July 27, 2017
By Joe Kloc

U.S. president Donald Trump, who in the 1990s posed as his own spokesperson to brag to tabloid reporters about cheating on the woman with whom he was cheating on his wife, appointed as his communications director Anthony Scaramucci, a former hedge-fund manager who in 2015 called Trump a “hack” from “Queens County” with a “big mouth,” and who after his appointment made several media appearances in which he said he loved Trump, said leaks from the White House offended him “as a Roman Catholic,” said he was going to “fire everyone,” and said he took the job so he could “aid and abet” Trump. Scaramucci told a journalist the president discussed with him his ability to pardon himself and members of his staff, a lawyer for Trump said Trump had never discussed pardons with anyone, and Trump tweeted that he could pardon whomever he wants. Trump then tweeted that because of the cost of health care for transgender soldiers he would ban them from serving in the U.S. military, which spends an estimated ten times as much on medications that treat erectile dysfunction; and Scaramucci praised Trump as a man capable of throwing a football in a “dead spiral” through a tire. Trump gave a speech before 40,000 Boy Scouts as young as 11 in which he announced that during his presidency children will say “Merry Christmas” when they “go shopping,” and told a story about when he was a “very young” man at a cocktail party in New York City with “the hottest people” and met for the first time a real-estate developer named William Levitt, who gave him life advice; and it was reported that Trump told the same story in a 2004 book, except in the latter version he was 47 years old and already acquainted with Levitt, who he claimed died two weeks after the party, but who news reports indicate spent the last 18 months of his life in the hospital suffering from a ruptured intestine. Trump said that he “could use some more loyalty,” joked that he would “fire” one of his cabinet members, told reporters that he regretted hiring another of his cabinet members, and accepted the resignation of his press secretary, Sean Spicer, who during his six-month tenure asked journalists to be “big boys and girls,” referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers,” was spotted on one occasion hiding from reporters behind bushes on the White House lawn, and was spotted on another occasion dragging up the White House driveway a mini fridge he had taken from his staffers so he could cool beverages in his office. Trump said he would “get somebody” if the Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act did not pass the Senate; and, after the bill failed, Trump’s secretary of the interior phoned both of Alaska’s senators and delivered a message that one senator told reporters made it “pretty clear” that “pro-jobs” policies in the state “are going to stop.” Energy secretary Rick Perry had a phone call in which he discussed the “scientific development” of making fuel from pig manure and home-brewed alcohol with a caller who he thought was the Ukrainian prime minister but who he later discovered was a prankster from Russia. A Trump adviser said that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators looking into the Trump campaign’s ties to the Russian government were working for the Democrats because several of them had in the past three decades donated to the Democrats a total of $56,000, an amount less than the individual Democratic contributions of Trump’s son-in-law, his daughter, his secretaries of the treasury and commerce, and Trump himself, who has donated more than $250,000 over the past 20 years. One of Trump’s former campaign managers told a reporter that Trump has “the legal authority” to fire Mueller, a former Republican congressman said there would be a “tsunami” if Trump fired Mueller, it was reported that Trump has been considering firing Mueller, and meteorologists reported that a tropical storm named Don had formed in the Atlantic, but that it wouldn’t last long.
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*UPDATE: Thanks to Nate Lavey who points out that ‘RUC’ may in fact be FBI-speak for ‘Referred Upon Completion’ rather than the former NI police force. You can see here that the acronym/phrase is part of the government’s law and order lexicon.

Two of these FBI files in thebrokenelbow’s continuing analysis of the Nate Lavey FBI archive are skimpy affairs. Part 7, which begins in December 1983 and ends in September 1984 is a mere 19 pages long, nearly half of which have been nearly entirely redacted.

Part 8, which spans September and October 1987, is even shorter, at just twelve pages, and deals almost entirely with plans to deal with anticipated Noraid-inspired protests at concerts performed by the regimental band of the Grenadier Guards, a British Army outfit touring North America.

*Both files have, for the first time, markings which suggest that FBI intel on Noraid was now being shared with the RUC. In Part 8, for instance, a stamp announced: ‘RUC ON THIS’; in part 7 it appears that one document may have been partly based on RUC-provided intel.

These are the first such references to intel sharing with the RUC in the archive and they prompt an interesting question or two, to wit, what level of co-operation existed before this, and if this was a new development, how did it come about?:

Part 7 is the more interesting of the two documents, if only because less of it has been redacted and its contents demonstrate how closely the Irish-American community was under surveillance for signs of pro-IRA views and activity.

The FBI investigation described in the files begins when a TV viewer in Kentucky answered an advertisement ‘in support of a movement to oust the British from Northern Ireland’. The unnamed Kentucky citizen then received correspondence from, inter alia, the Irish-American Unity Conference (IAUC) and this sparks an FBI probe into the source of this contact.

The IAUC was of interest to the FBI because Noraid was one of nine Irish-American groups which came together at a conference in Chicago, Illinois in July 1983 to form the umbrella group whose aim was to agitate for Irish unity in American political life.

The sender turns out to be a man called ‘Delaney’ who was originally from Chicago but moved to San Antonio, Texas where the correspondence to Kentucky originated. We know his name because the redactor missed one instance where it appears.

‘Delaney’ turns out to be clean – ‘there is no derogatory information on him’, in FBI-speak – although he is active in the AOH. Interviewed by the FBI in Texas, ‘Delaney’ stated that his main aim was to promote ‘harmony between Protestants and Catholics’, but the FBI notes ominously: ‘….one cannot rule out, however, the possibility that (Delaney) harbors anti-British sentiments’.

The message from this document is that in its hunt for IRA sympathisers in the US, few in the Irish-American community were immune from FBI surveillance, even if they were members of respectable groups like the AOH or the IAUC, since they were linked with Noraid through the formation of the IAUC.

Given the absence of any further reference to ‘the Kentucky citizen’, it seems this person may have been a freelance fisher, and possibly a Unionist/British sympathizer, intent on discovering who had placed the TV advert and then passing on the intel to the FBI. I would not find this surprising since in my experience ‘dropping the dime’ is a major American past-time, a relic, perhaps, of hysterical anti-communism.

Part 9, a file which covers 1984 and 1985, is an altogether more substantial document at 168 pages in length; it includes evidence of two recurring features of the FBI’s dealings with Noraid: an apparent obsession with Noraid’s  annual summer trip to Ireland being one, and penetration of the organisation’s ranks in the search for intelligence being the other.

Both these activities were carried out in the belief that one way or another Noraid was the American vehicle used to provide the IRA in Ireland with money and guns to fight its war against the British.

The Noraid summer tour of Ireland, which usually happened every August, appears to have been regarded by the FBI as an opportunity for Noraid to deliver money to the Provos, and sending an informer along with the delegation, which could number over 100 people, was always an FBI priority.

Both these aspects of the FBI’s surveillance of Noraid appear very early on in Part 9 of the archive in a report of intel provided by what the FBI called ‘a confidential and reliable source of continuing value’ concerning Chicago Noraid leader, Alex Murphy.

The intel on Murphy is contained in a May 14th, 1985 ‘New York teletype’, i.e. a confidential message to the Director of the FBI from the FBI’s New York office, and this suggests that the source on Murphy was a figure in the New York branch of Noraid.

The teletype describes what appears to be a phone conversation between Murphy and an unnamed activist from Ireland. We know this because the report describes Murphy asking the activist how long he/she would be in the United States. The activist asks Murphy for an address in Chicago he could write to and there is some apparent talk of the activist appearing at Noraid fundraisers.

The fact that the ‘confidential and reliable source’ was privy to such an exchange – which common sense suggests was a conversation between Murphy and an IRA figure of some stature visiting the US – may mean that he or she was part of, or close to a high level of Noraid activity in New York.

A native of Belfast, born in 1912, Murphy had an FBI file since 1977, according to Part 9, when he was described as the head of Southside Chicago chapter of Noraid. The report adds:

Alex Murphy was also indexed in Chicago file 199F-465-44, page 4, dated August 1982, wherein he was referred to as being a suspect of having carried money from the US to the provisional IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY (PIRA) in Ireland’.

Presumably in the hope of stumbling across another such transaction, the FBI’s informer in the ranks of the Detroit branch of Noraid had joined the delegation for the August 1985 tour of Ireland and a report dated August 22nd, 1985 details what he told his FBI handlers he had learned.

The informer, DE -T1, who has figured in earlier document in the Lavey archive, told his handlers that a branch of Noraid would be established in Norway, of all places, and that a hitherto unheard of Noraid front group had been created, known as the ‘Irish Defense Committee’. DE-Ti also reported on contacts between Noraid figures and presumed senior Provos, all of whose names are redacted in the document.

But of money changing hands between Noraid and the IRA there was no mention.

The FBI report also includes a New York Times’ report of Noraid’s participation in the internment anniversary march in west Belfast, traditionally the high point of the annual Noraid tour. Written by the paper’s London correspondent, Jo Thomas, the report carries a quote from Sinn Fein’s (and the IRA’s) director of publicity, Danny Morrison, which he might not like to be reminded of:

Mr Morrison said he saw no prospect of uniting Ireland by constitutional means. “There’s only two ways our troubles can be ended”, he said. “Either we surrender and give in, or we go on to victory.”

The FBI’s confidential sources reported on more than Noraid activity, as the following report on an April 26, 1985 meeting organised by IAUC and a body called the Justice for Ireland Committee illustrates. Noraid also sponsored the meeting and its chairman introduced the main speaker, Michael Farrell, the Northern civil rights and left-wing political leader.

MIchael Farrell, in his days as a student leader

The FBI report of the meeting is almost entirely taken up with Farrell’s remarks, which include the surprising claim that:

‘Irish opinion in both the Republic and Northern Ireland are turning in favor of the IRA.’

Anyway, here are the three FBI files, Parts 7, 8 and 9:

File this under ‘ludicrous’ – and subtly racist.

A CBS television report, broadcast on July 12th, believe it or not, quotes a so-called art investigator as claiming that a half billion dollar art collection stolen from a Boston, Mass. art museum in 1990, is now in the hands of the IRA.

And how does Arthur Brand  – touted by CBS as ‘the Indiana Jones of the art world’, no less – know that the 13 masterpieces, including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer, valued at $500 million are now gathering dust in an IRA art dump? Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? It’s the IRA, so he gathered his intel in a pub, over what he calls ‘Guinnesses’. Where else could it happen?

Here is how the super sleuth knew he was on to the big story. By the way when will Americans learn that the plural of one glass or pint of Guinness is two glasses or pints of Guinness?` There’s no such thing as ‘Guinnesses’.

Anyway he managed to persuade a highly paid CBS reporter, a producer and a presenter to run with this rubbish:

“We have had talks with… former members of the IRA – and after a few Guinnesses, after a few talks – you can see in their eyes that they know more,” Brand said.

“How do we believe you?” Doane asked.

“Well, I have a track record. We have found some pieces back before. So let’s give this a shot,” Brand said.

I didn’t make that up. Here’s the full report:

A useful pocket guide to the links beween Russia and Team Trump produced by the ever assiduous McClatchy newspaper group. Note the minot but not insignificant role played by Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea FC.

Mind-boggling stuff here courtesy of The American Conservative magazine. The problem is that with this White House, it is not inconceivable. Obscene and scary, for sure, but not unthinkable. Monetise war and you make it permanent, in the same way the American prison population is the world’s largest. All part of Making America Great Again!

The Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams yesterday announced that he intends to appeal two convictions dating back to 1975 on charges that he attempted to escape from Long Kesh internment camp, once when he was with a group of prisoners trying to cut through barbed wire and another when he switched places with a visitor.

Mr Adams, who publicly denies ever being in the IRA, said in a statement:

“Following the recovery of a document by the Pat Finucane Centre in October 2009 from the British National Archives in London, I instructed my solicitor to begin proceedings to seek leave to appeal the 1975 convictions.”

So, what is in this document found by the Pat Finucane Centre (PFC) at the Kew archives in 2009?

Well, Mr Adams is not saying and neither is the PFC.

This was the Centre’s emailed reply today to a request from myself for a copy of the Kew document:

A couple of thoughts. One, regarding this statement: “PFC has a policy whereby if we find document(s) concerning an individual……(W)e only publish or disseminate this information with third parties with the explicit consent of the individual and if they ask us to do so.”

I must have acquired dozens and dozens of files from the Pat Finucane Centre over the years and I was grateful always for the friendly help given by the researchers there.

Many, if not most of the documents that came my way, mention individuals by name and this problem of seeking permission from those individuals before I was given access never raised its head once.

Now, admittedly most of the names were of serving or former members of the security forces and that suggests that if the person or persons named in a Kew document were combatants then the PFC does not apply the rule. But surely Gerry Adams falls into the same category as other combatants in the Troubles and should be treated in the same fashion?

And bear in mind that this is how the PFC defines its aims and identity on its website:

A fascinating back story to the latest revelations in the never-ending Trump scandal has been provided today by the progressive New York Jewish publication, The Forward, in an account which could be filed under “You Could Not Make This Up.”

It includes a multifarious cast of characters and plots which includes Vladimir Putin; his feud with the hedge-fund manager/grandson of the former leader of the US Communist Party; the financier’s friend and lawyer murdered, possibly on Putin’s say-so, in a Russian jail; Joseph Stalin; a Kremlin-friendly Russian lawyer – and of course la familie Trump.

It is a ripping yarn, penned by JJ Goldberg. Enjoy:

Donald Trump Jr.

The Secret Jewish History Of Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Scandal

J.J. Goldberg

July 11, 2017

There’s much that we don’t know about the bonds that tie Donald Trump, his campaign or his family to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. But there are some important clues that are mostly being overlooked. To follow the trail, it helps to recall that the Trumps are not the only American family whose tangled ties to the Kremlin contributed to our current mess.

In fact, no figure in this saga has a more tangled family relationship with the Kremlin than the London-based hedge fund manager Bill Browder. A major investor in Russia, Browder got himself into a deadly feud with the Putin regime a decade ago. It began with Browder, a brash young foreign investor, challenging the corrupt billionaire oligarchs who surround Putin and lord it over everyone else. It led eventually to Trump Tower, where a shadowy Russian lawyer met last year with Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law and presidential campaign manager to explore enlisting the Trumps on Putin’s side of the feud.

Along the way, the feud turned deadly in November 2009, when Browder’s Moscow lawyer and friend Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison after being held without charges for a year under barbaric conditions. From there the feud jumped to Capitol Hill, where Browder won passage in 2012 of the so-called Magnitsky Law imposing sanctions on the Putin cronies associated with the lawyer’s death. Putin, reportedly apoplectic over the new sanctions, retaliated by abruptly outlawing the popular practice of American couples adopting Russian orphans.

And from there the feud led to Trump Tower, where a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties, Natalia Veselnitskaya, met in June 2016 with three of Donald Trump’s top associates: his son Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort. Her goal was to enlist them in Putin’s effort to overturn the hated sanctions. The bait: an offer to supply damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr., when first questioned about the meeting, said the Russian wanted to talk about “Russian orphans.” That’s about right. “Orphans” is apparently Kremlin code for “Magnitsky sanctions.”

We don’t know what information about Clinton was on offer, but it was just weeks later that America was first bombarded with damaging Clinton information hacked from Democratic Party computers on Putin’s orders.

Examining the Browder-Kremlin feud thus seems to clear up at least some of the mystery surrounding the Trump-Kremlin relationship. To fully understand the Browder-Kremlin feud, though, it’s important to note that it’s much older than either Bill Browder or Vladimir Putin. It goes back to the time of Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, longtime head of the Communist Party USA.

The Kansas-born son of a Methodist preacher, Browder joined the Communist Party shortly after the party’s birth in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Rising quickly through the ranks, he took over in 1930 as general secretary, head of the party, and held the post until 1945. He led American communism through the Great Depression and World War II, the years when the party had its closest flirtation with respectability, thanks to its labor and civil rights activism in the 1930s and the U.S.-Soviet wartime alliance in the 1940s (just ignore that little interlude when Stalin was allied with Hitler). Browder ran for president twice on a Communist ticket, in 1936 and 1940. His running mate, James Ford, was the first African American ever to appear on any national presidential ticket.

Browder was probably the closest thing the party ever had to a popular national figure. In 1945, though, he was summarily deposed from party leadership on Stalin’s orders. He was expelled from the party a year later, in 1946. He returned home to Yonkers and lived out his life far from the public eye. He died in 1973, when grandson Bill Browder was 9.

The reason for Browder’s humiliating fall was his advocacy of what’s called Browderism: an effort to take American communism away from its conspiratorial, revolutionary roots and remake it as a sort of left-liberal reformism. The heresy was tolerable from Moscow’s viewpoint during the depression and war years, when Stalin needed the American public’s goodwill. Starting in 1945, though, he was gearing up for a long cold war against the capitalist West. The last straw came when Browder formally reorganized the party as a liberal civic association. Stalin needed it to remain a conspiratorial underground, available for infiltrating unions and stealing nuclear secrets.

That’s the history, in broad strokes. What remains unclear is what the impact was of Browder’s humiliation by Stalin on his grandson’s feud with Putin. Bill Browder sends out mixed signals.

He describes his childhood and his relationship with his grandfather at some length in a 2015 memoir, “Red Notice.” It’s a gripping account of his feud with Putin & Co., of Magnitsky’s tortured death and of Browder’s own growing outrage at Putin’s Russia, with its culture of casual brutality. The early part of the book, though, is a lighthearted tale of a normal childhood in a conventional suburban household of communists. It’s almost like two books. In the second half he has something he urgently wants to say. In the first half he has a lot that he seems unable to get out.

Bill Browder’s father, Felix Browder, was born in 1927 Moscow, where Earl Browder spent several years doing party work. While in Moscow, Earl Browder met and married Raisa Berkman, described by his grandson as “a Russian Jewish intellectual.” Felix Browder was the first of three sons. All three grew up to be distinguished mathematicians at Berkman’s encouragement. None had any role in public or political life. The reader infers that Berkman didn’t much like what politics did to her husband, and wishes Bill Browder had something to say on the topic. But he didn’t.

Felix Browder was married in 1949 to Eva Tislowitz, a child refugee from Nazi-ruled Vienna who was sent to America on her own, was raised in an American foster home and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of himself, Bill Browder writes that he was an indifferent student, but he decided in high school that when he grew up he “would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss my family off more than that.” He sounds like an utterly normal American teenager whose family just happened to be communists.

Reading between the lines of the memoir, the reader infers that Bill Browder’s Jewish upbringing was equally conventional, despite the family’s unconventional politics. He writes casually of his best friend as “a Jewish kid.” Similar phrasings pop up repeatedly when he interacts with a fellow Jew. Moving to London after college to learn investment banking, he affectionately describes his traditional wedding in London’s fashionable Marble Arch Synagogue. He writes of taking David, his son from his first, Jewish marriage, to spend Christmas with his second, non-Jewish family, and one senses his mild discomfort at celebrating the Christian holiday “even though David and I are Jewish.”

After working at several London investment houses he decides to set up his own hedge fund, specializing in post-communist Russia and Eastern Europe. Why Eastern Europe? It’s 1990, and communism is collapsing. “My grandfather had been the biggest communist in America,” he writes, “and as I watched these events unfold, I decided that I wanted to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.” He did, in fact. He became the biggest foreign investor in Russia, until Putin’s henchmen raided his offices, cleaned out his bank accounts and murdered his lawyer, Magnitsky.

But there’s a reticence in his Jewish narrative. One of his first jobs in London is with the investment operation of the publishing billionaire Robert Maxwell. As it happens, Maxwell was originally a Czech Jewish Holocaust survivor who fled and became a decorated British soldier, then helped in 1948 to set up the secret arms supply line to newly independent Israel from communist Czechoslovakia. He was also rumored to be a longtime Mossad agent. But you learn none of that from Browder’s memoir.

The silence is particularly striking because when Browder launches his own fund, he hires a former Israeli Mossad agent, Ariel, to set up his security operation, manned mainly by Israelis. Over time, Browder and Ariel become close. How did that connection come about? Was it through Maxwell? Wherever it started, the origin would add to the story. Why not tell it?

When Browder sets up his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management — named for the famed czarist-era St. Petersburg art museum, though that’s not explained either — his first investor is Beny Steinmetz, the Israeli diamond billionaire. Browder tells how Steinmetz introduced him to the Lebanese-Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire Edmond Safra, who invests and becomes not just a partner but also a mentor and friend.

Safra is also internationally renowned as the dean of Sephardi Jewish philanthropy; the main backer of Israel’s Shas party, the Sephardi Torah Guardians, and of New York’s Holocaust memorial museum, and a megadonor to Yeshiva University, Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and much more. Browder must have known all that. Considering the closeness of the two, it’s surprising that none of it gets mentioned.

It’s possible that Browder’s reticence about his Jewish connections is simply another instance of the inarticulateness that seizes so many American Jews when they try to address their Jewishness. It’s a topic they don’t much think about. Anyway, Browder has so much to say on another topic of vital importance, Russian brutality, that it may be pointless to pick on the parts he left out. It could be, too, that Earl Browder was an early example of what’s now a widespread phenomenon — a Jewish-gentile marriage that has not a Jew marrying out of the Jewish community but a gentile marrying in. If we’re looking at a Methodist preacher’s son who became America’s most important communist and then settled down to raise a suburban Jewish family, it’s a great story, but not an urgent one. We don’t need Bill Browder to tell it.

There was a moment, however, when Browder seemed to let down the veil just a bit and show a hint of his inner turmoil regarding his own background. It came in a 2012 interview with New Republic writer Julia Ioffe, who is herself a Russian Jewish émigré. Browder was in Washington at the time, lobbying for his Magnitsky Act. Ioffe suggested there was a certain irony that he, an American-born expat, naturalized British, who’d voluntarily and unnecessarily renounced his U.S. citizenship, was now looking to Washington for moral leadership on the world stage.

“I don’t want to get into this too much,” Ioffe quotes Browder as saying, “but we came from a family that was persecuted in America, so I don’t have the same sort of, uh…. We were communists and we were persecuted in the McCarthy era.”

He added that “in a certain way, now I’m being politically persecuted in Russia.” And, Ioffe notes, he recalled that his grandfather “was kicked out of the Communist Party by Stalin, and they started killing all the people who were supporters of Browderism.”

That’s a far cry from the Grandpa-was-a-bigshot-commie approach that he would later take in his memoir. There’s a pain there. He comes from a family of American communists who’ve been spurned and betrayed by both America and communism. Nothing lighthearted about it.

In 2012, even in 2015, one could say it’s all Bill Browder’s private business. A casual observer might wonder whether and how much his battle with the Putin regime reflected an ancient grudge resurfacing across the generations, but there was nothing urgent about it. Now the stakes have changed. It could be, far-fetched though it seems, that the crisis in American governance exploding before us right now is just the latest twist in an old grudge match between the Soviet dictator and the sad, betrayed world of American Jewish communist idealism. That’s something we need to know about.

Matt Bolton offers an interesting corrective to those on the Right and Left who believe Jeremy Corbyn’s recent general election success heralds the renewal of radicalism in the British Labour party. Thanks to LS for this tip. This article originally appeared in the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) blog.

The New York Times story below appears to be the smoking gun in the Trumpgate scandal: the text of an email exchange last June between an obscure former British tabloid reporter and Donald Trump Jr. offering Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton during the impending US presidential election campaign.

What strikes this writer is the sheer amateurishness of the plot, not least the Russian failure to protect the secrecy of the emails flying between Russia and Trump Tower, or alternatively not using a more discrete and deniable way to make contact with team Trump, like flying the British contact to New York for a face-to-face meeting with people he seemingly knew well enough already.

If that was not feasible then the very least the Russians should have done was to ensure that both the British contact – former tabloid reporter turned music publicist, Rob Goldstone – and Donald Jr. were equipped with an email encryption programme.

The best know of these is GPG, a derivative of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). It is easy to load, at least on an Apple computer, and even easier to operate. Encrypted emails can only be opened once passwords, or keys, unique to the recipient and sender are created and in the event of the authorities demanding access say, to Donald Jr’s password, well…..passwords can so easily be forgotten or lost.

If Donald Jr and Mr Goldstone had been using GPG, today’s New York Times story would never have been written.

I have been using PGP or GPG for many years, during my time as a journalist in Belfast, where I assumed both the British and the Provos would be interested in some of my emails. Myself and the two researchers for the Boston College archive project communicated using a commercial version of PGP. I also display my GPG public key on the front page of this blog in case someone wishes to communicate using encryption.

If any of my readers would like to download GPG, here is a link.

So why didn’t the Russians employ this basic precaution? Conspiracy theorists will doubtless conclude that this was a deliberate mistake intended to create confusion and conflict in American politics once the emails were discovered – and anyway who could have imagined a Trump victory last June?

I suspect, however, that the simpler explanation is the right one, that it was a simple cock-up born of stupidity and hubris on the part of the FSB, the post-Communist successors to the KGB.

If I’m right then the big losers out of this affair, aside from la familie Trump, will be the reputation and standing of the Russian intelligence services.

Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It’ Donald Trump Jr. Said