Time For Heads to Roll at the CIA

Between the time I went to bed last night and when I got home from work today, the fake news story about the purported Russian dossier on Donald Trump was born, flowered and died. At this juncture, I think only one point is worth making.

The anonymously-sourced memos that are the basis for the report have been kicking around for months. Because they lacked any credibility, no respectable news source–not even the New York Times!–was willing to publicize them. Why did they suddenly become a news story? Because the CIA (most references are to “intelligence officials,” but I believe that means the CIA) attached a two-page summary of the scurrilous rumors to the inept report on alleged Russian hacking that it delivered to Barack Obama and Donald Trump last week. This was, apparently, on the theory that Trump needed to know that these rumors were circulating–as though he had to rely on the CIA to tell him that!

Thus, a reasonably respectable newspaper like the Washington Post takes this as a green light to report the slanders against Trump:

A classified report delivered to President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump last week included a section summarizing allegations that Russian intelligence services have compromising material and information on Trump’s personal life and finances, U.S. officials said.

The officials said that U.S. intelligence agencies have not corroborated those allegations but believed that the sources involved in the reporting were credible enough to warrant inclusion of their claims in the highly classified report on Russian interference in the presidential campaign.

Note that, while the report is “highly classified,” “U.S. officials” didn’t hesitate to tell the Post and other news sources all about it.

What is going on here is blindingly obvious. Intelligence agencies–again, I think this means the CIA, although the NSA could also be involved–are creating “news” in order to discredit the incoming Trump administration. Just as the report on Russian hacking that they delivered last week was 100% politics and 0% security, the attachment to that report that created today’s news stories had no purpose other than to legitimize the spreading of unsourced, and almost certainly false, slanders against the president-elect.

Many people do not realize that the CIA has been a liberal organization, generally associated with the Democratic Party, since its founding. For the agency to intervene in this manner to try to discredit a nascent Republican administration is shocking, but not entirely surprising.

This excerpt from the New York Times’s account tell you all you need to know:

[I]ntelligence agencies considered it so potentially explosive that they decided Obama, Trump and congressional leaders needed to be told about it and informed that the agencies were actively investigating it.

Intelligence officials were concerned that the information would leak before they informed Trump of its existence, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the summary is classified and talking about it would be a felony. [Emphasis added]

Right. So “intelligence officials” think nothing of committing a felony if it will help serve the cause of the Democratic Party. The CIA is a sick agency. Heads need to roll. Let’s hope that President Trump carries out a thorough house-cleaning, including, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions.

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