Secret CIA source claims Russia rigged 2016 election

I can’t find any reputable news source identifying these transcripts as classified.

But even if they are not, they should be. As near as I can tell, even the majority of liberal pundits agree that this type of stuff should not be leaked. It’s too dangerous, and it will prevent foreign leaders from having candid conversations with the President. As awful as Trump is, we still have to preserve the integrity of the office he holds.

So what prevents someone from marking everything they don’t want the public to see as classified?

Normally, this would be the case, but it ignores the gorilla in the room.

The number one thing which would prevent a foreign leader from having a candid conversation with Trump, is that they would be having a conversation with Trump.

Seriously.

Trump’s an idiot. He babbles to the press and says things he shouldn’t. He tells enemies about our allies top secret stuff. He cannot be trusted with anything. Hell, as we’ve seen recently, he flat out lies about what other guys say to him anyway.

In any conversation with Trump, the leaks of these transcripts wouldn’t even make the top 10 list of concerns, I wouldn’t think.

Exactly. In any other administration these leaks would be a scandal in themselves, both the content and the fact they are leaked.

With Trump they will be a headline for a day. And there’s nothing about the leak or the content that stands above the rest of the Trump circus, in terms of leaks and what he says in public every single day.

I do think some of the leaks just aren’t worth the damage though. We already knows Trump is garbage, I don’t need to see yet another leaked piece of evidence confirming it, if it might damage some intelligence source or whatever. The Flynn leaks are a good example that were very much worth it.

Will they be investing the leak that Russia gained information about Israeli agents in IS from someone within the administration?

Russian propaganda efforts apparently focused on attacking McMaster. Very interesting.

You know, if only they kept it on a separate unknown-about email server it probably would be safe from leakers getting access.

https://twitter.com/laurenduca/status/893617976758468609

That seemed to be the case in email-gate. If someone (in government) received something not marked as classified, it appears they cannot be prosecuted for not handling it as classified.

The transcripts should have been marked as classified, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the WH has yet to figure out how to keep track of such things and make sure the get marked appropriately.

Investigators working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently asked the White House for documents related to former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, and have questioned witnesses about whether he was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the final months of the presidential campaign, according to people close to the investigation.

Though not a formal subpoena, the document request is the first known instance of Mr. Mueller’s team asking the White House to hand over records.

In interviews with potential witnesses in recent weeks, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have spent hours poring over the details of Mr. Flynn’s business dealings with a Turkish-American businessman who worked last year with Mr. Flynn and his consulting business, the Flynn Intel Group.

Yep, which is actually my guess as to what happened. The fact that suddenly a White House that was calling everything from Trump’s desire to have two scoops to his vacation as “classified” is only saying “sensitive” makes me think someone slipped up. Some low-level staffer who is displeased with Trump maybe came across these and said, “Wait - they DIDN’T classify these transcripts?!? Oh, this will be great …”

Taking the opportunity to embarrass Trump might be worth your job if you’re unhappy, but not jail time.

Uhoh!

While this is, on the one hand, true, I am starting to get a sense that last week was a bit of a turning point for Trump. Someone mentioned the other day that’s it’s going to take a Katrina like event for the worm to turn but I think last week was his Katrina. The Republicans in Congress want someone else to do their dirty work for him but I think they are done protecting him. Flake’s article for Politico today was interesting in his timing. He’s always been anti-Trump but a sitting Republican Senator to standing up and calling bullshit on his party is a big deal and you get the sense that he’s not going to be pilloried for it because a lot of them are nodding their heads and realizing this circus has played out.

After last week and the transcripts that came out this week, it’s getting impossible to deny that the emperor has no clothes and they know it. They also see the legal noose tightening and knows it just a matter of time now.

I’m not saying things are going to change over night but I suspect, when we look back on this administration, people will mark last week as the week that things shifted.

Leaking classified material may be against the law, but there are protected situations, specifically whistle blowing.

I may be wrong in this, but I’m pretty sure whistleblower protection doesn’t extend to leaking classified materials to unauthorized individuals. It does, however, protect you if you bring to light wrongdoings without the disclosure of classified info. For instance, if our favorite individual Snowden had simply said “The CIA is doing bad stuff that endangers our privacy and someone needs to look at this,” that wouldn’t have been illegal afaik and if he’d just brought it to the inspector general then his job wouldn’t have been in danger (of course, one could argue that nothing would have come of it).

A long read about the extensive history of intersections between the Trump Organization and Russian money laundering. It’s not anything new, but it puts all the various threads in one place.

[E]ven without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.

It’s entirely possible that Trump was never more than a convenient patsy for Russian oligarchs and mobsters, with his casinos and condos providing easy pass-throughs for their illicit riches. At the very least, with his constant need for new infusions of cash and his well-documented troubles with creditors, Trump made an easy “mark” for anyone looking to launder money. But whatever his knowledge about the source of his wealth, the public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians

Money laundering is more likely to bring down the Trumps than espionage charges. The standard of proof is lower, thanks to RICO, and more importantly it’s also a violation of state laws - meaning a presidential pardon has no effect (New York state has a RICO-equivalent law.)

The reality is, all the money laundering just have the Russians massive leverage over Trump.

At any point, Putin could just pull one of those crimes out of his pocket and say, “do this, or folks are gonna find out about this thing you did”.

This is the chief thing that they look for when you apply for clearance… For ways foreign powers could exert influence over you. And it seems like Russia had massive leverage over Trump.

The reality is, what?