Trump wants bare-knuckle spycraft against China and secret propaganda campaigns. What about Tulsi?
Trump’s CIA Pick Seeks Clandestine Spy Operations
The Wall Street Journal reports Trump’s CIA Pick Expected to Push for Bare-Knuckle Spycraft Against China
President-elect Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to his coming national-security team is set to come under the spotlight in Congress this week, and one constant remains from his first term: America is about to take the gloves off in its shadow bout with Beijing.
The Republican president-elect has snubbed the conventional GOP approach in some of his other top national-security picks. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host chosen to lead the Pentagon, has criticized U.S. involvement in Ukraine and has said women should be barred from combat. Hegseth has also faced allegations of sexual assault, which he has denied, and is to testify at what is expected to be a tough confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
Trump’s pick to oversee U.S. intelligence agencies, Tulsi Gabbard, has run into some friction in meetings with lawmakers in recent weeks over her past skepticism of U.S. surveillance powers and seeming embrace of Washington’s adversaries. In those meetings, Gabbard—a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii—has walked back her opposition to a crucial spying program, in an apparent effort to win congressional support.
Clandestine intelligence operations are among the areas that could be subjected to some of the biggest changes under Trump. Ratcliffe would push for aggressive spy missions against high-level officials in China and for covert operations intended to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, a person close to him said. Ratcliffe would also likely pursue such activity to deter recent Chinese cyberattacks, including the compromise of telecommunications networks, the person said. (Beijing has denied involvement in the attacks.)
In the past, the CIA has used these kinds of covert operations, which require presidential authorization, to launch secret propaganda campaigns, cyberattacks and industrial sabotage.
In 2019, Trump authorized clandestine confrontation against Beijing, granting the CIA permission to launch a secret propaganda campaign aimed at undercutting Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to former U.S. officials. That included using social-media bot accounts to promote negative stories about China’s ruling elite, suggesting, for example, that senior officials were hoarding stolen state funds overseas.
Trump also signed a classified executive order, confirmed publicly by senior officials, that removed interagency bureaucratic restraints on using offensive cyber weapons against a range of foreign foes. The policy was largely kept in place under the Biden administration, but Trump could seek to deploy disruptive cyber actions more frequently, former officials said.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702
The WSJ says “Tulsi flips on the crucial intelligence-collection tool to win Senate GOP support. Is she believable?“
Please consider the WSJ editorial board position Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702
Does Tulsi Gabbard suddenly believe in gathering intelligence against America’s enemies? That’s presumably what she wants the U.S. Senate to believe with her come-lately conversion to support Section 702 data gathering.
The 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the U.S. spy without a court warrant on the electronic communications of non-Americans located outside the country. Ms. Gabbard voted against 702 when she was in Congress, though everyone serious about national security understands the tool’s vital importance.
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford told our Kimberley Strassel on her podcast last week that Ms. Gabbard’s views on 702 is crucial to whether defense-minded Republicans would support her nomination by President-elect Trump to be director of national intelligence (DNI). “If she comes out and says, ‘No, I want to oppose all 702 authority’—that literally shuts down all of our national defense gathering,” Mr. Lankford said.
He added that “she’s going to get a fair hearing to be able to put those things out there and to say, ‘This is what I believe about these issues.’” Voila, Ms. Gabbard suddenly saw the intelligence light.
The question is whether Senators should believe her. Ms. Gabbard’s explanation is hardly persuasive. She now says Congress has added enough protections for civil liberties that she is comfortable supporting 702.
The DNI operates largely in secret, coordinating intelligence from the 18 U.S. spy agencies and presenting the best estimate of threats for the President and his policy advisers. Ms. Gabbard’s statements across her career have demonstrated a knee-jerk instinct to underestimate threats.
It’s no surprise that the warmongering and spy hypocrite at the Journal want to trash Tulsi.
They complain about laughable Russia and China influence on US elections while supporting “secret propaganda campaigns, cyberattacks and industrial sabotage” on China.
The US spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, tapping her phone from 2002 to 2014.
Wikileaks hero Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed this for the world to see.
Was it All in Vain?
That’s what the CATO Institute concludes in it June 2023 report It Was All in Vain: Edward Snowden’s Sacrifice 10 Years On
Snowden’s error was in believing that meaningful, forceful, and effective democratic oversight of NSA, FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence components actually exists.
And as I’ve noted previously, Snowden’s efforts to inform his fellow Americans of the surveillance dragnet under which they now operated were met with scorn or outright attacks, some from the press but most from members of Congress whose oversight failures Snowden had effectively exposed.
Fifty years earlier, in an era that saw similar whistleblower-driven revelations of widespread illegal federal government surveillance, Congress was far less amenable to such executive branch misconduct. In 1975, the work of the Senate investigative committee, led by the late Senator Frank Church (D‑ID), exposed massive, previously undisclosed unconstitutional surveillance and political repression operations aimed at literally hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In contrast, Snowden’s revelations produced a nearly opposite reaction, with no public hearings into the breadth and damage caused by the mass surveillance he exposed and only one weak and ineffectual legislative fix for the NSA telephone metadata program: the 2015 USA Freedom Act. It was the legislative and constitutional equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.
It was also a testament to the power and influence of the nation’s national security establishment in shutting down any kind of meaningful surveillance reform effort, in no small part by indicting the whistleblower under the Espionage Act (no proof has ever surfaced that Snowden acted as the agent of a foreign power or gave legitimate U.S. secrets to one), seizing the royalties from his memoir, and refusing to consider allowing him to mount a public interest defense for his actions.
In that memoir, Snowden mused on the disparity in the treatment meted out to him and other whistleblowers versus officially sanctioned leaks (pp. 238–239):
“What makes one disclosure permissible, and another not? The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the fundamental prerogatives of an institution… To blow the whistle on secret programs, I’d also have to blow the whistle on the larger system of secrecy, to expose it not as the absolute prerogative of state that the [Intelligence Community] claimed it was but rather as an occasional privilege that the IC abused to subvert democratic oversight.”
Snowden’s error was in believing that meaningful, forceful, and effective democratic oversight of NSA, FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence components actually exists. The historical record at the time Snowden went public said otherwise, and that remains the case today.
Despite a fresh set of revelations of FBI and NSA abuses of the FISA Section 702 electronic mass surveillance program, no FBI or NSA officials have been sanctioned by the FISA court, much less lost their jobs as a result of their misconduct. That program is set to expire at the end of 2023, but anyone who believes its demise is a sure bet is only fooling themselves – in the same way that Edward Snowden tragically fooled himself into believing that exposing NSA and FBI surveillance crimes would somehow trigger a new age of surveillance reform and accountability.
Americans will continue to be federal government surveillance targets unless the public ejects from Congress and the White House those federal officials who continue to act as if Americans are suspects first and citizens a very distant second.
CIA Plan to Assassinate Assange
The Nation discusses the CIA Plan to Assassinate Assange.
A Yahoo! News investigation last year revealed newly installed CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s swift and furious reaction: He instructed the agency to make plans to kidnap and murder WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange was already the focus of investigations by the CIA, the FBI, and the departments of Defense, Justice, and State over his publication in 2010 of the government’s own communications proving its culpability in war crimes.
“But what really set Mike Pompeo…off was that Vault 7 leak,” Yahoo! News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff told Democracy Now!. “This was on his watch. This was his agency.” The campaign against Assange went into overdrive.
Pompeo appeared before the Center for Strategic and International Studies on 13 April to declare, “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Defining WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service” rather than what it is—a publisher—would legitimize any action the agency took against Assange. Except that it didn’t. National Security Council lawyers doubted the legality of killing Assange, and cooler heads within the CIA leaked the plot to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Yahoo! News wrote that kidnapping Assange in London “involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner—Australia—in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.” One of Yahoo! News’ US intelligence sources indicated that the plan might have been carried out if Assange had been in a Third World country: “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt—we’re talking about London.”
While the Trump administration dropped plans for Assange’s extrajudicial murder, neither it nor the Biden administration has turned away from killing him slowly in solitary confinement in Britain.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton asked Can’t we just drone Assange?
On January 5 2021, I reported Assange is a Political Prisoner, Free Him Now
Assange a Hero
No only is Assange a political prisoner, he is a hero in my book for disclosing what he did about US illegal activities.
Hats off to Mexico for offering asylum. But what’s needed is a full and complete pardon coupled with an apology.
Declassify Documents
Trump has threatened on many occasions to declassify documents.
- November 28: Trump threatens to declassify ‘devastating’ documents if Democrats ‘want to play tough’
- November 11: Trump allies clash with top intelligence officials in quest to declassify more Russia documents
Is Trump anti-deep-state or not?
Assange Finally Freed
On June 24, 2024 I reported Julian Assange to Be Free for Time Served in Guilty Plea Deal
Julian Assange is finally free. He is set to enter a guilty plea in Saipan and be sentenced to time served.
In 2021, I asked “Is Trump anti-deep-state or not?”
Today, I ask the same question.
Trump wants to expand intelligence operations and don’t pretend for a moment it will just be China.
Tulsi will either go along or she will be out.
Comment of the Day
“This is the first time I ever saw anyone announce a covert program to the public. Why don’t they make a documentary about it so we can all see what they will be doing?”
Thanks to CEO of the Sofa
Point taken. But..Did Trump actually say that or is that the WS Journal speaking for him? I cant see where he says that on record. Yes I see what he authorized such in 2019 but is that suppose to be private information or can be requested with a FOIA?
My point is that nothing will ever be allowed to be secret with Trump when it comes to the media. They despise him. They say bad stuff, lie about him every freaking day.
They will never ever allow the Trump Admin to do something secret.
This is going to be a very scary next 4 years. But i’m sorry, the Democrat party are far worse and have done more damage in the last 10 years that will take us 50 to recover from, and pay for
And if the Obama Admin can spy on us, and we know China is spying on us.
I leave that up to those that are supposed to be trying to protect us to decide
The point is probably to get the warmongering dipshits of the Senate to confirm her nomination. A publicly touted “covert” program might just be the thing to win them over. Sen Lankford of Oklahoma – a known dipshit – just came out in favor of her because she now says she supports FISA section 702. Who gives a **** what the DNI nominee supports or doesn’t support? I’d rather have her tell the Senate hawks whatever they want to hear and get confirmed than for her nomination to get scuttled. We know she knows better than the Lindsay Grahams and we know she’s against foreign entanglements.
The difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is that he now knows the system, and has appointed better people for his administration. The next four years will be measured by how much (1) he reduces inflation which in turn reduces living costs and (2) he is able to reign in government spending. It will be a challenge. Trump is a spender and risk taker. He has promised a lot but it will all come down to stabilizing our standard of living.
“Is Trump anti-deep-state or not?”
I guess we’re going to find out. His first term was a waste, not only because of deep-state treachery but also because of his betrayal of espoused principles. With Gabbard, we’re going to get an early warning of just how much Trump distrusts the deep state when he can tell himself it’s now his deep state. I don’t see much reason to be optimistic.
I’ll add: There’s evidence that these agencies can’t be controlled by Congress, the Executive Branch, or the citizenry: they either have institutional interests that shape analysis or they’re beholden to one part of government and ready to mislead another. You would think that a president who doesn’t have his head up his posterior, who can’t know how in-agency power interests will resolve, would want these operators on a short remit. But this looks like Trump is deluding himself once again that he‘ll be in charge.
ZH: “Wray described the CCP as “the greatest long-term threat” and the “defining threat of our generation” due in part to its state-funded cyber program that’s poised to “wreak havoc” on a whim – targeting water treatment plants, the electrical grid, natural gas infrastructure and other systems.”
Rather odd that the government gave China favored nation trade status.
We need clandestine spy operations on China. Afterall, they already do it to us and spend enormous amounts on propaganda campaigns against the US globally especially in the in the global south. We need to counter their BS and their so called sponsored 50 cent armies with our own.
Former NSA Binney said some time ago, we have a turnkey totalitarian state. NDAA 2013 allows the government to propagandize the American people. Remember “safe and effective?” Dr. Robert Malone just wrote a book on 5th gen warfare. Psyops. Chris Martinson recently interviewed him on the subject.
“Former French European Commissioner Thierry Breton has essentially openly confessed that the West stole the Romanian election and stands ready to do it again in Germany if deemed necessary.”
Not democracy. Autocracy. Do as we tell you or we will override you.
“Trump’s Pushes for Clandestine Spy Operations on China, Will Tulsi Go Along?”
Yes, of course, she will. She’s now Tulsi 2.0.
We aren’t doing this now???
I am appalled by the amount of biometric and other tracking data that irs.gov expects from me, to just let me log in (and say, check my refund). It is a full-spectrum 24-7 all-activity tracking suite. And considering how different the federal leadership is every 4 years, I’m very unhappy.
So don’t log in to check your refund.
Your suggestion is to give in to demands from the government that is supposed to serve us? Ignorance is bliss – until they come for you.
Tulsi will either go along or she will be out. Spot on summation! However, trump is involved so I’m going with H. L.: “After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.”
H. L. Mencken
Trump will either go along or he will be out.
This is the first time I ever saw anyone announce a covert program to the public. Why don’t they make a documentary about it so we can all see what they will be doing?
That might only be because it’s an utterly stupid and counterproductive idea. It’s not that the US mainstream hasn’t badmouthed China enough to the point ridiculous. Welcome back to the 1980s.
Get with the program sofa CEO, it’s 4D chess or some shit. It was announced overtly to cover the covert operation happening behind the very sofa you are CEO’ing over. Yes, your sofa is part or Trump’s 4D chess…or was it 8D?
Mish, surely you make a distinction between foreign and domestic Intel? I have no problem with the foreign kind.
You don’t have a problem with spying on Angela Merkel?
What about assassinating Assange for alleged spying?
Snowen is in exile because he reported on US spying.
There has to be some spying, bc we are being spyed on by other countries as well….no we should not have been spying on our allies. The big issue with Snowden was him sharing American spy craft secrets which is kind of important.
Correct! Can’t have a police state without spying on everyone. You get a gold star!
We should use some exploding cell phones on Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
Mish
Are you so naive to think that Germany isn’t spying on the US?
Every nation spies on its friends as well as it’s enemies.
And believe it or not US “spy agencies” also spy on each other. Fact.
Some spy agencies such as the Cubans are really, really good or maybe in this case the CIA is really bad in undertaking action against Cuba.
One can rank these type entities in their ability to undertake missions and protect their country.
I’d rank Israel as having the best in the world.
China has improved over the recent past in terms of HUMINT and especially cyberspace operations. It’s operations against the USA has been very good, but again the US is pretty poor in counteracting China. So I’d rank them number 2.
In terms of mission and ability I’d give number 3 to a combined entity as their work is often undertaken together. The US Army Electronic Warfare/INSCOM joint ops are the best in the world in their field. Given their limited field of operations is why they get number 3 overall.
Years ago I would have given number 4 to the Defence Intelligence Agency without question. I haven’t had any contact with people working there for years now and have heard that their product has fallen in quality. So I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and keep them at number 4.
Well, you ask, what about the two US biggies- the NSA and CIA….
Some parts of the NSA do really well and others are total crap. Most of NSA’s real successful ops are in fact HUMINT related that feed into its overall signals/cryptography/ELINT mission. I’d given number 5 because of their technical ability.
The CIA? I call them Complete Idiots and A***oles. Too many unqualified people there. DEI/PC took hold long ago and there are too many paper pushing bureaucrats. The recent former heads of the CIA have to be some of the worst people in the world to ever run an intelligence agency. I have nothing but contempt for the people from that agency that I interacted with. I would rank them as pretty bad in terms of capability, correct output, and ability to provide useful timely, and correct information.
After number 5 it is hard to rank others. For example, Cuba has really good intelligence entities, but they have limited reach and are not a major world player.
Russia used to be very good and had had numerous outstanding successful entities, but that is no longer the case.
The above are my personal opinions based on my experience in the field.
All Snowden ‘revealed’ is that the NSA was violating the 4th Amendment of every citizen every day. Bill Binney said that there were 4000 just like Snowden, doing that work, but he was the only one to talk. So now you know % of totalitarians in .guv
The problem is there is no longer any distinction between foreign and domestic. The NSA captures it all under the guise of foreign. After all there *ARE* some foreign agents operating in the USA so technically they have to capture domestic data too in order to search for these foreign agents.
Thus we have to spy on Americans too. Tulsi has already walked back her opposition to this because she was told she’d never be confirmed otherwise.
Chinese cyber-spies peek over shoulder of officials probing real-estate deals near American military baseshttps://www.theregister.com/2025/01/10/china_treasury_foreign_investment/