December 18, 2016
Exclusive: As the Electoral
College assembles, U.S. intelligence agencies are stepping up a campaign to
delegitimize Donald Trump as a Russian stooge, raising concerns about a spy
coup in America, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
As Official Washington’s
latest “group think” solidifies into certainty – that Russia used hacked
Democratic emails to help elect Donald Trump – something entirely different may
be afoot: a months-long effort by elements of the U.S. intelligence community
to determine who becomes the next president.
I was told by a well-placed intelligence
source some months ago that senior leaders of the Obama administration’s
intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the FBI – were deeply concerned about
either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ascending to the presidency. And, it’s
true that intelligence officials often come to see themselves as the stewards
of America’s fundamental interests, sometimes needing to protect the country
from dangerous passions of the public or from inept or corrupt political
leaders.
It was, after all, a senior
FBI official, Mark Felt, who – as “Deep Throat” – guided The Washington Post’s
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Watergate investigation into the
criminality of President Richard Nixon. And, I was told by former U.S.
intelligence officers that they wanted to block President Jimmy Carter’s
reelection in 1980 because they viewed him as ineffectual and thus not
protecting American global interests.
It’s also true that
intelligence community sources frequently plant stories in major mainstream
publications that serve propaganda or political goals, including stories that
can be misleading or entirely false.
What’s Going On?
So, what to make of what we
have seen over the past several months when there have been a series of leaks
and investigations that have damaged both Clinton and Trump — with some major
disclosures coming, overtly and covertly, from the U.S. intelligence community
led by CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey?
Some sources of damaging
disclosures remain mysterious. Clinton’s campaign was hobbled by leaked
emails from the Democratic National Committee – showing it undercutting
Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders – and from her campaign chairman
John Podesta – exposing the content of her speeches to Wall Street banks that
she had tried to hide from the voters and revealing the Clinton Foundation’s
questionable contacts with foreign governments.
Clinton – already burdened
with a reputation for secrecy and dishonesty – suffered from the drip, drip,
drip of releases from WikiLeaks of the DNC and Podesta emails although it
remains unclear who gave the emails to WikiLeaks. Still, the combination of the
two email batches added to public suspicions about Clinton and reminded people
why they didn’t trust her.
But the most crippling blow to
Clinton came from FBI Director Comey in the last week of the campaign when he
reopened and then re-closed the investigation into whether she broke the law
with her sloppy handling of classified material in her State Department emails
funneled through a home server.
Following Comey’s last-minute
revival of the Clinton email controversy, her poll numbers fell far enough to
enable Trump to grab three normally Democratic states – Pennsylvania, Michigan
and Wisconsin – enough to give him a victory in the Electoral College.
Taking Down Trump
However, over the past few
weeks, the U.S. intelligence community, led by CIA Director Brennan and
seconded by FBI Director Comey, has tried to delegitimize Trump by using leaks
to the mainstream U.S. news media to pin the release of the DNC and Podesta
emails on Russia and claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin was
personally trying to put Trump into the White House.
This remarkable series of
assessments from the CIA – now endorsed by the leadership of the FBI – come on
the eve of the Electoral College members assembling to cast their formal votes
to determine who becomes the new U.S. president. Although the Electoral College
process is usually simply a formality, the Russian-hacking claims made by the
U.S. intelligence community have raised the possibility that enough electors
might withhold their votes from Trump to deny him the presidency.
If on Monday enough Trump
electors decide to cast their votes for someone else – possibly another
Republican – the presidential selection could go to the House of
Representatives where, conceivably, the Republican-controlled chamber could
choose someone other than Trump.
In other words, there is an
arguable scenario in which the U.S. intelligence community first undercut
Clinton and, secondly, Trump, seeking — however unlikely — to get someone
installed in the White House considered more suitable to the CIA’s and the
FBI’s views of what’s good for the country.
Who Did the Leaking?
At the center of this
controversy is the question of who leaked or hacked the DNC and Podesta emails.
The CIA has planted the story in The Washington Post, The New York Times and
other mainstream outlets that it was Russia that hacked both the DNC and
Podesta emails and slipped the material to WikiLeaks with the goal of assisting
the Trump campaign. The suggestion is that Trump is Putin’s “puppet,” just as
Hillary Clinton alleged during the third presidential debate.
But WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange has publicly denied that Russia was the source of the leaks and one of
his associates, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, has
suggested that the DNC leak came from a “disgruntled” Democrat upset with the
DNC’s sandbagging of the Sanders campaign and that the Podesta leak came from
the U.S. intelligence community.
Although Assange recently has
sought to muzzle Murray’s public comments – out of apparent concern for
protecting the identity of sources – Murray offered possibly his most expansive
account of the sourcing during a
podcast interview with Scott Horton on Dec. 13.
Murray, who became a
whistleblower himself when he protested Britain’s tolerance of human rights
abuses in Uzbekistan, explained that he consults with Assange and cooperates
with WikiLeaks “without being a formal member of the structure.”
But he appears to have
undertaken a mission for WikiLeaks to contact one of the sources (or a
representative) during a Sept. 25 visit to Washington where he says he met with
a person in a wooded area of American University. At the time, Murray was at
American University participating in an awards ceremony for former CIA officer
John Kiriakou who was being honored by a group of former Western intelligence
officials, the Sam Adams Associates, named for the late Vietnam War-era CIA
analyst and whistleblower Sam Adams.
Former CIA analyst Ray
McGovern, a founder of the Sam Adams group, told me that Murray was “m-c-ing”
the event but then slipped away, skipping a reception that followed the award
ceremony.
Reading Between LInes
Though Murray has declined to
say exactly what the meeting in the woods was about, he may have been passing
along messages about ways to protect the source from possible retaliation,
maybe even an extraction plan if the source was in some legal or physical
danger.
Murray has disputed a report
in London’s Daily Mail that he was receiving a batch of the leaked Democratic
emails. “The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got
there in September,” Murray said in the interview with Scott Horton. “I had a
small role to play.”
Murray also suggested that the
DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them
the Russian government.
“The Podesta emails and the
DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn’t conclude that
they both have the same source,” Murray said. “In both cases we’re talking of a
leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that
information out had legal access to that information.”
Reading between the lines of
the interview, one could interpret Murray’s comments as suggesting that the DNC
leak came from a Democratic source and that the Podesta leak came from someone
inside the U.S. intelligence community, which may have been monitoring John
Podesta’s emails because the Podesta Group, which he founded with his brother
Tony, served as a registered “foreign agent” for Saudi Arabia.
“John Podesta was a paid
lobbyist for the Saudi government,” Murray noted. “If the American security
services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government’s paid
lobbyist in Washington, then the American security services would not be doing
their job. … His communications are going to be of interest to a great number
of other security services as well.”
Leak by Americans
Scott Horton then asked, “Is
it fair to say that you’re saying that the Podesta leak came from inside the
intelligence services, NSA [the electronic spying National Security Agency] or
another agency?”
“I think what I said was
certainly compatible with that kind of interpretation, yeah,” Murray responded.
“In both cases they are leaks by Americans.”
In reference to the leak of
the DNC emails, Murray noted that “Julian Assange took very close interest in
the death of Seth Rich, the Democratic staff member” who had worked for the DNC
on voter databases and was shot and killed on July 10 near his Washington,
D.C., home.
Murray continued, “WikiLeaks
offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of his killers.
So, obviously there are suspicions there about what’s happening and things are
somewhat murky. I’m not saying – don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that he
was the source of the [DNC] leaks. What I’m saying is that it’s probably not an
unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believes that he may have been killed
by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks … whether correctly or
incorrectly.”
Though acknowledging that such
killings can become grist for conspiracy buffs, Murray added: “But people do
die over this sort of stuff. There were billions of dollars – literally
billions of dollars – behind Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and those
people have lost their money.
“You have also to remember
that there’s a big financial interest – particularly in the armaments industry
– in a bad American relationship with Russia and the worse the relationship
with Russia is the larger contracts the armaments industry can expect
especially in the most high-tech high-profit side of fighter jets and missiles
and that kind of thing.
“And Trump has actually
already indicated he’s looking to make savings on the defense budget
particularly in things like fighter [jet] projects. So, there are people
standing to lose billions of dollars and anybody who thinks in that situation
bad things don’t happen to people is very naïve.”
An Intelligence Coup?
There’s another possibility in
play here: that the U.S. intelligence community is felling a number of birds
with one stone. If indeed U.S. intelligence bigwigs deemed both Clinton and
Trump unfit to serve as President – albeit for different reasons – they could
have become involved in leaking at least the Podesta emails to weaken Clinton’s
campaign, setting the candidate up for the more severe blow from FBI Director
Comey in the last week of the campaign.
Then, by blaming the leaks on
Russian President Putin, the U.S. intelligence leadership could set the stage
for Trump’s defeat in the Electoral College, opening the door to the elevation
of a more traditional Republican. However, even if that unlikely event –
defeating Trump in the Electoral College – proves impossible, Trump would at
least be weakened as he enters the White House and thus might not be able to
move very aggressively toward a détente with Russia.
Further, the Russia-bashing
that is all the rage in the mainstream U.S. media will surely encourage the
Congress to escalate the New Cold War, regardless of Trump’s desires, and thus
ensure plenty more money for both the intelligence agencies and the military
contractors.
Official Washington’s “group
think” holding Russia responsible for the Clinton leaks does draw some logical
support from the near certainty that Russian intelligence has sought to
penetrate information sources around both Clinton and Trump. But the gap
between the likely Russian hacking efforts and the question of who gave the
email information to WikiLeaks is where mainstream assumptions may fall down.
As ex-Ambassador Murray has
said, U.S. intelligence was almost surely keeping tabs on Podesta’s
communications because of his ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign
governments. So, the U.S. intelligence community represents another suspect in
the case of who leaked those emails to WikiLeaks. It would be a smart
play, reminiscent of the convoluted spy tales of John LeCarré, if U.S.
intelligence officials sought to cover their own tracks by shifting suspicions
onto the Russians.
But just the suspicion of the
CIA joining the FBI and possibly other U.S. intelligence agencies to intervene
in the American people’s choice of a president would cause President Harry
Truman, who launched the CIA with prohibitions against it engaging in domestic
activities, and Sen. Frank Church, who investigated the CIA’s abuses, to spin
in their graves.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
