Julian Assange Warns 🚨Trumps Mass Arrests Are Coming In Mar 2019 ! Confirmation Final Step

Sorry, Russia-gaters; WikiLeaks Got the DNC Emails From Insider, not Russia.. VIPSers Binney & Johnson use the forensics that the FBI avoided doing,, March 02, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Thinking back, President Barack Obama dropped a huge hint two days before he left office, using his last press conference to point out that the “conclusions of the intelligence community” regarding how WikiLeaks received the DNC emails were “inconclusive.”  The nerve!  Daring to say that just 13 days after the U.S. intelligence Gang of Four briefed Obama up and down on their evidence-free “assessment” that WikiLeaks got the DNC emails via a Russian hack.
This was one time Obama summoned the courage to face down James (the-Russians-are-almost-genetically-driven-to-deceive) Clapper and other intelligence chiefs.  After all, Obama is a lawyer.  He “does evidence.”  In contrast, ex-CIA Director John Brennan, told Congress that he does not “do evidence.”
Back in the day, the intelligence community “did evidence.”  As soon as the evidence-impoverished “Intelligence Community Assessment” was published on January 6, 2017, members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) smelled a rat.  That same day, former NSA Technical Director William Binney and Ray published “The Dubious Case on Russian Hacking,”

Then came “The Gaping Holes of Russia-gate,”

Even Michael Cohen admitted yesterday that he had no “direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.” But, he added, “I have my suspicions.”  We intelligence analysts, back in the day, did not “do suspicions.”

There are 1,001 other reasons to impeach President Donald Trump, if Nancy Pelosi had the courage.  But politics, not the Constitution, reigns supreme in the people’s House to which Founders bestowed an orderly political process to get rid of such a president.  Shame on them all.

Ray came to Washington from his native Bronx in the early Sixties as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.

Why The DNC was not hacked by the Russians

Why does a cyber security company wait 45 days after allegedly uncovering a massive Russian attack on the DNC server to take concrete steps to safeguard the integrity of the information held on the server?

Via Sic Semper Tyrannis. Authored by William Binney, former Technical Director NSA and Larry Johnson, former State CT and CIA

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The FBI, CIA and NSA claim that the DNC emails published by WIKILEAKS on July 26, 2016 were obtained via a Russian hack, but more than three years after the alleged “hack” no forensic evidence has been produced to support that claim. In fact, the available forensic evidence contradicts the official account that blames the leak of the DNC emails on a Russian internet “intrusion”.  The existing evidence supports an alternative explanation–the files taken from the DNC between 23 and 25May 2016 and were copied onto a file storage device, such as a thumb drive.

If the Russians actually had conducted an internet based hack of the DNC computer network then the evidence of such an attack would have been collected and stored by the National Security Agency. The technical systems to accomplish this task have been in place since 2002. The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” regarding Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election:

·        We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

The phrase, “moderate confidence” is intelligence speak for “we have no hard evidence.” Thanks to the leaks by Edward Snowden, we know with certainty that the NSA had the capability to examine and analyze the DNC emails. NSA routinely “vacuumed up” email traffic transiting the U.S. using robust collection systems (whether or not anyone in the NSA chose to look for this data is another question). If those emails had been hijacked over the internet then NSA also would have been able to track the electronic path they traveled over the internet. This kind of data would allow the NSA to declare without reservation or caveat that the Russians were guilty. The NSA could admit to such a fact in an unclassified assessment without compromising sources and methods. Instead, the NSA only claimed to have moderate confidence in the judgement regarding Russian meddling. If the NSA had hard intelligence to support the judgement the conclusion would have been stated as “full confidence.”

We believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller faces major embarrassment if he decides to pursue the indictment he filed–which accuses 12 Russian GRU military personnel and an entity identified as, Guccifer 2.0, for the DNC hack—because the available forensic evidence indicates the emails were copied onto a storage device.

According to a DOJ press release on the indictment of the Russians, Mueller declares that the emails were obtained via a “spearphising” attack:

In 2016, officials in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, including the campaign’s chairman. Through that process, officials in this unit were able to steal the usernames and passwords for numerous individuals and use those credentials to steal email content and hack into other computers. They also were able to hackinto the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through these spearphishing techniques to steal emails and documents,covertly monitor the computer activity of dozens of employees, and implant hundreds of files of malicious computer code to steal passwords and maintain access to these networks.

The officials in Unit 26165 coordinated with officials in Unit 74455 to plan the release of the stolen documents for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 presidential election. Defendants registered the domain DCLeaks.com and later staged the release of thousands of stolen emails and documents through that website. On the website, defendants claimed to be “American hacktivists” and used Facebook accounts with fictitious names and Twitter accounts to promote the website.  After public accusations that the Russian government was behind the hacking of DNC and DCCC computers, defendants created the fictitious persona Guccifer 2.0. On the evening of June 15, 2016 between 4:19PM and 4:56PM, defendants used their Moscow-based server to search for a series of English words and phrases that later appeared in Guccifer 2.0’s first blog post falsely claiming to be a lone Romanian hacker responsible for the hacks in the hopes of undermining the allegations of Russian involvement.

Notwithstanding the DOJ press release, an examination of the Wikileaks DNC files do not support the claim that the emails were obtained via spearphising. Instead, the evidence clearly shows that the emails posted on the Wikileaks site were copied onto an electronic media, such as a CD-ROM or thumbdrive before they were posted at Wikileaks. The emails posted on Wikileaks were saved using the File Allocation Table (aka FAT) computer file system architecture.

An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.

How do we know? The truth lies in the “last modified” time stamps on the Wikileaks files.  Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers.  If you are not familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second.

We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on Wikileaks and all 500 files end in an even number—2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If a system other than FAT had been used, there would have been an equal probability of the time stamp ending with an odd number. But that is not the case with the data stored on the Wikileaks site. All end with an even number.

The DNC emails are in 3 batches (times are GMT).

Date        Count       Min Time    Max Time FAT  Min Id Max Id

2016-05-23  10520  02:12:38      02:45:42 x    3800   14319

2016-05-25  11936  05:21:30       06:04:36 x    1         22456

2016-08-26  13357  14:11:36       20:06:04 x    22457  44053

The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power or approximately 1 chance in 10 to the 150th power – in other words, an infinitely high order.

This data alone does not prove that the emails were copied at the DNC headquarters. But it does show that the data/emails posted by Wikileaks did go through a storage device, like a thumbdrive, before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.

This fact alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts about Mueller’s indictment accusing 12 Russian soldiers as the culprits for the leak of the DNC emails to Wikileaks. A savvy defense attorney will argue, and rightly so, that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device (Eg., USB thumb drive) and transferred that to Wikileaks.

We also tested the hypothesis that Wikileaks could have manipulated the files to produce the FAT result by comparing the DNC email files with the Podesta emails (aka Larter file) that was released on 21 September 2016. The FAT file format is NOT present in the Podesta files. If Wikileaks employed a standard protocol for handling data/emails received from unknown sources we should expect the File structure of the DNC emails to match the file structure of the Podesta emails. The evidence shows otherwise.

There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails were downloaded over the internet as a result of a spearphising attack. Bill Binney, a former Technical Director of the National Security Agency, along with other former intelligence community experts, examined emails posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those emails could not have been downloaded over the internet as a result of a spearphising attack. It is a simple matter of mathematics and physics.

Shortly after Wikileaks announced it had the DNC emails, Guccifer 2.0 emerged on the public stage, claimimg that “he” hacked the DNC and that he had the DNC emails. Guccifer 2.0 began in late June 2016 to publish documents as proof that “he” had hacked from the DNC.

Taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value—i.e., that his documents were obtained via an internet attack—Bill Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained in the posted documents based on internet connection speeds in the United States. This analysis showed that the highest transfer rate was 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than possible from a remote online connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincides with the download rate for a thumb drive.

Binney, assisted by other colleagues with technical expertise, extended the examination and ran various tests forensic from the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest rate obtained — from a data center in New Jersey to a data center in the UK–was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the rate necessary to transfer the data, as it was listed from Guccifer 2.

The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the Wikileaks data does not prove who copied the information to a thumbdrive, but it does provide and empirical alternative explanation that undermines the Special Counsel’s claim that the DNC was hacked. According to the forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data, the DNC emails were not taken by an internet spearphising attack. The data breach was local. It was copied from the network.

There is other circumstantial evidence that buttresses the conclusion that the data breach was a local effort that copied data.

First there is the Top Secret information leaked by Edward Snowden. If the DNC emails had been hacked via spearphising (as alleged by Mueller) then the data would have been captured by the NSA by means of the Upstream program (Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney, Oakstar) and the forensic evidence would not modify times – the data would be presented as sent.

Second, we have the public reporting on the DNC and Crowdstrike, which provide a bizarre timeline for the alleged Russian hacking.

It was 29 April 2016, when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated (see https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f). No claim yet about who was responsible.

According to CrowdStrike founder, Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first detected the Russians mucking around inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:

Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike’s experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia’s answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.

And what did CrowdStrike do about this? Nothing. According to Michael Isikoff, CrowdStrike claimed their inactivity was a deliberate plan to avoid alerting the Russians that they had been “discovered.” This is nonsense. If a security company detected a thief breaking into a house and stealing its contents, what sane company would counsel the client to do nothing in order to avoid alerting the thief?

We know from examining the Wikileaks data that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35. No DNC emails were taken and released to Wikileaks after that date.

CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told Esquire’s Vicky Ward that:

Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office.

Why does a cyber security company wait 45 days after allegedly uncovering a massive Russian attack on the DNC server to take concrete steps to safeguard the integrity of the information held on the server? This makes no sense.

A more plausible explanation is that it was discovered that emails had been downloaded from the server and copied onto a device like a thumbdrive. But the culprit had not yet been identified. We know one thing for certain—CrowdStrike did not take steps to shutdown and repair the DNC network until 18 days after the last email was copied from the server.

The final curiosity is that the DNC never provided the FBI access to its servers in order for qualified FBI technicians to conduct a thorough forensic examination. If this had been a genuine internet hack, it would be very easy for the NSA to identify when the information was taken and the route it moved after being hacked from the server. The NSA had the technical collection systems in place to enable analysts to know the date and time of the messages. But that has not been done.

Taken together, these disparate data points combine to paint a picture that exonerates alleged Russian hackers and implicates persons within our law enforcement and intelligence community taking part in a campaign of misinformation, deceit and incompetence. It is not a pretty picture.

The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking’

Still not showing evidence, U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper told senators he’s really sure Russia was the source of “hacked” Democratic emails, but the case remains weak, say ex-intelligence officials William Binney and Ray McGovern.

By William Binney and Ray McGovern

It has been several weeks since the New York Times reported that “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” led the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers” to help Donald Trump win the election. But the evidence released so far has been far from overwhelming.

The long anticipated Joint Analysis Report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in the technical community. Worse still, some of the advice it offered led to a very alarmist false alarmabout supposed Russian hacking into a Vermont electric power station.

Advertised in advance as providing proof of Russian hacking, the report fell embarrassingly short of that goal. The thin gruel that it did contain was watered down further by the following unusual warning atop page 1: “DISCLAIMER: This report is provided ‘as is’ for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”

Also, curiously absent was any clear input from the CIA, NSA or Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Reportedly, Mr. Clapper will get a chance on Friday to brief an understandably skeptical Donald Trump, who has called the briefing delay “very strange,” even suggesting that top intelligence officials “need more time to build a case.”

Clapper’s Checkered History

Mr. Trump’s skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.

Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.

When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi émigré Ahmed Chalabi plied U.S. intelligence with spurious “evidence” on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was in position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might have the temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi “chemical weapons facility” for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic coordinates was nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the Rumsfeldian dictum: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” (It will be interesting to see if he tries that out on the President-elect Friday.)

A year after the war began, Mr. Chalabi told the media, “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful.” By that time it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq. When Mr. Clapper was asked to explain, he opined, without adducing any evidence, that they probably were moved into Syria.

With respect to the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in the U.S. election, it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it must rely on “circumstantial evidence,” when it has NSA’s vacuum cleaner sucking up hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA’s capabilities shows that the email disclosures were from leaking, not hacking.

Here’s the difference:

Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper’s checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.

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George W. Bush Warns 🚨 Deep State Will Destroy Trump In Mar 2019? A CLEAR & PRESENT DANGER

From Bush to Trump, the Hard Left-Deep State Alliance Endures

Afuture American history exam will ask students to recall a U.S. president who relied heavily on the political intelligence-gathering and counsel of one or more of his adult children. This president bypassed the foreign policy and diplomatic bureaucracy and practiced a notably personal style of international dealmaking. He also invested what some considered an inordinate amount of trust in his direct relationship with a controversial Saudi Arabian sheikh and the strategic importance of the Desert Kingdom’s oil resources.

One acceptable answer would be Franklin Roosevelt. The White House during his era had no one styled “chief of staff.” Jefferson’s White House with Meriwether Lewis, and Lincoln’s with John Hay, had top aides known as “private secretary” or a similar title. For part of FDR’s presidency, his de facto chief of staff was his eldest son James, snarkily described by Henry Luce’s Time magazine in 1938 as the “Assistant President of the United States.”

FDR famously conducted direct diplomacy with Churchill and Stalin to guide the Allies to victory over Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. His personal chemistry and understandings with the British statesman and the Soviet dictator were essential both to the war’s success and to negotiating the tragic era of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following the war.

After the fateful February 1945 summit with Churchill and Stalin in Yalta, Roosevelt flew from the Crimea to the Suez Canal, where the Navy’s U.S.S. Quincy served as his floating Oval Office. There he met with the founder of the current Saudi Arabian dynasty, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud. The Saudi monarch and FDR made an agreement—still in force today—providing U.S. security assurances to Saudi Arabia in exchange for access to the kingdom’s abundant oil resources.

Of course, FDR was probably not the president most readers had in mind. The answer that probably came first to mind is Donald Trump. Anyone who knows anything about the politics of the moment is familiar with the diplomatic and White House staff preeminence of Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump. The first son-in-law, a New York City real estate magnate in his own right, was indispensable in negotiating a new United States-Mexico-Canada agreement on trade. He also is the principal interlocutor between the Trump Administration and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, a grandson of FDR’s counterpart.

Yet another correct answer, and a timely one this week, is George Herbert Walker Bush.

Fascinating Parallels—and a Story Never Before Told
As much as the Republican NeverTrump faction, in concert with the Democrats, wants us to think otherwise, there are important similarities between the context, goals, and methods of the Bush 41 White House and those of Donald Trump’s administration.

Like Trump, the Bushes trust blood relatives above all others. During the 1988 and 1992 campaigns, Jeb Bush led the family’s Florida organization. He also was an essential advisor to his father on many matters of policy, notably U.S.-Latin American relations.

And speaking of the Bush family, during the 1988 campaign I paid a brief visit to a tiny, closet-sized office with army-surplus or worse furnishings in the then-decrepit old Woodward Building on Washington’s 15th street—low-budget real estate rented to house the Bush presidential campaign headquarters. There I had a direct interaction with an intense, scowling 42-year-old entrusted with what might be called the counterintelligence function of the Bush operation. This is a story I’ve never made public before, but now that all of the older generation of protagonists have died, I’ll do so.

A Republican fundraiser of my acquaintance arranged and brought me to the meeting. At the time I was working as a Reagan appointee in the State Department for that building’s strongest advocate of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, retired General Edward Rowny. Like Lincoln, Reagan had a national security cabinet of rivals. Rowny’s principal rival was the wealthy, urbane Paul Nitze, a Cold War Democrat who had been an architect of the reorganization of the U.S. national security bureaucracy and the containment strategy under President Truman. He was the crème de la crème of Washington High Society.

A Cold War Democrat critic of President Jimmy Carter’s failed SALT II arms control treaty with the Soviets, Nitze accepted an appointment at the beginning of the Reagan Administration, in parallel with Rowny, as a senior negotiator and advisor.

By 1988, Nitze was constantly to the left of Rowny’s policy positions, which were in line with those of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Nitze wanted to make more concessions to the Soviets, and he disconcerted missile defense stalwarts with hints he kept dropping that SDI perhaps could be negotiated away as a bargaining chip.

One day a fellow staff member of mine reported he had attended, not as a partisan but as a foreign policy professional, a public speech in Washington on national security policy by Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. He reported that Nitze—once and always a Democrat—was at the front of the audience applauding Dukakis enthusiastically. Nitze was at that time a serving ambassador-at-large in the Reagan-Bush administration.

With Rowny’s permission, I looked for a way to get this piece of information to the Bush campaign. Within very short order, I was escorted into the cramped little office in the Woodward Building. There sat a not very friendly young man who, maybe just because the room was so small, did not rise from his chair. His name was George W. Bush. I stood there for a moment and passed along my tidbit. His eyes, already intense, narrowed.

“Is that right?” he glowered.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He thanked me and I walked back out to 15th Street.

A few months later, following Bush’s election victory over Dukakis, Rowny was one of the few Reagan arms control experts asked to remain in post under the new president. Nitze was not. (It came to pass that Rowny’s counsel was never valued by President Bush or Secretary of State Baker as it had been by President Reagan, and Rowny resigned out of frustration after a year and a half of trying to make the relationship work.)

The point of the story, anyway, is to show how remarkably similar have been the roles of Jimmy Roosevelt, “George Junior” Bush, and Jared Kushner. Resented by the career bureaucracy as well as by political people who had not been chosen by God to be born or married into presidential families, each of these men has been a vital, implicitly trustworthy advisor to his paterfamilias.

Administrations Come and Go—Deep State Enmity Lasts Forever
Today it is especially timely to consider some parallels between the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump.

While the genteel elder Bush is rightly remembered for a much closer affinity with the elite “Establishment” than the bombastic, purposefully disruptive Trump, it’s almost uncanny how similar were some of their confrontations against elements of what now might be called the “hard left” and the “deep state.”

Trump today is undermined by the collaboration of criminal leakers from within the intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The Steele dossier and the roles in that of McCabe, Strzok, Lisa Page, et al., is a prominent example. Another is the selective leaking of CIA reports on the killing of a Saudi intelligence agent/sometime writer and broadcaster for Saudi state-controlled media, Jamal Khashoggi. Trump and his defenders are rightly outraged by the illegal leaks and the twisted political purposes to which they have been employed.

What perhaps is forgotten is how besieged President George H. W. Bush was by leaks and politicized efforts to bring about his impeachment at the behest of some of his foreign policy foes. As one who worked on the White House staff in 1991 and 1992, I can state that the president’s top lawyers at that time were extremely concerned about a deep state effort to impeach President George Bush for his role as vice president in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair. Reagan-era special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was still at work as Bush’s presidential term came to a close—shades of Donald Trump’s remark to the New York Post last week about the probe he is facing, “Mueller would like it to go for the rest of his life.”

Senior Bush aides were deathly afraid he might face impeachment proceedings had he been re-elected in 1992. Lawrence Walsh really did want his investigation to go on for the rest of his life.

Then as now, an ironclad alliance of the Washington Post, New York Times and other establishment media with leftist Democrats on Capitol Hill and eager leakers and collaborators within the national security agencies was gunning to destroy the presidency of a Republican president.

So nefarious is this cabal that not even Bush’s own sterling establishment and deep state credentials—including Yale, Skull and Bones, and former directorship of the CIA—immunized him from their vendetta. Bush had committed the unforgivable sin of serving as Reagan’s vice president and supporting Reagan’s efforts to roll back Marxist regimes and guerrilla movements in Latin America.

Deep State Eats Its Own
When the deep state cross-breeds with the hard left, the deep state devours its own—unless their loyalty is to the hard left.

One of the speeches I wrote for President Bush during my time on the White House staff was for the annual dinner of Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor to the CIA. The president added some very strong, personal words to the draft I had prepared.

You can read the full text  here.

I never would have dared to draft language as forceful as the words the president added to the speech; such words never would have been cleared by the bureaucracy.

In President Bush’s own words: “…we will show no tolerance for those who leak secrets that protect our intelligence professionals’ lives. I was only out at Langley a short time. I want to relate something to you because few moments for me have been more painful than the occasion I had just before I became DCI, to meet with the son of Richard Welch, a CIA station chief who had been murdered by left-wing terrorists after his name and position had been disclosed to the press. What was I to say to this young man? Why has his father died? So that a reckless ideologue could sell more books, Philip Agee’s Counterspy having blown Richard Welch’s cover? I don’t care how long I live, I will never forgive Philip Agee and those like him who wantonly sacrifice the lives of intelligence officers who loyally serve their country.”

Reflect upon the phrase from the last sentence: “. . . and those like him.”

Those like Philip Agee and his publishers are, today, the CIA leakers and their friends at the Washington Postwho propagate their version of how the killing of Jamal Khashoggi came about. Their pretense of sorrow over Khashoggi’s death is phony and cynical. How many covers have they blown? Just imagine the “sources and methods” compromised, and the human beings whose names we’ll never know who will be tortured to death in the exquisite Middle Eastern fashion, because of these comfortable, criminal Langley leakers.

The enduring presence of Saudi Arabia near the center of U.S. national security concerns is another thread connecting the late President Bush with President Trump, and both of them with Franklin Roosevelt.

Bush was committed to the Saudi security relationship; it was a prime motive for America’s war to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, because without expulsion Saddam posed an imminent threat to invade Saudi Arabia. The relationship was built upon careful and constant communication, face to face, between Bush and the ostentatious Saudi Ambassador in Washington at the time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a cousin of today’s Crown Prince Mohammed. That is how one does business with Riyadh. It is not a government of civil servants.

A week before Bush’s speech in October 1991 to the OSS veterans, the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The morning after the OSS veterans’ dinner, Bush spoke to a gathering of the American Society for Public Administration.

He devoted great attention in the latter speech to the deformation of the Clarence Thomas hearings, through “outrageous” leaks of allegations of sexual misconduct, from “what should have been a confidential investigation into what many people who wrote me described as ‘a circus’ and ‘a travesty.’”

The president said, “The Senate should immediately appoint a special counsel to find out who leaked what and for what reasons . . . . Frankly, the American people just will not understand it if the Senate fails to bring the leaker or leakers to justice.”

That was 27 years ago. The grinning Senate Democrat who chaired the Clarence Thomas hearings, a man named Joe Biden, never brought the leakers to justice. Nor, for those with shorter memories, has justice caught up with leakers on Senator Dianne Feinstein’s team since a few months ago when they leaked confidential, uncorroborated accusations of sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh.

An Opportunity for Grace and Illumination
Among ordinary citizens, there’s a great continuum from the coalition that elected the Reagan-Bush ticket in 1980 to the Trump-Pence ticket in 2016. Millions and millions of the same people—Republicans, independents and conservative-leaning Democrats—voted for the winning presidential candidates in 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016.

There’s remarkable continuity of goals and tactics of the hard left-deep state alliance over the past three decades.

A critical difference today is the existence of the NeverTrump Republican faction. NeverTrump Republicans are few in number—insignificant at the ballot box. But they have outsized power and prestige in Washington, D.C.’s “permanent village.” Some Bushies, and most neoconservatives, are in the NeverTrump camp.

It’s evident that Bushies and MAGA people disdain one another. For true Bushies, this is something bred in the bone, but it is mostly a matter of manners. Neoconservative NeverTrumpers are power-hungry ideologues. They make extravagant displays of their supposed moral revulsion at Trump, without the decency and sincerity of the always-in-good-taste Bushies.

I don’t hold out much hope for the power-hungry ideologues to have a change of heart. But I do pray that the passing of George H.W. Bush might become a moment of grace and illumination for those Bushies who now oppose Trump.

It’s in the Bushies’ interest—not to mention the nation’s—that they overcome their heartburn about the indelicate New Yorker who currently occupies their genteel hero’s old Oval Office. They should put aside their differences with the Trump administration. They should recognize that the forces that sought to destroy Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh are the same, and their playbook is the same.

The deep state-hard left combination that aims to impeach Trump also was implacable in its efforts to impeach George H.W. Bush, and, for that matter, to impeach Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.

Those who revered George H.W. Bush, those who saw what was best in that good, patriotic public servant and statesman, have a chance now to honor his memory and complete some of his unfinished business. Would they like to vindicate Bush’s deeply felt outrage regarding the leakers who caused Richard Welch’s murder and tried to destroy Clarence Thomas? To do so they’ll need to make common cause with Donald Trump and the rambunctious MAGA movement.

The deep state/hard left cabal is getting uglier and more powerful by the day. Moderate-to-conservative America needs the brains, breeding, and decency of the Bushies for the upcoming confrontations.

Democrats spit on Trump's 'end the shutdown' olive branch

Last month, House speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that President Trump had to re-open the government before Democrats would engage in any negotiations over border security.  Subsequently, President Trump announced a three-week temporary end to the partial government shutdown that did not include funding for a border wall.  In doing so, he put country over politics and put the onus on the Democrats to negotiate in good faith.  Despite the president's good-faith effort to reach across the political aisle, congressional Democrats failed miserably, acted in bad faith, and seriously undermined their credibility.

When President Trump re-opened the government, Democrats had the opportunity to work in a bi-partisan manner so as to adequately fund (or at least negotiate) the president's border wall and border security.  Rather than doing so, "Senate Democrats introduced legislation on Monday to prevent President Trumpfrom using military and disaster relief funds to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall should he declare a national emergency," according to The Hill.  

In other words, not only did congressional Democrats fail to negotiate funding for the border (and border security), as Pelosi indicated, but they also blatantly (albeit poorly) attempted to circumvent the president's power under the National Emergency Act.  For example, Section 2808 "permits the Secretary of Defense to undertake military construction projects, and to authorize the Secretaries of the military departments to undertake military construction projects[.] ... [S]uch projects may be taken only within the total amount of funds that have been appropriated for military construction."  Moreover, in an L.A. Times article, Elizabeth Goitein, a scholar at the Brennan Center at NYU, stated:

[T]he federal law that applies to the Defense Department includes a special provision on "construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency."  It says that in the event of war or the "declaration by the president of a national emergency ... that requires use of the armed forces, the secretary of Defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects ... not otherwise authorized by law."

Therefore, assuming that this legislation fails, which is highly likely, Senate Democrats will probably resort to the courts to address this issue.  (There is also the question of whether the president's decision to declare a national emergency is a "political question," in which case the courts will not interfere.)  Regardless of whether they decide to involve the courts, it is outrageous and shameful that congressional Democrats' offer to negotiate was seemingly nothing more than a ruse to stymie the president by refusing to fund the wall and attempting to deprive him of his rights under the National Emergency Act.

Additionally, this outrageous piece of legislation and the bad-faith negotiation tactics utilized by some congressional Democrats have further eroded their credibility.  More importantly, they have bolstered people's doubts about whether Democrats truly want to work with the president (and Republicans) or whether their real goal is to oppose, attack, and defeat the president at all costs.

Chuck Schumer's recent remarks about the president and his State of the Union address perfectly exemplify this point.  According to The Hill, Schumer stated, "Knowing this president, he will then make some bold new promises and not even make an attempt to fulfill them."  "The man has so little integrity that a promise that he makes at the State of the Union means nothing the next morning."  Schumer made these critical and offensive remarks before he had even seen the president's speech.  Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to comment after reviewing the speech?

President Trump showed true leadership when he temporarily re-opened the government.  In doing so, he left congressional Democrats with two choices.  They can either agree to fund the wall or they can allow partisan politics, greed, and bad faith to dictate their behavior.  Sadly, it appears that congressional Democrats have chosen the latter path.  Time will tell what impact this will have on the country.  

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WARNING 🚨 The Final Showdown -Trump, Bush Family ,Nixon, And The Deep State

Trump, Nixon, and the Deep State

“ Is there a deep state in the United States?” asked George Beebe in a recent essay. Yes, the former chief of Russia analysis at CIA concluded, if the definition of “deep state” holds that elements of the national security apparatus possess “the capability, albeit not the legal authority, to abuse intelligence to alter the outcomes of national elections or distort public-policy debates.”

Curbing the power of this shadowy group, Beebe suggested, could be accomplished through robust congressional oversight. Yet, in the minds of most analysts inclined to afford the question any serious thought, the Deep State is usually considered immune to the incursions of oversight committees. The group’s members are thought to enjoy the same power over elected officials that blackjack dealers hold over casino visitors: The house always wins.

Does that Deep State exist?

A logical preliminary question, posed with the same zoological dispassion we would reserve for contemplation of any elusive species, such as the Loch Ness Monster, would first inquire whether such a beast has ever been documented to exist. After all, anyone affirming the existence, let alone the primacy, of the Deep State in Trump-era Washington would presumably concede the impossibility of such fearsome power amassing overnight, or in swift reaction to the ascendancy of a specific political actor deemed an intolerable threat. Would it be a creature solely of our time, the age of Big Data, or was there a Deep State before computers were widely used?

One elected official who could have been forgiven for believing as much was former President Richard Nixon. While the 37th president effectively admitted to David Frost that he obstructed justice in a Watergate coverup, the academic scholarship published since 1977 has documented in exhaustive detail how the critical wings of the Nixon White House, the National Security Council, the covert operations unit dubbed “the Plumbers,” and Nixon’s campaign arm, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, were all infiltrated by rival power centers in the capital and exploited for intelligence. The people burrowing in came from the military, the intelligence community, and the news media (reports that the Soviet Union also placed moles in the Nixon White House have not been confirmed).

Accordingly, no national election has so directly had its outcome “altered,” in Beebe’s genteel formulation, as the presidential contest of Nov. 7, 1972. The incumbent, Richard Nixon, appearing on the national ticket for the fifth time, a feat equaled only by Franklin Roosevelt, won reelection with a 49-state landslide, yet was forced to resign the presidency less than two years later and was spared criminal prosecution only by Proclamation 4311. Issued by successor Gerald R. Ford, that document pardoned Nixon for all crimes he “committed or may have committed” in the White House.

Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, never spoke explicitly of a Deep State. But he alluded to it once, in suitably cryptic terms. Reeling from his discovery that the Pentagon had spied on Nixon, and struggling to grasp the large role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate, Baker said: “There are elephants crashing around in the forest.”

* * *

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had been increasingly frustrated by strains with civilian superiors over the conduct of the Vietnam War, and these deepened as American military involvement increased. Because of these frustrations, the top military brass developed an apparatus to help them stay informed during President Lyndon Johnson’s secretive decision-making process.

The instrument the military men used was the JCS-NSC liaison office, housed in the Executive Office Building and run by a pair of admirals. The late Melvin Laird, the longtime Wisconsin representative selected by Nixon to run the Pentagon, told me in a 1997 interview that before becoming defense secretary in January 1969, he had observed the chiefs building what was, in literal terms, a covert intelligence capability against the White House.

“The Johnson administration had had such a problem there, and I knew about it,” Laird told me. “I don’t think [defense secretaries] Clark Clifford or [Robert] McNamara really realized it, but I knew what they were doing. … So early on, I said [to Nixon’s aides], ‘You better watch that very carefully.’”

The warning was well-founded. By December 1971, the White House Special Investigations Group, a covert unit called the "Plumbers" formed to plug leaks of classified material to the news media, had uncovered the activities of Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a stenographer and courier detailed to the JCS-NSC liaison office. After intensive polygraph examination, Radford admitted to having stolen some 5,000 classified documents in 1970-71 from White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his aides. He'd even rifled through Kissinger’s briefcase while he slept on his official airplane. Radford admitted having passed top-secret documents, via the liaison office, to Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer.

The “Moorer-Radford affair,” as scholars later dubbed it, ranks among the most serious constitutional crises of the Cold War. For 13 months in wartime, the nation’s top uniformed commanders presided over a spy ring targeting the commander in chief and his national security adviser. As I detailed in a 2002 article for The Atlantic, based on my access to previously unheard tapes of Nixon’s meetings and telephone calls at this critical juncture, the president wanted to prosecute Moorer for “espionage,” but was steered toward a quieter response by Attorney General John Mitchell.

The latter had been Nixon’s law partner and campaign manager in 1968, and was the president’s closest confidant in government. As attorney general, Mitchell became the face of “law and order” in Nixon’s America, a reviled figure among the drug lords, revolutionaries, and domestic terrorists of the late '60s. Along with his wife, Martha, best known for phoning reporters late at night when drunk, Mitchell received so many death threats that they became the first Cabinet couple to receive round-the-clock FBI protection.

J. Edgar Hoover, the aging FBI Director, who'd spent decades amassing blackmail against his bosses and others in official Washington, seized the opportunity to spy on the attorney general, who was his nominal boss. The FBI agents who drove the Mitchells around installed burglar alarms in their plush duplex in Watergate East, and otherwise ministered to their needs, and typed up every word the Mitchells uttered in their presence. These dispatches were forwarded up the chain to Hoover himself, who scrawled instructions and catty notes in the margins, capped with his trademark “H.” Such intimate surveillance of an attorney general, Nixon’s most trusted adviser, was unprecedented. I uncovered it when I used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the Mitchells’ FBI files, published for the first time in my 2008 biography of the attorney general.

The Central Intelligence Agency also trained its resources on the Nixon White House. By the time the Plumbers became operational in June 1971, and burglarizing the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, the agency had installed a longtime officer with a history in covert operations, E. Howard Hunt, on the team. Langley’s own NSC liaison, an officer named Rob Roy Ratliff, swore in a 1974 affidavit that Hunt, ostensibly retired from the CIA and working as a consultant in the White House, was regularly using secure couriers to send sealed pouches back to CIA Director Richard Helms, continuing right up until shortly before the Watergate arrests. Sources told investigative reporter Jim Hougan, author of Secret Agenda(1984), that the pouches contained sexual “gossip” about White House officials.

When the Watergate arrests occurred in the predawn hours of June 17, 1972, touching off the great scandal that would topple Nixon, among the Cubans in the break-in team fielded by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President was Eugenio Martinez. He was the only one of the Watergate burglars on the CIA payroll. For months, Martinez had been sending his case officer reports on the team’s activities; uniquely among the burglars, he carried on his person at the time of the arrests a key to the desk in the Democratic National Committee headquarters that was the true target of the ill-fated break-in. So highly prized an asset was the sinewy Bay of Pigs veteran that CIA’s top lawyer adamantly rebuffed a request from lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force by saying: “Under no circumstances would the Agency give up all records relating to the Agency’s relationship with Martinez.”

Nor was that all Langley did to keep tabs on Nixon. Secret Agenda reported that the agency was aggressively “lending” technicians to the Secret Service unit that managed the president’s taping system. One of the technicians told Hougan: “I don’t know what they were up to, but the fact of the matter is you had these guys from [CIA’s] Office of Security working in the White House under Secret Service cover.” Indeed, the CIA’s inspector general reported in 1975, after Nixon had resigned, that CIA agents had been placed in “intimate components of the Office of the President.”

The Joint Chiefs, the FBI, the CIA: There are few more powerful institutions in Washington; all three were systematically spying on the Nixon White House and campaign committee during the president’s first term. This, aside from sounding an awful lot like a Deep State, has not received the attention it deserves from historians, political scientists, and other students of Watergate and the modern presidency. The problem of subversion from within the FBI would grow with the predations of Mark Felt, the No. 2 FBI official whose leaks during Watergate to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post earned him the nickname “Deep Throat.”

Why would these institutions have wanted to spy on Nixon? Mitchell had a theory. As he told Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup (1991): “It was his [Nixon’s] personality and his mode of operation that did him in.”

The Joint Chiefs rebelled at the secrecy with which Nixon and Kissinger, even worse than LBJ and McNamara, excluded the Pentagon from war policymaking. At CIA, the formation of the Plumbers triggered a predictable response. For the nation’s premier spy agency to allow this new White House covert operations unit to operate unchecked, to stand by while the squad staged break-ins and surveillance operations on sensitive targets, would have violated all principles of bureaucratic behavior, and of the spy game in particular.

And for Hoover and the FBI, the chance to spy on the Mitchells was a simple target of opportunity.

* * *

Yet, there was more to Hoover’s decision than opportunism, and here, we find a striking similarity with the Trump era.

During the 1968 campaign, Nixon and Mitchell quietly used a diplomatic backchannel to encourage the South Vietnamese government to withhold concessions at the Paris peace talks then underway to end the Vietnam War. The Nixon campaign feared that the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, would benefit from a last-minute bombing halt or peace announcement by LBJ, and wanted to avert such developments by persuading Saigon that its interests would be better served under a Nixon presidency.

The conduit the Nixon campaign used was Anna Chennault, a glamorous member of the capital’s “China lobby” with contacts in Saigon. Her conversations with those contacts were swiftly detected under foreign surveillance maintained by the FBI and CIA. And from this episode, which scholars have called the “Chennault affair,” selected elements of the intelligence community, the Deep State of 1969, concluded that even by the loose norms of their profession, Nixon and Mitchell were men who needed to be watched.

Top officials of the Nixon campaign team told me decades later that Chennault was an over-the-transom type with little influence in Washington or Southeast Asia and that, in any event, the South Vietnamese government needed little prodding from Nixon and Mitchell to recognize that the Paris talks would disadvantage Saigon. But the men in power at the time viewed the matter differently.

McNamara told me he considered the Chennault affair a bona fide “October Surprise,” a crime: specifically, a violation of the Logan Act, which forbids private citizens from interfering with U.S. foreign policy.

While two years of investigation by the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller have yet to establish any evidence of active collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, allegations of such machinations circulated widely during the 2016 election season and undeniably produced, within some precincts of the intelligence community, a deep and irremediable mistrust of the man who would become the next president. The evidence of this is preserved in, among other places, the 10,000 text messages exchanged between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, thick with contempt for the brash New York billionaire and alluding to an “insurance policy” in the event that he somehow won the election.

It is now clear that there was at least sloppiness and, more likely, abuse of process in the FBI's application to the FISA court to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a low-level conduit into communications by the Trump election campaign. This is confirmed not simply by the memo prepared by Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but also unintentionally by the panel's senior Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, in his would-be rebuttal. It was additionally underscored by a letter written by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham suggesting a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele, author of the Trump-Russia dossier.

The FBI did not tell the court that the dossier was a piece of opposition research for Hillary Clinton's campaign against Trump, emphasized Steele's reliability even though the bureau had already fired him for lying, and had failed to interview Page about his Russia connections even though he had proved a reliable FBI witness three years earlier.

It is not certain that this is hostile action by the Deep State against Trump, but it smells like it, and nothing that has yet become public makes it clear that such a suspicion is baseless. And, of course, we know that the Deep State has been around working covertly in the political arena for half a century.

The mere existence of a special counsel provides another similarity with the Watergate era, of course, but it doesn’t end there. The expulsion of Strzok from the Mueller team, once his texts were discovered, hardly dispelled fears of anti-Trump bias within the Office of the Special Counsel. Andrew Weissman, a top Justice Department prosecutor under Mueller, was revealed to have sent an email praising a fellow DOJ official for refusing to implement President Trump’s travel ban. In the political donations made by Mueller’s staff lawyers, federal filings show, more than $62,000 went to Democrats, only $2,750 to Republicans.

Nixon would have understood. Seven of the top eight lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force had served under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. In the early 2000s, again using FOIA, I became the first researcher to mine the WSPF's 10,000-page archive: 10,000 pages in all. And while those papers did not contain the kind of sophomoric invective for the incumbent that would later characterize the Strzok/Page texts, the WSPF archive captured the prejudicial bias the Watergate special prosecutors harbored toward their prey.

Time and again, with the same casualness and IBM-Selectric font that the Watergate conspirators used in their own incriminating memos, the WSPF staff lawyers could be seen scheming to withhold material exculpatory to the Watergate defendants, falsifying evidence against them, and deceiving their jurors at trial. In 2015, Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon White House attorney, published The Real Watergate Conspiracy (2015). The book featured previously unpublished memoranda that chronicled, in real time, a series of flagrantly illegal ex parte meetings held by the presiding judge in the Watergate trials, John J. Sirica, with WSPF lawyers. Shepard’s archival discoveries led even liberal law professors to express concern for due process in the treatment of Nixon and his men.

* * *

The notion that presidents can find themselves isolated, not only from the public and the press, but from large and important segments of their own bureaucracies, including the Pentagon and the intelligence community, remained a concern long after the Nixon era.

In November 1995, then-Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, made a shocking disclosure that is all but forgotten today. “From 1986 to 1994,” the New York Times reported, “the Central Intelligence Agency passed on to presidents and Pentagon officials a total of ninety-five reports from foreign agents whom it knew or strongly suspected were controlled by Moscow. ... In no case were Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush or President-elect Clinton warned that the information came from known or suspected Soviet double agents. ... Even when the agency was all but certain that the source was a double agent, it kept passing on the reports without warning.” The Chicago Tribune headline read: WHITE HOUSE FED FLAWED DATA BY CIA.

In 2005, while covering the George W. Bush White House for Fox News and working on my Watergate book, I told a top presidential aide, who is still influential in politics today, about my research on the Moorer-Radford affair, confiding my astonishment that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had systematically spied on the president and his national security adviser in wartime. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the official muttered, “if the same thing were happening now.”

As Trump surveys the political landscape of 2018, he too can be forgiven for imagining that the Deep State, or something like it, exists. Like Richard Nixon, our 45th president took the oath of office keenly aware that influential figures in the military and intelligence communities deeply distrusted him as an accused colluder with a foreign power, as someone who was not “one of us,” and as a man many said was psychologically unfit for the presidency, whatever voters thought. Both saw their inaugurations marred by rioting. Both would stand eternally accused, whatever the evidence, of capturing the presidency through collusion with a foreign power, and thus be stripped, by media elites that despised them, of all legitimacy. And like Nixon, Trump has been subjected, from the inception of his presidency, to unprecedented leaks of classified material to those elites.

In all this, with the various Russia investigations still unresolved, their ultimate discoveries and outcomes unknown, Trump would do well to internalize the central lesson of Watergate, and perhaps thereby avoid some of the many self-inflicted wounds that Nixon committed during his own death throes against entrenched forces. This lesson Nixon articulated in the final minutes of his presidency, in the maudlin and meandering farewell address he delivered to the White House staff in the East Room on Aug. 9, 1974, shortly before boarding the helicopter that whisked him away from power.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

18 Huge Numbers Show That The US Economy Is Starting To Fall Apart Very Rapidly

Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Here are several of the latest examples…Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically.  Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that.  But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing.  But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there.  The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly…

#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.

#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December.

#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores.

#4 Victoria’s Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores.

#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years.

#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores.

#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online.

#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to “millions of dollars in severance pay”.

#9 The Baltic Dry Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.

#10 This is the worst slump for core U.S. factory orders in three years.

#11 We just witnessed the largest decline in the Philly Fed Business Index in more than 7 years.

#12 In January, sales of existing homes fell 8.9 percent from a year earlier.  That was the third month in a row that we have seen a decline of at least 8 percent.  This is an absolutely catastrophic trend for the real estate industry.

#13 U.S. housing starts were down 11.2 percent in December compared to the previous month.

#14 Compared to a year earlier, home sales in southern California were down 17 percent in January.

#15 In December, home sales in Sacramento County fell a whopping 22.5 percent compared to a year earlier.

#16 Pending home sales in the United States have now fallen on a year over year basis for 13 months in a row.

#17 More than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is now “seriously delinquent”.  That is an all-time record.

#18 More than 7 million Americans are behind on their auto loan payments.  That is also a new all-time record, and it is far higher than anything that we witnessed during the last recession.

It appears that “the recovery” has finally come to an end.  After seeing all of those numbers, there is no way that anyone can possibly claim that economic conditions are “getting better”.

And even though the official government numbers are highly manipulated, we never even had one “boom year” throughout the entire “recovery”.

The final numbers for 2018 are now in, and last year was the 13th year in a rowwhen U.S. GDP growth was below 3 percent.

The last time we had a “boom year” when economic growth was above 3 percent was all the way back in 2005.  That was in the middle of the Bush administration.

We have never seen a bad streak like this before in modern American history.  The following comes from CNS News…

But prior to the current 13-year period when real GDP has failed to grow by 3.0 percent in any year, there has been no stretch (in the years since 1930) when the United States went as long as five straight years with real GDP failing to grow by at least 3 percent.

Even though the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system over the last decade, and even though we added nearly 12 trillion dollars to the national debt, the best that the authorities have been able to do is to stabilize the system for a while.  Now it is starting to sputter once again, and many believe that the next crisis will be far worse than the last one.

By contrast, the Great Depression of the 1930s featured some really bad years, but following those bad years the U.S. experienced a tremendous economic boom…

By contrast, after the stock market crash in 1929, the United States saw four years of negative annual GDP—1930 (-8.5), 1931 (-6.4), 1932 (-12.9) and 1933 (-1.2). But then in the nine full years from 1934 through 1942, real GDP grew by an average of 9.75 percent.

We should have had some boom years too, but we didn’t, and now things are going to get bad again.

The Democrats are going to blame the Republicans and the Republicans are going to blame the Democrats, but all of that arguing isn’t going to solve anything.

What is coming next has been a central focus of my work for a very long time.  The last recession was very painful, but it did not fundamentally alter life in America.

This next crisis will.

The “Everything Bubble” is bursting, the “Perfect Storm” is coming, and all of our lives will never be the same again.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope.  In fact, once things really start getting crazy hope is going to be one of the major themes in my work because people are really going to need it.

There will be great challenges, and life will be very different, but that doesn’t mean that life is over.

America is about to experience the consequences of decades of exceedingly foolish decisions, and the pain will be extreme.  But difficult times also offer an opportunity for dramatic change, and that is something that we will need to embrace.

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