Originally Posted on January 12, 2017
This is a follow up to my "we need to wait and see" post of yesterday.
CNN went deeper today, and indicated that this is not the equivalent of a Tea Party hire with a hand held camera working the DNC. This is a seasoned porfessional who has undergone an extroardinary training.
"As in the American intelligence community, the selection, vetting, training, education and seasoning of the veteran operative in British intelligence is the result of an extraordinary filtering process."
The article goes into details that include:
"It begins with strict and high educational standards, moves through a series of interviews to a day of high-pressure competitive scenario work and psychometric, literacy, numeracy and analytical testing against several other candidates. There is a final individual assessment and judgment hurdle to pass before a lengthy vetting process, conducted by the intelligence agencies themselves."
For the full story, see:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/12/opinions/intelligence-russian-trump-opinion-dowling-handley/index.html
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While this is spycraft, and not definitive proof, it follows, and does exist in the context of the Russian hacking of the DNC, and their decision to attempt to undermine Hillary and favor Trump. Even the president-elect steped back from his prior, dubious assertion that there was no way to know. Even he now agrees, the Russians did have their finger on the scale of the 2016 election.
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That the Russians do hold undiclosed and potentially damging information re the president-elect - is still unproven. But today we know that one person who asserts that this is likely to be true, is highly trained and has held a position of extraordinary trust within the British Intelligence Service (MI6).