes the United States' military should be strong and its capitalism more tender; and a Harvard-educated agitator comfortable in the backrooms of the elite, who has studied propaganda to achieve his goal of swaying the masses.
Many left-leaning critics have protested his selection as senior White House adviser and have accused him of being a closet white supremacist and anti-Semite. (Bannon, who did not respond to interview requests submitted to the Trump transition team, has denied such assertions.)
Bannon has repeatedly stated his long-term goal: shatter the political establishment, including the conservative one, and create an unorthodox "center-right" populist movement based on nationalism and a more humane form of capitalism. He seems to have found his vehicle for those goals in Trump, whose campaign Bannon joined in August.
Bannon has cultivated an arch-villain image, recently declaring, "Darkness is good," and praising Dick Cheney, Darth Vader and Satan as emblems of power. (One "Saturday Night Live" actor played Bannon by wearing a Grim Reaper costume.) Bannon's remarks succeeded in further enraging his liberal critics, who see him as the master enabler of a demagogue.
In the past, Bannon has repeatedly expressed his affinity for the technique of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose work in the 1930s glamorized the rise of Adolf Hitler. "One time we were in the office, and he said, 'I want to be the Leni Riefenstahl of George Bush,' and I was horrified,' " Jones said. (Jones said Bannon later amended his remark to say he wanted to be the Riefenstahl of the GOP.)
The filmmaker Tim Watkins, who approached Bannon around 2000 to create a documentary about Reagan, said Bannon introduced him to Riefenstahl's work, which many film students also study.
"I didn't like it," Watkins said of the content of Reifenstahl's work, "but you had to look at it as the art it was and how it influenced the nation and the world."
The ensuing documentary codirected by Bannon and Watkins, "In the Face of Evil," released in 2004, uses similar dramatic imagery, and praises Reagan as "a radical, with extreme views" on government, while referring to the United States' fascist and communist adversaries simply as "the beast."
The film also offers a clue as to why Bannon seemed so at home in liberal Hollywood, where he would go on to create additional conservative documentaries. A narrator praises the Hollywood of the 1930s as "the most powerful crucible on Earth," a "brutally efficient industrial process" run by Jewish refugees with "ruthlessness and uncompromising patriotism" that reinforced the values of Western civilization with stories of "order vs. chaos, good vs. evil."
Hollywood, in other words, was an ideological weapon. "That was mostly his writing and mostly him," said Jones, who was credited as a co-writer with Bannon on the film, and who said Bannon also admired the technique of liberal political filmmaker Michael Moore. (Both men share a fascination with populist messages and a disdain for business suits.)
The Reagan documentary drew the attention of conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who later called Bannon the Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement. The pair fell into each other's orbits.
Bannon cited the 2008 financial crisis as another turning point that drove him deeper into conservative politics, like the Sept. 11 attacks and his military service during the Cold War.
"I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats," Bannon, who was born in Virginia, told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. "I wasn't political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter [messed] things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had [messed] up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster."
Breitbart's death in 2012 led to Bannon's installation as chairman of Breitbart News, a rabble-rousing conservative news site.
At Breitbart, an editor, Joel Pollak, recalled seeing a "staggering collection of books" at Bannon's desk, mostly about history, including some first editions.
"We shared an interest in 'The Private Life of Chairman Mao' by Dr. Li Zhisui," Pollak said in an e-mail. "The most recent book I discussed with him was [Timothy] Snyder's new history of the Holocaust, 'Black Earth,' which argues that the Soviet destruction of its Eastern European neighbors eventually facilitated Hitler's Final Solution by creating a stateless, amoral environment."
At Breitbart, Bannon dived into the populist realm of right-wing radio and hosted a SiriusXM show, where the Harvard Business School graduate occasionally flashed unorthodox reading habits. During one January program, he likened global migration to a "Camp of the Saints," the title of a 1973 French novel about immigration that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called "a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees."
The problem that the United States faces, Bannon said in a 2014 speech at the Vatican, is "a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism," and he outlined his belief that the West was in an existential struggle against "jihadist Islamic fascism."
In the same speech, Bannon criticized free-market capitalism as "a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities" and called for an "enlightened capitalism" that is "really distributed among a middle class." (In 2013, Pope Francis criticized capitalism for treating people as "consumer goods to be used and then discarded." Francis does not share Bannon's views on Islam.)
Bannon's moderator for the speech, Benjamin Harnwell of the Institute for Human Dignity, a Christian think tank, said that Bannon's Catholicism had clearly influenced his views on capitalism.
"I think recognition of the imago Dei — that man is made in the image and likeness of God — runs all the way through Steve Bannon's thought in a sincere way," Harnwell said in an e-mail.
Under Bannon's stewardship, Breitbart News has been criticized for running racist content and has attracted a following among white supremacists, some of whom see Bannon's nationalist views as a milder form of their own beliefs. But many of Bannon's associates have said they can't recall him saying anything explicitly racist.
"In all the years I knew him, he never talked about any eugenic or racial superiority," said Jones. "He never even talked about a person's race or their religion."
Since joining Trump's victorious campaign, Bannon has scarcely spoken at all publicly, and has moved out of the role of bashing the establishment to become one of its most powerful representatives.
"Eight months ago, everybody could tell you Steve Bannon was one of the most opinionated people on Earth," Watkins said. "But now you wouldn't know Steve's opinion about dinner."
An example of how Trump's business makes him susceptible in other ways:The Trump family’s dealings in the Philippines will set off a constitutional crisis on the first day of Trump’s presidency, if anyone in the federal government decides to abide by the law. There is serious debate as to whether Trump will be violating the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause—which prohibits office holders from accepting gifts from foreign states—since the majority of his company’s business is with other corporations and developers. That is not the case in the Philippines. The man writing millions of dollars’ worth of checks to the Trump family is the Duterte government’s special representative to the United States. To argue that these payments will be constitutional if they are paid to the Trump children, and not to Trump personally, is absurd. This conflict demands congressional hearings, and could be an impeachable offense
Gülen and Erdogan were allies until 2013, the year a series of corruption investigations erupted regarding government officials accused of engaging in a “gas for gold” scheme with Iran; Erdogan claimed the man with whom he once shared common goals was the driving force behind the inquiries, which he called an attempted “civilian coup.” Erdogan has placed Gülen on country’s list of most-wanted terrorists, but the Obama administration has not acted on the extradition request, and it has told the Turks they would have to produce proof of Gülen’s involvement in the coup attempt before he could be sent to Ankara, the Turkish capital.
Enter Donald Trump. The day of the U.S. election, the news site The Hill published an article by Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, who has since been named as Trump’s national security adviser. “The forces of radical Islam derive their ideology from radical clerics like Gülen, who is running a scam,” Flynn wrote. “We should not provide him safe haven…. It is imperative that we remember who our real friends are.” (Flynn, who runs a consulting firm hired by a company with links to the Turkish government, seems unaware that radical Islamic groups like the Islamic State, or ISIS, are more likely to decapitate someone like Gülen.)
That article, according to the financier with contacts in the Turkish government, led Erdogan and his associates to believe a Trump administration would not demand more evidence to justify deporting Gülen. So, almost immediately, Erdogan stopped condemning Trump and instead voiced support for him. The day after the U.S. election, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim issued a statement directly linking his country’s good wishes for Trump with its desire to get Gülen back. “We congratulate Mr. Trump. I am openly calling on the new president from here about the urgent extradition of Fethullah Gülen, the mastermind, executor and perpetrator of the heinous July 15 coup attempt, who lives on U.S. soil.”
In a telephone call that same day with Erdogan, Trump passed on compliments to the Turkish president from a senior official with his company’s business partner on the Istanbul project, whom the president-elect was reported to have called “a close friend.” The official, Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, is the son-in-law of Dogan Holding owner Aydin Dogan and was instrumental in the development of the Trump complex in Turkey. That Trump delivered messages from his business partner to Erdogan has been reported in numerous media outlets in Turkey, including some closely tied to the government, and has not been denied by Turkish officials or the Trump transition team.
According to the Middle Eastern financier with contacts in the Erdogan administration, Trump’s casual praise of a member of the Dogan family prompted Erdogan to believe this relationship might give him leverage over the president-elect. In the past, Erdogan has placed enormous pressure on the Dogan Group, which owns media operations that have been critical of him, by imposing a $2.5 billion tax fine and calling for supporters to boycott its newspapers and television stations. Then, just weeks after hearing Trump’s kind words about his Dogan business partner, Erdogan lashed out at the Turkish company again.
On December 1, authorities detained Barbaros Muratogl, a 28-year veteran of Dogan who was the company’s representative to Ankara. His alleged crime? Maintaining links to the movement led by Gülen, thus connecting the Dogan executive to the attempted coup. In response, Dogan shares fell 8.6 percent. (The purported evidence against Muratogl: public accusations from an editor at a newspaper owned by a company that competes with Dogan.)
Once again, follow the dominoes as they tip over. Erdogan is frustrated in his efforts to grab Gülen; Trump praises a Turkish executive who works with his business partner there, Dogan. A few weeks later, a senior Dogan executive is detained on threadbare allegations. If Erdogan’s government puts more pressure on the company that’s paying millions of dollars to Trump and his children, revenue flowing from the tower complex in Istanbul could be cut off. That means Erdogan has leverage with Trump, who will soon have the power to get Gülen extradited. The financier with contacts in the Turkish government explained the dynamic to Newsweek: “Erdogan has something he believes Trump wants, and Trump has someone Erdogan desperately wants.”
McParadigm wrote:http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-jeopardize-us-531140.html
Long, but you really have to read the whole thing to appreciate.
An example of how Trump's business makes him susceptible in other ways:The Trump family’s dealings in the Philippines will set off a constitutional crisis on the first day of Trump’s presidency, if anyone in the federal government decides to abide by the law. There is serious debate as to whether Trump will be violating the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause—which prohibits office holders from accepting gifts from foreign states—since the majority of his company’s business is with other corporations and developers. That is not the case in the Philippines. The man writing millions of dollars’ worth of checks to the Trump family is the Duterte government’s special representative to the United States. To argue that these payments will be constitutional if they are paid to the Trump children, and not to Trump personally, is absurd. This conflict demands congressional hearings, and could be an impeachable offense
Gülen and Erdogan were allies until 2013, the year a series of corruption investigations erupted regarding government officials accused of engaging in a “gas for gold” scheme with Iran; Erdogan claimed the man with whom he once shared common goals was the driving force behind the inquiries, which he called an attempted “civilian coup.” Erdogan has placed Gülen on country’s list of most-wanted terrorists, but the Obama administration has not acted on the extradition request, and it has told the Turks they would have to produce proof of Gülen’s involvement in the coup attempt before he could be sent to Ankara, the Turkish capital.
Enter Donald Trump. The day of the U.S. election, the news site The Hill published an article by Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, who has since been named as Trump’s national security adviser. “The forces of radical Islam derive their ideology from radical clerics like Gülen, who is running a scam,” Flynn wrote. “We should not provide him safe haven…. It is imperative that we remember who our real friends are.” (Flynn, who runs a consulting firm hired by a company with links to the Turkish government, seems unaware that radical Islamic groups like the Islamic State, or ISIS, are more likely to decapitate someone like Gülen.)
That article, according to the financier with contacts in the Turkish government, led Erdogan and his associates to believe a Trump administration would not demand more evidence to justify deporting Gülen. So, almost immediately, Erdogan stopped condemning Trump and instead voiced support for him. The day after the U.S. election, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim issued a statement directly linking his country’s good wishes for Trump with its desire to get Gülen back. “We congratulate Mr. Trump. I am openly calling on the new president from here about the urgent extradition of Fethullah Gülen, the mastermind, executor and perpetrator of the heinous July 15 coup attempt, who lives on U.S. soil.”
In a telephone call that same day with Erdogan, Trump passed on compliments to the Turkish president from a senior official with his company’s business partner on the Istanbul project, whom the president-elect was reported to have called “a close friend.” The official, Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, is the son-in-law of Dogan Holding owner Aydin Dogan and was instrumental in the development of the Trump complex in Turkey. That Trump delivered messages from his business partner to Erdogan has been reported in numerous media outlets in Turkey, including some closely tied to the government, and has not been denied by Turkish officials or the Trump transition team.
According to the Middle Eastern financier with contacts in the Erdogan administration, Trump’s casual praise of a member of the Dogan family prompted Erdogan to believe this relationship might give him leverage over the president-elect. In the past, Erdogan has placed enormous pressure on the Dogan Group, which owns media operations that have been critical of him, by imposing a $2.5 billion tax fine and calling for supporters to boycott its newspapers and television stations. Then, just weeks after hearing Trump’s kind words about his Dogan business partner, Erdogan lashed out at the Turkish company again.
On December 1, authorities detained Barbaros Muratogl, a 28-year veteran of Dogan who was the company’s representative to Ankara. His alleged crime? Maintaining links to the movement led by Gülen, thus connecting the Dogan executive to the attempted coup. In response, Dogan shares fell 8.6 percent. (The purported evidence against Muratogl: public accusations from an editor at a newspaper owned by a company that competes with Dogan.)
Once again, follow the dominoes as they tip over. Erdogan is frustrated in his efforts to grab Gülen; Trump praises a Turkish executive who works with his business partner there, Dogan. A few weeks later, a senior Dogan executive is detained on threadbare allegations. If Erdogan’s government puts more pressure on the company that’s paying millions of dollars to Trump and his children, revenue flowing from the tower complex in Istanbul could be cut off. That means Erdogan has leverage with Trump, who will soon have the power to get Gülen extradited. The financier with contacts in the Turkish government explained the dynamic to Newsweek: “Erdogan has something he believes Trump wants, and Trump has someone Erdogan desperately wants.”
So...is this a long-winded Thanks Obama?BurtReynolds wrote:On the other hand, major powers routinely play these games with their rivals, and the fact that we've become so lazy at defending against them under our recent administrations is pretty alarming. Russia attempting to influence the election shouldn't be news. Our incompetence and susceptibility should be.
jwfocker wrote:When two epic narcissist meet:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?420082-10 ... rump-tower
McParadigm wrote:jwfocker wrote:When two epic narcissist meet:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?420082-10 ... rump-tower
How many rubles are you paid per post?BurtReynolds wrote:um what? Presented with an attack on the sanctity of his own country’s democracy by a hostile foreign power, McConnell and Obama's overriding concern was party over country.McParadigm wrote:http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/trump-mcconnell-putin-and-the-triumph-of-the-will-to-power.html
What is more interesting in the Post story is the response of various officials to the revelations. The Obama administration declined to publicize, wary of being seen as intervening on Clinton’s behalf. Instead, it devised a fallback plan. Concerned that Russia might attempt to hack into electronic voting machines, it gathered a bipartisan group of lawmakers to hear the CIA’s report, in the hopes that they would present a united front warning Russia not to disrupt the election. According to the Post, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.” Other Republicans refused to join the effort for reasons that can only be understood as a desire to protect the Republican ticket from any insinuation, however well-founded, that Russia was helping it.
Even the most cynical observer of McConnell — a cynical man to his bones — would have been shocked at his raw partisanship. Presented with an attack on the sanctity of his own country’s democracy by a hostile foreign power, his overriding concern was party over country. Obama’s fear of seeming partisan held him back from making a unilateral statement without partisan cover. No such fear restrained McConnell. This imbalance in will to power extended to the security agencies. The CIA could have leaked its conclusion before November, but held off. The FBI should have held off on leaking its October surprise, but plunged ahead
