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Schindler: Donald Trump's White House Is Pushing Kremlin Storyline
http://observer.com/2017/03/donald-trump-wiretapping-kremlin-disinformation/The question of where the president got the nutty idea that Obama “wiretapped” him therefore is important. Based on White House statements, Trump’s tweetstorm was inspired by comments made by Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News regular and former New Jersey judge with no background in anything relating to espionage. Notwithstanding Napolitano’s indulgence in weird conspiracy theories—he is a 9/11 truther who has pushed the idea that the Feds will enter your house to forcibly vaccinate you, additionally claiming that it was NSA, not the Russians, who hacked the Democrats last year—he was considered credible by Team Trump.
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A bit of digging has revealed that the main “intelligence source” for Napolitano’s dishonest claim was none other than Larry Johnson, a notorious figure in espionage and security circles. Johnson does possess a modest background in the Intelligence Community, working as CIA analyst for four years at the end of the Cold War, then serving as a counterterrorism official with the State Department from 1989 to 1993. He has been out of the intelligence business for a generation, and he has spent subsequent decades vehemently denouncing his former employers.
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He then headed where angry failures in the West go when they are shut out of even fringe outlets at home: the Kremlin. Johnson reinvented himself as a regular on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, finding a home among the stable of freaks and rejects who get airtime on Moscow’s outlet. Since RT features avowed neo-Nazis and even an Illuminati correspondent as regulars, it can’t be said that Johnson is their most outlandish talking head.
On Putin’s dime, Johnson has denounced American spies at every opportunity, unmasking nefarious IC plots and assassinations which others have not been able to detect. In recent months, he has towed the Putin-and-Trump line on RT, spinning conspiracy theories about the downfall of Mike Flynn, the president’s ill-fated first National Security Advisor. Johnson also went on RT to denounce the IC’s conclusion that Russian operatives were behind the hacking of the Democrats in 2016.
Significantly, on March 5—the day after the president unleashed his “wiretapping” tweetstorm—Johnson went on RT to float his latest conspiracy theory, that President Obama illegally monitored Donald Trump and his entourage last year, co-opting IC leadership in secret efforts to derail the Republican nominee. On air, Johnson explicitly pointed the finger at British intelligence in this plot, repeatedly referring to GCHQ as the alleged culprit—though he laughably kept calling it “GHCQ.”
-snip-
-snip-
A bit of digging has revealed that the main “intelligence source” for Napolitano’s dishonest claim was none other than Larry Johnson, a notorious figure in espionage and security circles. Johnson does possess a modest background in the Intelligence Community, working as CIA analyst for four years at the end of the Cold War, then serving as a counterterrorism official with the State Department from 1989 to 1993. He has been out of the intelligence business for a generation, and he has spent subsequent decades vehemently denouncing his former employers.
-snip-
He then headed where angry failures in the West go when they are shut out of even fringe outlets at home: the Kremlin. Johnson reinvented himself as a regular on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, finding a home among the stable of freaks and rejects who get airtime on Moscow’s outlet. Since RT features avowed neo-Nazis and even an Illuminati correspondent as regulars, it can’t be said that Johnson is their most outlandish talking head.
On Putin’s dime, Johnson has denounced American spies at every opportunity, unmasking nefarious IC plots and assassinations which others have not been able to detect. In recent months, he has towed the Putin-and-Trump line on RT, spinning conspiracy theories about the downfall of Mike Flynn, the president’s ill-fated first National Security Advisor. Johnson also went on RT to denounce the IC’s conclusion that Russian operatives were behind the hacking of the Democrats in 2016.
Significantly, on March 5—the day after the president unleashed his “wiretapping” tweetstorm—Johnson went on RT to float his latest conspiracy theory, that President Obama illegally monitored Donald Trump and his entourage last year, co-opting IC leadership in secret efforts to derail the Republican nominee. On air, Johnson explicitly pointed the finger at British intelligence in this plot, repeatedly referring to GCHQ as the alleged culprit—though he laughably kept calling it “GHCQ.”
-snip-
So Trump's idiotic accusation that President Obama had a British intel agency spy on him not only came from a discredited, conspiracy-theory-peddling has-been who's now paid by RT, it came from someone who once worked in the IC who can't even get the simple acronym for the UK Government Communications Headquarters right, instead calling it GHCQ.
Trump's source is as stupid as he is.
And that source works for Putin, via RT.