Секреты особой важности

[tijd]

Хотелось бы уже перестать писать про бывшего президента, но новости не отпускают.

Скандал с ворованными документами, обнаруженными в Маролаго во время обыска ФБР, и обнародованное (с купюрами) обоснование для обыска привело многих комментаторов к убеждению, что Дональду Трампу будут в конце концов выдвинуты уголовные обвинения.

Sorry, @Redistrict, but I am stealing the line.

I have seen enough, folks. Donald Trump will be indicted in the classified documents matter. I'm placing my marker.
- Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) August 26, 2022

Известный адвокат Брэдли Мосс, "the most active national security lawyer on Twitter", пишет по пунктам:

"I believe Trump will actually be indicted for a criminal offense. Even with all its redactions, the probable cause affidavit published today by the magistrate judge in Florida makes clear to me three essential points:
(1) Trump was in unauthorized possession of national defense information, namely properly marked classified documents.
(2) He was put on notice by the U.S. Government that he was not permitted to retain those documents at Mar-a-Lago.
(3) He continued to maintain possession of the documents (and allegedly undertook efforts to conceal them in different places throughout the property) up until the FBI finally executed a search warrant earlier this month.
That is the ball game, folks. Absent some unforeseen change in factual or legal circumstances, I believe there is little left for the Justice Department to do but decide whether to wait until after the midterms to formally seek the indictment from the grand jury."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-over-trump-will-be-indicted/



С ним в целом согласен прославленный прокурор (ныне профессор NYU Law) Эндрю Вaйсман:

"That debate is a sideshow. The key questions that remain include what precisely is the full scope of what Mr. Trump took from the White House, why he took the documents and did not return them all and what he was doing with them all this time.
The redacted affidavit does not answer those questions, and the usually loquacious Mr. Trump has not addressed them. But we do now know that the Justice Department is one step closer to being able to hold Mr. Trump to account for his actions, if it so chooses.
Under Mr. Garland’s leadership, only the facts, law and precedent will matter. Mr. Trump’s penchant for hyperbole and spin to his base will be ineffective in a forum where the rule of law governs."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/opinion/redacted-affidavit-trump.html

Never great to see your unredacted name in a search warrant affidavit.

To borrow from Eric Hirschman, “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you're ever getting in your life. Get a great F'ing criminal defense lawyer - you’re going to need it.” pic.twitter.com/n9jU44E2nW
- Peter Strzok (@petestrzok) August 26, 2022

Какие именно документы Трамп прихватил с собой из Белого дома, остается загадкой, ответа на которую мы, возможно, никогда не узнаем. На связь этих документов с Рашагейтом указывает вовлеченность старого знакомого Кашьяпа Патела. Имя Патела появляется в заявке на обыск без купюр, что может указывать на его роль в качестве сообщника и объекта расследования.



Со времени выборов Пател успел выпустить кринжевую книжку для детей "The Plot Against the King". То, что в Америке нет королей кроме жуликов, его мало смутило.

The fiction-cum-fact narrative revolves around a nefarious plot by “Queenton” and her “shifty knights” to embroil King Donald in dubious propaganda to defame him in the eyes of the general public. Queenton alleges that King Donald was colluding with the “Russionians” in order to gain access to the White House. Patel appears as a “wizard” in the book, attempting to prove King Donald was wrongfully accused. In fairytale speak, the book claims that the disproved dossier on King Donald and the “Russionians” - gathered in real-life situations by former MI-5 officer Christopher Steele - sparked the American intelligence investigation into Russian election interference in 2016. The dossier was “written” by Hillary Queenton and “put in a steel box,” according to the book.
https://theconservativenut.com/how-to-read-the-plot-against-the-king-book-by-kash-patel/



Он также обещал обнародовать документы о расследовании Рашагейта, которые, по уверениям Патела, Трамп рассекретил личным распоряжением.

In the June 21, 2022 interview covered by ABC News, Patel spoke about using his official status as Trump’s representative to the National Archives to obtain and release the documents. He said, “Now that I am now officially a representative for Donald Trump at the National Archives, I’m going to march down there - I’ve never told anyone this, because it just happened, and I’m going to identify every single document that they blocked from being declassified at the National Archives and we are going to start putting that information out next week.” It is notable that Patel promised to start putting out the information, even though his interviews were replete with references to the National Archives opposing such a move.
In a July 4 interview for another far-right media show, Patel referred to pressing the National Archives for documents on the Russia investigation to “be released because they are already declassified.” Referring to the Russia investigation, he said “the American public has only seen sixty percent of what we’ve been able to see;” “Why won’t they release the other forty percent? … So I am going to continue that work at the National Archives, I apologize I can’t get it declassified overnight, but I’m on it.” At varying points in the interview, Patel appeared to maintain the line that the information was already declassified and at other times admit it was not.
https://www.justsecurity.org/82723/trump-associates-stated-plan-to-publicly-release-declassified-documents/



Среди секретных документов могли быть и сведения об осведомителях американской разведки в Кремле - в частности тех, от кого стало известно о личном приказе Путина атаковать американские выборы 2016. Но тут можно только гадать.

Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.
“HCS information is tightly controlled because disclosure could jeopardize the life of the human source,” said John B. Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration. “It would be reckless to declassify an HCS document without checking with the agency that collected the information to ensure that there would be no damage if the information were disclosed.”
C.I.A. espionage operations inside numerous hostile countries have been compromised in recent years when the governments of those countries have arrested, jailed and even killed the agency’s sources.
Last year, a top-secret memo sent to every C.I.A. station around the world warned about troubling numbers of informants being captured or killed, a stark reminder of how important human source networks are to the basic functions of the spy agency. <...>
Even a single source, if well placed, can be of amazing importance to the spy agency. When one informant, critical to the intelligence assessment that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump, had to be extracted and resettled in Virginia, the C.I.A. was, for a time, left somewhat in the dark about senior levels of Kremlin decision-making.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/us/politics/trump-affidavit-intelligence-spies.html

Exclusive: In October 2021, the U.S. obtained “extraordinary detail” about the Kremlin’s secret plans for a war in Ukraine.

President Biden pressed his advisers. Did they really think that this time Putin would strike?
Yes, they affirmed. This is real. https://t.co/bDCuxXQ8DW
- The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 16, 2022

Если Путин считал, что (с помощью Трампа или без) избавился от "кротов ЦРУ" в своем окружении к началу агрессии в Украине, то жестоко ошибался. Американская разведка его переиграла - ей было известно в деталях о планах вторжения. Эта информация помешала подготовить повод для вторжения. Она также помогла украинцам уничтожить российский десант, предназначенный для штурма Киева, сразу после его приземления.

Об этом рассказывается в подробном расследовании Washington Post:

The U.S. intelligence community had penetrated multiple points of Russia’s political leadership, spying apparatus and military, from senior levels to the front lines, according to U.S. officials.
Much more radical than Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and instigation of a separatist movement in eastern Ukraine, Putin’s war plans envisioned a takeover of most of the country. <...>
According to the intelligence, the Russians would come from the north, on either side of Kyiv. One force would move east of the capital through the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, while the other would flank Kyiv on the west, pushing southward from Belarus through a natural gap between the “exclusion zone” at the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant and surrounding marshland. The attack would happen in the winter so that the hard earth would make the terrain easily passable for tanks. Forming a pincer around the capital, Russian troops planned to seize Kyiv in three to four days. The Spetsnaz, their special forces, would find and remove President Volodymyr Zelensky, killing him if necessary, and install a Kremlin-friendly puppet government.
Separately, Russian forces would come from the east and drive through central Ukraine to the Dnieper River, while troops from Crimea took over the southeastern coast. Those actions could take several weeks, the Russian plans predicted.
After pausing to regroup and rearm, they would next push westward, toward a north-south line stretching from Moldova to western Belarus, leaving a rump Ukrainian state in the west - an area that in Putin’s calculus was populated by irredeemable neo-Nazi Russophobes.
The United States had obtained “extraordinary detail” about the Kremlin’s secret plans for a war it continued to deny it intended, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines later explained. They included not only the positioning of troops and weaponry and operational strategy, but also fine points such as Putin’s “unusual and sharp increases in funding for military contingency operations and for building up reserve forces even as other pressing needs, such as pandemic response, were under-resourced,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-to-war/

Also can read: "Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting."
- Steve Herman (@W7VOA) January 15, 2021

До того, как покинуть Белый дом, Трамп безуспешно пытался назначить Каша Патела на роль замдиректора ФБР, а позже - на роль замдиректора ЦРУ. Этим назначениям удалось помешать - генпрокурор Барр и директор ЦРУ Хаспел пригрозили со скандалом уйти в отставку. Патела в итоге пристроили руководителем администрации министра обороны.

Patel was Trump’s kind of disrupter, and in mid-2020, the then-president tried to appoint him as deputy director of the FBI, according to former attorney general William P. Barr. Barr recounts in a recent memoir that he told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Patel would get the job “over my dead body.” Barr explains: “Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency.”
Trump then tried to install Patel as deputy CIA director. In mid-December, Meadows approached Director Gina Haspel and told her that Trump planned to fire her deputy, Vaughn Bishop and appoint Patel to the position. Haspel said she would quit rather than take Patel, and after Meadows conveyed that threat to Trump, he backed down, according to knowledgeable sources who spoke to me last year about Haspel’s exchange and reiterated their accounts this week.
In the last two turbulent months of the Trump administration, Patel served as chief of staff to acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller. Patel continued to press a range of Trump initiatives, including troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Somalia and changes in the intelligence community.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/trump-kash-patel-declassification-mar-a-lago-search/

В случае возвращения Трампа во власть в 2024, вероятность чего не следует преуменьшать, Пателу готовится место в руководстве, наряду с его приятелем Ричардом Гренеллом.

In a second term, Trump would install a different cohort at the top than in 2017. He has said what he wants, above all, is people with “courage.”
Under the courage criteria, he has singled out Jeffrey Clark for particular praise. Trump has also praised Patel, who would likely be installed in a senior national security role in a second term, people close to the former president said. If Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director, these sources said. If not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House.
People close to the former president said Richard Grenell has better odds than most of being nominated as Trump’s secretary of state. Grenell was one of Trump’s favorite officials at the tail end of his first term. As Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, he declassified copious materials related to the Trump-Russia investigation.
https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump-2025-radical-plan-second-term



Роль министерства обороны, в руководстве которого работал Пател, во время Пути-путча 6 января 2021 до сих не до конца расследована. Пател давал показания комиссии Конгресса, но во время публичных слушаний они не упоминались.

Если Пателу не дали сыграть более активную роль в неудавшемся путче, это произошла в частности благодаря генералу Милли, председателю Объединенного комитета начальников штабов. После назначения Патела и Коэна-Ватника в Пентагон, Милли прямым текстом пригрозил им тюремным сроком в случает попыток помешать мирной передаче власти. Об этом рассказывается в новой книге "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021", главу из которой опубликовал The New Yorker:

Patel, a former aide to Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, had been accused of spreading conspiracy theories claiming that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election. Both Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton, and Bolton’s deputy, Charles Kupperman, had vociferously objected to putting Patel on the National Security Council staff, backing down only when told that it was a personal, “must-hire” order from the President. Still, Patel found his way around them to deal with Trump directly, feeding him packets of information on Ukraine, which was outside his portfolio, according to testimony during Trump’s first impeachment. (In a statement for this article, Patel called the allegations a “total fabrication.”) Eventually, Patel was sent to help Ric Grenell carry out a White House-ordered purge of the intelligence community. <...>
After Esper’s firing, Milley summoned Patel and Cohen separately to his office to deliver stern lectures. Whatever machinations they were up to, he told each of them, “life looks really shitty from behind bars. And, whether you want to realize it or not, there’s going to be a President at exactly 1200 hours on the twentieth and his name is Joe Biden. And, if you guys do anything that’s illegal, I don’t mind having you in prison.” Cohen denied that Milley said this to him, insisting it was a “very friendly, positive conversation.” Patel also denied it, asserting, “He worked for me, not the other way around.” But Milley told his staff that he warned both Cohen and Patel that they were being watched: “Don’t do it, don’t even try to do it. I can smell it. I can see it. And so can a lot of other people. And, by the way, the military will have no part of this shit.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war-between-trump-and-his-generals



История о том, как в последние дни президентства Трампа он с помощью Патела и путиниста Макгрегора, лихорадочно в пытался вывести американские войска из Афганистана и других стран, дает подсказку о мотивации воровства секретных документов. Трудно объяснить такое рвение желанием осуществить предвыборные обещания. Дав волю фантазии, можно предположить, что Трамп считал, что остается в долгу перед Путиным, и отчаянно пытался выполнить данные тому обещания.

Part of the new team’s agenda soon became clear: making sure Trump fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw American troops from the “endless wars” overseas. Two days after Esper was fired, Patel slid a piece of paper across the desk to Milley during a meeting with him and Miller. It was an order, with Trump’s trademark signature in black Sharpie, decreeing that all four thousand five hundred remaining troops in Afghanistan be withdrawn by January 15th, and that a contingent of fewer than a thousand troops on a counterterrorism mission in Somalia be pulled out by December 31st.
Milley was stunned. “Where’d you get this?” he said.
Patel said that it had just come from the White House.
“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Patel, who said no.
“Did you advise the President to do this?” he asked Miller, who said no.
“Well, then, who advised the President to do it?” Milley asked. “By law, I’m the President’s adviser on military action. How does this happen without me rendering my military opinion and advice?”
With that, he announced that he was putting on his dress uniform and going to the White House, where Milley and the others ended up in the office of the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien.
“Where did this come from?” Milley demanded, putting the withdrawal order on O’Brien’s desk.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before,” O’Brien said. “It doesn’t look like a White House memo.”
Keith Kellogg, a retired general serving as Pence’s national-security adviser, asked to see the document. “This is not the President,” he said. “The format’s not right. This is not done right.”
“Keith, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Milley said. “You’re telling me that someone’s forging the President of the United States’ signature?”
The order, it turned out, was not fake. It was the work of a rogue operation inside Trump’s White House overseen by Johnny McEntee, Trump’s thirty-year-old personnel chief, and supported by the President himself. The order had been drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and a Trump favorite from his television appearances, working with a junior McEntee aide. The order was then brought to the President, bypassing the national-security apparatus and Trump’s own senior officials, to get him to sign it.

Meanwhile on Russian state TV: another translated clip of retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, delivering additional pro-Kremlin talking points. Macgregor's preposterous claims that "Russia is avoiding civilian targets and casualties" are as messy as his surroundings. pic.twitter.com/3iNZG9xEYt
- Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) March 28, 2022

Магрегор - не единственный человек из окружения Трампа, который во время войны оказался на стороне путинской России. Тем же прохиндейка Кристина Бобб, присутствовавшая в качестве адвоката во время обыска Маролаго, во время своей предыдущей карьеры в качестве телеведущей канала OANN.

the kicker in this weird bullshit is that she says she stands with the ukrainian people, while also blaming them for not already overthrowing zelenskyy over, again, a bunch of dumb crap. so the russians came in to do it because, whatever, karma or something
- Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 8, 2022