Yates/Clapper Hearing (Part 3)

Up until now, I haven't really talked much about Sally Yates and her testimony.

It had previously been reported that she informed the White House about Michael Flynn and warned them that he was a security risk on Thursday, January 26th, 2017. In the hearing yesterday, we learned that there were actually two in-person meetings, the 26th and the 27th. We also learned that Yates had made arrangements for WH counsel to view the evidence at a later date. However, she was fired on Monday, January 30th, 2017.

So an open question is whether or not that evidence was ever viewed by anyone at the WH. Here is the official account from WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer:

Immediately after the Department of Justice notified the White House Counsel of the situation, the White House Counsel briefed the President and a small group of senior advisors.  The White House Counsel reviewed and determined that there is not a legal issue, but rather a trust issue.
During this process it’s important to note that the President did not have his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who he trusts immensely, approved by the Senate.  When the President heard the information as presented by White House Counsel, he instinctively thought that General Flynn did not do anything wrong, and the White House Counsel’s review corroborated that.
It is not ordinary* [unordinary] for an incoming National Security Advisor to speak with his counterparts about the issues of concern to them.  In fact, he spoke with over 30 of his counterparts throughout the transition.  As Charles Krauthammer said last night, it is “perfectly reasonable for him to do so.”  The issue here was that the President got to the point where General Flynn’s relationship -- misleading the Vice President and others, or the possibility that he had forgotten critical details of this important conversation had created a critical mass and an unsustainable situation.
That’s why the President decided to ask for his resignation, and he got it.

Okay, so no mention of the fact that Yates warned them that Flynn was compromised and thus posed a national security risk. No mention of the second meeting or the arrangements to view the evidence.

Look at what he did say, though. Upon being briefed about the fact that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russians, that the Russians had this information on tape, and that this compromised Flynn, the President concluded that he had done nothing wrong. What??? This is your National Security Adviser, and you find out that he's made himself vulnerable to foreign manipulation, and you think that's cool?

Spicer says it's normal for an incoming NSA to speak to his counterparts. Sure, but how normal is it for them to discuss policy matters when another administration is still in office, to lie about it to everyone else in the WH, and for it to be revealed that the Russians had a recording of the conversation? Don't know about you, but that doesn't sound normal to me. Also, upon hearing that, I wouldn't conclude that Flynn hadn't done anything wrong. I'd say he screwed up bigly, exposing himself to compromise before he'd even assumed the position. That seems grossly incompetent, and if Trump didn't come to that conclusion, what does that say about him?

The headline on CNN this morning was "Why did the White House wait 18 days to fire Flynn?" I'd ask a related question: Why did it take the press almost 90 days to ask this question? We knew about all of this. Yates hammered down the details and got it under oath, but it was still public knowledge. Trump left a compromised person in the top intelligence and national security role for 18 days. Some conservatives are saying that seemed like a reasonable amount of time, that the important thing was that he fired him. No. At the very least, his should have been suspended from sensitive meetings and briefings until the issue was resolved. Instead, it looks like the WH did absolutely nothing until the story was broken by the Washington Post. Only then did they fire him.

I was hoping this story would dominate the news cycle for the entire week, because the question needs to be asked, over and over. Why did the WH do nothing after what they learned from Yates? But the headline on CNN is already moved to the side. And since there are absolutely zero new public hearings scheduled at this time, and the intel committees seem to keep slow-walking this, I'm worried the questions will just sort of fade away.

Yates/Clapper Hearing (Part 2)

Continuing on, here are some things that we learned from the testimony yesterday...

James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, overseeing all intelligence operations in the government, was apparently not aware of the FBI investigation into Russian interference and possible Trump-Russia coordination.

When the intelligence community obtains information suggesting that a U.S. person is acting on behalf of a foreign power, the standard procedure is to share that information with the lead investigatory body, which of course is the FBI. The bureau then decides whether to look into that information and handles any ensuing investigation if there is one. Given its sensitivity, even the existence of a counterintelligence investigation's closely held, including at the highest levels.
During my tenure as DNI, it was my practice to defer to the FBI director, both Director Mueller and then subsequently Director Comey, on whether, when and to what extent they would inform me about such investigations. This stems from the unique position of the FBI, which straddles both intelligence and law enforcement. And as a consequence, I was not aware of the counterintelligence investigation Director Comey first referred to during his testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence on the 20th of March, and that comports with my public statements.

 This is weird, right? The guy who oversees all intelligence operations was not aware of this FBI investigation, which was launched in July 2016. Now, Trump supporters like to point to statements Clapper made in March, like this one:

There was no evidence whatsoever, at the time, of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians,

Here, "at the time" refers to when he left his position on January 20, 2017. But if he wasn't even aware of the FBI counterintelligence investigation, how would he? This whole bit does sound weird to me, though.

I'm not sure how the DNI, after overseeing and issuing a report that Russia interfered in a massive and unprecedented way in the 2016 elections, doesn't open an investigation into that interference or ask around about whether or not one exists. That doesn't make much sense. So I'm not sure what's going on here. If we take Clapper at his word, though, his statement about the lack of evidence of collusion is relatively meaningless. The only way we're probably going to find out is from the conclusion and results of the FBI investigation, and that's ongoing and open-ended.

Here's something else we learned...

The Trump WH has ludicrously been trying to blame the lack of vetting of Michael Flynn on the Obama administration. Sean Spicer has said that they basically relied on Flynn's previous security clearance as the only real vetting they did, which is to say, none at all.

This exchange is interesting:

HIRONO: The Trump administration blames President Obama for failing to suspend General Flynn's clearance. And in fact in a press conference today, Sean Spicer said: "Everyone in the government goes through the same process." 

And he also said: "There's no difference of a security clearance once it's issued. And basically as far as this administration is concerned, nothing more needed to be done" by them regarding General Flynn's clearance. Director Clapper, isn't it true that the CIA has a separate vetting process for National Security Council appointees? And in fact the press is reporting today that General Flynn never completed that process. Can you enlighten us?

CLAPPER: I can't speak to specifics of how it was done with General Flynn. I know what I went through as a political appointee twice in two -- in a Republican and a Democratic administration.

And the vetting process for either a political appointee or someone working in the White House is far, far more invasive and far, far more thorough than a standard TS/SCI clearance process.

But I don't know what process was used in General Flynn's case. And nor did I have access to his complete investigatory file, so it's very difficult for me to speculate on what was in it and what action, if any, was taken by the White House.

HIRONO: Well, according to Sean Spicer, that he had a clearance from the Obama administration, and that was it. And this administration had no further responsibilities.

So it sounds like the Trump WH didn't do this additional, more rigorous security clearance vetting of Michael Flynn, instead relying on his generic renewed clearance from earlier in the year. This should set off alarm bells. The Trump WH, by their own admission and by trying to blame Obama, are admitting they didn't do a single bit of additional scrutiny of Flynn's background. This was the person at the very highest level of government in terms of dealing with intelligence and national security. This is a shocking admission of complete incompetence.

Why does it matter?

Because Michael Flynn clearly wasn't fit to hold the position of National Security Adviser. At the time he was hired, he was an unregistered foreign agent, lobbying on behalf of Turkey. Let that sink in for a second. Our National Security Adviser was a foreign agent.

Besides that, he didn't disclose payments from multiple foreign countries, which he wasn't supposed to even take. All of this nonsense might have been caught if the Trump administration had bothered to vet him at all. Saying they simply relied on his renewed clearance is a horrible excuse, and trying to somehow shift the blame to the previous administration is pathetic.

I'm not sure how his supporters continually justify the way he never accepts an ounce of personal responsibility. It's always someone else's fault. The buck, apparently, stops anywhere but here.

Yates/Clapper Hearing (Part 1)

Sally Yates and James Clapper testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism yesterday.

Here is the full video. C-SPAN's transcription is available via the same link, but the speakers are not identified, which isn't very useful.
Here is the full transcript, via the Washington Post.

If you have the time to watch or read the whole thing, I definitely recommend it. It's over 3 hours long, but there's a lot of important stuff in there, and this is only the third public hearing on the Russian interference in our election. There are no public hearing scheduled for the foreseeable future (I'll talk more about that at the end). So we need to take what we can get. I think everyone would be better informed by watching/reading as much of this hearing as possible.

We didn't learn a ton of new things, but we got a lot of things that had been reported in the press on the record from the people who were actually there. First of all, it's important to look at Lindsey Graham's (the Republican chair of the committee) opening statement. Here's an excerpt:

PEOPLE WONDER WHAT ARE WE DOING, WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH? IN JANUARY, THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY UNANIMOUSLY SAID THAT THE RUSSIANS THROUGH THEIR INTELLIGENCE SERVICES TRIED TO INTERFERE IN THE 2016 AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, THAT IT WAS THE RUSSIANS WHO HACKED PODESTA PODESTA'S E-MAILS, IT WAS THE RUSSIANS WHO BROKE INTO THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE AND WAS RUSSIANS WHO HELPED EMPOWER WIKILEAKS. NO EVIDENCE THAT THE RUSSIANS CHANGED VOTING TALLIES, HOW PEOPLE WERE INFLUENCED BY WHAT HAPPENED, ONLY THEY KNOW AND GOD KNOWS, BUT I THINK EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD BE CONCERNED ABOUT WHAT THE RUSSIANS DID. FROM MY POINT OF VIEW, THERE'S NO DOUBT IN MY MIND IT WAS THE RUSSIANS INVOLVED IN ALL THE THINGS I JUST DESCRIBED. NOT SOME 400 POUND GUY SITTING ON A BED OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

Right. All this stuff about Michael Flynn is important, but the first and most important thing is that everyone recognize that America was the target of a massive cyberattack aimed at damaging and disrupting our democratic process.

Here's the unclassified report describing this attack that was released in January.

And here's an excerpt from Clapper's opening statement yesterday:

The Russians used cyber operations against both political parties, including hacking into servers used by the Democratic National Committee and releasing stolen data to WikiLeaks and other media outlets. Russia also collected on certain Republican Party- affiliated targets, but did not release any Republican-related data. The Intelligence Community Assessment concluded first that President Putin directed and influenced campaign to erode the faith and confidence of the American people in our presidential election process. Second, that he did so to demean Secretary Clinton, and third, that he sought to advantage Mr. Trump. These conclusions were reached based on the richness of the information gathered and analyzed and were thoroughly vetted and then approved by the directors of the three agencies and me.
These Russian activities and the result and assessment were briefed first to President Obama on the 5th of January, then to President-elect Trump at Trump Tower on the 6th and to the Congress via a series of five briefings from the 6th through the 13th of January. The classified version was profusely annotated, with footnotes drawn from thousands of pages of supporting material. The key judgments in the unclassified version published on the 6th of January were identical to the classified version.

The main takeaways from the opening statements were that everyone should be concerned about this. Graham also correctly noted that the Russians are opportunistic. In the long run, they don't have preferences for one party or another, one candidate or another. They simply want to sow as much chaos and distrust as possible.

The other main takeaway is that Donald Trump was brief 5 times on this intelligence and its conclusions. And yet, as recently as ten days ago, he said this:

If you don't catch a hacker, okay, in the act, it's very hard to say who did the hacking, It could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups.

It was the conclusion of the CIA, FBI, and NSA, with high confidence, that the Russians hacked the election. Trump was briefed five times. Why is he not sure who it was? Why is he not relying on the intelligence provided by the entire Federal apparatus?

This simple fact should also be alarming to Americans. The president is basically shrugging off the conclusions of multiple intelligence agencies.

Is he worried about delegitimizing his election win? He does seem to be very sensitive about that subject. But if that were the case, he might be suggesting there was no hack at all, or he might downplay the impact. Instead, he's admitting the influence occurred. He's just deflecting the blame from Russia. That's weird, right?

Anyway, I'm going to break up this post into a series, to make each point more digestible. But if you do nothing else, I recommend you read or listen to the opening statements. Trump, for whatever reason, wants you to ignore the findings and conclusions of our major intelligence agencies and the experts and elected officials who have all viewed this intelligence. Don't bury your head in the sand on this issue. It's too important.

Yates Testifies Today

Yep, in about three hours.

I expect a lot of her answers to be "I can't discuss that matter in an open session", but I do expect her to poke a lot of holes in the official WH narrative of the Michael Flynn debacle.

Apparently, President Trump isn't thrilled about what she might say, because he tweeted this just a couple of hours ago:

This makes the president look a defendent in a trial yelling at his lawyer while he's questioning a witness. "Hey, ask her where she was on the night of the murder!" 

Maybe I'm just spitballing here, but maybe the president should just keep his mouth shut about ongoing congressional and federal investigations into his possible wrongdoing? I mean, if he's innocent, why not just let everything just air out and prove he and his people did nothing wrong? 

But he can't do that, right? Because this is all some giant conspiracy between the press, the deep state, and apparently everyone but his supporters to delegitimize him. So he's got to do an end-around the liberal media and pre-emptively smear Sally Yates by accusing her of being a leaker.

Because that's what innocent people do, right? They wouldn't say things like "I look forward to Sally Yates' testimony so we can clear the air and get to the real issues that face Americans." Instead, you'd insinuate she's a rat. I mean, that's what I'd do if I were innocent.

Besides, it's not like Trump has a history of slinging false allegations at people to smear them with absolutely no proof. It's not like he's the president now, with the highest levels of clearance to the most sensitive intelligence. 

Anyway, nobody would be so stupid as to fall for this kind of nonsense, would they? I mean, Americans are smart enough to listen objectively to what Yates has to say and try to discern how reliable they think she is. Aren't they?

Public Hearings

So Sally Yates is supposed to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism. I've pointed out it's a little weird that her first time testifying isn't before one of the intelligence committees. What exactly is the point of all these congressional hearings anyway? I mean, the FBI is doing all the behind-the-scenes legwork, right? It's not like congress is going to crack something that the FBI doesn't, right?

So doesn't it make sense that the primary purpose of these hearings is to act as a conduit between the intelligence community and the public, and to inform us as much as is possible with sensitive, ongoing investigations about what's happening?

Well, we're not getting any hearings out of the House next week, because they're already on vacation again for a week. What about the Senate? Besides that subcommittee hearing, not much for the public. The Senate Intelligence Committee just updated their calendar for next week, and here it is:

Yeah, that's right. Three closed-door hearings. The optimist in me would hope that this committee is just ripping along and doing a lot of good work behind those closed doors. But like I said, are they really doing anything the FBI is not? Shouldn't we be having at least one open hearing a week?

They do appear to finally be sending out requests for information from former members of the Trump team, and threatening subpoenas. They sent out a request to Carter Page, and though he was initially all oh, I want to clear my name and cooperate fully and show there's nothing there, blah, blah, blah...he has now changed his tune.

Former Trump adviser Carter Page has declined to provide records of his communications with Russians to the Senate intelligence committee, saying that anything of note has already been recorded by former President Barack Obama’s administration.

In the last few days, he's also said he's the victim of a hate crime perpetrated against him by the Obama administration motivated by his Catholic faith. Uh huh.

Anyway, while the SIC appears to now be doing things, we're still not getting any public hearings. One report I read indicated that any upcoming hearing where Page is called as a witness would likely be behind closed doors.

Again, the FBI has most likely interviewed Carter Page multiple times by now. Is the SIC really going to learn something behind closed doors that the FBI didnt? What we need from congress is that public reassurance that things are moving forward and that answers and explanations are being found. We don't get that from closed-door sessions. I'd rather have open sessions where half the answers are either people taking the fifth or saying they can't answer such things in a public forum than closed door sessions. The light of day is the best disinfectant, and right now there's a whole lot of stink. We need to see and hear as much as we can.

A War of Information

I'm pretty sure we've entered a new era of war, and that we're currently losing. I think the main reason we're losing is because most people don't even know we're in this new war, and then there's a substantial number of people who know, but just don't care.

This new war is being waged, not with bombs or bullets, but information. Unable to compete with conventional military means, Russia has invested disproportionately in attacking not just us, but Western democracy in general, by leveraging the freedom of the internet to hack public opinion in order to disrupt and warp our democratic processes.

France has its presidential election on Sunday. The race is between two candidates:

Emmanuel Macron, left-centrist
Marine Le Pen, anti-Muslim, nationalistic, and far-right

Macron has been in a commanding lead throughout the election. Yesterday, tens of thousands of files that had been hacked from the Macron campaign were released publicly. Conveniently, France has blackout laws that prohibit candidates from saying anything about the election in the days just prior, so Macron can't give a press conference about the hack or its contents. The reports note that Macron's campaign says that false information has been interweaved with actual files.

Russia is the prime suspect, but it's too early to say for sure. I don't believe as of this writing that Wikileaks has leaked the contents of the hack. According to their Twitter account, they are analyzing it for authenticity. If Wikileaks releases the info before the election tomorrow, that's going to look highly suspicious. The sheer volume of the information most likely prohibits any kind of thorough check in that short a period of time. What I found interesting this morning, though, was when I Googled "wikileaks macron" to see if they had leaked the info. Here's a screenshot of my search results, with the timestamp from my PC added:

Now this is very interesting. The top three news stories that pop up are from Breitbart (far right-wing media outlet), Sputnik International (state-run Russian propaganda site), and RT (another state-run Russian propaganda site). The first actual search result is from The Gateway Pundit, a far right-wing blog. All the top search results, both news and search, are from a mixture of far right-wing sources or straight-up Russian propaganda. 

The implication here is that Russia is actively working to boost these search results through Google. I've been noticing a lot more stories in my news results from Breitbart and RT over the last couple of months, but nothing as drastic as this particular search. This means that anyone searching for specific news or information about this particular topic is going to get fed a skewed version of the story.

I don't know what Google's doing about this, if anything. Their news feed has been one of their weaker services for a while. I don't know if they make some attempt to balance news sources, and thus become exploitable. From what I know of the company, they tend to be as laissez-faire as possible, just letting the free market of information and backtracked links figure things out. I'm sure they maintain blacklists of sites like child porn or terrorist groups, but for the most part I think they're probably pretty hands-off.

And it looks to me with these kinds of search results that the Russians are exploiting that. Just as the 9/11 attackers exploited our openness and freedoms, it seems the Russians are doing the same on the digital front, warping the open marketplace of ideas.

I don't know the answers about how to fix this. But it's obvious to me that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have a responsibility to step up their game. I don't necessarily want to see greater internet regulation, but if Google's mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Presumably that doesn't include gross misinformation. But maybe it does. Maybe Google has an agnostic view of the quality of information.

But here's an article from the NY Times about Google and Facebook's response to fake news.

"The goal of search is to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users," Andrea Faville, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement. "In this case, we clearly didn’t get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."

So Google seems to be saying they do care about the accuracy of the information they're serving up via search, though the language is a little vague. Presumably the results should return a mix of views, with highly-speculative sources being pushed down or tagged in some meaningful way. It's disturbing, though, that the Russians and the alt-right still seem to be effectively gaming the system so easily.

Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to the issue is also disturbing:

Facebook's decision to clarify its ad policy language is notable because Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's chief executive, has repeatedly fobbed off criticism that the company had an effect on how people voted. In a post on his Facebook page over the weekend, he said that 99 percent of what people see on the site is authentic, and only a tiny amount is fake news and hoaxes.
"Over all, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other," Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.

So he doesn't even really see it as a problem. Like I said, I really don't want to see the government step in and have to regulate news sources. I do want to see our tech giants care about the integrity of their product and how it's used, as well as not helping to destroy the political and economic system in which they operate. That seems like a simple case of self-interest, if nothing else.

The public needs to increasingly care about the quality and integrity of the information they consume. So it's not just up to the corporations who's entire business is information, but among the electorate as well. Because if nobody cares, then we may have already lost.

Comey and Yates Testimony

FBI Director James Comey's open testimony this week didn't really seem to reveal much. Some people jumped on this line of questioning:

HIRONO: So in the investigations that you're currently doing on the Russian interference and the Trump team's relationship, are you coordinating with any U.S. attorney's office in these investigations?
COMEY: Yes, well -- two sets of prosecutors, the Main Justice the National Security Division and the Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney's Office.

Some people are reading into this that grand juries are already convening and that they're getting ready to indict a bunch of people. I don't know that much about the process, but I'm in wait-and-see mode on this one. It doesn't seem that unusual for the investigative branch to coordinate with the legal people, regardless of how much evidence they have. But then, my main source for this is Law & Order.

Anyway, I'm not reading too much into anything Comey said. I do like how people keep saying "There's no evidence!". Uh huh. It's a classified investigation. It would be stupid for them to reveal evidence at this time because it would screw up any trials. There's mountains of circumstantial evidence already made public, so that's a silly thing to say. As far as hard evidence, we'll find out when they either start arresting people, or conclude the investigation and say nothing was found. Until then, crying that no evidence has been found so we should just move on is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, Sally Yates is set to testify on Monday. On Tuesday, the chair of the committee, Lindsey Graham, asked Susan Rice to testify, presumably about unmasking. Seems like an attempt to mitigate or distract from Yates' testimony. Rice said no, because the co-chair, Sen. Whitehouse, did not agree to the invitation, and so it wasn't a bi-partisan request.

I have also been worried that the Rice request might be an excuse to tank or delay the hearing. "Oh look! Rice won't testify. We can't agree on witnesses. We have to cancel or postpone." That's still a possibility. Or something else happening to keep it from going forward. Though with every day that passes, the probability increases that it really will.

I don't expect much new out of her testimony either, only a solidification of the timelines, which are going to look bad for the Trump White House. But you never know. She might reveal something new and interesting. I'm giving her chance of actually testifying at 75% now.