[VIDEO] Evelyn Farkas Says Obama Was Spying on Trump
Posted: March 29, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Russia, White House | Tags: Evelyn Farkas, Morning Joe, MSNBC, Obama administration, Spying, video Leave a comment“It’s not everyday you see someone admit on TV they have committed a felony & have given classified info to media”
“I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill… get as much information as you can. if [Trump staffers] found out how we knew what we knew about their … the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.”
Evelyn Farkas was once considered the most senior policy officer for Russia within the Pentagon, and she is now apparently defending the leaks that have been coming out of the Trump White House.
Farkas was one of the Obama administration’s go-to people on Russia.
“We have good intelligence on Russia… that’s why you have the leaking. People are worried.”
— Evelyn Farkas
Now an MSNBC analyst and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Farkas has “advised three secretaries of defense on Russia policy,” according to a senior defense official quoted in Politico. She has served on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Senate Armed Services Committee, among others, and was executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism in 2008-2009.
In an appearance on MSNBC earlier this month, Farkas told Mika Brezinski about her role in the efforts to collect intelligence on Trump’s team, and their alleged ties with Russia, in the Obama adminstration’s final days.
“I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill… get as much information as you can,” Farkas said, adding that her big fear was “if [Trump staffers] found out how we knew what we knew about their … the Trump staff dealing with Russians – that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.”
At the end of the interview, Farkas said, “we have good intelligence on Russia… that’s why you have the leaking. People are worried.”
Farkas was responding to a report in The New York Times suggesting the “Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking.”
Farkas notably served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia under President Obama, and parted ways with the White House in 2015 after some five years amid the ongoing debate over how to respond to Russia’s role in the unfolding conflict in Ukraine. Farkas reportedly supported Ukraine’s request for weapons in the fight against Russian-backed rebels. The White House opted to send millions in “nonlethal” aid.
On May 6, 2014, Farkas told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Russia’s actions threatened to upend the international peace “that we and our allies have worked to build since the end of the Cold War.”
News of her resignation broke just over a year later, at the end of September 2015. It was on Sept. 28, 2015, that President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Read the rest of this entry »
Dezinformatsiya: Russian Internet Trolls were Being Hired to Pose as Pro-Trump Americans
Posted: July 27, 2016 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Global, Politics, Russia, War Room | Tags: Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Donald Trump, Embassy of the United States in Moscow, Evelyn Farkas, Federal Security Service (Russia), Foreign Intelligence Service (Russia), Moscow, Presnensky District, RUSSIA, Saint Petersburg, Soviet Union, St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin 1 Comment
It’s a brand of information warfare, known as ‘dezinformatsiya,’ that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one ‘active measure’ tool used by Russian intelligence to ‘sow discord among,’ and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.
Natasha Bertrand reports: Russia’s troll factories were, at one point, likely being paid by the Kremlin to spread pro-Trump propaganda on social media.
That is what freelance journalist Adrian Chen, now a staff writer at The New Yorker, discovered as he was researching Russia’s “army of well-paid trolls” for an explosive New York Times Magazine exposé published in June 2015.
“The DNC hack and dump is what cyberwar looks like.”
— Dave Aitel, a cybersecurity specialist, a former NSA employee, and founder of cybersecurity firm Immunity Inc., wrote for Ars Technica last week.
“A very interesting thing happened,” Chen told Longform‘s Max Linsky in a podcast in December.
“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff,” he said.
Linsky then asked Chen who he thought “was paying for that.”
“I don’t know,” Chen replied. “I feel like it’s some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the US or something. Like false-flag kind of thing. You know, that’s how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia.”
St. Petersburg, Russia. Flickr/ranopamas
In his research from St. Petersburg, Chen discovered that Russian internet trolls — paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet — have been behind a number of “highly coordinated campaigns” to deceive the American public.
“I created this list of Russian trolls when I was researching. And I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them have turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don’t know what’s going on, but they’re all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff.”
— Adrian Chen
It’s a brand of information warfare, known as “dezinformatsiya,” that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one “active measure” tool used by Russian intelligence to “sow discord among,” and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.
[Read the full story here, at Business Insider]
“An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare,” Michael Weiss, a senior editor at The Daily Beast and editor-in-chief of The Interpreter — an online magazine that translates and analyzes political, social, and economic events inside the Russian Federation — wrote on Tuesday.
He continued (emphasis added):
“It is designed, as retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, ‘to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.’ The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish, if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister.”
It is not surprising, then, that the Kremlin would pay internet trolls to pose as Trump supporters and build him up online. In fact, that would be the easy part. Read the rest of this entry »
pundit from another planet 