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03/07/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Secret C.I.A Documents: Over 8,000 Documents Revealed!

The latest WikiLeaks document dump about the CIA’s computer hacking toolshighlights the intelligence agency’s penetration of everyday consumer electronics, heightening profound fears about privacy aroused in 2013 by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In the Washington security establishment, however, the leaks are being viewed more as the latest battle in a struggle between US and Russian intelligence services being played out in the US political arena – a fight in which WikiLeaks is widely seen as sitting firmly in Moscow’s corner.

The apparent CIA hacking tools published by WikiLeaks feed directly into that struggle. Some Trump supporters have claimed that the apparent Russian hacking attacks could be a “false-flag” operation, hinting it was carried out by the new president’s domestic foes, and the “Vault 7” documents published on Tuesday give them potential ammunition.

The WikiLeaks press release highlights the CIA’s “Umbrage” group, said to collect a library of hacking tools used by intelligence agencies of foreign countries, “including the Russian Federation”, allowing them to conduct false flag operations.

“With Umbrage and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the ‘fingerprints’ of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from,” WikiLeaks said.

James Lewis, senior vice-president at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on cyber security, speculated that the motive behind the leak could be to underpin the false flag narrative of the Trump camp.

“This might be one explanation for the leaks – it’s data to build a case that the Russian interference and connections are a secret ‘deep state’ plot, as the false flag bits in WikiLeaks ‘shows’,” Lewis said, putting “Vault 7” in the context of the trial of strength between the president and intelligence agencies.

“Mr Trump, who last year angrily dismissed the conclusion of intelligence officials that the Russians interfered in the presidential election to boost his candidacy, has now asked both his staff and a congressional committee investigating Moscow’s influence on the election to turn up evidence that Mr Obama led an effort to spy on him,” he said.

But since its high-profile role in the 2016 presidential election, it is now viewed with far greater scepticism. Its leaks focused exclusively on Hillary Clinton’s camp, and were released at critical moments in the campaign. (Following the dump of nearly 2,000 emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign, Trump told voters: “I love WikiLeaks!”)

Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser, wrote on Saturday night that he had a “perfectly legal back channel” to WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange. Stone then deleted the message.

In early January, the CIA, National Security Administration (NSA) and FBI assessed with “high confidence” that Russian military intelligence was behind the anonymous hackers Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.com, which stole data from prominent Democrats and passed it on to WikiLeaks.

“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries,” the agencies found.

Assange has insisted that the documents did not come from Russian sources, although the organisation also says that in most cases it does not know the sources of the data passed on to it.

In a press release announcing the latest document dump, WikiLeaks suggested that the original source was a former US government hacker or contractor.

Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than four years, since Sweden sought his extradition for questioning on an accusation of sexual assault. In that time, he has hosted his own show on the Russian state-run television channel RT (formerly Russia Today).

WikiLeaks has published little or no material that could be seen as damaging to Russia, although Assange has argued that is because the leaks the organisation receives are overwhelmingly in English, while Russian-language material finds its way to other outlets.

“There is a lot of circumstantial evidence of the links between Assange and Russia,” said Susan Hennessey, a former NSA lawyer now at the Brookings Institution. “It’s certainly not a coincidence that Russian military intelligence selected WikiLeaks as a distribution platform for its Democrats hack.”

“WikiLeaks’ involvement creates a reason for suspicion. It has committed itself to putting out material that is harmful to western interests, but has assiduously avoided releasing material that could be perceived as damaging to Russian interests.”

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/07/wikileaks-cia-documents-us-russia-conflict

03/07/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Female Muslim Prof. Says Muslims Can Rape, Rob Infidel Women

Straining at gnats while swallowing camels is increasingly how Islam’s apologists rationalize away the violence and hate Sharia engenders for the “infidel,” the non-Muslim. Consider the significance of yet another video of yet another learned Muslim justifying the enslavement and rape of non-Muslim women.

Suad Saleh, a female professor of doctrine at Al Azhar University, correctly defines the Arabic phrase melk al-yamin — “right hand possession” (see Koran 4:3):

[Non-Muslim] female prisoners of wars are “those whom you own.” In order to humiliate them, they become the property of the [Muslim] army commander, or of a Muslim, and he can have sex with them just like he has sex with his wives.

Ms. Saleh’s comments are not new or unique. Countless Muslims — beginning with Muhammad himself — have confirmed that Islam permits the sexual enslavement of non-Muslim women seized during the jihad.

Saleh cannot even take the “honor” of being the first Muslim woman to support this inherently misogynistic creed.

Of interest here to the West is how the Al Azhar professor claims the Islamic institution of sex slavery is fair and just — it’s just that too many Muslims exploit it, to the detriment of Islam:

ome [Muslim] opportunists and extremists, who only harm Islam, say: “I will bring a woman from East Asia, as [as a sex slave] under the status of ‘right hand possessions.’ And with the consent of my wife, I will allocate this woman a room in the house, and will have sex with her as a slave girl.”

This is nonsense. This is not prescribed by Islam at all. Islam says that a woman is either a wife or a slave girl. Legitimately owned slaves come from among prisoners from a war.

Saleh is correct in saying that many Muslim men twist the “right hand possession” law in ways that allow them to have extramarital sex. For example, some years back in Egypt a Muslim scholar formally took a woman to be his “right hand possession,” even though she wasn’t conquered in a jihad and in fact entered the agreement willingly.

Yet what Professor Saleh and Muslim apologists fail to understand is that an inherently unjust and uncivilized law — such as one that permits the sexual enslavement of “infidel” women — will, by nature, always be “abused.”

For example, Saleh and others would insist that the mass rape and sexual abuse of European women by Muslim men in Cologne and elsewhere does not fit the literal definition of “right hand possessions.”

However, other interrelated Islamic doctrines command Muslim men to hate all non-Muslims, and to see women — especially “white,” infidel women — as little more than sex objects. In the words of a Muslim who recently murdered a Christian girl in Pakistan for refusing him sex:

Christian girls are only meant for one thing, the [sexual] pleasure of Muslim men.

Moreover, Islamic clerics routinely encourage Muslims to migrate to Europe to help empower Islam anyway they can — including through propaganda, proselytization, apologetics, births, theft, etc. — and not just through violent jihad. If they do any of this, they technically become jihadis. After all — and as the apologists are fond of insisting — jihad literally means “striving” on behalf of Islam.

Thus, many Muslim rapists in Europe believe it their Islamic right and reward to sexually abuse infidel women.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/02/08/good-news-female-muslim-prof-says-muslims-can-rape-rob-infidel-women-only-in-some-circumstances/

03/07/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Social Justice Syndrome And Mentally Unstable Millennials’

If you were to come across someone who cried in the streets, who saw the world in terms of black and white and made death threats against strangers, who cowered in a special room and made public displays of naked self-harm and blood letting, you might conclude that they were suffering from a personality disorder.

All these symptoms can be found in the High Conflict Personality Disorder category known as Axis II in DSMV, including Anti-Social PD, Histrionic PD, Paranoid PD, Narcissistic PD, and Borderline PD.

Alternatively, you might reason that these are the everyday behaviors of the modern Social Justice Warrior (SJW).

Of course, not every SJW has a personality condition, but sufferers from High Conflict disorders are often drawn to extreme beliefs and behaviors under the illusion that they are acting politically.

A 2016 UK survey found that, since 1990, rates of depression and anxiety among the young have increased by 70%, while the American Counseling Association has reported a “rising tide of personality disorders among millennials.”

That such disorders appear to be an acute problem with this generation may be an unintended outcome of the unprecedented experiment conducted in the 1990s and 2000s by progressive parents.

Persecution Complex and the “Safe Space”

In 2014, a survey of 100,000 college students at 53 U.S. campuses by the American College Health Association found that 84% of U.S. students feel unable to cope, while more than half experience overwhelming anxiety.

A byproduct of such fear has been the growth of the “safe space,” a safe-haven for minority groups and distressed students from what they perceive as threats within campus life. Safe spaces contain comforting objects that evoke childhood — bean bags, soothing music, Play-Doh, coloring books. The spaces often forbid entry to straight white men or political opponents.

The idea of “running to the safe space” is a form of psychological regression. The safe space presents a fantasy barrier against imagined exterior evils, and so encourages persecution paranoia and hyper-fragility. These are all symptoms of histrionic, borderline, and paranoid personality disorders that emerge from problems with the early child-parent bond.

The majority of millennial children (now aged 18-34) had two working parents; this was partly an ideological project of feminism and partly economic necessity. The downside was the damage done by daycare, services for which grew by 250% between the 1970s and ;90s (see Laura Perrins’ work on psychological trauma caused by daycare). According to Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Thesis, babies require two years of intimate attention to enable them to form the caregiver-child bond essential for secure ego formation. Any disturbance of this process will “predispose the children to respond in an anti-social way to later stresses.”

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found:

Children in full-time day care were close to three times more likely to show behavior problems than those cared for by their mothers at home.

…

The more time in child care of any kind or quality, the more aggressive the child.

The result is young people who, a decade and a half after daycare, scream at the parent/State for not protecting them sufficiently. It is no coincidence that “safe spaces” resemble daycare centers.

Unfortunately, “safe spaces” enforce the distressed person’s fear of the world, trapping them in their original trauma within a psychological frame of permanent and inescapable victimhood.

“Trigger Warnings” and “Helicopter Parents”

For the SJW, everyday speech contains a multitude of “microaggressions,” or subconscious power dynamics which conceal colonial or patriarchal oppression. Failing to use the words prescribed by SJW activists — most particularly in the case of “trans-people” — is seen as an act of violence equivalent to physical assault. See, for example, a statement made by a protester at UC Berkeley in January 2017 at a protest event that turned into a violent riot:

Your free speech is raping and killing us.

People with High Conflict Personality disorders experience similarly paranoid emotions about hidden messages, omnipotent threats, and imminent violence. They are hyper-alert and live with higher than normal levels of cortisol and adrenalin, which in turn causes lasting neurological damage, affecting their ability to reason and to regulate emotion. They panic easily and regress to infantile distress.

Millennials Killed 19 Things Last Year

Faced with histrionic students, university staff end up behaving like “Helicopter Parents”: those largely absent, full-time working parents who overcompensated by flying in to fuss over their child. Attempting to assuage parental guilt, one of the tools they used was “positive parenting” — a philosophy created by social Progressives.

Parents were taught to not scold or punish, and instead to use “positive reinforcement” in an attempt to raise their children with “high self-esteem.” This ideology also became fashionable within an increasingly progressive school system that awarded children prizes for “non-competitive sports” and for merely taking part in school activities.

As they passed from day care to through high school, these children with artificially enforced high self-esteem were also told that they were morally superior to generations that came before. They were inducted into politically correct language and were even taught to lecture their own parents on racism, equality, and ecology. From the ages of six to eighteen, they took part in yearly multiculturalist “save the planet” projects. They were told they had a heroic destiny as “agents of change.”

A false picture of the world and a vastly inflated sense of self-importance did not compensate for the foundational trauma of parental neglect. Instead, as Dr. Jean Twenge has explained, Positive Parenting created young people with a “narcissistic wound” for whom the real world would be perceived as a threat to self-worth.

Border Violation and Self-Harm

The Positive Parenting movement expounded the beliefs that “there is no boundary between you and your child” and that “you are friends and equals.” For the child growing up without “paternalistic laws” and boundaries, the only way to find limits was to attack the only boundary it knew: its own bodily boundaries.

In this light it is worth exploring why the Fourth Wave feminist/social justice activist group known as “Femen” should mimic the outward signs of the BPD sufferer. Their trademark form of protest is public toplessness, with slogans written over the belly and breasts in fake or real blood. One classic Femen image is of an almost-naked woman holding a protest sign that reads: “Rape Me. I’m a Slut.” The intention may have been to demonstrate that no matter how sexually a woman dresses she is still not “asking for it.” But public nudity as a protest against sexual violation is a contradictory signal — and sending out conflicted messages around dangerous sexual subjects is a symptom of BPD and NPD.

The Femen protester may subconsciously be saying, “show me boundaries and control, show me authority and concern.” She might be displaying the pain of living within a self-in-contradiction.

Contradiction and Splitting

SJW protests are awash with contradictions. SJWs claim to fight for freedom, but are opposed to freedom of speech, support banning videos and books, and support the violent disruption of public talks, as was seen with the riots at UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and elsewhere.

SJWs believe in a world with “no boundaries” where “everyone is equal” — free immigration, open access to healthcare and education, etc. — but at the same time are obsessed with creating segregated spaces.

While they protest against the “fascist patriarchal state” they are, at the same time, fundamentally Statist, demanding that the government police language for them and punish their enemies. While SJWs claim to fight for human rights, they parade the symbol of the largest genocides in history — the Communist flag. They are pro-feminist, and at the same time defend Sharia law.

Living-in-contradiction is similar to the “Love me — I hate you” dynamic in Borderline pathology called “Splitting.” In splitting, everything is “all or nothing,” and the thing that was passionately idealized suddenly becomes an object of hatred. Traitors are everywhere. This was exemplified by the expulsion of gay men and “TERFS” — “Trans exclusionary radical feminists” — from LGBT+ groups by Intersectional feminists.

Along with splitting comes the symptoms of low-impulse control, histrionics, dysphoria, a pervasive sense of emptiness, suicidal ideation, and self-harming.

Symbolic demonstrations of self-harming behaviors are widely used in SJW protests. Along with smearing faces with fake blood to signify female oppression, a protest group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants in the UK in 2015 took razors to their arms in public to “spill rivers of blood.”

With an attempted self-immolation and a reported “contagion” of suicide threats occurring during the Trump protests, thousands attempted to use politics as an alibi for a deeper inner compulsion to self-harm.

The Results of the Human Experiment

Trapped among infant neglect, artificially elevated self-esteem, and identity dysphoria, the millennials were set up for a fall.

When they were pushed out of their parental homes in the 2010s, they discovered they did not have the tools to construct stable selves. They couldn’t blame their parents or teachers. Instead they searched for a vast, abstract, all-encompassing enemy. In identity politics they found a temporary unity, through hatred of Patriarchy, of Capitalism, of White Men.

In President Trump they found their savior.

In the stages before psychosis, sufferers from High Conflict Personality disorders fixate on one object of hate. Subconsciously, they need this super-enemy so they can feel whole. This is the tragic truth of the identity politics of the SJW. Without a totalizing object of blame, the personality of the warrior for social justice falls apart.

While the SJWs idealize themselves as victims of omnipresent evil, they are in fact the victims of well-meaning liberal parents and progressive teachers who subjected them to an experiment in social engineering. They were the guinea pigs of the progressive project. Older generations of radicals then exploited their volatility and rage for political ends.

What the Social Justice Warriors are actually asking for, when they scream at us, is our help.

https://pjmedia.com/blog/social-justice-syndrome-rising-tide-of-personality-disorders-among-millenials/

03/07/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Good News! ESPN Is Struggling And Big Layoffs Coming Because They Are To Damn Liberal

Curt schilling fired for not want men in women’s restrooms

As sports cable network ESPN continues to bleed cash, another round of layoffs is about to hit that will reportedly take out some well-known reporters and on-air faces.

Reports say that ESPN management is being tasked with cutting “tens of millions” of dollars of staff salary from its payroll, meaning that on-air personalities are on the chopping block, according to Sports Illustrated.

“Today’s fans consume content in many different ways, and we are in a continuous process of adapting to change and improving what we do. Inevitably, that has consequences for how we utilize our talent,” ESPN said in a statement. “We are confident that ESPN will continue to have a roster of talent that is unequaled in sports.”

The network is reportedly set to buyout some contracts, and fire writers and behind the camera staffers. The slashing of staff will likely be completed by June, insiders say.

The news of the massive cuts comes on the heels of reports that ESPN is losing millions per year.

Once a sports powerhouse, ESPN has gone from must-see-TV for millions of sports fans to a financial boondoggle for owner Disney with the network losing up to 10,000 subscribers a day, reports said last month.

“A floundering ESPN, with rising costs and declining viewership, continued to sink Disney’s DIS, +0.24% financial results during its fiscal first quarter,” MarketWatch.com reported.

With ESPN dragging on the company, Disney’s revenue fell 3 percent, and its profits sank 14 percent, the financial site reported.

As to ESPN itself, the network lost subscribers, found its average viewership crater, and experienced falling advertising rates even as its programming costs climbed. And this fall from grace continued even after Disney insisted that ESPN had reached its bottom after the previous quarter came to an end.

ESPN’s crashing revenue coincides with its increasingly leftward political content, a drift so blatant that the network’s ombudsman felt pressured to address the network’s political content.

Last November, ESPN’s Jim Brady presented evidence that even inside its executive boardroom complaints from viewers have resonated that sports cable network ESPN has become far too liberal.

03/05/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

FBI Director James Comey Is In Bed With The Clinton’s

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A review of FBI Director James Comey’s professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader — now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton — is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships — all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton — reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe.

These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey’s former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner’s board, and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.

Lockheed Martin

When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers.

But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year.

Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel.

How much money did James Comey make from Lockheed Martin in his last year with the company, which he left in 2010? More than $6 million in compensation.

Lockheed Martin is a Clinton Foundation donor. The company admitted to becoming a Clinton Global Initiative member in 2010.

According to records, Lockheed Martin is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to deliver a speech in 2010.

In 2010, Lockheed Martin won 17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department.

HSBC Holdings

In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings.

“Mr. Comey’s appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,” according to HSBC company records.

HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation. For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to “retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector” in “New York City.”

“Retrofitting” refers to a Green initiative to conserve energy in commercial housing units. Clinton Foundation records show that the Foundation projected “$1 billion in financing” for this Green initiative to conserve people’s energy in low-income housing units.

Who Is Peter Comey?

When our source called the Chinatown offices of D.C. law firm DLA Piper and asked for “Peter Comey,” a receptionist immediately put him through to Comey’s direct line. But Peter Comey is not featured on the DLA Piper website.

Peter Comey serves as “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas” for DLA Piper. James Comey was not questioned about his relationship with Peter Comey in his confirmation hearing.

DLA Piper is the firm that performed the independent audit of the Clinton Foundation in November during Clinton-World’s first big push to put the email scandal behind them. DLA Piper’s employees taken as a whole represent a major Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign donation bloc and Clinton Foundation donation base.

DLA Piper ranks #5 on Hillary Clinton’s all-time career Top Contributors list, just ahead of Goldman Sachs.

And here is another thing: Peter Comey has a mortgage on his house that is owned by his brother James Comey, the FBI director.

Peter Comey’s financial records, obtained by Breitbart News, show that he bought a $950,000 house in Vienna, Virginia, in June 2008. He needed a $712,500 mortgage from First Savings Mortgage Corporation.

But on January 31, 2011, James Comey and his wife stepped in to become Private Party lenders. They granted a mortgage on the house for $711,000. Financial records suggest that Peter Comey took out two such mortgages from his brother that day.

This financial relationship between the Comey brothers began prior to James Comey’s nomination to become director of the FBI.

DLA Piper did not answer Breitbart News’ question as to whether James Comey and Peter Comey spoke at any point about this mortgage or anything else during the Clinton email investigation.

Peter Comey Re-Designed the FBI Building

FBI Director James Comey grew up in the New Jersey suburbs with his brother Peter. Both Comeys were briefly taken captive in 1977 by the “Ramsey rapist,” but the boys managed to escape through a window in their home, and neither boy was harmed.

James Comey became a prosecutor who worked on the Gambino crime family case. He went on to the Bush administration, a handful of private sector jobs, and then the Obama administration in 2013.

Peter Comey, meanwhile, went into construction.

After getting an MBA in real estate and urban development from George Washington University in 1998, Peter Comey became an executive at a company that re-designed George Washington University between 2004 and 2007 while his brother was in town working for the Bush administration.

In January 2009, at the beginning of the Obama administration, Peter Comey became “a real estate and construction consultant” for Procon Consulting.

Procon Consulting’s client list includes “FBI Headquarters Washington, DC.”

So what did Procon Consulting do for FBI Headquarters? Quite a bit, apparently. According to the firm’s records:

Procon provided strategic project management for the consolidation of over 11,000 FBI personnel into one, high security, facility.

Since 1972 the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had its headquarters in a purpose built 2.1 million square foot building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Having become functionally obsolete and in need of major repairs, GSA and the FBI were considering ways to meet the space needs required to maintain the Bureau’s mission and consolidate over 11,000 personnel.

Procon assisted GSA in assessing the FBI’s space needs and options for fulfilling those needs. Services provided included project management related to site evaluations, budgeting, due diligence, and the development of procurement and funding strategies.

Those “funding strategies” included talking to “stakeholders”: “Worked with stakeholders and key leadership to identify strategic objectives, goals and long range plans for capital and real estate projects.”

Procon Consulting obtained its contract for FBI Headquarters prior to James Comey’s nomination to serve as director of the FBI.

In June 2011, Peter Comey left Procon Consulting to become “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas” for DLA Piper.

Peter Comey has generated some controversy in that role. According to Law360 in May 2013 (the same month that James Comey was confirmed as someone being considered by Obama to become FBI director):

Two real estate services businesses filed a $10 million suit against the law firm Monday alleging it stiffed them on as much as $760,000 of work done at DLA Piper’s Chicago office and improperly gave proprietary information to a competitor.

….

The plaintiffs take particular aim at Peter Comey, DLA Piper’s senior director of real estate operations. Leasecorp and SpaceLogik include several emails in the complaint that are purportedly from DLA Piper senior real estate partners Jay Epstein and Rich Klawiter and are sharply critical of Comey’s handling of the matter. In one email, Epstein wrote that “it’s an embarrassment for the firm to be treating someone who we are working with like this.”

In another email allegedly from Klawiter on Feb. 20, the DLA Piper partner informed Leasecorp President Michael Walker, a principal for both plaintiffs, that Comey had sent him and Epstein an email claiming that the real estate services firms were behind on their contractual obligations.

“I just received an email from Peter (Jay was also a recipient) that is so inflammatory I can’t even send it or you’ll hit the roof,” Klawiter said in the email, according to the complaint. “This is not going to end well.”

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/09/10/exposed-fbi-director-james-comeys-clinton-foundation-connection/

03/05/2017 by The Doctor Of Common Sense

Fraud James Comey Tells Justice Dept. to Reject Trump’s Wiretapping Claim

James Comey and Hillary Clinton Work For the Same People

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

The White House showed no indication that it would back down from Mr. Trump’s claims. On Sunday, the president demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama had abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election. In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

In addition to being concerned about potential attacks on the bureau’s credibility, senior F.B.I. officials are said to be worried that the notion of a court-approved wiretap will raise the public’s expectations that the federal authorities have significant evidence implicating the Trump campaign in colluding with Russia’s efforts to disrupt the presidential election.

Mr. Comey has not been dealing directly with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the matter, as Mr. Sessions announced on Thursday that he would recuse himself from any investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the election. It had been revealed on Wednesday that Mr. Sessions had misled Congress about his meetings with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.

Mr. Comey’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering is certain to invite contrasts to his actions last year, when he spoke publicly about the Hillary Clinton email case and disregarded Justice Department entreaties not to.

It is not clear why Mr. Comey did not issue a statement himself. He is the most senior law enforcement official who was kept on the job as the Obama administration gave way to the Trump administration. And while the Justice Department applies for intelligence-gathering warrants, the F.B.I. keeps its own records and is in a position to know whether Mr. Trump’s claims are true. While intelligence officials do not normally discuss the existence or nonexistence of surveillance warrants, no law prevents Mr. Comey from issuing the statement.

In his demand for a congressional inquiry, the president, through his press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued a statement on Sunday that said, “President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016.”

Mr. Spicer, who repeated the entire statement in a series of Twitter posts, added that “neither the White House nor the president will comment further until such oversight is conducted.”

A spokesman for Mr. Obama and his former aides have called the accusation by Mr. Trump completely false, saying that Mr. Obama never ordered any wiretapping of a United States citizen.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Kevin Lewis, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, said in a statement on Saturday.

Mr. Trump’s demand for a congressional investigation appears to be based, at least in part, on unproven claims by Breitbart News and conservative talk radio hosts that secret warrants were issued authorizing the tapping of the phones of Mr. Trump and his aides at Trump Tower in New York.

In a series of Twitter posts on Saturday, the president seemed to be convinced that those claims were true. In one post, Mr. Trump said, “I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”

On Sunday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy White House press secretary, said the president was determined to find out what had really happened, calling it potentially the “greatest abuse of power” that the country had seen.

“Look, I think he’s going off of information that he’s seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential,” Ms. Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week.” “And if it is, this is the greatest overreach and the greatest abuse of power that I think we have ever seen and a huge attack on democracy itself. And the American people have a right to know if this took place.”

The claims about wiretapping appear similar in some ways to the unfounded voter fraud charges that Mr. Trump made during his first days in the Oval Office. Just after Inauguration Day, he reiterated in a series of Twitter posts his belief that millions of voters had cast ballots illegally — claims that also appeared to be based on conspiracy theories from right-wing websites.

As with his demand for a wiretapping inquiry, Mr. Trump called for a “major investigation” into voter fraud, saying on Twitter that “depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!” No investigation has been started.

Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials who worked in the Obama administration have said that there were no secret intelligence warrants regarding Mr. Trump. Asked whether such a warrant existed, James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Not to my knowledge, no.”

“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, as a candidate or against his campaign,” Mr. Clapper added.

Mr. Trump’s demands for a congressional investigation were initially met with skepticism by lawmakers, including Republicans. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said he was “not sure what it is that he is talking about.”

“I’m not sure what the genesis of that statement was,” Mr. Rubio said.

Pressed to elaborate on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Rubio said, “I’m not going to be a part of a witch hunt, but I’m also not going to be a part of a cover-up”

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Millennials Killed 19 Things Last Year

As sports cable network ESPN continues to bleed cash, another round of layoffs is about to hit that will reportedly take out some well-known reporters and on-air faces.

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