Wikipedia defines the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) as a British intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance to the British government and armed forces.This group played an interesting role in the 2016 presidential election in America. The American Spectator reported today on some aspects of that involvement. The article at The American Spectator refers back to an article in the U.K Guardian on April 13th. The perspective on the story in the two articles is very different, but both stories have valid points.
The article at the U.K. Guardian reports:
Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.
…Instead both US and UK intelligence sources acknowledge that GCHQ played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016.
One source called the British eavesdropping agency the “principal whistleblower”.
The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow ahead of the US election. This was in part due to US law that prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants. “They are trained not to do this,” the source stressed.
“It looks like the [US] agencies were asleep,” the source added. “They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’
I would like to point out that with all this electronic surveillance and all this investigating, there has not been one concrete, proven charge of the Trump campaign working with Russia to impact the election. I would also like to point out that the people in charge of this electronic surveillance in America (the Obama Administration) had a sincere interest in making sure Donald Trump was not elected President.
The article at The American Spectator has a different perspective:
An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election — Hillary’s.
Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people.
John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan’s retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with “Hillary for president cups” and other campaign paraphernalia.
A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan.”
The article at The American Spectator concludes:
Were the media not so completely in the tank for Obama and Hillary, all of this political mischief would make for a compelling 2016 version of All the President’s Men. Instead, the public gets a steady stream of Orwellian propaganda about the sudden propriety of political espionage. The headline writers at Pravda couldn’t improve on this week’s official lie, tweeted out by the Maggie Habermans: “Susan Rice Did Nothing Wrong, Say Both Dem and Republican House Aides.”
Liberals pompously quote the saying — “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed” — even as their media enshrine it. Historians will look back on 2016 and marvel at the audacity of its big lie: whispers of an imaginary Trump-Russia collusion that wafted up from the fever swamps of a real collusion between John Brennan and foreign powers seeking Trump’s defeat.
I am convinced that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia does not exist. I am also convinced that the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Russia should be much more scrutinized than it is.
As I reported here in December 2016:
Let’s look at some of the history between Hillary Clinton and the Russians. in April 2015, Breitbart.com reported that the chairman of the Russian Nuclear Agency-controlled Uranium One funneled $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. This was followed by the Uranium One deal that allowed the Russians to acquire control of one-fifth of America’s uranium. So the mainstream media is trying to tell me that Russia would rather do business with Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. You can bribe Hillary Clinton. I’m not sure you can bribe Donald Trump.
The lesson learned in the contrast between the articles in The American Spectator and the U.K. Guardian is that the media can twist a story in any direction it chooses. It is up to the readers to do the research into the background of the story.
