What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[HVC]

Maybe his Facebook account got cucked

[Jacob]

I'm not on Facebook.

Oh. That explains it. I'm confusing you with some other Icelandic languish poster I guess.

[citizen k]

I'm not on Facebook.

Oh. That explains it. I'm confusing you with some other Icelandic languish poster I guess.

You're  thinking of Freya Longpostsdottir.

[CountDeMoney]

You know, it wouldn't have been that long ago someone like Assange would be pushing up daisies. And in South America?  Wouldn't even have made that much of an effort to cover it up.

[CountDeMoney]

I wonder how Der Trumpenführer is going to tweet back all those impending restructuring losses by Macy's to close 100 stores and eliminate 10,100 jobs.

[The Minsky Moment]

I wonder how Der Trumpenführer is going to tweet back all those impending restructuring losses by Macy's to close 100 stores and eliminate 10,100 jobs.

Same way he dealt with Carl Icahn canning the entire staff of Trump Taj Mahal.  If it's not in the twitter feed, it doesn't exist.

[FunkMonk]

Lmao

Donald Trump Plans Revamp of Top U.S. Spy Agency http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-officials-frown-on-donald-trumps-dismissal-of-u-s-intelligence-1483554450

WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump, a harsh critic of U.S. intelligence agencies, is working with top advisers on a plan that would restructure and pare back the nation's top spy agency, people familiar with the planning said, prompted by a belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized.

The planning comes as Mr. Trump has leveled a series of social media attacks in recent months and the past few days against U.S. intelligence agencies, dismissing and mocking their assessment that the Russian government hacked emails of Democratic groups and individuals and then leaked them last year to WikiLeaks and others in an effort to help Mr. Trump win the White House.

One of the people familiar with Mr. Trump's planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world. The CIA declined to comment on the plan.

In one of his latest Twitter posts on Wednesday, Mr. Trump referenced an interview that WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange gave to Fox News in which he denied Russia had been his source for the thousands of emails stolen from Democrats and Hillary Clinton advisers, including campaign manager John Podesta, that Mr. Assange published.

Mr. Trump tweeted: "Julian Assange said 'a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta'—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!"

Mr. Trump has drawn criticism from Democratic and Republican lawmakers and from intelligence and law-enforcement officials for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, for attacking American intelligence agencies, and for embracing Mr. Assange, long viewed with disdain by government officials and lawmakers.

"We have two choices: some guy living in an embassy on the run from the law...who has a history of undermining American democracy and releasing classified information to put our troops at risk, or the 17 intelligence agencies sworn to defend us," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). "I'm going with them."

But for Mr. Trump and some of his supporters, the accusations of Russian hacking and the criticism of WikiLeaks are seen as an effort to delegitimize the president-elect's victory.

Donald is going to gut the CIA because he believes the CIA is undermining the legitimacy of his election. He always has an axe to grind. 

Also this will play well with much of the tinfoil hat brigade that constitutes some of his core support. Maybe he'll turn next to instigating an executive investigation into chemtrails.

[CountDeMoney]

  We're all going to die.


No, seriously.  We're all going to die.

[MadImmortalMan]

Sarah Palin has officially apologized to Assange now for being mad at him for releasing her emails in 2008. 

[FunkMonk]

Sarah Palin has officially apologized to Assange now for being mad at him for releasing her emails in 2008. 

We live in the most interesting timeline.

[HisMajestyBOB]

We're all going to die.


No, seriously.  We're all going to die.

The only way I see us not having a major terrorist attack in the next four years is if the intelligence community can work together effectively and operate independently of Trump.

[MadImmortalMan]

I wonder how Der Trumpenführer is going to tweet back all those impending restructuring losses by Macy's to close 100 stores and eliminate 10,100 jobs.

Macy's tanked about 10% after hours.

Of course it's the Amazon effect. Trump had Bezos in the tower, but really he should be visiting that guy in the hospital who jumped off Amazon's roof a month ago.

[jimmy olsen]

I don't think the Senate is going to be down with gutting the CIA.

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312738-republicans-assange-criticism-highlights-russia-rift-with-trump

GOP lawmakers slam Assange after Trump praise, highlighting Russia rift

By Ben Kamisar and Joe Uchill - 01/04/17 06:36 PM EST   

Conservative Republicans in the House and Senate ripped into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday, underlining a clash over alleged Russia hacking with President-elect Donald Trump.

The same day that Trump tweeted approvingly of Assange following his appearance on Fox News, Speaker Paul Ryan and a cavalcade of other Republicans criticized Assange as an enemy of the United States—even as they offered rationales for the president-elect's more favorable comments.

In two tweets Wednesday morning, Trump used Assange's Fox News interview from the previous night to cast doubt on Russia's alleged role in hacking the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic groups.

"Why was DNC so careless?" Trump tweeted. "Also [Assange] said Russians did not give him the info!"

That skepticism is directly at odds with the consensus assessment by America's intelligence agencies. 

But Trump's party didn't uniformly echo his praise for Assange. GOP critics ranged from lawmakers who supported Trump's campaign to one of his most dedicated party antagonists.

Republicans have long maligned Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who published a trove of classified military documents in 2010, accusing him of jeopardizing national security.

Ryan, who has walked the line of an uneasy truce with Trump since the GOP primary, blasted Assange in an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt as a "sycophant for Russia [who]...steals data and compromises national security."

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, an Army combat veteran who spoke at Trump's convention after offering him lukewarm support in the general election, told MSNBC that he has "a lot more faith in our intelligence officers" who blame Russia for the hacks "than I do in people like Julian Assange."

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a regular critic of Trump who said in December he'll travel to Eastern Europe to investigate Russian election interference, warned Americans not to be "duped" by Assange, whom he blasted as an "accused rapist on the run."

Even Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Trump transition vice-chair and prominent supporter, said she doesn't put "a whole lot of trust in Julian Assange."

Still, Blackburn defended Trump's general skepticism about the source of the hacks.

Wednesday's Assange spat reflects a larger divide between Trump and others in GOP lawmakers over how to deal with the alleged Russian hacks.

While Congressional Republican party leaders have called for investigations, differing primarily on whether the investigation should be conducted existing committees, Trump has urged the country to "move on" from possible election interference.

While others in the GOP remained steadfast in opposition to Assange, some Trump supporters have followed the president-elect to shift their personal stances on Assange.

Fox News' Sean Hannity, who conducted the Assange interview, called for the WikiLeaks founder's arrest in 2010 and blasted him for "waging his war against the U.S." for the 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and sensitive military information.

And in a late Tuesday night Facebook post, 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin wrote a mea culpa for calling Assange an "anti-American operative with blood on his hands" in 2010. She even urged her followers to see "Snowden," Oliver Stone's 2016 biopic of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Their shifts aren't unlike Trump's own changing opinion on Assange. Trump once proposed the "death penalty" over one WikiLeaks release during a 2010 interview unearthed by CNN.

But now Trump and a handful of allies have Assange back in their good graces.

The exiled Australian has been a prominent Trump defender from his perch in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he fled to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape and molestation charges in Sweden—as well as a potential extradition to the U.S. Assange hindered Clinton's campaign throughout 2016 as his group released emails from top Clinton staffers that drew headline after headline.

During his Fox interview, Assange mirrored Trump's claim that Democrats are only focusing on the hacks to delegitimize his victory. And Assange's claim that a "very dishonest" media was "colluding" with the Clinton campaign match Trump's own frequent attacks on the press.

Trump responded with a tweet agreeing with Assange's assessment of the media, writing that it's "more dishonest than anyone knows."

Daniel Vajdich, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Hill Trump's decision to amplify Assange's skepticism to intelligence community reports that Russian was behind the attack is a counterattack to Democrats who argue Trump would have lost to Hillary Clinton but for the leaks.

"The only thing that really matters to Trump right now is the fact that you have a majority of Democrats across the country who believe the outcome of the election isn't legitimate," he said.

That's in part the tack the Democratic National Committee took in its statement Wednesday, where DNC national press secretary Adrienne Watson called Assange an "enemy" and slammed Trump "for "putting his own insecurities ahead of national security because he is sensitive about how he won."

But Trump's perspective on Assange, as well as his agreement that Russia may not have been responsible for the hack, has drawn its fair share of criticism—and not just from Democrats.

"Situational effects are never a good guide for policymaking," said Danielle Pletka, a former Senate Foreign Relations staffer and current senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute. "'You're a scumbag because you stole from me but you are Robin Hood because you stole from the other guy' doesn't really work."

"When you posture toward people like a scumbag like Julian Assange, you run the very real risk that, having once correctly identified him as a traitor, he will, at a point convenient to him, betray you again."

While Trump is tweeting support of Assange now, Pletka thinks it's unlikely that he views his Twitter feed as permanent policy, or even the last word.

America's top intelligence officials are slated to make their case to Trump about Russia's role in the hack on Friday.

Even that meeting has become a source of dispute, though, with Trump speculating on Twitter Tuesday that the meeting had been delayed until Friday because intelligence officials required "more time needed to build a case." (An intelligence official countered to NBC News that the meeting had always been scheduled for Friday).

In his tweet, Trump surrounded "intelligence" with apparently mocking quotation marks.

While Assange has said his source was not connected to the Russian government, he has also claimed that the hacker or hackers known as Guccifer 2.0 are not his source. Guccifer 2.0 leaked documents from the DNC and DCCC servers to a variety of media outlets. Assange has acknowledged that the source of the Guccifer 2.0 leaks may have been Russian.

But third-party security experts question whether Assange has been disingenuous about what he knows about the attacks.

"You have to parse his words very carefully," said Matt Tait, co-founder of the United Kingdom security firm Capital Alpha Security.

Tait notes that during the Fox News interview, Assange claimed the attack on Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's email account was simple enough that a 14-year-old could do it.

It's technically true that a 14-year-old could conduct a one-off phishing attack of the type that ensnared Podesta, according to Tait.

In this case, however, a single person of any age is unlikely to be the culprit.

The firm SecureWorks identified the email that tricked Podesta after finding his email address in a much larger campaign of attacks conducted using the same account on a link shortening service. The larger campaign targeted nearly 2000 accounts in 2015 alone - predominantly victimizing Putin's critics, and political and military figures in the US, Ukraine and NATO.

"He knows full well there's a stronger case the attack is from Russia," said Tait.

[11B4V]

We're all going to die.


No, seriously.  We're all going to die.

You can't make the shit up that he's doing. 

[CountDeMoney]

The only way I see us not having a major terrorist attack in the next four years is if the intelligence community can work together effectively and operate independently of Trump.

Uh. Yeah.  Those odds are increasing.

Trump taps private security director for White House job
By Madeline Conway
Politico.com
01/04/17 03:15 PM EST

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped his private security director, Keith Schiller, to be deputy assistant to the president and his director of Oval Office operations, confirming that he'll bring at least one member of his personal security detail with him to the White House.

Schiller has worked with Trump since 1999, when the real estate mogul hired him as a part-time bodyguard. He now leads his private security force, a group that recently drew some scrutiny when POLITICO reported that Trump had opted to continuing using it after the election.

The Secret Service traditionally takes full control of managing security around presidents-elect and presidents, with local police sometimes assisting at public events.

Trump, though, enlisted his private detail to work a series of victory rallies he held after the election and was expected to keep some members of his team on after the inauguration. According to experts, such an arrangement is unprecedented in recent history; some former officials raised concerns that the mix of private security officials and Secret Service agents could increase confusion, liability and risk in general.

"It's playing with fire," Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent, told POLITICO last month.

Schiller will also bring some legal baggage with him to the White House — Schiller and four of his subordinates in the Trump security operation are the subjects of an ongoing lawsuit winding its way through New York State courts accusing them of assaulting a handful of protesters during a raucous protest outside the campaign's Manhattan headquarters in September 2015.

In an affidavit filed in the case, Schiller acknowledged that he struck one of the protesters in the head. But he claimed that was because he felt the protester "physically grab me from behind and also felt that person's hand on my firearm, which was strapped on the right side of my rib cage in a body holster. Based on my years of training, I instinctively reacted by turning around in one movement and striking the person with my open hand."

The Trump campaign, the Trump Organization and Trump himself are also named as defendants in the suit.

This should be a no-brainer decision, and the USSS should be taking a big stomping shit on this. 
But, there are no brains anymore.