monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

So what are we left with? A claim that Russia hacked the DNC, based heavily on an organization whose credibility is now being called into question.

Nunes told Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake that his source was an intelligence official and not a White House staffer.

..how does he get onto White House grounds unless someone from the White House lets him in?

MSNBC host Katy Tur outrageously suggested that simply reporting on the story was helping Russia “undermine our democratic institutions.”

Donald Trump campaigned for president as the ultimate outsider, promising to unseat a corrupt and atrophied Washington establishment. Now, after two months in office, has he become the establishment? Are Trump and his team the insiders now?

One thing the recent collapse of healthcare reform efforts in the House of Representatives has revealed is just how quickly attitudes and alliances can shift in Washington, DC.

Last year Mr Trump and members of the House Freedom Caucus, a collection of 30 or so libertarian-leaning fiscal conservatives in Congress, were singing from the same anti-government hymnal.

Now, however, Mr Trump is the government - and he teamed up with congressional leadership to back a healthcare bill that conservative hard-lines believe didn't go far enough in undoing the 2009 Democratic-designed system.

The effort's failure set off back-and-forth sniping between Mr Trump and the Freedom Caucus that morphed into a classic insider-outsider faceoff, with Mr Trump cast as the new voice of the powers that be.

Congressman Justin Amash said the White House has become part of the hated status quo - the "Trumpstablishment", he called it in a Saturday tweet.
That line drew the ire of Mr Trump's director of social media, Dan Scavino Jr, who tweeted that Mr Amash was a "big liability" and encouraged Michigan voters to unseat him in next year's Republican primary. (The tweet has since been criticised as a possible violation of a federal law preventing executive branch officials from attempting to influence election campaigns.)

If Mr Trump's conservative critics are trying to make the case that the president has become the establishment he campaigned against, their arguments have been buttressed by the financial disclosure documents released by the White House on Friday evening, which revealed exactly how well-heeled and connected many of the top White House staff are. According to the Washington Post, 27 members of Mr Trump's team have combined assets exceeding $2.3bn (£1.84bn).

Presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner - both unpaid presidential advisers - are worth roughly $740m.

Senior White House strategist Steve Bannon earned as much as $2.3 million in 2017. Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who is one of Mr Trump's top economics advisers, has a net worth approaching $611m.

The New York Times points out that many in the inner circle of the putatively anti-establishment Mr Trump drew significant sums from the network of big-money political donors, think tanks and associated political action committees that populate the Washington insider firmament.

"The figures reveal the extent to which private political work has bolstered the financial fortunes of Trump aides, who have made millions of dollars from Republican and other conservative causes in recent years," the paper reported.

Already there are signs that conservative true-believers - some of whom were never fully sold on Mr Trump to begin with - are questioning Mr Trump's anti-establishment bona fides.

"That's the dirty little secret," writes conservative columnist Ben Shapiro. "Trump isn't anti-establishment; he's pro-establishment so long as he's the establishment."

Even conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, an early Trump supporter, is having some doubts.
"I think it is really, really unhelpful to Donald Trump's ultimate agenda to slam the very people who are going to be propping up his border wall, all the things he wants to do on immigration, on trade," she said on Fox News."I don't know where he thinks he's going to get his friends on those issues."

Perhaps of greatest concern to Mr Trump is that the failure to enact promised healthcare reform, along with his recent feud with members of his own party, have been accompanied by a softening of his core support in recent polls.

In a Rasmussen survey, the number of Americans who "strongly approve" of the president has dropped from 44% at shortly after his inauguration to 28% today. While the Republican base is largely sticking with Mr Trump so far, they may be starting to have some doubts.

For much of 2016 Donald Trump was the barbarian at the gate, threatening to rain fire on the comfortable Washington power elite. Even in his January inaugural address, he condemned an establishment that "protected itself" at the cost of average Americans.

"Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land," he said.

Now, however, Mr Trump and his team of formerly angry outsiders meet in the Oval Office. They fly on Air Force One. They host events in the White House rose garden. They issue tweets warning apostates of harsh political consequences.

They walk the halls of power and call the shots.

It doesn't get any more "insider" than that.

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.

The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.

Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

The Dem-shilling media is getting a little push back.

In pushing its Manchurian-candidate-Trump narrative, the media fail to mention the much deeper ties of Democratic lobbyists to Russia. Don’t worry, the media seems to say: Even though they are representing Russia, the lobbyists are good upstanding citizens, not like the Trump people. They can be trusted with such delicate matters.

CNN reported that Rice accusation is false.
Apr 3, 10pm

Two years before joining the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser, New York business consultant Carter Page was targeted for recruitment as an intelligence source by Russian spies promising favors for business opportunities in Russia, according to a sealed FBI complaint.

According to the document, the FBI interviewed Page as part of the investigation stemming from the indictment of three Russian men identified as agents of the Russian overseas intelligence agency, the SVR. One of them, Evgeny Buryakov, was operating undercover as an executive in the New York office of a Russian development bank.

During the interview, Page described how he and the man identified as a Russian recruiter, Victor Podobnyy, met periodically and exchanged emails about the energy industry, but nothing in the court document suggests that Page shared any sensitive information with Podobnyy.

A Monday Bloomberg report alleging that a former top Obama administration official requested the unmasking of U.S. persons tied to the Trump campaign who were swept up in foreign surveillance is not the “smoking gun” that the President’s backers are making it out to be.

According to surveillance and national security experts, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice would be within her rights to make such requests if she was trying to determine the extent of Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

“Part of her job as national security adviser is to pay attention to what foreign governments are doing,” Rebecca Lonergan, a former federal prosecutor who handled foreign surveillance cases, told TPM. “If she’s asking for specific names to be unmasked in order to understand what Russia may be doing to influence the U.S. political system and influence our elections, presumably in a way they thought would benefit them, she’s doing her job.”

Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst, noted on Twitter that it was not “odd or wrong” for the national security adviser to read “a report of foreign officials discussing US persons coming into” the White House. And Susan Hennessey, a fellow in national security governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote of the Bloomberg article that “nothing in this story indicates anything improper whatsoever.”

Reading the accumulated sexual harassment accusations against Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and former network executive Roger Ailes is like a quick dip in a sewage treatment pond. After even a brief exposure, the stench stays with you for days.

If the accusations of dozens of women over two decades are correct — and it is hard to dismiss the women, as the accused have done, as unbalanced, dishonest or disgruntled — then Fox News is the focus of hypocrisy in the modern world. While preaching traditional values, it has operated, according to former Fox anchor Andrea Tantaros, “like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny.”

A recent New York Times story detailing $13 million in payouts to women accusing O’Reilly of harassment depicts a corporate atmosphere of predation and enablement. Stories on Ailes present a similar (and even worse) picture of women treated as sex objects and employment benefits.

All this could be a grand, elaborate calumny. But the culture described by the women rings true. A culture in which powerful, older men exploit, sully and destroy the hopes and ambitions of young women for the benefit of their own appetites. Then, over cigars and whiskey, they say things like: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the p---y. You can do anything.” This statement made by Donald Trump describes not the pleasures of the flesh, but the pleasures of the bully. Not just ridiculous-looking lechery, but genuine cruelty.

Quote:

A Monday Bloomberg report alleging that a former top Obama administration official requested the unmasking of U.S. persons tied to the Trump campaign who were swept up in foreign surveillance is not the “smoking gun” that the President’s backers are making it out to be.

According to surveillance and national security experts, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice would be within her rights to make such requests if she was trying to determine the extent of Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

“Part of her job as national security adviser is to pay attention to what foreign governments are doing,” Rebecca Lonergan, a former federal prosecutor who handled foreign surveillance cases, told TPM. “If she’s asking for specific names to be unmasked in order to understand what Russia may be doing to influence the U.S. political system and influence our elections, presumably in a way they thought would benefit them, she’s doing her job.”

Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst, noted on Twitter that it was not “odd or wrong” for the national security adviser to read “a report of foreign officials discussing US persons coming into” the White House. And Susan Hennessey, a fellow in national security governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote of the Bloomberg article that “nothing in this story indicates anything improper whatsoever.”

TPM

That MIGHT be all well and good, but sources that have seen the raw intell where she unmasked the names say it had NOTHING to do with Russia.

i can see all this being vieed from polar extremes. I there any truth to anyones stance??
I know what the donut eaters will say. How bout ye of the cheesafiliacs

"Five Held in Plot to Bug Democratic Offices Here," said the headline at the bottom of page one in the Washington Post on Sunday, June 18, 1972. The story reported that a team of burglars had been arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington.

So began the chain of events that would convulse Washington for two years, lead to the first resignation of a U.S. president and change American politics forever.

The story intrigued two young reporters on The Post's staff, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who were called in to work on the story. As Woodward's notes show, he learned from police sources that the men came from Miami, wore surgical gloves and carried thousands of dollars in cash. It was, said one source, "a professional type operation."

it appears they [Page and the later convicted Russian spies] spoke in much the way business executives seeking opportunities do – with Page touting his work ties to the Russian energy firm Gazprom. The Russians were heard laughing, saying Page had no idea they were government agents.

The FBI said “Male-1” [Carter Page] provided the Russians his “outlook on the current and future of the energy industry” and “also provided documents … about the energy business.”

Early in his campaign for president, Trump identified Page as one of his top foreign policy advisers during a Washington Post editorial board meeting. At the time, Page had almost no public profile in Washington foreign policy circles. In September, he emerged as a key figure in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections when questions began to circulate about a speech he gave at a prominent Moscow university over the summer. Page was also named in the now infamous dossier prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele hired to conduct opposition research on Trump. The dossier alleged that Page used the speech as cover to meet with senior Kremlin officials on Trump’s behalf, a claim that Page has denied.