Tuesday, May 30, 2017

“This is way beyond a private server”: Four questions on Kushner’s “back channel” to Russia

Intel pros tell Business Insider they can’t believe it. Not the fact that Kushner and Team Trump would want a “back channel” to Moscow; that happens all the time when governments (in this case a government-in-waiting) want to speak frankly about potential policy shifts without public pressure. What they can’t believe is that Kushner allegedly wanted to do it using the Russians’ own secure communication apparatus. The only reason to do that would be to hide the conversation from U.S. intelligence, which is listening in on all of Russia’s less secure lines.
Why would Kushner be worried about the feds knowing what he was saying to the Kremlin?
“This is off the map,” Michael Hayden, who served as the director of the NSA and the CIA, told CNN on Saturday. “I know of no other experience like this in our history, and certainly not within my life experience.”
“This was probably as off-putting to Kislyak as it is for you and me,” Hayden added. “What manner of ignorance, hubris, suspicion, and contempt [for the previous administration] would you have to have to think doing this with the Russian ambassador would be a good or appropriate idea?”…
“If you are in a position of public trust, and you talk to, meet, or collude with a foreign power” while trying to subvert normal state channels, “you are, in the eyes of the FBI and CIA, a traitor,” said Glenn Carle, a former top counterterrorism official at the CIA for more than two decades. “That is what I spent my life getting foreigners to do with me, for the US government.”
Another former CIA analyst made the same point: If he’d tried to do an end-around federal surveillance in talking to Russia, he’d have been booked for espionage. “This is way beyond a private server,” said a former FBI counterintelligence specialist to BI. “This is doing US government diplomatic business over a foreign government’s communication system. It’s not an off-the-record conversation. It’s a conversation recorded by the opposing party.”
Read the rest from ALLAHPUNDIT HERE.

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