It’s been a good week for the DVD. Their number two target in the Administration, after the President himself, Steve Bannon, has been forced out, crippling the White House. He’s been in office for less than seven months but already President Trump, very sadly, is a lame duck.
It’s not as though the Administration had a galaxy of conservative talent at its disposal. The failure to appoint John Bolton as Secretary of State ruled out any serious foreign policy achievements, aside from withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change. Even that was watered down by State Department lawyers insisting that the US had ratified the agreement and was therefore caught by the three year limit in Article 28.
If the US, despite the failure of the Senate to ratify the agreement in accordance with the US Constitution, treats the agreement as having come into force, then denunciation under Article 28 cannot effect until 2019.
Since a minimum 12 months’ notice of withdrawal is required President Trump’s decision to ‘withdraw’ is effectively meaningless: the new Democrat administration will simply reverse it.Secretary of State Tillerson really put one over the President on that one.
With Steve Bannon gone, you can forget the Republicans in 2020. After this disastrous week most conservatives will be thinking long-term and concentrating on winning in 2024, unless the ‘Dump Trump’ initiative for 2020 gathers momentum. Sadly, the only way to get Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn and General McMaster out of the White House is to get Trump out.
I doubt that President Trump will be impeached. Helped by widespread electoral fraud, I predict that with heavy illegal Mexican support the Democrats will regain the Senate next year, not that the Senate is under effective Republican control at the moment.
My prediction is that the Democrats, again with heavy Mexican support, will regain the House in 2020. I am sure that they will try to impeach the President after the mid-terms, but they won’t have the numbers till 2020. By then it won’t matter. It will scarcely make any difference who the Democrat nominee in 2020 is, as long it’s not Hillary Clinton. The base will desert the President and the Democrats will win the Rust Belt states by default.
In sacking Steve Bannon President Trump has kissed good-bye to his flagship policies, including the Wall. America will be lucky to get a picket fence. Illegal immigrants, gun-runners and narcotics traffickers will be happy this weekend. With Bannon out they’ll be getting a free ride.
So will Peking. American jobs will continue to be exported across the Pacific. It scarcely matters what the President wants, or on what policies he was elected, by a probable majority of American voters. With ‘von’ Mueller, the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department jumping all over him, faithfully carrying out directives from Frankfurt, President Trump will be on the defensive until he’s thrown out of office in 2020. Only Steve Bannon could have saved President Trump from ‘von’ Mueller, as only Bannon had the smarts to realise that Sessions, Rosenstein and ‘von’ Mueller have to go. Talk about firing the wrong people!
General Kelly’s a good man and a capable administrator, but he hasn’t got Steve Bannon’s brain, nor in any sense of the word is the general a true conservative. He will quietly abandon all of the policies on which his boss was elected and will thereby virtually guarantee the President’s defeat in 2020, assuming he gets the Republican nomination. General Kelly’s hopelessly out of his depth, with respect. He couldn’t get President Trump elected as a dog-catcher.
To those who say that Kelly’s a four-star I would respond: how many four-stars have you met? They tend not to be terribly bright and are easily manipulated by intelligence officers, in the way that General Kelly was manipulated, indirectly, by the DVD into sacking Steve Bannon. Conservatives, who will now be deserting the President in droves, are not likely to forgive or forget Kelly’s brutal treatment of Steve.
Not to put too fine a point on it, General Kelly, good man that he is, has behaved like a bastard, again no offense intended. He was obviously gunning for Steve from the moment that he was appointed. The general needs a good smack, and I’m sure that Breitbart will be happy to oblige.
Lack of high intelligence is a problem with generals generally. I don’t entirely go along with liberals who assert that ‘Military Intelligence’ is an oxymoron, although goodness knows there’s never been a shortage of morons in military intelligence. (We have the same problem, BTW – Admiral Lord West, another 4-star, was actually our head of defense intelligence at one point!)
To illustrate the capability gap at the head of the military, the US Army went through the whole of World War 11 without realising that its Chief of Staff, General Marshall, was a German spy. Generals wasted hours of their time chastising subordinates about security then handed over America’s battle plans to the enemy. They weren’t even bright enough to pick it up when they found the Germans and the Japs waiting for them time and again. They just carried on, throwing away the lives of more good young men under their command, presumably wanting a monument to their stupidity.
Not content with throwing away tens of thousands of lives in World War II on compromised military operations, the generals decided to do it again. They fought another war, in Vietnam, with another German spy in charge, this time as Secretary of Defense. They didn’t even have the sense to have Robert McNamara thrown from the top of a tall building, as President Truman had Secretary Forrestal. (The Pentagon isn’t high enough, BTW – throw a Secretary from the roof and he might survive.)
Speaking of stupidity
The President is right about one thing, with respect, even as he was wrecking his Administration and turning it into an international laughing stock. Pulling down Confederate statutes, let alone in the South, is stupid.
Slavery and the Civil War are part of America’s history, for good or bad. It wasn’t entirely an accident that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-owners – uncomfortable though it may be for liberal Americans to acknowledge, the emerging trend towards the abolition of slavery in the British Empire was one of the drivers of the American Revolution.
Slavery was not outlawed in the Constitution for a reason, as the Supreme Court understood when handing down its otherwise indefensible decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. At any rate the US Constitution permitted slavery until the 14th Amendment, which could not have been enacted without fighting the Civil War first.
A nation which does not understand its history is doomed to repeat it. Renaming Lee Park Emancipation Park was a pointless and provocative piece of political correctness, indeed it was political correctness gone mad, not least in the South. And Virginia is part of the South last time I looked. You get treated politely there – it’s not Maryland.
General Lee was probably no brighter than General Kelly, no offense intended. His reputation as a military genius is a bit overdone, although he was undoubtedly a genius when compared with his brother officers. (I’m referring to General Lee of course – General Kelly doesn’t have a reputation as a military genius.) Lee’s victories were in fact won with the benefit of Prussian military advisers, who stayed deep, as did the Prussian Secret Service then they assassinated President Lincoln, using a Southern cut-out.
Robert E. Lee was however an honorable man. So far as I know he treated his slaves well. I know you shouldn’t have slaves in the first place, but some slave-owners were more brutal than others. Lee was humane. Despite his intellectual shortcomings he was a good leader and a fine officer. He was in every sense of the word a gentleman and a general who earned the respect of Ulysses S. Grant.
It is entirely appropriate that statutes should have been erected in his memory throughout the former Confederate States of America. Hasn’t the North treated the South badly enough than for historically illiterate and rude young Yankees to go around pulling down statutes of Confederate heroes now?
I think the President understands that re-opening the wounds of the Civil War at this time is not going to aid national unity. He also understands that not all the demonstrators last weekend were neo-nazis, let alone actual Nazis.
Ironically enough the left-wing demonstrators were the unwitting tools of a German intelligence agency the origins of which lie in the Nazi period. In helping to undermine the elected president they weren’t just pulling down a statue, they were pulling down the Constitution itself. Like so many liberals, communists and radical Islamists they were opposed to the very concept of democracy: elections only count if they win them and their opponents must never be allowed to govern.
What really happened at Charlottesville
It’s easy to see now, although it took me a day or two to work it out. The organiser of the alt-right rally, Jason Kessler, is either an operative or, like General Kelly, a useful idiot, no offense to either intended. Kessler used to be left-wing, now he’s right-wing. Huh?
I used to be left-wing, but the transformation in my political thought from liberal to conservative was a gradual process, which took over a decade. Moreover, like many members of the British Labour Party I was put off by the party’s rejection of democracy and self-government, i.e. its switch under Neil Kinnock to outright support for British membership of the EU. As a loyal Labour Party member and former Parliamentary candidate, Labour’s betrayal of democracy and the national interest was a searing experience for me.
Moreover I am still in many ways a social liberal, not least because I’m out and proud. Support for capital punishment and opposition to abortion, partly because I prefer killing killers to killing babies, are about the only positions I share with social conservatives, many of whom are religious nutters. (As I explain in Spyhunter, I gave up religion and joined the Church of England years ago).
This Keller guy seemed to switch almost overnight. That does not compute, as the robot said to Dr Smith.
Then we have the swastika flags. There don’t seem to have been very many of them, and nobody’s yet succeeded in identifying an actual Nazi carrying one. More likely they were carried by operatives.
Then the alleged driver of the killer car turned out to be a schizophrenic, i.e. vulnerable to suggestion. He may well have driven the car, but who put the idea up to him? It is highly unlikely that he came up with it himself. He doesn’t strike me as a particularly violent young man.
As if the rally weren’t enough, Steve Bannon was then trapped in a pincer movement by that phony American Prospect iInterview. I’m not blaming Steve – he’s a journalist by profession and would not have been thinking in terms of an intelligence trap.
He might have done had he read Spyhunter, but all attempts to get a copy to him failed, sadly. In the upshot he was forced out by a hostile intelligence agency he had never heard of.
The timing of the operation to remove Steve Bannon may have been speeded up by the most recent attempt to get a copy of Spyhunter to him. This involved the book being converted into a single PDF file, which could easily be copied, and the Secret Service. It looks like the Secret Service were hauled off by the Department of Homeland Security, which should probably be renamed the Department of Fatherland Security. It has always placed Germany’s national security interest ahead of America’s.
So far as I know, no one else in the world apart from myself was willing to warn the Administration about the DVD’s operation to destabilise it. Most European heads of government and the dictators of North Korea and China are aware, but they’re the Bad Guys. None of them was ever going to shop the DVD. Its existence is one of the world’s darkest and best-kept secrets.
My former colleague at the American Military University, Dr Paul Medhurst, is aware of the DVD and has taught it at AMU, but he broke off contact with me after the bogus GO2/Cabinet Office charges were brought in 2014. So far as I know, Professor Medhurst is not a Trump supporter and is happy to let the President swing in the wind.
The hack that never happened
Ironically, even as the German operation to derail the Trump Administration in a way we haven’t seen since the train wreck in The Fugitive in 1993 achieved final success, another German operation collapsed. This was the absurd Russia Gate smear.
As I explained last week one of the central allegations in the Russia Gate smear was the suggestion that the Russian FSB had hacked the DNC. This was never fact-checked by either the FBI or the CIA, very obviously since neither agency was remotely interested in the truth of the allegation, as long as it embarrassed the President.
The fact checking has now been done, inter alia by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). The hack could not have happened, for two reasons: download speeds and the time zone.
Broadly speaking the download speed was about twice that which could have been achieved by a hack from anywhere in Eastern Europe, i.e. was physically impossible. Furthermore, the time stamp locks the download into the Eastern Daylight Time zone, i.e. the time stamp not only tells you the Zulu or GMT time of the download, but the Lima or local time.
If there had been a hack it could have been from Miami or Toronto, but not Russia or Romania. Very useful features, time stamps. Since the data could not physically have been downloaded remotely, we can safely rule out Miami and Toronto.
I am advised that we can also safely rule out memory sticks. I think we’re looking at a portable hard drive here. I suggested some possible culprits last week. What is clear is that this was a leak, not a hack.
If the Congressional, FBI and ‘von’ Mueller inquiries had any integrity they would have promptly abandoned the hacking allegation. The fact that they have not simply emphasises that these assorted inquiries are being conducted in bad faith, for political and intelligence motives.
However, it no longer matters. President Trump is now a lame duck, sadly. Germany has a firm veto over the Administration’s foreign policy, all major domestic policy decisions and most non-judicial appointments. The DVD’s successful derailing of the Trump Administration will be a case study long taught in intelligence schools. The speed of the German operation has been stunning – it’s the intelligence equivalent of the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg.
BTW, I warmly commend the writing on the DNC leak of Patrick Lawrence in The Nation. Please don’t comment that he’s a liberal and The Nation’s a left-wing publication. I already know.
I judge men and women, and their writings, on their merits. I don’t care if Patrick Lawrence is a liberal, a centrist or a conservative. He writes very well, if I may say so. More than that, his writing on the alleged DNC hack is well-informed, fair and balanced. Well done him. Good work will always win praise from me.
The Supreme Court
Although the Trump Administration has been forced to abandon the policies on which it was elected, will not now get the Wall built and will not get any meaningful legislation through Congress, it will not be a total disaster area.
Whilst lower ranking federal judicial appointees will probably not be confirmed, President Trump should be able to get a further Supreme Court nominee confirmed, at least until the mid-terms, when the Republicans will most probably hand over control of the Senate to the Democrats.
After that it will be game over and President Trump may as well play golf and host parties in the White House for all the good that he will be able to do. At least he’ll get his handicap down before he leaves office, as the least successful president since Warren Harding, and the first to be utterly humiliated by members of his own family. Indeed, the Trump family, sadly, will hold the record as the most ruthless and disloyal any president ever had.
It looks like at least one Supreme will snuff it, or retire, before the mid-terms. I do not under-rate the importance of getting another serious jurist onto this utterly discredited court, no offense intended. Like the liberals on our own Supreme Court, an international laughing-stock after its failed attempt to stop Brexit, the liberals on the US Supreme Court are not jurists in any meaningful sense of the word. Their opinions are political. Such legal reasoning as they contain, like the UK Supreme Court, tends to be pretty thin, no offense intended.
President Trump, with respect, got his first Supreme Court nomination right. He has a list, and there is no reason to suppose that he will get his next nomination wrong. It’s not that his Supreme Court appointment(s) will be the most important part of his legacy – they will be his only legacy, sadly. He knows he’s finished, so he will want to get that nomination right, if the chance comes along.
Happily, a couple of the liberals on the court are looking a bit doddery, no offense intended – their bodies are starting to follow their minds.
Barcelona
I humbly and respectfully endorse the generous and humane message to the Spanish King of Her Majesty the Queen in the wake of this appalling terrorist atrocity, which sadly claimed the lives of at least two young children. One, a young Aussie lad aged no more than seven, is pictured in today’s papers, happily smiling and enjoying himself on holiday, little knowing that Thursday was to be the last day of his life. Officially he’s listed as missing, but hope for him is fading fast.
It looks as though the Germans ordered the attack in order to put pressure on Madrid over attacking Gibraltar. I gather that not everybody in the Spanish Government is keen to see Spain sacrificed on the altar of Germany’s ambition to dominate Europe.
The full-size attack carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is now in commission and will be fully worked up, with Lockheed F-35B Lightning II fighters aboard, by March 2019. The Spanish Navy has every reason to fear her and her air group. Spain’s antiquated and non-battle-hardened armed forces face total wipe-out in a war with Britain, a country which has fought and won four major wars in the last 35 years. Our community partners the Krauts, as always, would prefer others to do their fighting for them.
Sir Bruce Forsyth CBE (1928-2017)
Barely known in America, Sir Bruce, who sadly died this week, was Britain’s best-loved entertainer.
He holds the world record for the longest career in television: his first appearance on TV was in 1939, his last in 2015.
It’s difficult to see that record ever being surpassed. 76 years is a long time in television. He was a lovely man and the last of the old-time entertainers.
Sir Bruce will be sorely missed.
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Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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