On Friday 10th February 2017 NBC circulated a report the Russian government in order to improve relations with the Trump administration was preparing to hand Edward Snowden over to the US.
The report obviously worried Snowden himself, who tweeted that the report proved that he was not and never had been a Russian agent. That suggests that he took the report seriously.
The Russian media is reporting today that Ruslan Stoyanov, a manager working at the Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s leading cyber security and anti-virus provider, has been arrested by Russia’s counter-intelligence agency the FSB.
The FSB’s involvement, and the fact that Stoyanov is apparently being charged with treason, inevitably provokes speculation that he was providing information to the intelligence agency of some foreign government.
US President Obama in what was supposed to be his final press conference as President (it turns out he may be giving another one tomorrow morning) made a very interesting comment about the role of Wikileaks in the publication of the DNC and Podesta emails, which appears to cast doubt on the whole story of Russian interference in the US election.
The degree of paranoia within some parts of the US intelligence community about Donald Trump is best illustrated by what seem to be authoritative news reports that US spies have warned their Israeli counterparts against sharing Israeli secrets with Donald Trump’s administration lest it be leaked to the Russians.
The clear implication is that some parts of the US intelligence community do genuinely believe that Trump is somehow under the Kremlin’s control, or that the Kremlin has leverage over him.
Following the eruption of accusations against the US intelligence community at Donald Trump’s press conference on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has met with him to try to limit the damage, and in order assure Trump of his “dismay” that the Trump Dossier was leaked and that the US intelligence community was not responsible for it.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s press conference, in which he criticised the US intelligence for permitting the ‘Trump Dossier’ to get published, various attempts are being made to distance the US intelligence agencies from the ‘Trump Dossier’.
An opinion piece in The Financial Times by its commentator Gideon Rachman represents the first admission by a member of the mainstream media of what is becoming increasingly obvious to me…
Donald Trump is winning the war with the spies:
Amongst the myriad of reasons for the Obama-Clinton-CIA campaign about alleged Russian hacking during the US election, a key one was to bluff Donald Trump into condemning Russia.
