JAMES BAMFORD, washwriter@gmail.com
Bamford recently wrote “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel” for The Nation. He has written extensively about the NSA and other agencies. His latest book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence.
Bamford writes: “While the American media and political system fixated on Russian President Vladimir Putin” what was completely missed “in the Russiagate investigation of 2016 was the Israeli connection. … The FBI did uncover hard evidence of extensive collusion between close Trump associates and the highest levels of the Israeli government.” After then-Secretary of State John Kerry had pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about negotiating with the Palestinians during a meeting in Rome in 2016, an Israeli agent sent a message to Trump operative Roger Stone: “RETURNING TO DC AFTER URGENT CONSULTATIONS WITH PM [Prime Minister] IN ROME. MUST MEET WITH YOU WED. EVE AND WITH DJ TRUMP THURSDAY IN NYC.”
Bamford highlights that Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, was “eavesdropping on the Russians and they were picking up all this information that the Russians were getting from the Clinton campaign and the DNC. And rather than giving it to the president of United States, to Obama, which is what an ally is supposed to do, especially one that gets $4 billion a year, they instead were secretly giving it to the Trump campaign, in order to get concessions from Trump when he became president, and hopefully they were going to help make him president.”
Specifically, Bamford notes that Roger Stone had fingered “Randy Credico, a one time friend who had a radio program in New York, as his back channel to WikiLeaks,” which had gotten hold of the DNC emails and would make them public. “Credico had interviewed Assange on his program, but that was four days after Stone’s tweet about [Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’s upcoming time in the barrel. Credico denied under oath that he had acted as a back channel for Stone, and there was never any evidence to show he had.” Bamford effectively argues that Credico was being truthful and it was Israel that was funnelling the information to Roger Stone and the Trump campaign — not WikiLeaks or any of its allies.
Bamford’s recent in-depth piece concludes: “Throughout this chain of events — including the trial, the Mueller Report, and the nearly 1,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee Report — no hint of the involvement of Israel was made public. Despite the clear violations of U.S. law and months of clandestine, high-level attempted interference in the presidential election, no details were released, and no congressional hearings or investigations took place. Nor was there ever a hint in the press, which remained transfixed by Russia.
“The evidence however, suggests that throughout the summer and into the fall of 2016, Israel illegally interfered in the U.S. presidential election. A top agent of Netanyahu was secretly offering intelligence and other covert assistance to Trump to get him elected — all with virtually no oversight or scrutiny by the FBI or the U.S. media, though both had numerous personnel in Israel at the time. Now Netanyahu is back in office as prime minister, and Trump is once again running for president. All the ingredients are there for history to repeat itself, unless the Justice Department and Congress conduct long-overdue investigations into the real source of secret foreign collaboration and interference in the 2016 election, and both the FBI and the media remove their self-imposed blinders when it comes to Israel.”
