Trump's spy chief just released 'Russian disinformation' against Hillary Clinton that he acknowledged may be fabricated

ssheth@businessinsider.com (Sonam Sheth)

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Business Insider•September 29, 2020

Rep. John Ratcliffe

Yuri Gripas/Reuters

• Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified a dubious claim from Russian intelligence sources alleging that former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton "approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal" against then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and his ties to Russia.

• Ratcliffe said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham that the US intelligence community "does not know the accuracy" of the allegation "or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication."

• The DNI's move raised questions about why the nation's spy chief declassified information that had not been corroborated and which he himself admitted may be false or exaggerated.

• Ratcliffe's decision to release disparaging information about Clinton also mirrors Moscow's ongoing disinformation campaign against the former secretary of state.

John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, declassified dubious information from a "Russian intelligence analysis" in 2016 alleging that then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton "approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal" against then-Republican candidate Donald Trump "by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee."

Ratcliffe divulged the information in a letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of Trump's staunchest congressional allies.

However, the letter said the US intelligence community "does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication."

 

Ratcliffe's move raised immediate questions about why the country's top intelligence official declassified information that the US could not corroborate, and which Ratcliffe himself acknowledged could be false or exaggerated.

Moreover, as several observers pointed out, Ratcliffe's decision to release disparaging information about Clinton from Russian intelligence sources appears to mirror Moscow's ongoing disinformation campaign against the former secretary of state.

The president and his allies have also amplified the claim over the last several years, alleging without evidence that the Clinton campaign colluded with the Ukrainian government to cook up a Trump-Russia conspiracy and sabotage his campaign. US intelligence officials have seen no evidence supporting the claim, and a bipartisan report by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee concluded the same.

The intelligence community also determined in early 2017 that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his government and intelligence agencies to wage an elaborate and extensive campaign to interfere in the 2016 general election. Putin's main goal was to damage Clinton and propel Trump to the Oval Office, according to the US's assessment.

Nick Merrill, a spokesperson for Clinton, described the allegations Ratcliffe's letter laid out as "baseless bullshit" in a text message to Politico.

Frank Montoya, a recently retired FBI special agent, told Business Insider in a text message that the allegation Ratcliffe publicized "sounds like more Russian disinformation" meant to protect the "Russian intel effort to undermine our sovereignty. This is how Russia (like the Soviet Union before it) does disinformation ops."

"What's more, this is old news, meaning the IC has had years to corroborate it and hasn't been able to do that," he added. Montoya said the DNI's decision was particularly striking given that when he served in Congress, he and other Republicans railed against the release of uncorroborated information connected to the so-called Steele dossier, an unverified collection of memos by a former British intelligence officer alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"Ratcliffe is serving up political chum to the President's allies on-demand, seeming to disregard whether it's A) accurate or B) in service of a foreign disinformation campaign," Ned Price, the former senior director of the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter.

"This is Russian disinformation," Rachel Cohen, spokesperson for Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted. "Laundered by the Director Of National Intelligence and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is extraordinary."

Ratcliffe's letter also said that John Brennan, the CIA director at the time of the July 2016 "Russian intelligence analysis," briefed Obama and other senior officials on the information.

In September 2016, the letter said, US intelligence officials "forwarded an investigative referral" to then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok. The referral was about Clinton's "approval of a plan concerning" Trump "and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."

Ratcliffe's letter said that Attorney General William Barr, who Trump tapped to run the Justice Department last year, "has advised that the disclosure of this information will not interfere with ongoing Department of Justice investigations."

Trump fired Comey in May 2017 after he confirmed the existence of the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. And the bureau fired Strzok after it surfaced that he exchanged anti-Trump text messages with Lisa Page, who was an FBI lawyer at the time. Comey is set to testify before Graham's committee on Wednesday.

Ratcliffe was confirmed as DNI earlier this year after Trump ousted Joseph Maguire, the former acting DNI after he authorized an official to brief Congress on Russia's ongoing interference in the 2020 election.

Ratcliffe was previously a congressman from Texas and one of Trump's biggest attack dogs on Capitol Hill. He made headlines last year when he berated the former special counsel Robert Mueller during the latter's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee about the Russia probe.

Trump initially nominated Ratcliffe as DNI shortly after that hearing in July 2019, but Ratcliffe withdrew from consideration after it surfaced that he inflated his resume and misled the public about his role in overseeing anti-terrorism efforts at the US attorney's office for the Eastern District of Texas. Trump nominated him a second time earlier this year, and he was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in May.

Brett McGurk

@brett_mcgurk

·

Sep 29, 2020

Wait? The DNI won’t release the US Intelligence Community’s global threat assessment to the American people (for the first time ever) but he’ll release RUSSIAN intel that US analysts say may be fabricated?

Andrew Desiderio

@AndrewDesiderio

To recap: The country’s top intelligence official just declassified a Russian intel assessment that he acknowledges might be exaggerated or fabricated by the Russians. https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1311014296961404928…

Brett McGurk

@brett_mcgurk

Put another way: the DNI thinks the American people should be aware of sketchy Russian intel chatter while keeping from the American people the considered USG intelligence assessment on current threats to our country—including from Russia.

2:33 PM · Sep 29, 2020

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VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT 

Venus might be habitable today, if not for Jupiter

Study shows destabilizing effect of the giant gas planet

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

Research News

 

IMAGE: COMPOSITE OF IMAGES TAKEN BY JAPANESE SPACECRAFT AKATSUKI OF VENUS. view more 

CREDIT: JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / DAMIA BOUIC

Venus might not be a sweltering, waterless hellscape today, if Jupiter hadn't altered its orbit around the sun, according to new UC Riverside research.

Jupiter has a mass that is two-and-a-half times that of all other planets in our solar system -- combined. Because it is comparatively gigantic, it has the ability to disturb other planets' orbits.

Early in Jupiter's formation as a planet, it moved closer to and then away from the sun due to interactions with the disc from which planets form as well as the other giant planets. This movement in turn affected Venus.

Observations of other planetary systems have shown that similar giant planet migrations soon after formation may be a relatively common occurrence. These are among the findings of a new study published in the Planetary Science Journal.

Scientists consider planets lacking liquid water to be incapable of hosting life as we know it. Though Venus may have lost some water early on for other reasons, and may have continued to do so anyway, UCR astrobiologist Stephen Kane said that Jupiter's movement likely triggered Venus onto a path toward its current, inhospitable state.

"One of the interesting things about the Venus of today is that its orbit is almost perfectly circular," said Kane, who led the study. "With this project, I wanted to explore whether the orbit has always been circular and if not, what are the implications of that?"

To answer these questions, Kane created a model that simulated the solar system, calculating the location of all the planets at any one time and how they pull one another in different directions.

Scientists measure how noncircular a planet's orbit is between 0, which is completely circular, and 1, which is not circular at all. The number between 0 and 1 is called the eccentricity of the orbit. An orbit with an eccentricity of 1 would not even complete an orbit around a star; it would simply launch into space, Kane said.

Currently, the orbit of Venus is measured at 0.006, which is the most circular of any planet in our solar system. However, Kane's model shows that when Jupiter was likely closer to the sun about a billion years ago, Venus likely had an eccentricity of 0.3, and there is a much higher probability that it was habitable then.

"As Jupiter migrated, Venus would have gone through dramatic changes in climate, heating up then cooling off and increasingly losing its water into the atmosphere," Kane said.

Recently, scientists generated much excitement by discovering a gas in the clouds above Venus that may indicate the presence of life. The gas, phosphine, is typically produced by microbes, and Kane says it is possible that the gas represents "the last surviving species on a planet that went through a dramatic change in its environment."

For that to be the case, however, Kane notes the microbes would have had to sustain their presence in the sulfuric acid clouds above Venus for roughly a billion years since Venus last had surface liquid water -- a difficult to imagine though not impossible scenario.

"There are probably a lot of other processes that could produce the gas that haven't yet been explored," Kane said.

Ultimately, Kane says it is important to understand what happened to Venus, a planet that was once likely habitable and now has surface temperatures of up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

"I focus on the differences between Venus and Earth, and what went wrong for Venus, so we can gain insight into how the Earth is habitable, and what we can do to shepherd this planet as best we can," Kane said.

Mystery of Zimbabwe elephant deaths may be solved, as experts eye bacterial disease

34 elephants have died so far

By James Rogers | Fox News

Officials in Zimbabwe say that the recent spate of elephant deaths in the country is the result of bacterial infection.


Fulton Mangwanya, the director-general of the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, told a parliamentary committee that 34 elephants have died so far and “many” more could still die “in the short term.”

“All results to date point to the cause of these elephant deaths being a disease known as hemorrhagic septicemia,” said Mangwanya, noting that the disease does not appear to have been previously recorded as causing deaths among Africa’s savannah elephants.

MYSTERY OF BOTSWANA'S MASS ELEPHANT DIE-OFF MAY BE SOLVED

“However, it has been reported to kill Asian elephants in India. It has also affected cattle, pigs, and chickens in southern Africa in which it can cause massive mortality. It has also been recognized in buffalo and some other wildlife species in this part of this world,” he said.

Nov. 10, 2019: Elephants make their way through the Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, in search of water. (AP Photo)

Two elephants were found dead in Victoria Falls last week, the Sunday Mail reports, citing the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority. Samples have been sent to the U.K. for tests, the Authority said.

Other samples will also be sent to the U.S. and neighboring South Africa, according to Mangwanya.

Additionally, a mass elephant die-off occurred earlier this year in neighboring Botswana. Officials in Botswana recently reported that the deaths of the more than 300 elephants may be the result of toxic algae in the water the animals were drinking.

Eyal Harel, CEO of Israeli firm BlueGreen Water Technologies told Fox News that toxic algal blooms have been growing annually in scale, severity, and frequency all over the world. "Poisoning by cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae toxins is something that animals, namely big mammals, cannot evolve to avoid or to be immune from," he explained, via email. "The phenomenon of large mammals falling victim to toxic water sources, what happened in the case of Botswana’s elephants, occurs when toxic algae species inundate already depleted or scarce water resources."

The Associated Press contributed to this article.