toucana

The Meidas Touch news site recently produced a viral super-cut video after Fox anchor Laura Ingraham asked "Which Republican official or candidate has ever condoned or encouraged any form of violent physical assault ? Can you start naming them ? I can't think of any". The video was featured by Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC last night as her sign off to the 'The 11th Hour".

The Conservative Party MPs at Westminster are elected by and held accountable to the voters in their respective constituencies (and by the electorate at large). The constituency party members on the other hand are accountable to absolutely no one whatsoever - and yet they are in the position of being able to have the decisive say in selecting who will become the next PM, absent any form of wider plebiscite. This might matter less is quite so many of this 0.37% segment of the population didn't largely consist of golf club Brexiteers and casual racists - like the caller 'Gerry' in this video clip below who phoned in to LBC radio host Sangita Myska's show yesterday and who wanted to complain that Rishi Sunak (former chancellor and leadership front-runner) can't really be 'British' because he is brown skinned.

The most recent information I can find is a Guardian article which says the active fee-paying membership of the UK Conservative party is currently around 200.000 people. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/08/tory-members-over-60-white-male-choice-of-leader The World Population Review site indicates that the UK population is around 67,522.166 The number of these over 18 years old is somewhat less than 54 million. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-kingdom-population That means the active membership of the UK Conservative party represents around 0.37% of the adult population of Britain. The Guardian article notes that ”More than half are aged over 60, and they tend to be male residents of southern England. They are overwhelmingly white – at 97%”

As Britain prepares to select its third PM in just over 6 weeks, attention is being drawn to the curious nature of UK Conservative Party membership rules, and the critical role that members play in selecting a new PM. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/21/2130404/-How-did-the-UK-get-Truss-the-UK-may-be-able-to-blame-us-or-someone-else If a British PM voluntarily steps down from office, it does not trigger a general election. Instead a two-part internal leadership election process begins. First, a slate of candidates is chosen in a ballot by Conservative Party MPs at Westminster. The final selection is then settled by a vote of ordinary members of the Conservative party in the UK - right ? Wrong ! As these two websites make clear: https://www.conservatives.com/members/membership-faqs#accordion-ce4b514d78-item-6f9020ca8c https://www.twocitiesconservatives.org.uk/join-clwca-and-conservative-party-online You *don’t* need to be resident in the UK to join the Conservative Party, and you don’t even need to be eligible to vote in the UK in order to do so. For the sum of £25, it would seem that anyone, anywhere, can acquire - “All the benefits of party membership, including participation in the Conservative Policy Forum, attendance at party conferences, and a vote in the election of the party leader”. - Who then automatically becomes the new PM. Reassuring isn’t it ?

A frank discussion between Xi Jinping and Putin about the latest Russian mishaps in Ukraine would probably also provide some pause for serious thought by Xi about any future Chinese plans vis-a-vis Taiwan. The recent imbroglio over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and the US navy’s subsequent despatch of warships through the Taiwan straits would have brought home to the PRC that the US is quite serious about meeting its stated committment to supporting Taiwan in the event of a military attack by China. The patent superiority of American high-tech weapons systems supplied to Ukraine such as the HIMAR artillery rockets, SAM air defences, and the anti-ship missiles that sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet will all be a potent reality check on China’s more hawkish generals. Taiwan itself is a formidably difficult target to invade. During WW2 the US military chiefs made a decision at the Honolulu planning conference in 1944 to bypass Formosa (as it was then known) completely, and to invade the island fortress of Okinawa instead, which led to the largest and bloodiest amphibious operation of the Pacific war. The invasion of this much smaller garrison island led to over 40,000 US casualties, including the 4-star General Buckner who was the commander. (He was killed by shrapnel from a Japanese artillery shell while inspecting the clean-up operations). It should be noted that Okinawa has an area of just 463 sq.mi. Taiwan by contrast has an area of 13,976 sq. mi. The cost benefit value of attacking Taiwan was too high to contemplate in 1945, and remains so today.

A recent MSNBC segment called ‘The New Dark Ages’ looks into the recent banning of 54 Mathematics textbooks from schools by the Florida Department of Education, a sanction subsequently endorsed by Florida governor Ron de Santis at a press conference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrJXammBAFE The Maths textbooks in question, many of which are for K-5 grade elementary students, were banned by the Florida authorities because they allegedly incorporate “prohibited topics and strategies” including references to CRT (Critical Race Theory) - which is usually taught as a college level subject. Journalist Judd Legum who is the founder of the online Public Information Newsletter obtained copies of eight of these banned tetxbooks, but his researchers could only find one example of any passing reference to race in any of these banned textbooks - it appears in a set of marginalia about notable mathematicians in history.

An interesting drone video of a Russian tank ‘regrouping’ after the sudden breakthrough by Ukraine army forces during their latest offensive in the Kharkiv Oblast area which led to the capture of the cities of Kupiansk and Izium within the last 48 hours. The video shows the fleeing tank shedding Russian soldiers into the road as it swerves wildly around abandoned vehicles, before crashing into a tree at high speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWfV12XnTH0

Déjà vu ?

Frank Figliuzzi. a former FBI assistant director of counter-intelligence has pointed out that a subpoena shown in the unredacted version of the MAL search warrant refers to Secret/ FRD documents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoZlYov0clI The FRD cryptonym means ‘Formerly Restricted Data’, which is somewhat misleading - the real point is that US intelligence material held on a foreign power’s civilian atomic energy research program can be reclassified as Secret/FRD if that program is suddenly shifted onto a military footing for the purposes of producing nuclear weapons - because it is now secret military information. This suggests that the subject of the TS-SCI document in question is an aspiring nuclear power in the process of converting civilian atomic research programs into military ones - Basically that means either Iran or North Korea.

Agreed, and one of the most pernicious aspects of the delay is that this particular district judge has taken it upon herself to enjoin the entire federal criminal investigation which the document seizure was part of, thereby halting it in its tracks - an action which is wholly unprecedented on the part of a low ranking Article III district judge, and which has been condemned out of hand by a very wide spectrum of senior lawyers, including former AG William Barr. Allowing the DNI to continue its evaluation of the security compromise in these circumstances is meaningless, because they need to work in tandem with DoJ criminal investigators in order to do so - if for example they need to establish the exact chain of custody of a top secret document, or if they need to test it for fingerprints, how can they do so without forensic access to the contraband ?

According to a new Washington Post report, the FBI search team recovered a top secret document containing details of the nuclear weapons systems of an un-named foreign country from Mar-a-Lago during the August 8th search. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/06/donald-trump-mar-a-lago-documents-nuclear-weapons-report Documents of this type are so highly classified that only the president and a tiny handful of senior advisors are ever read-in on them. They represent the results of many millions of dollars, and years of espionage effort (and lives) invested in obtaiining such closely guarded information. News of this find has probably been leaked to the WP by DoJ officials to underline quite how ludicrous Florida judge Aileen Cannon’s recent ruling in favour of appointing a Special Master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents truly is. Who could possibly be appointed to the role of sorting through boxes to separate Trump’s random bricolage of bed-socks, narcissistic press clippings, and Twitter rants from TS-SCI/SAP nuclear secrets that only three or four people in government are permitted to read ?

The US astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake (1930-2022) has passed away aged 92. Born in Chicago Illinois, he trained at Cornell, and then in graduate school at Harvard, specialising in radio astronomy. He worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank West Virginia, and at the Jet propulsion Laboratory Pasadena California. Drake became one of the founders of the SETI program (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and is best known for writing the Arecibo message sent to the globular cluster M13 in 1974, and also for creating the famous Drake Equation in 1961 which sets out to estimate the likely number of communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. —> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVCYjtsxvns

It is difficult to say precisely - The most optimistic reading would be that 27 of the empty folders found in Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago match up with unfoldered documents found in the same tranche of boxes unearthed on August 8, and that the contents of the other 16 orphaned folders were co-mingled with the papers in the other 15 boxes previously returned in January. Counter-espionage officers cannot however rely on optimistic assumptions. They have to consider worst case scenarios. Several things stand out - firstly, distributions of documents of this type are normally very closely monitored and logged by the agencies who produce them. The copies are numbered, and the individual pages are probably also indexed with micro-printing techniques of the type used to protect banknotes from forgery. Secondly - anyone who has undergone even the most elementary training in handling classified documents would have been taught that the integrity of a file is of paramount importance. *Nothing* is ever removed or detached from its enclosure, especially not the classification covers - not without the same type of elaborate sign-off and countersigning procedures that would be required to declassify it completely. Finally there is the matter of classifcation levels - One of the classication covers shown in that photo is marked TS-SCI with three further distribution codes HCS-P, SI, and TK which indicate that this single document alone was probably sourced from and cross-references —> field reports from spies in foreign countries (HCS-P), NSA signals intercepts (SI), and satellite surveillance photos (TK - an acronym for the ‘Talent Keyhole’ program). Documents of this sensitivity simply should not exist outside of a SCIF. The implications of finding an empty folder that once contained them are beyond hair-raising.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62771613 According to a newly unsealed inventory of material seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, agents retrieved 33 boxes of documents that included inter alia: 3 documents marked confidential 17 documents marked secret 7 documents marked top secret 43 empty folders with classified banners 28 empty folders labelled "Return to staff secretary/military aides" That would appear to indicate at least 16 sets of folders with classification cover sheets that are now missing their contents. Where would those be now I wonder ?

Truth Social's most active user posted an important clarification yesterday - (below) So did Alina Habba, one of his attorneys, who complained that the DoJ were using 'mundane' statutes like the Espionage Act 1917 to 'harrass' her client. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-attorney-alina-habba-mocked-233643827.html

The DoJ released a 36 page filing late last night which included this photo of classified documents found in Donald Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago. Some of these documents were actually found in his desk . The filing discloses that the June subpoena for the return of documents which Trump ignored was a Grand jury subpoena that was part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the theft of documents from NARA. The filing also seems to imply that Trump and his staff moved and hid heavily classified documents from his own lawyers, who subsequently signed an affidavit to the DoJ officials asserting that they had searched the storage location, and that all classified material had been returned. This would appear to be felony obstruction of justice and concealment of evidence - a 20 year sentence.

This dovetails neatly with another recent story in the WP https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/27/trump-archives-records-war/ Two of the buried ledes from that article include: "Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel, following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States." "“Any documents that made it to the White House residence were these boxes Trump carried around with him,” explained Stephanie Grisham, a former senior White House staffer" ....... “There was no rhyme or reason - it was classified documents on top of newspapers on top of papers people printed out of things they wanted him to read. The boxes were never organized,” Grisham said. “He’d want to get work done on long trips so he’d just rummage through the boxes. That was our filing system.”

Trump who is only marginally literate apparently disliked reading anything much at all. He was said to be particularly averse to reading PDF documents on a laptop, or any sort of Kindle type reader - which is relevant here, because the PDB or ‘Presidential Daily Brief’ was delivered as an encrypted electronic ‘black book’ from 2014 onwards. CIA and DNI staff apparently resorted to putting pictures and flattering references to the POTUS into the PDB to try and draw his interest. They also reportedly followed a proforma of - ‘No longer than one page and a maximum of 8 bullet points’. Trump always preferred to have paper documents that he could scribble on with a sharpie, or rip up if they displeased him. As John Bolton who was his NSA recently recounted, the POTUS was also prone to simply walk out of briefings clutching whatever document he had just been given. A Wikipedia article suggests that president G.W.Bush attended to 86% of his PDBs, Obama attended 43.8% of his PDBs, and Trump typically read his PDB about once a week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President's_Daily_Brief

The redacted affidavit says that 184 classified documents were found unfoldered in the first tranche of 15 boxes returned by Trump in January 2022. The classification markings on them included; HCS - (Human Control System) - These are CIA field reports that relate to secret agent debriefings. SI - (Signals Intelligence) - These are NSA intercepts from eavesdropping and codebreaking sources. NOFORN - (No Foreign) - Sensitive material not to be shared even with friendly allied intelligence agencies. ORCON - (Originator Control) - The original source agency must consent to its wider dissemination. None of these documents should ever be found outside of a SCIF. The affidavit also seems to imply that the DoJ had not one but multiple sources telling them that there were further boxes of classified documents still being concealed at Mar-a-Lago. If I were a betting man, I would put £5 on the likelihood that they were tipped off by members of the other law enforcement agency who were present at Mar-a-Lago, namely the Secret Service agents serving as the protective detail to the FPOTUS.

Why would his fingerprints be on the storage boxes the documents were found in at Mar-a-Lago, especially given that the FBI apparently have CCTV footage showing staff at Mar-a-Lago repackaging documents and moving them to new boxes *after* NA and DoJ officers had already visited the premises at least once to insist upon their return ? There would be no innocent explanation for that.

Two recent news stories that deserve to be read together: “Investigators may even check for fingerprints on seized Trump documents to determine who accessed them” https://www.rawstory.com/mar-a-lago-documents/ “Mr Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021 according to multiple people briefed on his efforts” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/trump-mar-a-lago-documents.html Unless Trump took the precaution of wearing nitrile gloves whilst rummaging through his personal trove of stolen TS-SCI and CNWDI restricted data, this means that his fingerprints will quite literally be all over said boxes and documents. This should dispose of any possible legal fudging in court over the distinction between ‘Actual’ and ‘Constructive’ ownership of the contraband, as well as any suggestion that “The Butler did it”.

“I am very worried for our agent Trump. They found everything at Mar-a-Lago, they got packages of documents. In all seriousness they say he should be executed as a person that was ready to hand off nuclear secrets to Russia” -(Vladimir Solovyov - ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’) Vladimir Solovyov is a pro-Putin Russian propagandist who hosts a satirical TV show called ‘Evening with Vladimir Solovyov’ on Russia-1 every Sunday. It’s not exactly meant to be taken seriously - one episode earlier this year suggested that the Russian army should invade Great Britain and seize Stonehenge. The adage about ‘many a true word spoken in jest’ does however come to mind when reading some of their more outre attempts at SNL style humour about the classified documents raid at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this week NYT reporter Maggie Haberman speculated in a podcast that some of the documents Trump stole and took with him to Mar-a-Lago pertained to the Russia investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller between 2017-19. https://www.businessinsider.com/maggie-haberman-trump-could-have-taken-mueller-probe-documents-2022-8?r=US&IR=T

As a topical side-bar on Classified Documents: Last October, a US naval engineer called Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana who worked in Annapolis Maryland were arrested on charges of attempting to sell US naval state secrets to a foreign power. Toebbe who had spent almost a decade working as a submarine propulsion specialist allegedly attempted to sell a large cache of blueprints and technical data for $5 million in cryptocurrency to a foreign agent who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/maryland-man-accused-spying-pleads-not-guilty-will-remain-jail-n1282002 His wife Diana allegedly acted as a lookout while her husband placed ‘dead drops’ of classified information on data cards hidden in peanut butter sandwiches and bandaid covers. In a surprise ruling Tuesday, federal judge Groh rejected a plea deal for 12.5 to 17.5 years offered on behalf of Jonathan Toebbe, and 3 years for his wife Diana. The judge rejected the proposed deal because it was too lenient in her view. The couple have now withdrawn their plea deal and will go to trial next year. The information Toebbe was trying to sell was said to be classified at the Confidential level (not at Secret or Top Secret levels). Which raises the interesting question of what sentencing guidelines would be considered appropriate by a judge for a person who stole TS-SCI and CNWDI restricted data and offered it for sale ?

My initial post did in fact frame a very precise question —> “Why in the world would an ex-president remove such material from the custody of the National Archives, and store it in an insecure basement area of his retirement home in Florida ?” The only plausible answer I can think of is that he planned to sell it to the highest bidder