Trump’s Pushes for Clandestine Spy Operations on China, Will Tulsi Go Along?

Tyler Mitchell By Tyler Mitchell Jan14,2025 #finance

Trump wants bare-knuckle spycraft against China and secret propaganda campaigns. What about Tulsi?

Trump’s CIA Pick Seeks Clandestine Spy Operations

The Wall Street Journal reports Trump’s CIA Pick Expected to Push for Bare-Knuckle Spycraft Against China

President-elect Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to his coming national-security team is set to come under the spotlight in Congress this week, and one constant remains from his first term: America is about to take the gloves off in its shadow bout with Beijing.

The Republican president-elect has snubbed the conventional GOP approach in some of his other top national-security picks. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host chosen to lead the Pentagon, has criticized U.S. involvement in Ukraine and has said women should be barred from combat. Hegseth has also faced allegations of sexual assault, which he has denied, and is to testify at what is expected to be a tough confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

Trump’s pick to oversee U.S. intelligence agencies, Tulsi Gabbard, has run into some friction in meetings with lawmakers in recent weeks over her past skepticism of U.S. surveillance powers and seeming embrace of Washington’s adversaries. In those meetings, Gabbard—a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii—has walked back her opposition to a crucial spying program, in an apparent effort to win congressional support.

Clandestine intelligence operations are among the areas that could be subjected to some of the biggest changes under Trump. Ratcliffe would push for aggressive spy missions against high-level officials in China and for covert operations intended to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, a person close to him said. Ratcliffe would also likely pursue such activity to deter recent Chinese cyberattacks, including the compromise of telecommunications networks, the person said. (Beijing has denied involvement in the attacks.)

In the past, the CIA has used these kinds of covert operations, which require presidential authorization, to launch secret propaganda campaigns, cyberattacks and industrial sabotage.

In 2019, Trump authorized clandestine confrontation against Beijing, granting the CIA permission to launch a secret propaganda campaign aimed at undercutting Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to former U.S. officials. That included using social-media bot accounts to promote negative stories about China’s ruling elite, suggesting, for example, that senior officials were hoarding stolen state funds overseas.

Trump also signed a classified executive order, confirmed publicly by senior officials, that removed interagency bureaucratic restraints on using offensive cyber weapons against a range of foreign foes. The policy was largely kept in place under the Biden administration, but Trump could seek to deploy disruptive cyber actions more frequently, former officials said.

Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702

The WSJ says “Tulsi flips on the crucial intelligence-collection tool to win Senate GOP support. Is she believable?

Please consider the WSJ editorial board position Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation Conversion on Section 702

Does Tulsi Gabbard suddenly believe in gathering intelligence against America’s enemies? That’s presumably what she wants the U.S. Senate to believe with her come-lately conversion to support Section 702 data gathering.

The 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the U.S. spy without a court warrant on the electronic communications of non-Americans located outside the country. Ms. Gabbard voted against 702 when she was in Congress, though everyone serious about national security understands the tool’s vital importance.

Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford told our Kimberley Strassel on her podcast last week that Ms. Gabbard’s views on 702 is crucial to whether defense-minded Republicans would support her nomination by President-elect Trump to be director of national intelligence (DNI). “If she comes out and says, ‘No, I want to oppose all 702 authority’—that literally shuts down all of our national defense gathering,” Mr. Lankford said.

He added that “she’s going to get a fair hearing to be able to put those things out there and to say, ‘This is what I believe about these issues.’” Voila, Ms. Gabbard suddenly saw the intelligence light.

The question is whether Senators should believe her. Ms. Gabbard’s explanation is hardly persuasive. She now says Congress has added enough protections for civil liberties that she is comfortable supporting 702.

The DNI operates largely in secret, coordinating intelligence from the 18 U.S. spy agencies and presenting the best estimate of threats for the President and his policy advisers. Ms. Gabbard’s statements across her career have demonstrated a knee-jerk instinct to underestimate threats.

It’s no surprise that the warmongering and spy hypocrite at the Journal want to trash Tulsi.

They complain about laughable Russia and China influence on US elections while supporting “secret propaganda campaigns, cyberattacks and industrial sabotage” on China.

The US spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, tapping her phone from 2002 to 2014.

Wikileaks hero Julian Assange and Edward Snowden exposed this for the world to see.

Was it All in Vain?

That’s what the CATO Institute concludes in it June 2023 report It Was All in Vain: Edward Snowden’s Sacrifice 10 Years On

Snowden’s error was in believing that meaningful, forceful, and effective democratic oversight of NSA, FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence components actually exists.

And as I’ve noted previously, Snowden’s efforts to inform his fellow Americans of the surveillance dragnet under which they now operated were met with scorn or outright attacks, some from the press but most from members of Congress whose oversight failures Snowden had effectively exposed.

Fifty years earlier, in an era that saw similar whistleblower-driven revelations of widespread illegal federal government surveillance, Congress was far less amenable to such executive branch misconduct. In 1975, the work of the Senate investigative committee, led by the late Senator Frank Church (D‑ID), exposed massive, previously undisclosed unconstitutional surveillance and political repression operations aimed at literally hundreds of thousands of Americans.

In contrast, Snowden’s revelations produced a nearly opposite reaction, with no public hearings into the breadth and damage caused by the mass surveillance he exposed and only one weak and ineffectual legislative fix for the NSA telephone metadata program: the 2015 USA Freedom Act. It was the legislative and constitutional equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.

It was also a testament to the power and influence of the nation’s national security establishment in shutting down any kind of meaningful surveillance reform effort, in no small part by indicting the whistleblower under the Espionage Act (no proof has ever surfaced that Snowden acted as the agent of a foreign power or gave legitimate U.S. secrets to one), seizing the royalties from his memoir, and refusing to consider allowing him to mount a public interest defense for his actions.

In that memoir, Snowden mused on the disparity in the treatment meted out to him and other whistleblowers versus officially sanctioned leaks (pp. 238–239):

“What makes one disclosure permissible, and another not? The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the fundamental prerogatives of an institution… To blow the whistle on secret programs, I’d also have to blow the whistle on the larger system of secrecy, to expose it not as the absolute prerogative of state that the [Intelligence Community] claimed it was but rather as an occasional privilege that the IC abused to subvert democratic oversight.”

Snowden’s error was in believing that meaningful, forceful, and effective democratic oversight of NSA, FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence components actually exists. The historical record at the time Snowden went public said otherwise, and that remains the case today.

Despite a fresh set of revelations of FBI and NSA abuses of the FISA Section 702 electronic mass surveillance program, no FBI or NSA officials have been sanctioned by the FISA court, much less lost their jobs as a result of their misconduct. That program is set to expire at the end of 2023, but anyone who believes its demise is a sure bet is only fooling themselves – in the same way that Edward Snowden tragically fooled himself into believing that exposing NSA and FBI surveillance crimes would somehow trigger a new age of surveillance reform and accountability.

Americans will continue to be federal government surveillance targets unless the public ejects from Congress and the White House those federal officials who continue to act as if Americans are suspects first and citizens a very distant second.

CIA Plan to Assassinate Assange

The Nation discusses the CIA Plan to Assassinate Assange.

Yahoo! News investigation last year revealed newly installed CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s swift and furious reaction: He instructed the agency to make plans to kidnap and murder WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange was already the focus of investigations by the CIA, the FBI, and the departments of Defense, Justice, and State over his publication in 2010 of the government’s own communications proving its culpability in war crimes.

“But what really set Mike Pompeo…off was that Vault 7 leak,” Yahoo! News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff told Democracy Now!. “This was on his watch. This was his agency.” The campaign against Assange went into overdrive.

Pompeo appeared before the Center for Strategic and International Studies on 13 April to declare, “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Defining WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service” rather than what it is—a publisher—would legitimize any action the agency took against Assange. Except that it didn’t. National Security Council lawyers doubted the legality of killing Assange, and cooler heads within the CIA leaked the plot to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Yahoo! News wrote that kidnapping Assange in London “involved violating the sanctity of the Ecuadorian Embassy before kidnapping the citizen of a critical U.S. partner—Australia—in the capital of the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.” One of Yahoo! News’ US intelligence sources indicated that the plan might have been carried out if Assange had been in a Third World country: “This isn’t Pakistan or Egypt—we’re talking about London.”

While the Trump administration dropped plans for Assange’s extrajudicial murder, neither it nor the Biden administration has turned away from killing him slowly in solitary confinement in Britain.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton asked Can’t we just drone Assange?

On January 5 2021, I reported Assange is a Political Prisoner, Free Him Now

Assange a Hero

No only is Assange a political prisoner, he is a hero in my book for disclosing what he did about US illegal activities.

Hats off to Mexico for offering asylum. But what’s needed is a full and complete pardon coupled with an apology. 

Declassify Documents

Trump has threatened on many occasions to declassify documents.

Is Trump anti-deep-state or not? 

Assange Finally Freed

On June 24, 2024 I reported Julian Assange to Be Free for Time Served in Guilty Plea Deal

Julian Assange is finally free. He is set to enter a guilty plea in Saipan and be sentenced to time served.

In 2021, I asked “Is Trump anti-deep-state or not?” 

Today, I ask the same question.

Trump wants to expand intelligence operations and don’t pretend for a moment it will just be China.

Tulsi will either go along or she will be out.

Tyler Mitchell

By Tyler Mitchell

Tyler is a renowned journalist with years of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, entertainment, and technology. His insightful analysis and compelling storytelling have made him a trusted source for breaking news and expert commentary.

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